Belva Lockwood. Jill Norgren
Lockwood as a stepping stone to a career as an attorney. Although Belva knew very little about Ezekiel’s past she gambled, correctly, that he was a man who would not be threatened by her life as an activist, or her barely suppressed dreams of breaking occupational barriers. Widowed for most of her adult life, Belva had found companionship and the promise of a new vocation. She understood that the family’s financial well-being would ultimately fall on her shoulders. She accepted this reality. Ezekiel, in turn, won an interesting bargain: the company of a smart woman whose radical challenges to society would make the last years of his life anything but quiet.
The couple continued their work as rental agents for several public halls, including the Union League building. This hall, situated in the center of downtown Washington at Ninth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, stood at a good location, and the Lockwoods were able to fill it daily with social and civic groups, including four separate temperance lodges.53 Veterans’ groups also rented space, as did the Universal Franchise Association. This work, however, caused the neighbors to talk. They said it was a strange business for a woman. Belva disliked the gossip, and she disliked the work, which she found distasteful. Her duties kept her up late at night and placed her, she wrote, “constantly in contact with people with whom [I] had no affiliation.”54 But the Lockwoods needed the agent fees and continued in the business for five or six years.
When they married, Ezekiel moved in with Belva and Lura at the Union League building. In addition to managing the building the couple continued, with Lura’s help, to run the school, but only for a few months. Belva had become pregnant. Married in March 1868, Belva knew about the pregnancy some time late in May. Although it was the custom of the day for middle-class women who were “expecting” to withdraw from public life, Belva maintained her active schedule of benevolent and political work. In late September, five months pregnant, she was among the speakers at a UFA meeting called upon to welcome U.S. Senator S. C. Pomeroy as the group’s honorary president.55 Four months later, on January 28, 1869, Belva gave birth to a daughter, named Jessie Belva. Marriage and motherhood did not cure her “mania for the law.”56 She had finished the British jurist William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England and now spent any time Jessie spared her reading James Kent’s commentaries on American law.57
Belva and Ezekiel forged a relationship based upon the creation of a household economic unit and shared interests in social reform. They were relative newcomers to Washington, inhabiting the hard-working world of the emerging urban middle class. Such people resided in boarding houses, toiled as clerks and teachers, and experimented with small enterprise. Belva and Ezekiel entered the radical politics of women’s rights, but the form of their partnership was quite conventional. They were not attracted to the example of the prominent Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, who, when they married in 1855, read aloud at their ceremony, and signed, a “Marriage Protest.” Stone, a nationally known abolitionist and women’s rights activist, had agreed to marry Blackwell only after he accepted a contract in which the couple renounced the social and legal disabilities imposed on women. Their “Protest” decreed not only that Stone would retain ownership of her property but also that she would have complete control of her body and determine if, and when, she would become pregnant.58 She also refused to take Blackwell’s last name.
Belva asked nothing so scandalous. She married Ezekiel without any particular concern that he would limit her independence. She remained a member of her Methodist church but also visited his congregation, E Street Baptist.59 She adopted his last name, but signed letters and documents “Belva Ann Lockwood” rather than “Mrs. Ezekiel Lockwood.” The new couple participated together in women’s rights and temperance activities. Ezekiel sometimes chaired suffrage meetings that were held at the League building at the far end of their living quarters.
The newlyweds did not always agree. Although Ezekiel supported women’s right to vote, a young friend remembered that Dr. Lockwood took issue with the idea of women governing, insisting that “it would be too sudden a change.”60 Belva glossed over these differences, and in 1876 wrote stiffly, “Dr. Lockwood fully sympathized with his wife in her ideas in regard to woman’s enfranchisement, and together they valiantly battled for the Woman’s Suffrage cause.”61
3
Apprenticeship
The notion of political equality for women was so radical that for a long time it was virtually impossible even to imagine woman suffrage.
Ellen Carol DuBois, 1987
The Universal Franchise Association first met at a Pennsylvania Avenue building known as Spiritualists Hall but later moved to the space that the Lockwoods provided at the Union League building. The UFA welcomed men as members, but the elected positions of chair and secretary were filled by women who managed the association and represented it in public.1 After Julia Holmes and Josephine Griffing each served as president, Belva took office in 1870. Holmes was a widely traveled woman whose husband had finessed a political appointment from Lincoln but, in the late 1860s, in their group, Josephine Griffing was the star, an activist with years of experience who regularly corresponded with other influential reformers.2 Lockwood was the less knowledgeable partner, a newcomer on the periphery of suffrage and temperance politics.
The women started the UFA hoping for a measure of positive influence on public opinion. The congressional debate over S.1 had been respectful, but the behavior of the public and the press was another matter. Rowdy opponents could, and did, reduce public UFA meetings to chaos. Men came just to hiss and boo speakers. As a child, Allen Clark, a Lockwood family friend, watched as bystanders threw vegetables and rolled metal plates among the chairs.3 He developed great admiration for the bravery of these “suffragettes,” then a term of derision. Lockwood and her reform colleagues were, he wrote, “martyrs without seeking credit for their martyrdom. They endured the abuse in silence [and] were of strong spirit which ridicule could not swerve.”4
Belva thought that the press wanted to “break” the UFA. She wrote that as soon as the regular meetings of the association took on a “serious air,” reporters began to show a “special talent in ridicule.”5 They described the heckling and rolling tinware with smug satisfaction and threatened to print the name of any woman who attended a meeting of the UFA.6 This bullying, along with what Lockwood called the “fusilade of ludicrous reports,” scared away many ladies who were curious about suffrage reform but afraid to have their husbands come to the breakfast table and learn from newspaper gossip that their wives were inclined toward women’s rights.7 What was apparently not remarkable was the racially integrated nature of UFA membership. Local newspapers noted, without comment, the presence of “ladies and gentlemen of both colors.”8
UFA officers bore the insults directed at them with dignity and continued to call meetings although it was also difficult to draw diffident women to gatherings that spun out of control when the police “join[ed] hands with the mob.”9 Reluctantly, the officers decided to impose an admission fee, hoping to put a check on the “rabble.” “Strangely enough,” Lockwood reported, “so great had the interest become, the crowd increased instead of lessening, and night after night Union League Hall was crowded, until the coffers of the association contained nearly $1000.”10 In 1869 the association’s executive committee passed a resolution to spend this money on a lecture series devoted to the question of equal political rights for women. Lockwood, UFA secretary, and Griffing, then president, organized the series, beseeching leading personalities of the day to “favor” them with a talk. They succeeded in scheduling the much sought after Anna Dickinson, “queen of the lyceum,” humoristsatirist Petroleum V. Nasby (David Locke), author Bret Harte, Stanton, Anthony, and Belva’s future boss, newspaperman Theodore Tilton.11
Lockwood adopted a practical attitude toward the press. She believed that editors could be won over with goodwill. To enhance the group’s reputation, as well as her own, she became adept at producing a steady stream of news items for the daily papers. Although many of Lockwood’s contemporaries disparaged journalism, she never mocked the men of the newsroom. Living in downtown Washington, close to the offices of the Star