Belva Lockwood. Jill Norgren
argue that the existing Constitution granted to all citizens, including women, the right to vote. In the months that followed she heard about Francis and Virginia Minor, two activists from St. Louis who, like Pomeroy, were making the case that women already had the right to vote and that no amendment specifically to guarantee woman suffrage was necessary. The Minors contended that if, under the U.S. Constitution, women had not always been entitled to elective franchise, the recently ratified Fourteenth Amendment enfranchised them as a right of national citizenship. In stating that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” were “citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” the Fourteenth Amendment established a national definition of citizenship that, when joined to subsequent clauses prohibiting states from making or enforcing “any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” forbade the denial of suffrage.
Most suffrage women knew nothing about Woodhull until early 1870 when the New York newspapers and Stanton and Anthony’s suffrage paper, Revolution, began covering Woodhull, Claflin & Co., America’s first female stockbrokers, a business established with Vanderbilt’s help.4 Woodhull worked quietly in the first months of 1870, pulling together a team of advisors that included Blood, radical philosopher Stephen Pearl Andrews, and Massachusetts congressman Benjamin Butler. In April, pronouncing herself “the most prominent representative of the only unrepresented class in the republic,” she declared herself a presidential candidate, saying, “While others of my sex devoted themselves to a crusade against the laws that shackle the women of the country, I asserted my individual independence.…I proved it by successfully engaging in business.…I boldly entered the arena of politics.…I therefore claim the right to speak for the unenfranchised women of the country.”5
Woodhull was the first woman to enter an American presidential race. Suffrage activists were electrified by her decision, but nervous about her radical social views. She supported sweeping change in relations between capital and labor as well as between the sexes. Reporters charged her with advocating free love. She made no effort to hide her personal and political philosophies, voicing them in Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, the newspaper that she had established, which covered finance, culture, and politics. Woodhull used the publication to promote her candidacy and to write about women’s rights, including the argument made by the Minors and her own view that suffrage was a civil right of all citizens.6
Late in 1870 Woodhull traveled to Washington, prepared to test her ability to influence the suffrage debate. She had learned from her friend Benjamin Butler that Julian’s Sixteenth Amendment bill, viewed as a pesky piece of business, would never come out of committee. The news pleased her because, like the Minors, Woodhull thought that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments made a woman suffrage amendment superfluous. She had come to Washington to argue that Congress now only needed to pass “enabling legislation” similar to the Enforcement Act of May 31, 1870 (prohibiting state officials from discriminating against voters on the basis of race).7
Woodhull presented this written argument in “The Memorial of Victoria C. Woodhull.” Four days before Christmas, members of the House and Senate received copies of the document along with the request that the question of a declaratory bill be referred to each chamber’s judiciary committee. And then, in a blunt test of her star power, the publicity-savvy candidate arranged to make a personal plea for action before the House Judiciary Committee. Woodhull’s January 11, 1871, appearance, organized with the help of Butler, was a coup for her, and for the suffrage movement. Despite the increasing frequency with which women lobbied members of Congress, as Lockwood had done in support of the Arnell bill, women’s public testimony in one of the Capitol’s smoky committee rooms remained unusual.
Lockwood, invited to be present along with other leaders from the UFA, was fascinated by Woodhull’s argument.8 She listened a second time when Woodhull crossed town and repeated her presentation before delegates attending a national woman suffrage convention. The delegates agreed to make the Minor-Woodhull position their “New Departure.” The new strategy had considerable appeal with its call for direct action rather than a long, uncertain wait for a woman suffrage amendment. An agenda took shape that emphasized passage of enabling legislation, efforts to register and vote, and court challenges when local officials refused to register women or to accept their ballots.
Lockwood immediately saw the possibility of using the Woodhull-Minor theory of woman suffrage to influence Senate debate on a new District of Columbia governance bill. Only days after Woodhull’s presentation, in collaboration with UFA colleagues Caroline B. Winslow and Susan A. Edson, she prepared two memorials intended to convince members of Congress that District women had the right to vote. They had met defeat in 1867 when the universal suffrage bill was voted down. Now, however, they had the carefully constructed New Departure argument to work with.9
It is likely that Lockwood, having just entered law school, authored most of the text. In the first memorial she argued that the original Constitution and Bill of Rights gave women the right to vote although she acknowledged that the constitutional text was ambiguous. She told the senators that they could not know the intentions of the Framers, and must construe the rights and obligations of citizenship from the document’s language. She then repeated the much-observed fact that the Constitution, as originally written, contained no “negative declaration,” no language that prohibited women from voting. Therefore, she wrote, any state or territorial government, or Congress on behalf of the District of Columbia, could enact declaratory legislation granting women the right to vote. Wyoming had done so and, in 1870, so had the territorial government of Utah. Like any good lawyer, she did not rest her case on one theory. American constitutional law, she observed, now embraced the additional guarantees of the Fourteenth and Fifteen Amendments, which must be read to include women in the national community of citizens entitled to vote, and to be protected in that right by the federal government.10
A second memorial outlined the cultural and political reasons for woman suffrage. Answering opponents who misrepresented man’s greater position outside of the home, and contributions in war, Lockwood and her colleagues described woman’s role as producer and taxpayer, and as a class that suffers under the “responsibilities and dangers of maternity.”11 Yet, despite these contributions to society the law treats her as “a mere chattel.” Countering the nineteenth-century belief that women lacked the ability to reason, and thus to participate responsibly in the political life of the country, the memorial insisted that “[w]oman possesses the faculty of government, and cannot be deprived of its advantages without damage to the body politic.” Pursuing this utilitarian political argument, they concluded the sober but hopeful lecture: “Man, deprived of female society degenerates rapidly, as may be seen in all communities composed of men alone. Doubtless the same would be true of woman. A perfect government can only come of a perfect manhood and womanhood with their efforts united for the common good.”
Senator Pomeroy, honorary UFA president, arranged for the memorials to be introduced into the record on January 23, but Congress could not be persuaded to side with the women, and the attempt to win “impartial suffrage” in the District of Columbia failed. On February 27, 1871, the new law, locally referred to as the Organic Act, went into effect, with District voting still limited to men.12 Perhaps inspired by Woodhull’s candidacy, Lockwood responded to this defeat by trying to win a delegate’s position at the nominating convention that was to select a District representative to sit in the Congress. She delivered a short speech and came within one vote of winning a place.13
While women in the territories of Wyoming and Utah had won the right to vote from their territorial governments, the experience of the women of Washington in the struggle for suffrage was far more typical. In general, there was little progress in the matter of woman suffrage. Julian’s Sixteenth Amendment bill was dead in committee, and the declaratory act strategy had resulted in little gain. On January 30, 1871, a majority of the House Committee on the Judiciary, having considered Woodhull’s “Memorial,” issued a report that rejected the Minor-Woodhull argument in its entirety. Chairman John A. Bingham of Ohio wrote that neither the Fourteenth nor the Fifteenth Amendment granted women the right to vote and that, therefore, “it is not competent for the Congress of the United States to establish by law the right