Belva Lockwood. Jill Norgren
interest so long as the recitations were continued; studying through the long hot days of Summer.…Judge our disappointment when diplomas were refused us on the ground that we had not studied long enough.…Having received a liberal education, and graduated in a College composed mostly of young men in the State of New York as far back as 1857…I cannot appreciate or understand this (to me) manifest injustice. I am not only wounded in my feelings, but actually deprived of an honest means of livelihood, without any assignable cause.52
Apparently, only hours after posting this letter, she again wrote Grant. The envelope addressed to the president contained nothing more than a note, short and alarmingly rude.
September 3, 1873
Sir,—You are, or you are not, President of the National University Law School. If you are its President, I desire to say to you that I have passed through the curriculum of study in this school, and am entitled to, and demand my diploma. If you are not its President, then I ask that you take your name from its papers, and not hold out to the world to be what you are not.”53
President Grant did not answer her, but two weeks later the university chancellor presented Lockwood with her long-denied diploma.
Obtaining the diploma was the key to bar admission. On September 24, 1873, the “culprits” so opposed to innovation stepped aside and Belva Lockwood was admitted to the District of Columbia bar. She became the second woman attorney in the capital, and one of the very few in the nation, to be licensed to practice law. Ironically, the first woman admitted to the District bar, Charlotte E. Ray, had enrolled at Howard Law School in 1870, completed the course of study, and won admission to the District bar in March of 1872, when the names of her entire class were forwarded to the bar committee. Ray was the daughter of the nationally prominent African-American minister Charles B. Ray. Had Lockwood attended Howard, she might never have had to endure “the weary contest.” She never said why she had not started law school at Howard or why, when she attended lectures there after working for Tilton, she chose to quit. It seems less likely that “the fight was getting monotonous” than that she and Ezekiel could no longer afford the tuition. She did, however, maintain good relations with the faculty at Howard. She later received invitations to speak there and saw at least one of her female acolytes graduate from its law program.
In the nineteenth century most Americans felt that women would “unsex” or degrade themselves if they undertook professional work. Female brains were thought to be unfit for the strain of mental exercise. Wombs, it was also believed, could be weakened by mental exertion. Women first broke through the barriers of workplace prejudice in the field of teaching. With greater struggle, before the Civil War, Elizabeth Blackwell and a handful of her sisters opened American medical education to members of their sex. They faced resistance from male physicians but they succeeded, in part, because of the belief that women doctors should attend female patients.54 In the 1850s Jennie Jones invented women’s-interest news for the daily newspapers and was thought to be the first woman to work in a newsroom.55 Organized religion also resisted women’s importuning. Olympia Brown matriculated at St. Lawrence Theological School in Canton, New York, and was ordained to the Universalist ministry in June 1863, but she was a lonely pioneer.
The hostility toward women with professional aspirations was so great that only the very brave voiced their interest in public. Lockwood was not apprehensive about her place in the vanguard, and while she strongly supported women’s rights, she did not enter the field of law specifically to plead the cause of her sisters. Rather, she expressed a love for reading law and desired greater professional status and financial security. She loved the fact that law was a man’s game and that it could be “a stepping stone to greatness.” But she would always smart at the way she had been treated. Nearly three decades after she had been barred from graduation she retold, with unvarnished sarcasm, the story of her first months as a woman attorney improperly denied a license. “I had,” she wrote, “already booked a large number of government claims, in which I had been recognized by the heads of the different Departments as attorney: so that I was not compelled, like my young brothers of the bar who did not wish to graduate with a woman, to sit in my office and wait for cases.”56
5
Notorious Ladies
We cannot forget, even in this glad hour, that while all men of every race, and clime, and condition, have been invested with the full rights of citizenship, under our hospitable flag, all women still suffer the degradation of disfranchisement.
Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States
by the National Woman Suffrage Association, July 4, 1876
On July 4, 1876, Richard Henry Lee stood in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall and read aloud the Declaration of Independence. As he sat down Susan B. Anthony, barred from participating in the centennial celebration, rose from her seat and marched past foreign guests and American officials to the speaker’s stand, where she thrust a copy of the “Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States by the National Woman Suffrage Association” into the hands of President Grant’s representative. Followed by a small group of supporters, Anthony retraced her steps while scattering copies of the offending document among the invited guests. As the women had planned, she then mounted a platform erected at the front of Independence Hall. With Matilda Gage holding an umbrella to protect her friend from the intense noonday sun, she read the declaration “to an immense concourse of people.”1
The hour was sorely needed political theater. After repeated defeats in legislatures and in the courts, the cause of woman suffrage had stalled. NWSA members had hoped to revive interest on the occasion of the nation’s hundredth birthday by issuing an attention-grabbing declaration. They had asked for, and had been denied, a place on the official centennial program. General Joseph Hawley, president of the organizing committee, told the NWSA that their “slight request,” if granted, “would be the event of the day—the topic of discussion to the exclusion of all others.”2
Lockwood waited for Anthony a few blocks away at the First Unitarian Church, where the Nationals had arranged to hold their own celebration of the nation’s birthday. She had signed the declaration and now sat at the front of the church, one of several speakers scheduled to tell a warmly approving audience about “the tyranny and injustice of the nation toward one-half its people.”3
In its official record, the editors of the History of Woman Suffrage proclaimed the meeting a great success. Still, the fact remained that, despite a great deal of lobbying, public demonstration, and a test of woman’s disfranchisement that had been heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, in July 1876 Americans showed little inclination to tackle the question of women’s rights. Equality challenged settled arrangements with which most citizens were content to live.
If, in 1876, Americans were satisfied with the arrangements that disadvantaged women it was not because the notorious suffrage ladies of Lockwood’s acquaintance had not done everything in their power to educate them, and to change the law. And in a startling declaration on April 2, 1870, one of the most notorious announced herself as a candidate in the 1872 presidential campaign. Her name was Victoria Wood-hull, and she wanted to create a new reform party that would challenge the power and corruption of the Republicans.
Like Lockwood, Woodhull was a work in progress. At the age of fifteen, she had stepped out of a chaotic childhood into a hard-luck marriage to an alcoholic. In her twenties, however, encouraged by her sister Tennie Claflin’s success as a spiritual medium, and urged forward by James Harvey Blood, her second husband, Woodhull became a medical clairvoyant.
The sisters were good at their vocations, earning substantial fees. In 1867 they decided to move to New York City, where they hoped to solicit the backing of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. In the spring of 1868, the sisters presented him with engraved business cards. Beauty, brains, and business credentials won them his immediate attention, and the three formed an extraordinary relationship that brought the two women fame, wealth, and, for Victoria, the opportunity to speak forcefully on the subject of woman’s unequal status.
Woodhull made her first recorded visit to a woman