Belva Lockwood. Jill Norgren
a model for women’s clubs and organizations.44 At a time when advice books told women to be domestic, pious, and submissive, to “avoid a controversial spirit, to repress a harsh answer,” these women challenged orthodoxy and were objects of curiosity and occasional violence.45 Newcomers did not make lightly the decision to join their ranks.
Like these women, Belva did not shy from controversy. Once established in Lockport, she did not hesitate to collaborate with New York women reformers, who radiated “controversial spirit,” most significantly with Susan B. Anthony, who was ten years older than Belva and had already earned a reputation as a peripatetic activist who would not brook sex discrimination. In 1852 she bolted from a Sons of Temperance meeting in Rochester when the chairman, saying women delegates were only present to listen, refused to let her speak. With her new friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anthony organized the Women’s State Temperance Society, an association run by women. Five hundred delegates attended its first meeting in April 1852 where they heard Stanton argue that male drunkenness as well as adultery should be grounds for divorce under state law.46 Stanton and Anthony also linked temperance to woman suffrage, insisting that men could not be relied upon, as proxies for women, to vote against alcohol. In public Anthony urged the wives of drunks not to allow their husbands “to add another child to the family.” This message from “a maiden lady” was taken as effrontery and Anthony, who faced the public more in these years than the often-pregnant Stanton, found herself viciously attacked by newspaper editors protective of liquor interests and male prerogatives. In one editorial she was demeaned as “personally repulsive,” a woman who labored “under feelings of strong hatred toward male men, the effect we assume of jealousy and neglect.”47
Anthony, like Belva, had begun teaching while in her teens. She left the profession to work as a paid organizer for the Anti-Slavery Association but continued to use educators’ forums for her advocacy. Belva encountered her most often at teachers’ conventions held in Lockport. In a message warmly received by Belva, Anthony repeatedly encouraged women teachers to agitate for equal professional status and pay. The message provoked contention. At an August 1858 New York State Teachers Association meeting, a cranky male delegate admonished Anthony for practicing “every dodge,” constantly bringing in this question of woman’s rights. He pronounced the topic now “a stench in the nostrils of many prominent educational men.”48 Anthony refused to back down and Belva watched with admiration as she insisted upon the appointment of women to association committees.
Anthony also opposed many elements of the traditional “girls’” curriculum. During one convention, at Anthony’s suggestion, she and Belva were placed on a committee charged with determining whether it would be appropriate and beneficial for young ladies to be taught public speaking. The two women were given the length of a school term to submit a report. Belva worked quickly, anxious to demonstrate, “with my usual practicality,” that the curriculum for girls, which emphasized domestic arts, underestimated their mental abilities.49 In an experiment, she assigned a weekly public talk to her students and found, over the course of a quarter, that they greatly improved with practice, so much so that “declamation for the girls became the standing order for the school forever after.”50 Flush with success, she urged the school association to recommend a similar change in curriculum throughout the state. When she became an attorney, she praised this liberalization and said such training would have benefited her in the courtroom.51
While they would later quarrel over policy and strategy, in the 1850s Belva and Anthony had a warm relationship, nurtured by their shared profession, work on curriculum reform, and mutual interest in the expansion of coeducational schooling.52 Belva described “this” Susan as a young and handsome woman, whose “spirit of aggressiveness” made her a marked figure, always far ahead of her competitors.53 Profession, family, and finances kept Belva in Lockport, but without Lura and Inverno to care for she might well have emulated Anthony and left teaching to become a field organizer and public speaker for temperance and woman suffrage. She had left Lura once, however, and now felt she had no choice but to remain where she was and to teach, particularly after 1859 when Inverno graduated and returned to Illinois, where she became a teacher and later married.54
When the Civil War started in April 1861 Belva, an abolitionist but also a pacifist, experienced a struggle of the spirit. She was not yet formally affiliated with the American peace movement but, like many northern pacifists, she found it necessary to choose between principle and politics. Reluctantly, she gave Lincoln her support and became president of the Aid Society, organizing the girls in her school, along with the older women of the community, into groups that made clothing and lint bandages for several companies of local volunteers. Like many people, however, she never made peace with the cruelties and cost of this war. Years after the bloodshed ended, she wrote that she had been opposed to slavery “from the first moment that I was able to lisp my school reader” but would have preferred peaceful arbitration “to the sad carnage.”55
Belva resigned her position in Lockport in the summer of 1861 and moved the small McNall household southeast to Wyoming County, New York, where she took up a teaching position at the Gainesville Female Seminary. Aged thirty-one and restless, Belva hoped shortly to buy a small ladies’ seminary where she could experiment further with education whose transforming powers she appreciated as a democrat, a Methodist, and an advocate of equal opportunity for both sexes. Like influential women educators before her, including New Yorker Emma Willard, she thought that a rigorous education could alter women’s lives and make them financially independent.56 She had read about Mary Lyon’s Mount Holyoke Seminary, founded to prepare rural women to work as teachers and missionaries, and was devoted to the exercise regimens advocated by Catharine Beecher of the Hartford Female Seminary.57 Respectable but radical, these mentors sought to open a wider sphere of public influence to their students, claiming for women teachers a share of the life-shaping authority that traditionally had rested with family and church. Belva had accepted this role when she went to Lockport, making a number of changes in the curriculum for girls, including the introduction of a program of calisthenics devised by Beecher. She hoped that the move to Gainesville would afford her even more independence and the chance to mold a new generation of women students.
Initially the move produced little more than frustration and failure. Although Belva was looking for a school of her own, for two years she had to settle for being an employee and endure the opposition of a principal who rejected her suggestions for reform. They clashed over the introduction of Beecher’s calisthenics. When ponds near the seminary froze over, Belva recommended that the girls be encouraged to skate, but her employer forbade it, saying that the innovation would be immodest and irreligious.58 The two were spared further argument when the seminary building burned down, forcing Belva to take Lura and move on. They went to nearby Steuben County, where, in the town of Hornell, Belva obtained a new teaching position at a private academy.
In 1863 the nomadic pair set off again, to the south-central New York State town of Owego, where Belva used her savings to buy the small Owego Female Institute, located on Front Street near the Susquehanna River. Owego was the county seat and the commercial center of a prosperous agricultural and lumbering district. Various teachers had operated a woman’s seminary in the vicinity since 1828, typically not staying more than a few years. Princeton graduate George H. Burroughs and his wife preceded Belva. In 1863 they sold the building to her. Announcement of the change was made in the Owego Times, where an advertisement commended Belva McNall to the citizens of the village as “an earnest and efficient teacher.”59 She and three women assistants operated the institute as a day and boarding school. She made no record of her professional work and after three years, again restless, made the decision to risk an uncertain future in order to explore unspoken ambitions.60 She sold the school property for double her original investment and enrolled Lura, sixteen, at the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary.61 And then, because of her fascination with national politics, she decided to visit Washington, D.C.
2
In Search of a New Identity
Madame de Staël said to Napoleon Bonaparte, when asked why she meddled with politics: “Sire, when women have their