Belva Lockwood. Jill Norgren
an effort to open the American Foreign Service to women.22 She had been told about a vacancy at the U.S. consul’s office at Ghent and rushed to brush up on her German, while searching the musty basement library of the U.S. Supreme Court for books on international law. Through a member of Congress she obtained a copy of the Consular Manual and memorized its contents. When she felt herself competent to perform the services required of a consular officer, she submitted her job application to President Johnson and his secretary of state, William H. Seward.
To her “chagrin and disappointment,” the application was not acknowledged. Belva later wrote that she had not stopped to consider whether the Europeans would receive a woman officer. Still a novice in the game of politics, she let the matter drop, later criticizing herself as having been “weak-kneed.”23 But she was harsh in this judgment. She had, after all, acted, fearlessly taking aim at the federal government, defying custom and risking ridicule. The President had ignored her—Belva attributed the inattention to his messy entanglement in Reconstruction politics, a prelude to his 1868 impeachment trial—but he could not undo the challenge, the direct action that would become the signature of her politics. For this reason, the application was an important milestone, and one she often mentioned. Before this test she had been a woman who jousted verbally with local school boards engaged in shameless wage discrimination. Now, with a few pieces of paper, she had challenged the hiring practices of the United States government.
Belva came to Washington knowing only her mother’s nephew, William G. Richardson, and his wife, Sarah. Richardson was a ship captain, four years older than Belva.24 His presence eased the transition to life in the capital. When Lura arrived, she and her mother joined the Wesley Methodist Church at Fifth and F Streets, NW, a few blocks’ walk from their rooms at the Union League Hall.25 Although church and family provided the first network of friends, reform activism endowed them with community. In the ensuing years these new friends and acquaintances would include people of influence, notoriety, and modest rank: government clerks and members of Congress, many women, and more than a few men.
The women that Belva met were an unconventional vanguard, ladies intent on public and professional lives. Josephine Griffing was among the first of Belva’s acquaintances.26 She was an established figure in the National Freedmen’s Relief Association, as well as the fledgling national woman suffrage movement. Griffing had made a name for herself as an outspoken abolitionist. Earlier, while living in Ohio and Indiana and despite the responsibilities of motherhood, she had toured the Midwest as a paid agent of the Western Anti-Slavery Society. She had come to Washington near the end of the war to work for freedmen’s relief and, later, to lobby on behalf of a federal intervention program, the Freedmen’s Bureau.
Griffing and Belva may have become acquainted at Washington temperance meetings, as both women sang the praise of abstinence. It is also possible that they met late in 1866 when Belva and other Washington activists began to talk about forming a local woman suffrage organization. As they puzzled out strategy, Julia Archibald Holmes joined the circle and became the first president of the women’s rights group that they launched, the Universal Franchise Association (UFA). Holmes had lived in the New Mexico Territory and, against local advice, had been the first white woman to climb the 14,000-foot Pike’s Peak. She and her husband were active in the Republican Party and operated a printing office that, against custom, employed women as typesetters.27 UFA meetings also gave Belva the opportunity to make the acquaintance of Sara Spencer, who ran the woman’s department of the Spencerian Business College, as well as doctors Susan Edson and Caroline Winslow. J. Hamilton Willcox, a statistician in the Treasury Department, and Andrew J. Boyle, a congressional clerk assigned to the Committee on Education and Labor, each came to meetings and became friends. These men had political expertise that Belva was quick to appreciate. From her earliest days with the UFA she saw the benefit of working for change with sympathetic men.
Belva also came to know several powerful Washington women journalists. Emily Briggs, who wrote under the pen name “Olivia,” was the first woman to obtain news regularly from the White House. Northerner Mary Clemmer Ames had flirted with writing before the breakup of her marriage opened the way for a move to the District, where, in 1866, she launched her career as a political commentator. She could be observed for long hours in the ladies’ gallery of the House and Senate taking notes for her column. Like Briggs, she wrote about the problems encountered by women government clerks.28
Dr. Mary Walker was a friend of a different stripe. In the eyes of the world, she was an eccentric who, despite her medical degree, sacrificed respectability by wearing male clothing. Walker had emerged as a notorious figure during the Civil War when, against all odds, she won an appointment as an assistant surgeon for the 52nd Ohio Regiment.29 She scandalized the troops by wearing the uniform of a male medic. She served at the front and was captured by Confederate soldiers. Imprisoned for four months, she was released in exchange for a Confederate officer. After the war, she adopted the habit of wearing a man’s frock coat and pantaloons, accompanied by a high silk hat and a slender cane. As the years rolled on, she cast off the pantaloons and frilly shirt collars, and wore strictly male attire. Newspaper editors seldom lost the opportunity to mock her. Lura, more parochial than her mother, was also given to belittling Walker.
Belva liked the doctor. The two women met sometime after September 1867, when Walker returned from a year of lecturing in England and France. They formed a lifelong friendship, though the two women could not have been more different in matters of family life and physical appearance. Walker was a divorced loner with no children. She lived far from her upstate New York relatives and seldom kept house, while Belva followed many of the conventional domestic routines of the day. The friendship rested upon the experience of two independent women who shared a love of ideas and writing, each of whom needed to earn a living, each of whom believed in the movement for women’s rights.
These Washington women had a profound effect on Belva. As professionals and as reformers, they were tough, assured, and accomplished. Before Washington Belva had known hard-working and caring women, her mother chief among them. But during her New York State days, with the exception of Susan B. Anthony, at best an acquaintance, she had lived outside the world of influential women leaders. She needed a circle of friends and associates who would be political confederates, people who would encourage her, educate her and, critically, respect her. In Washington she found that community and a life in equal rights politics.
It is a startling fact that the United States Constitution ratified in 1789 did not guarantee Americans the right to vote. Out of a desire to protect states’ rights, established property interests, and traditional cultural values, the Framers of the Constitution remained virtually silent on a matter that we now agree lies at the heart of democratic government. Hoping to escape the oppressive heat of Philadelphia with a document that would be approved, the convention delegates decided to leave the determination of who could vote to the states, whose laws, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, limited participation in national and local elections to white men who met property qualifications.30 Free African Americans and women rarely qualified. By 1850, most white men had been granted suffrage regardless of their economic status, the result of practical concerns, including the recruitment of militia as well as political-party competition for voters. Women of all races remained disfranchised while, at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, African-American men could vote in five New England states and, with qualification, in New York.31
Free blacks had protested their limited voting rights before the Civil War. After the victory of the North, they resumed this agitation, joined by the new freedmen of the South and a small group of white allies, in particular the Radicals of the Republican Party. Some women also disputed their exclusion from full political citizenship and had been lobbying state legislatures on the question of suffrage at least since the mid-1840s. When Belva arrived in Washington in 1866 Congress was debating the question of African-American voting rights. Within months, much to her surprise and pleasure, a proposal that would enfranchise the women of Washington, D.C., also came before the legislature. The bill provoked a heated discussion of universal suffrage. It also strengthened Belva’s identity as an advocate of women’s rights.
Universal suffrage embodied the simple but, at the time, radical idea that neither race nor sex could