Belva Lockwood. Jill Norgren
conventions she offered resolutions of gratitude to local reporters “for their courtesy.”12 She had a natural feel for the art of public relations, and her attention to the press paid off. Increasingly, reporters and editors treated her and the issue of women’s rights with deference.
At the end of the Civil War women like Lockwood expected that the significant energy of the abolitionist and women’s movements would be jointly focused upon winning national legislation, or a constitutional amendment, barring the use of race or sex in the determination of voting rights. For more than two decades members of the antislavery and women’s movements had worked closely, sharing leaders and the common language of natural rights. But in 1865, only weeks after the victory of the North, Elizabeth Cady Stanton learned that prominent advocates of African-American citizenship and voting rights planned to abandon the fight to enfranchise women, limiting their campaign to black manhood suffrage. Wendell Phillips, president of the Anti-Slavery Society, declared that the “hour belongs to the negro” and that Reconstruction politics could not bear the weight of women’s aspirations.13 Stanton, a long-time friend, quickly fired off a letter in which she asked, “Do you believe the African race is composed entirely of males?”14
For the next five years a fight to define the terms of this suffrage-reform debate enveloped these two civil rights movements. Initially, Stan-ton, Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Lucretia Mott, along with male allies, including Theodore Tilton, tried to win back the support of their anti-slavery society colleagues with a renewed appeal for the “equal rights of all.” In May 1866 they formed the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), with Stanton asking whether the time had not come “to bury the black man and the woman in the citizen?”15 Within a month of its founding, however, Congress approved a constitutional amendment, the Fourteenth, which established modest guarantees of male African-American voting rights while ignoring the question of women.16 AERA members protested, sending to Congress petitions that legislators refused to introduce into floor debate. The amendment assailed women’s sense of justice but, with a bitter irony, it also disappointed many male reformers who had hoped for a stronger statement of impartial male voting rights.
The limitations of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified by the states and made part of the federal Constitution in 1868, meant that the nation’s examination of its political conscience continued through the elections of 1867 and 1868. Christmas 1868 brought the bold decision of congressional Republicans that, despite recent setbacks at the polls, they would support a Fifteenth Amendment to enfranchise African-American men.17 Proponents of woman suffrage immediately pressed their former allies to reject anything other than a universal suffrage amendment, again to no avail. With violence against African Americans rising in the South, and the Republican Party leadership envisioning a greatly expanded base of voters if the more than one million freedmen were enfranchised, virtually no member of Congress was willing to jeopardize passage by asking that women be added to the list of citizens to be protected in their political rights.
Stanton and Anthony came into this fight with tarnished reputations. Stanton, in particular, was increasingly spoken of as a radical critic—of religion, men, and the laws of marriage and divorce. The two women vociferously opposed the Fifteenth Amendment, debated in Congress during January and February 1869 and sent out to the states for ratification in March. But in speaking against the “aristocracy of sex” that the amendment would establish, Stanton abandoned measured language.18 Anthony defended her friend. She wrote the editor of the New York Times that Stanton did not object “to the voting of ignorant men per se, but that she most strenuously protests against the principle and the practice that gives them civil and political superiority over…women.”19
Recognizing the likely ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, in the early spring of 1869 the Stanton-Anthony faction prevailed upon Radical Republican George Julian to introduce into Congress a Sixteenth Amendment that would enfranchise women. In May these women, a group that included Lockwood’s colleague Josephine Griffing, traveled to New York City for a meeting of the near-moribund AERA. At the convention hall they presented a plan: their faction would discontinue its effort to block the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment if the association would pledge its immediate support of Julian’s bill.20
The convention was a contentious meeting of friends who had fallen into hopeless bickering over interpretations of democratic theory, strategy, and ego. Delegates who championed the Fifteenth Amendment refused to endorse the Julian initiative, still arguing that debate on the woman suffrage question could threaten ratification of African-American manhood suffrage.21 Frederick Douglass was one of several speakers who insisted that woman’s cause was not as urgent as “the shield of suffrage” needed by freedmen facing the violence of the “Ku-Kluxes.”22 Exasperated, Anthony told him he would not “exchange his sex & color, wronged as he is, with [the woman] Elizabeth Cady Stanton.”23
The Equal Rights Association had been tottering, and now it fell. Stanton, Anthony, Griffing, and a number of other reformers, impatient, bitter, and fearful that the power of the Radical Republicans was waning and that the delay demanded by the Douglass faction would defer woman suffrage indefinitely, quit AERA, determined to form an independent women’s rights organization. Two days after the close of the AERA convention, they announced the creation of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). These break-away delegates pledged to work for a federal woman suffrage amendment and to do everything in their power to block ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. Six months later AERA members who supported the Fifteenth Amendment formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). Built around the leadership of several notable New Englanders, including Julia Ward Howe, Lucy Stone, and Henry Blackwell, the “Americans” committed themselves to woman suffrage only after ratification of the manhood suffrage amendment, and to the recruitment of men in the “management” of the association.24 After the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, the efforts of AWSA members focused on reform of state constitutions. Twenty-one years would pass before the two factions reunited as the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
Lockwood did not join the anti–manhood suffrage lobby in the winter of 1869 or participate in the meetings that led to the creation of the NWSA. She was sidelined, being nine months pregnant and then busy with her young daughter, Jessie, born January 28. She relied on Josephine Griffing to represent the UFA and to bring news to her. When the time came to declare loyalties, she became a member of the National Woman Suffrage Association. While she supported voting rights for freedmen, she had personal ties to Griffing and Anthony and believed, as they did, that female citizens should not have to wait any longer for their political rights. This group also attracted her because its founding members championed equal educational and employment opportunities for women, and for a number of years had lobbied for the reform of laws that gave husbands absolute control of their wives’ assets and earnings. Lockwood liked their willingness to bundle social, economic, and political rights. As she later told an interviewer, she had first taken an interest in woman suffrage because of the “inequality that prevailed between the payment of men and women for identical work.”25
For an energetic woman who liked to be in charge and in the thick of things, Lockwood’s “confinement” must have been a trial. She curtailed her public activities for as short a period as was respectable and then, with paid household help as well as support provided by Lura and Ezekiel, she resumed her life as an activist. She wrote that the baby, her “little blossom,” did not prevent her from doing “a great amount of work in benevolent causes.”26 Temperance figured in this “benevolence” but, curiously, she seldom referred to her advocacy of prohibition laws.27 She also resumed work on the reform of the District’s married women’s property laws, and by summer 1869 she was participating in discussions of how to overcome employment discrimination with her UFA colleagues as well as her friend Mary Walker. The UFA had an ambitious plan to attack the inequities experienced by women working for the federal government, while Lockwood and Walker, perhaps with the support of Julia Holmes, who employed women typesetters, were exploring the possibility of collaboration with the new trade union movement.
The new mother was not yet traveling. In August she wrote a letter of introduction for Walker to take to the