Before It Was Merely Difficult: Belva Lockwood's Life in Law and Politics Jill Norgren On December 2, 1880, the widely-read Washington, D.C., newspaper, The Evening Star, announced that for the first time a woman lawyer had “an opportunity to argue a cause in the U.S. Supreme Court.” No banner headline accompanied the thirty-six line notice but, in keeping with its historic nature, the oral argument made by BelvaA. Lockwood prompted attention. This con trasted sharply with the prior year when the same newspaper, known for its reporting of civic affairs, barely remarked upon the admission ofLockwood as the first female member ofthe bar of the Supreme Court of the United States stating only, “For the first time in the history of this court a woman’s name now stands on the roll of its practitioners.”1 The brevity of this announcement hid the dramatic story of the woman who had struggled for a decade, first, to join men in the study of law, and later, in its practice. At the time of her admission to the U.S. Supreme Court bar Lockwood was the head of a small Washington, D.C., law office. She had been licensed to practice law in the courts of the District of Columbia in 1873, winning the right shortly after the pioneering African-American woman attorney, Char lotte E. Ray.2 Lockwood had established a general practice, taking and arguing cases in the Law (Civil), Criminal, and Equity divisions ofthe Supreme Court ofthe District of Columbia. Although these accomplishments were story enough, Lockwood’s career merited par ticular attention because she had, virtually single-handedly, contested the federal courts and then Congress for five years in order to win the “bill ofrights” that gained women law yers admittance to the U.S. Supreme Court. She insistently claimed the right of women to pur sue professional careers at a time when most Americans were certain that middle-class women properly belonged at home. She became a lawyerbecause she believed that attorneys had BELVA LOCKWOOD 17 greatpowerto shape public policy andbecause she believedthatwomen shouldhave equal op portunity to participate in governance. She fought the exclusion of women from the fed eral bar as a lawyer and an activist. Lockwood was an early and adamant woman suffragist whose activism led to a lifetime of personally confounding the social axioms of nineteenthcentury America. Her life provides a bold and visible example of pluck, persistence, and achievement. She not only desegregated the profession oflaw, but also changed the face of American politics when she ran for the United States presidency in 1884 and 1888. Journey Into Law and Politics Lockwood was bom Belva Ann Bennett in Royalton, Niagara County, New York, in 1830. Her farm family background endowed her neither with advantage nor a tradition of rebellion. As a teenager she resembled numer ous country girls who provided an extra pair ofhands at home while teaching numbers and letters atthe local schoolhouse. Widowed, with a child, at age twenty two, she entered a local seminary and a year later its affiliated college (now Syracuse University), eventually becom ing a teacher and school principal. She de scribed herself in an 1867 survey of college alumni as “an earnest, zealous laborer in the cause ofEducation, Sabbath School and Mis sionary work and an indefatigable advocate of the Temperance Cause....”3 At thirty-six, Belva Bennett McNall moved herselfandher sixteen-year-old daugh ter to Washington, D.C. Later in life she ex plained the move and her motives in several different articles and interviews. In her 1888 self-portrait, “My Efforts To Become A Law yer,” written for Lippincott’s Monthly Maga zine, she said, “I sold out my school property in Owego, and came to Washington, for no other purpose than to see what was being done atthis greatpolitical centre, —this seethingpot, —to learn something ofthe practical workings of the machinery of government, and to see what the great men and women ofthe country felt and thought.”After visiting herparents and exploring the possibility ofteaching in the area of Illinois to which they had moved, she re turned to Washington and “accepted a position in a...