Belva Lockwood. Jill Norgren
from the preceptress of the seminary, who told her she could expect to be a more highly cultured person if she stayed with the ladies’ program.30 The president of the college welcomed her, but did not hide his concern that she, a poor single mother, would not finish the longer course of study.
The Genesee program imposed a strict code of behavior, one that emphasized long hours of study and rote classroom recitation. The cloistered students were not allowed newspapers, and were encouraged not to mix with the citizens of Lima. Belva said that as a result of these policies she and her classmates were a “blank” with respect to contemporary politics.31 On campus, informal social conversation between the sexes was also discouraged. At meals, men and women sat on opposite sides of long tables without speaking. Belva had no callers at the dormitory parlor, something of a trial for a gregarious person.
Genesee had a “decidedly religious cast,” with male students and teachers dominating the school: “The only thing that the young ladies pretended to run themselves,” Belva wrote, “was a literary society, which gave opportunity for the display of such genius as had not been exhausted by the rigorous study of the week.”32 Although the college nourished her in many ways, she occasionally slipped away in order to widen her perspective. She attended law lectures conducted by a local attorney. She said this was frowned upon by the Genesee faculty, who considered it an intrusion upon their rights, but her fascination with the law was already strong, and she went as often as possible.33 On at least one occasion she also left campus in order to hear Susan B. Anthony lecture on women’s rights. Anthony made the radical argument that society must permit women to work in stores and offices, a proposal Belva described as “startling heresy” to the public of the time.34
Belva graduated with honors on June 27, 1857. Forty years later, she confided that the discipline and thought “awakened” by the Genesee faculty was as important as the knowledge imparted by these teachers; and that the education “has been…like a cash capital in bank, giving reputation and standing in the community, and a constant desire for greater knowledge.”35 She had risked the love of her family for a degree that did, in fact, change her life.
While she may have dreamed about finding an attorney bold enough to apprentice her, immediately after graduation Belva headed home to take up work at the Lockport Union School. In 1857 teaching was virtually the only profession open to women. Schools were enrolling an increasing number of female students, and women instructors were being sought to teach them.36 After the quiet of her life with Uriah, and the isolation of Genesee, she would be living in the county seat, a prosperous transportation and manufacturing town with a population of several thousand. Again, however, she faced the problem of wage discrimination. Although the school board knew she was a widow with a child to support, she was offered a salary lower than the one paid to her male colleagues. She complained, unsuccessfully, and then began the work of educating some of the school’s six hundred students, anxious to earn enough salary to be reunited with her daughter.37 In the late autumn she collected her pay and made the journey to her parents’ home in Onargo, Illinois. She saw Hannah and Lewis for the first time since leaving for college in 1854 and was reunited with Lura, to whom she was a stranger. After a visit of some weeks, she gathered up her six-year-old daughter and her teenaged sister, Inverno, and traveled back to New York. She set up housekeeping at Esther Comstock’s boarding house, grateful for the presence of her sister, who was close to Lura. Both girls were enrolled at the Lockport Union School, Lura in the lower division and her aunt, already a high school student, in the Senior Department.
Historians describe the decades before the Civil War as an “age of great movements.” Men joined in organized campaigns, at first religious but later secular, to bring the “good news” that society could be reformed. Women’s activism labored under the general belief that women belonged in the home, that they were intellectually inferior to men and should defer to them. But there was something sufficiently permissive in the culture of western New York where Belva grew up and had returned to teach that women could, and did, claim a place in changing society. With men, they became a voice against slavery and drink and, at Seneca Falls, they publicized the peaceful suffrage revolution that was taking shape in a number of communities through talk and petitioning.38
Cloistered college life had been confining for Belva, an enthusiast, but the move to Lockport freed her to join the highly charged world of upstate New York reform, to read newspapers, and to catch up on the politics of the day. Her religion drew her to benevolent-society activity, while her experience with sexual discrimination and the tragedy of widowhood gave her a natural sympathy for women’s rights.
The social ferment in western New York was the product of many influences, including “fires of the spirit” that had burnt with particular intensity twenty years earlier during a period of religious revivals, giving the region the nickname, “the Burned-Over District.”39 By the time Belva returned to Lockport in 1857, this religious excitement had matured into a culture of spiritual and secular optimism that embraced the hoped-for second coming of Christ and the practice of benevolence.
The year before moving to Lockport, Belva had been converted to Methodism by the preaching of her college president, Joseph Cumming, and had been baptized by him. She had read the Bible as a child and undoubtedly attended the revival meetings that broke the tedium and isolation of farm work, but before 1856 she never spoke about membership in a church. The Methodists’ belief in individual responsibility, divine love freely bestowed upon humankind, and faith confirmed by good works nurtured Belva’s inherent sense of her own worth and encouraged her desire to improve the world. Through her conversion she gained focus. She became, she wrote, “an earnest, zealous laborer in the cause of Education, Sabbath School and Missionary work and an indefatigable advocate of the Temperance Cause.”40 It was a public role encouraged by a church that, since the early days of John Wesley’s preaching in England, had been progressive on the question of women. In western New York Methodist women had been known to preach at meeting, publicly affirming Wesley’s particular message of salvation and charging others to share the good news of the Gospels.41 By 1857 this part of the state, once a storm center of personal religious fervor, had turned outward with citizens now stoking the fires of social and political reform in matters of temperance, abolition, and women’s rights.
Western New York was a good place for Belva, who was empowered by her religion and by a thousand changes, large and small, that were working their way into the secular culture that also defined women’s lives. An increase in commerce, transportation, urbanization, and female literacy reshaped mid-nineteenth-century America, introducing new ideas about what was right and proper. Belva also benefited from the slow but dramatic transformation in women’s civic life that had begun in the 1830s. Once welcomed and celebrated in politics only for their role as mothers of the Republic, ordinary women had seized a greater role and stepped out into the community, as Belva had, performing benevolent and missionary work. In this coming out, they saw their communities and governments in a new light and concluded that the perfection of society required their participation in politics.42 Although they could not vote, women sized up parties and candidates, concerned themselves with the business of school boards, and began lobbying state educational appropriations, married women’s property rights, and observance of the sabbath.
This activism was aided by a handful of courageous women who proved to be exceptionally able theoreticians, agitators, and organizers. In Belva’s civic genealogy, they are the mothers: African-American Maria Stewart; Quaker minister Lucretia Mott; southern abolitionists Angelina and Sarah Grimké. Each asserted the right of respectable women to talk in public even when what they had to say was controversial. They argued that all women, not only preaching women who spoke from an “Inner Light,” had the right and duty, as equals to men, to speak on matters of public importance. The Grimkés wrote essays on women’s unequal status. Their work anticipated the writing of Margaret Fuller, one of America’s great intellectual figures, who made the radical argument that men “could never reach [their] true proportions while [woman] remained in any wise shorn of hers.”43 In her too-short life, Fuller championed women’s intellectual (rather than domestic) development, insisting that women must be taught rigorous critical thinking. She offered private classes, “Conversations