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Book Review
| Jill Norgren, Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would be President, New York: New York University Press, 2007. Pp. 232. $35.00 (ISBN 0-8147-5834-7).
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| Belva Lockwood lived an extraordinary life as an attorney, lobbyist, suffragist, two-time presidential candidate, progressive reformer, and peace advocate. Primarily known as the first woman admitted to practice before the Supreme Court, she is one of those remarkable nineteenth-century women, occasionally commemorated, but whose life has otherwise fallen into obscurity. With such accomplishments, it is shocking that until now there has been no biography of Lockwood. Jill Norgren has filled this important gap. Belva Lockwood is a thoroughly researched and well-written traditional biography that chronologically recounts Lockwood's life. |
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Lockwood, raised in upstate New York, married young, gave birth, and was widowed early. Taking her small inheritance, she enrolled in college and spent the next years teaching. In 1866, Lockwood, now thirty-six, and fascinated by politics moved to Washington, D.C. with her daughter. In D.C., Lockwood met politically active and professional women and quickly became involved in women's rights and temperance activities. Soon Lockwood remarried, had another child, established a pension claims office with her husband, and, having tired of teaching, decided to become a lawyer. Although Lockwood attended the new National University Law School, it refused to grant her or the other woman who completed its program a diploma. Lockwood then unsuccessfully attempted to be admitted to the all-male D.C. bar. Using tactics that she would come to rely upon in later years, Lockwood refused to take no for an answer and enlisted politically connected friends in her cause while also repeatedly petitioning officials and politicians. After years of agitation, Lockwood received her diploma and became the second woman admitted to the D.C. bar. |
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Having won this battle, Lockwood continued her work on women's suffrage while seeking admission to various bars including the U.S. Court of Claims and the U.S. Supreme Court. Both rejected her application as they did not admit women. With the support of a number of congressmen and some of Washington's legal luminaries, Lockwood eventually submitted a bill to Congress that prohibited discrimination against female attorneys in regard to federal bar admission. After five year of lobbying, the bill, one of the first to address sex discrimination, was passed in 1879 and soon thereafter Lockwood was admitted to the Supreme Court. In December 1880, Lockwood also became the first woman to argue before the Court. |
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In addition to the drama of Lockwood's battles for bar admission, Norgren provides a nice account of the mundane work of a solo legal practitioner. Lockwood's practice included veteran's pension claims, probate, real estate, patent, criminal, and divorce work. Her clients were primarily working class and ethnically and racially diverse. Unlike some other early women lawyers, Lockwood embraced trial work and eagerly took on women's civil cases involving seduction, rape, and the breach of promises to marry. Lockwood's most significant case involved the Cherokee claims litigation. In the 1870s, Lockwood became close to James Taylor, a Cherokee lobbyist and she began representing the Eastern Cherokee regarding claims against the U.S. and the Western Cherokee relating to Cherokee land and treaties. In the decades of lobbying, litigation, Congressional acts, political and inter-lawyer wrangling, Lockwood remained intimately involved, successfully arguing a part of the case in front of the Supreme Court. |
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Lockwood clearly enjoyed being in the spotlight. In 1884, she became the presidential nominee of the Equal Rights Party, which was established by a handful of suffrage leaders who had become increasingly frustrated with the Republican and Democratic Parties' failure to support women's suffrage. Lockwood embarked on a quite serious campaign, advocating for a broad range of equal rights for women, marital reform, generous veteran's pensions, temperance, citizenship for Native Americans, acceptance of Chinese immigrants, and peaceful relations with foreign governments. Her campaign, which attracted significant newspaper headlines, had not been blessed by the main suffrage organizations and they were far from supportive. Susan Anthony objected to Lockwood's candidacy as a distraction and at least some labeled Lockwood "a female Barnum" (176). Such antagonism only grew when Lockwood again ran for president in 1888. Having alienated Anthony, and perhaps never successfully engaging in any broad-based organizing activity, Lockwood was blocked from any leadership position in the mainstream suffrage movement. Furthermore, the new generation of suffrage leaders, often more religious and conservative than the previous generation, failed to pay appropriate homage or integrate the older generation of suffrage pioneers. |
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As Lockwood found herself alienated from the mainstream suffrage organizations, her attention increasingly turned to the peace movement where she obtained a leadership position in Alfred Love's Universal Peace Union. Norgren writes that the UPA was the "most radical peace organization in the United States (155). The UPA sought to eliminate war, injustice, and social conflict in all forms and promoted arbitration and international courts. For forty years, Lockwood lobbied for this organization and the UPA provided Lockwood with opportunities to meet heads of state and to travel extensively. |
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Like many biographers of women, Norgren was faced with a less than complete cache of documents and, as she recognizes, this left some holes. One such gap is that the biography does not give the reader a full understanding of Lockwood's interior life, what motivated her, or what drew her to the many causes in which she participated. This absence also creates the sense that Lockwood did not have intimate female friendships, which stands in marked contrast to other suffrage leaders. Yet, as the biography mentions but does not fully integrate, Lockwood spent much of her life surrounded by family and friends and was especially close to her daughter who ran Lockwood's legal practice in her absence. |
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Finally, Norgren confronted the formidable task of explaining the many causes, cases, and activities in which Lockwood was involved. Often the biography understandably is just able to touch the surface. This reader, however, would have appreciated greater historical analysis of the peace movement given the amount of energy Lockwood devoted to it. Without doubt, however, for those of us interested in U.S. women's history or the nineteenth-century practice of law, Norgren's work is a must. |
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| Felice Batlan
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| Chicago Kent College of Law |
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