In 1884, a dynamic presidential candidate caught America’s attention. Belva Lockwood was a lawyer and a woman running for president of the United States when women did not have the right to vote.
“I cannot vote,” she told The Evening Star, "but I can be voted for."
Belva Lockwood spent her long life, as she said, fighting “to place my sister woman on an equality with man.” She was the second woman to run for president of the United States (Victoria Woodhull was the first), the first female lawyer admitted to practice in front of the Supreme Court, a lobbyist, a powerful public speaker, a peace activist and a leader in the women’s suffrage movement.
“Resilience, wit, and good humor, Lockwood’s work and days reveal, can turn put-downs and slights into opportunities,” Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg writes in the introduction to Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President, by Jill Norgren.
Lockwood's Early Life
Belva Ann Bennett was born October 24, 1830, on a farm in Royalton, New York. “Belva had mixed feelings about a childhood in which her accomplishments and ambitions were not particularly valued,” Norgren writes. “She complained that she did the work of a boy caring for the farm animals but did not get proper credit. She chafed when her father did not encourage her schoolwork because of her sex.”
At the age of 14, Lockwood became a teacher and was dismayed to learn that she was paid half of what her male co-worker made. In 1848, she married a farmer name Uriah McNall. He died three years later, leaving her on her own to support their daughter, Lura.
As a widow, Lockwood enrolled at Genesee Wesleyan Seminary and graduated with honors in 1857. She became involved with the growing suffrage and temperance movements. In 1866, she moved to Washington, D.C., teaching and cultivating an influential circle of progressive friends and becoming the president of the Universal Franchise Association.
In 1868, she married an elderly minister and dentist named Ezekiel Lockwood. They had a daughter Jessie (who died before her second birthday). Ezekiel helped raise Belva's daughter Lura, from her first marriage, and supported his wife's career and activism.
Long fascinated with the law, Belva Lockwood next enrolled in the National University Law School. Although she completed her coursework, the university initially refused to grant her a diploma, which she needed to gain admittance to the District of Columbia Bar. Lockwood battled the school, even writing a letter to President Ulysses S. Grant, appealing for his assistance. Finally, in September 1873, the university granted her a diploma and, at age 43, she was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar.
“I think she had a tremendous ego. And that was something that was necessary for what she was going to do,” Norgren says. “Being a big ego isn't necessarily a delightful thing for other people. I don't know if I would've been pals with her, but I was drawn to, and I admired her tenaciousness.”
Lockwood's Legal Career
Lockwood next set her sights on the nation's highest court. After years of being denied, on March 3, 1879, she became the first female lawyer admitted to the Supreme Court bar. The next year, she became the first woman to argue a case, Kaiser v. Stickney, in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Lockwood became famous for riding her bicycle throughout D.C., which was considered scandalously unladylike. Her private practice thrived, and she represented all races and sexes—from murder suspects to veterans fighting for pensions and real estate interests. She also encouraged other women to become lawyers. “There is a good opening at the bar for the class of women who have taste and tact for it,” she advised, per Norgren.
In 1872, Lockwood watched with interest as Victoria Woodhull, the glamorous, eccentric, savvy suffragette, ran for president on the ticket of the Equal Rights Party.
Presidential Run as a Statement
In 1884, the Equal Rights Party nominated Lockwood to the top of the ticket. Although very different in personality from Woodhull, both women understood the importance of their symbolic runs. “I think they were women who had some understanding of history and how you move the needle,” Norgren says.
Lockwood knew that being visible was part of the battle for equal rights. “It is quite time that we had our own party; our own platform, and our own nominees,” she wrote. “We shall never have equal rights until we take them, nor respect until we command it.”
Woodhull and Lockwood were building a movement which had been brewing since the end of the Civil War. “Beginning in the 1870s, women did start running for local offices that ran from justice of the peace to a lot of different educational offices,” Norgren says. “Most of the time, like Belva, if they were going to be elected, they were elected by men because the women in their jurisdiction didn't have the vote.”
But the assertion that a woman could be president upped the ante. “Lockwood was part of that movement, but willing to take all of the heat of being more outrageous in her demand—‘I'm going to be President Lockwood.’ Doing that takes the moment and makes it bigger,” Norgren says.”
Lockwood also noted that America lagged behind many other countries with female leaders. “Why not nominated women for important places?” she asked. “Is not Victoria Empress of India? Have we not among out countrywomen persons of as much talent and ability? Is not history full of precedents of women rulers?”
Unlike Woodhull, Lockwood launched a full-scale, professional campaign. Her platform focused not only on suffrage, but also on the economy, and bettering the lives of lower and middle-class Americans of all races. She travelled the country giving stump speeches and interviews, and good-naturedly confronting detractors.
On November 4, 1884, Democrat Grover Cleveland was elected president of the United States. While Lockwood didn't come close in the final vote count, she established a legacy. Americans named businesses, streets, even their children after her. For decades after, female lawyers had portraits of her hanging in their offices.
In 1888, Lockwood ran again to the dismay of some of the leaders of the suffrage movement, including Susan B. Anthony who saw her as a self-serving showboat (for her part, Lockwood accused Anthony of “tyrannical jealousy.”) The campaign garnered less attention than her 1884 run but did include an interview with the pioneering journalist Nellie Bly. “Men always say, ‘Let’s see what you can do,’” Lockwood told Bly, per Norgren. “If we always talk and never work, we will not accomplish anything.”
Lockwood's Legacy
For the rest of her long life, Lockwood became a leading figure in the international peace movement while practicing law. “She… last argued before the Court in 1906,” Ginsburg writes. “Then age seventy-five she helped to secure a multi-million-dollar award for Cherokees who had suffered removal from their ancestral lands and relocation, without just compensation.”
Shortly before her death, Lockwood was asked if she believed a woman would ever be president. “If [a woman] demonstrates that she is fitted to be president she will some day occupy the White House,” Lockwood said. Belva Lockwood died in 1917—two years before women were granted the right to vote.
