Belva Lockwood. Jill Norgren
that Dr. Mary E. Walker is connected with the Woman’s Labor Movement in this City and is an accredited Delegate for the Working Women of Washington.”28 Lockwood and Walker left no record attesting to a local labor movement; quite possibly, they invented it at Belva’s writing table. Still, their concern with improved salary and working conditions for women reached back to their teenage years. They were undoubtedly encouraged by the knowledge that several women, including Susan B. Anthony, were trying to create a bridge between the women’s movement and labor reform. Anthony had been seeking influence within the National Labor Union but Walker, apparently with Lockwood’s blessing, hoped to win credentials from the more radical-socialist Working Men’s Association.29 Their correspondence is silent as to whether she succeeded.
With her confinement behind her Lockwood learned that the fledgling National Woman Suffrage Association planned to hold its first annual convention in mid-January. She had missed several important suffrage meetings because of the pregnancy and was pleased that this gathering would be in the capital, only a few blocks from her residence and eleven-month-old Jessie. The year, 1870, would be an important one for her: she was about to step into greater prominence as the president of the Universal Franchise Association, and she was now giving greater thought to becoming a lawyer. The convention of the Nationals was a good start: for the first time she came face to face with accomplished women from across the United States, many of them ready to take up the mantle of progressive reform leadership.
In a world without radio, television, telephone, or internet, the annual meetings of the National provided suffrage women with the opportunity to boost one another’s morale and to inform public opinion. The women met in January because Congress was in session. Founding member Matilda Gage told delegates that the meeting had been called in Washington “to impress more fully upon members of the National Legislature the claims of the women of the land.”30 Grabbing a few headlines was also part of the plan.
The record of the annual NWSA meetings held in the 1870s and early 1880s tells the story of respectable middle-class women with a remarkable commitment to free and open debate. Lockwood was attracted to this spirit of inquiry and argument. She also enjoyed hobnobbing with the country’s leading reform women and quite quickly realized that she could carve out a niche for herself, privileged by her Washington residence and, later, by her status as a woman lawyer. She was repeatedly chosen as a member of the important resolutions committee through which convention policy was expressed, served as convention coordinator, and was a regular speaker until her falling out with the Anthony faction in the mid-1880s.
NWSA delegates met for two days, in a setting that, for some, must have resembled a revival jamboree. People came and went in easy fashion, with talks occasionally interrupted to applaud a late arrival whose reputation was greater than that of the speaker. Members of the audience were asked to stand up for suffrage and promised a better world when, according to Stanton, women’s votes would bring “moral power into the political arena.”31 The speeches were sober, full of urgency, encouragement, and, occasionally, bitterness. Most speakers concentrated on the issue of woman suffrage, but Matilda Gage and Lockwood were not alone in urging the membership to lobby for equal educational, employment, and property rights.32
Stanton opened the convention with an enthusiastic speech. She rejoiced in the decision of the Wyoming territorial legislature granting women the right to vote and said that the hour of universal woman suffrage throughout America was near. In the hours that followed, in quick succession, the audience heard comments from several men who had joined the meeting as well as letters from absent supporters, including one, read by Stanton, from the English philosopher John Stuart Mill. Delegate Pauline Davis delivered a lengthy history of the women’s rights movement in the United States, Britain, and Europe. For many of the convention participants, this talk was the first opportunity to hear the details of their as-yet-unwritten struggle. Primed with history and exhortation, the delegates listened next as Anthony enumerated four resolutions presented for approval. If accepted, they would guide the association’s lobbying effort in the coming months. Predictably, the first resolution requested that members of Congress submit a woman suffrage (Sixteenth) amendment to the states. A second resolution asked that Congress strike the word “male” from the federal laws governing the District of Columbia, while a third urged officials to enfranchise the women of Utah Territory as a “safe, sure and swift means to abolish the polygamy of that Territory.”33 Lockwood’s influence, felt in the D.C. resolution, was also expressed in the final resolution, which petitioned Congress to amend federal law to provide equal pay for women government employees. All of the items received approval. Before a dinnertime adjournment, Anthony said the hour had come “to pass the hat,” to cover the expenses of the rental hall. In a rare moment of playfulness she said that women delegates were not expected to make much of a contribution as their husbands still held the purse strings, “but the men were expected to give liberally.”34
Speaking at these meetings was not an easy task. Audiences were unpredictable, and could be apathetic or overstimulated. In Washington the sessions became events that, according to one reporter, attracted large crowds of young ladies, drawn more “from curiosity than a desire to be instructed.”35 As a matter of policy the public could enter much of the time without paying a fee, leaving the men and women at the podium with the challenge of addressing simultaneously believers, cynics, and social gadflies.
Lockwood left the convention full of plans. In addition to the public sessions where speakers exhorted the audience to take action, there had been opportunities to talk about the future during informal conversations. She had been particularly interested in meeting Phoebe Couzins, who, along with Lemma Barkaloo, had started law school at St. Louis’s Washington University. Three months earlier the faculty of the law department of the District’s Columbian College had denied Lockwood’s application to become a student. She was stung by their decision but had resolved to apply to other law schools, and to join Barkaloo, Couzins, and Illinois resident Ada Kepley as one of America’s first women law students.36 Nothing she learned at the convention changed her mind.
Lockwood felt good about the future. Shortly after the NWSA convention, she took over as UFA president, an opportunity that may have come to her because Josephine Griffing was showing signs of the illness that would lead to her death in 1872.37 Lockwood was a logical choice to head the association. She had joined the organization as an inexperienced newcomer but had apprenticed successfully with Griffing, who had taught her the ropes and who appreciated that Belva’s personal fearlessness made her a valuable spokeswoman for an unpopular cause. As she left the NWSA convention Belva had the confident feeling that she could duplicate her rise to prominence in the UFA within the national women’s movement. Perhaps to prove this, she took up work on two UFA-backed initiatives: a renewed drive for female suffrage in the District and a campaign to initiate equal employment legislation for women employees of the federal government.
Lockwood brought experience and passion to the question of employment discrimination. Throughout her teaching career she had been paid less than her male colleagues. In Washington she had quickly learned that the federal government also discriminated in the salaries paid to women. Friends told her it was not unusual for a female clerk to be promoted to the vacant place of a man, to do exactly the work he had performed, and yet to receive half the “male” wages. She also discovered that the government limited the number of clerking positions open, through hiring or promotion, to women. As a result, before the Civil War, domestic service and prostitution were the only reliable, ready sources of employment for women.38
The Treasury Department was the first federal agency to recruit women employees, after the department had been ordered to print more paper money as a means of financing the war. Processing the new currency was a labor-intensive activity. Fresh notes had to be cut and counted, while old currency had to be checked for counterfeits, recounted, and then destroyed. According to local lore, Treasurer Francis Spinner arrived on the job at the beginning of the war and found dozens of healthy men busy with scissors. He suggested to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase that the men could be sent off to fight, to be replaced by women, who would be more productive and who could be paid half the twelve-hundred-dollar salary of the men.39
Chase, reluctant