Belva Lockwood. Jill Norgren
did, in fact, help women. In the decade of the 1870s, the percentage of women in positions at Treasury paying more than nine hundred dollars increased from 4 to 20 percent.52 Yet while the new law urged that fair consideration be given to women’s employment, a culture of patronage and patriarchy continued to nourish the discretionary powers of politicians and federal agency officials. In September 1875, Lura McNall told readers of her Lockport Daily Journal column about Washington that the government needed a better merit system and that she had recently heard it rumored that the new U.S. treasurer was as likely as his predecessor to hand out jobs according to the looks and charms of female applicants.53
4
Becoming a Lawyer
No woman shall degrade herself by practicing law…if I can save her. I think the clack of these possible Portias will never be heard at Dwight’s moot courts. “Women’s Rights-women” are uncommonly loud & offensive of late. I loathe the lot.
George Templeton Strong, a founder of Columbia
University Law School, Diary entry, October 9, 1869
In antebellum America the profession of law belonged to men, who, in accordance with tradition, passed on their knowledge through legal apprenticeships held by their sons and nephews and neighbors’ boys. When the Lockwoods married in 1868 there were no women attorneys in the District. Belva had begun her private study of law shortly before the marriage and found that she loved reading legal commentaries. She could not, however, find a lawyer willing to take her on as an apprentice.1 In October 1869, Ezekiel’s fellow parishioner, the Reverend George Samson, invited the couple to attend his lecture at Washington’s Columbian Law School, where he was president. This invitation marked the beginning of Lockwood’s public struggle to become an attorney and to join the small sorority of pioneers still unknown to her—Barkaloo, Couzins, Kepley, Myra Bradwell, Arabella Mansfield, and Charlotte E. Ray—who had also set out to open the profession of law to women.2
Columbian College had been founded by Baptists in 1821. The Law Department, abandoned in 1828, had been revived and in 1869 was offering lectures in the late afternoon and evening in order to encourage the enrollment of government clerks.3 Samson’s decision was part of a national movement to institutionalize legal training by moving apprentice education out of law offices and into university classrooms.
On the day that Lockwood visited Columbian, she was approaching her thirty-ninth birthday, the mother of two daughters, one barely a toddler. She described herself to a census taker as “keeping house,” although she worked as a rental agent and helped her husband with his claims business.4 She told people that she had “wearied” of teaching, and believed that law “offered more diversity, more facilities for improvement, better pay, and a chance to rise in the world.”5 While the profession was closed to women, Lockwood had, as she put it, a “mania” for law and counted, among her friends and UFA colleagues, many unconventional professional women who no doubt urged her on.
The Lockwoods went to Samson’s lecture at a time when, with regular discipline, Belva was reading the major legal authorities of her time, William Blackstone and James Kent. She gave herself daily assignments, having set her sights on winning admission to one of the new law school programs like Columbian that were hungry for students.6 After listening to Samson’s lecture, she returned to the school a second time and then, before a third lecture, presented herself for matriculation, ready to pay the entrance fee.7
Her radical act quickly became a matter of public attention. An article in Washington’s Morning News describing the law school’s opening exercises observed, “the noticeable feature of the evening was the presence in the school of the irrepressible Mrs. Lockwood, of Union League Hall—women’s rights discussion notoriety. It is understood that she is anxious to study for the bar, and will endeavor to be admitted to the school.”8 Many people thought her rash and provocative, and once again, as with her application for the consul position, she found her way blocked. The entrance fee that she offered was refused on the pretext that the question of her admission needed review by the faculty.
On October 7, 1869, a brief note arrived from President Samson: “Madam,—after due consultation [the faculty] have considered that such admission would not be expedient, as it would be likely to distract the attention of the young men.”9 Belva later described Samson’s action as a slap in the face, a dismissal of her rights and privileges because they were thought to conflict with those of men.10 At the same time, officials at Columbian refused the offer of Mrs. Maria M. Carter to endow scholarships for female students in the undergraduate program, a gift that would have initiated coeducation at the school.11
Samson’s letter put Ezekiel in the difficult role of supporting his wife’s ambitions while not antagonizing his church colleague. He counseled Belva to keep silent, but reporters got hold of the story—quite possibly from the rejected candidate—and came around to speak with her, and to see the letter. Ezekiel protested but his wife, asserting her independence and her cause, read Samson’s reply to the local press, who published it.12 It went out on the wire service. Two days later the Evening Star reprinted an article from the New York Commercial agreeing that coeducational law school was a poor idea, although suggesting that “an exception might be made in favor of these ladies on the shady side of forty, who are classed under the head ‘Rawboned,’ and wear spectacles.”13 A flurry of talk continued but eventually the furor, and hard feelings, died down.
Lockwood was anxious to study for the bar but, not wishing to leave Washington and the family claims office, she continued to face the problem of where. Hearing Couzins and achieving a certain success with the Arnell bill only increased her “irrepressible” interest in the law. But only weeks after the final vote on the bill, tragedy struck the Lockwood home when eighteen-month-old Jessie sickened and died. In the Victorian idiom of her time, Belva memorialized her “little blossom,” writing that Jessie had been a comfort and blessing “and had awakened…maternal love to a depth that an uncultivated individual can never comprehend. But the flower wilted, and…the immortal gem of purity was set by the Eternal Jeweler in his own coronet to be worn eternally.”14
Lockwood faced tragedy and disappointment throughout her life. Her genius, first demonstrated after Uriah’s death, lay in accepting misfortune and moving ahead with new plans. Jessie’s death was no different. Determined to be resilient, she resumed her public activities, using the well-being of the community to justify a short period of mourning: “[O]ther people’s children were soon to be worse than dead, if a prohibitory law were not passed in the District.”15 She joined the acrimonious debate over proposals to regulate alcohol and obtained seven hundred signatures on a petition to be presented to the government. She never again wrote publicly about Jessie, whose death seemed to increase her desire to become a lawyer.
Sometime in 1870, she thought she had found a way. In that year officials of the District’s new National University Law School, perhaps in order to lard enrollment in the program, invited a number of women, including Lockwood, to attend classes. She later insisted that the offer was “part of [their] plan to admit women to membership on the same terms as men,” and that the program would be coeducational.16 Early in 1871, fifteen women, including Belva and Lura, enrolled in National’s law program.17 Most of the ladies, Lockwood wrote, matriculated “as a novelty…certainly without any adequate idea of the amount of labor involved.”18 They believed that the school’s administrators sympathized with the idea of equal rights, but when they came to class, the women discovered that while they would be permitted to attend certain lectures with the male students, their regular recitations would be sex-segregated. Lockwood called this a compromise between prejudice and progress that the women accepted.19
The male students, however, were locked into their old-fashioned ideas. They rebelled at any presence of the opposite sex, sending up what Lockwood described as a “growl,” with some of them declaring they would not graduate with women.20 The administration capitulated and the female students were notified that they could no longer attend