by Jill Norgren
Shortly after sending this letter, Lavinia and Angie King formed a partnership, Goodell & King, Attorneys at Law.110 Goodell helped the novice lawyer and King aided Goodell, whose health was deteriorating. A letter to Sarah Thomas two months later reveals that Lavinia may have been wrong in her professional appraisal of Kane, who had opened a law practice in Milwaukee: “[J]udge, officers, and lawyers have welcomed her very warmly … [S]he is energetic and getting paying clients at once. … I shouldn’t wonder if she beat Angie and I all out yet; especially as the Milwaukee folks take to her so.”111
The prospect of an appeal to the state supreme court on behalf of one of her clients gave Goodell the opportunity to renew her petition for bar admission. She spent the early part of April 1879 preparing an argument for Ryan’s court. This included a new survey of precedents. The best, she knew, was Belva Lockwood’s admission to the United States Supreme Court bar only weeks before, following the passage of anti-discrimination legislation by Congress. Goodell thought that Ryan “will fight to the last” but that the other judges (the associate judges now numbered four) would go against him.112 Although she believed that Ryan would fight, Goodell would not consider that he would “dare disregard” the Lockwood precedent. Happily, she predicted that it would be “delicious to make him admit me after the way he has acted; and if he should refuse, I think I can compel him to do it by a mandamus issued by the U. S. Supreme Court—which would be still better fun. Ryan had his little day, and now I think my hour has come!”
She went to Madison on April 22 to make her application and, again, to listen to I. C. Sloan argue on her behalf. Sloan admired Goodell, but told her to anticipate opposition.113 She was not surprised when the court reserved its decision. Less than two months later, however, on June 18—over Ryan’s protest—Lavinia Goodell was admitted to the Wisconsin Supreme Court bar, the first woman in the state to win this privilege. Justice Orsamus Cole wrote for the court, conceding deference to the new legislative rule.114
Happy and empowered, Goodell set to work on the first appeals brief that she would submit to the state supreme court.115 The case involved one of her jailhouse boys, Tom Ingalls, who had previously served time for stealing a coat. In October 1878 he was accused of stealing clothes from a tailor shop. Ingalls said he had been drinking with friends. In Judge Conger’s court Goodell argued that Ingalls had been too drunk to carry out a theft involving a precisely cut hole in the shop’s window. The jury disagreed and returned a verdict of guilty. A second-time offender, he was sentenced to five years in the state prison. Goodell wrote the appeals brief by herself. Over the summer of 1879, she and Angie King had a falling out, perhaps over the firm’s finances, and by late summer the partnership had been dissolved.116
The death of her parents and the failure of the law partnership pushed Goodell to look elsewhere to live. Early in the autumn of 1879 she walked around Milwaukee, now Kane’s home, but decided upon Madison because of its law library. In November Lavinia wrote Sarah Thomas that she was living in a boarding house and had been “the bluest and lonesomest dog” since arriving.117 She was despondent that the only law office within her means was an “unlovely” back room with no view.118 It was there that Goodell completed the Ingalls appeals brief, while trying a few cases in justice court.
One of these justice court cases provided Goodell with a final “ray of sunlight.” In court, she argued and won in front of a group of visiting law students who were delighted to see her “give it to Carpenter [their professor],” laughing and applauding. Her success galled Carpenter as he opposed the idea of women lawyers and had “spoken disparagingly” of Goodell’s abilities.119
By the New Year cancer was severely limiting Lavinia’s activities. Over the winter, she pursued cures and the alleviation of pain—Turkish baths, homoepathic treatments, and, finally, morphine. On March 11, 1880, she learned that the Ingalls case had been decided in her favor. She had handled the case without the aid of men and called it “a pure woman’s victory.”120
Goodell died days later on March 31, a month shy of age forty-one. Thanks to the articles published by Myra Bradwell, Lucy Stone, and others, reformers in the women’s rights community knew about both the obstacles Goodell had faced and the victories she had wrenched from the legal system using intellect, patience, and alliances with sympathetic male attorneys and legislators.121 Those who knew her best undoubtedly imagined that had Goodell lived she would have pushed limits, and opened more doors. Many of her male lawyer acquaintances had served in the Wisconsin legislature, or Congress. Perhaps she would have worked to break the barriers keeping women from elective office. Or perhaps, following the example of her father’s life, she might have formed a penal reform organization.
Goodell spelled out her values and aspirations in her last will and testament: family, friendship, learning, and reform. She left money and jewelry to her cousin, Sarah Thomas, and her friend Sarah Case. She willed her law books to Angie King, “provided she shall be engaged in the practice of law … otherwise to Miss Kate Kane.”122 Maria received the bulk of her estate. This included money and investments to be managed by an uncle in a way that would keep both out of the reach of Maria’s nearly estranged husband, to make certain that Maria did not deny herself “the comforts of life for the sake of others.”123 Goodell instructed that upon Maria’s death, this trust fund would not be conferred upon Maria’s sons but, rather, used equally “for the advancement of the cause of woman suffrage … the advancement of the cause of temperance … and the advancement of the cause of prison reform.”124 Lavinia had affection for her nephews but said that they already had been sufficiently provided for in their grandmother’s will, and “for the further cause that as boys they are better able to provide for themselves than women are.”125
Goodell had a profound understanding of the trials women faced in providing for themselves. Edward Ryan’s pronouncement that the “fair sex” should not be permitted to mix professionally in “all the nastiness of the world which finds its way into courts of justice” was only one of the many barriers thrown in her way as she tried to earn a living as an attorney. Yet, like other women who wished to be admitted to the legal bar, she finally found tolerance, if not complete acceptance, among legislators who were willing to grant women the equal opportunity to prove themselves. Goodell had won over Wisconsin’s representatives in March 1877, two years before Belva Lockwood, locked into a similar struggle in Washington, D.C., prevailed before the U.S. Congress.
5
Belva A. Lockwood
The First Woman Member of the U.S. Supreme Court Bar
I have been now fourteen years before the bar, in an almost continuous practice, and my experience has been large, often serious, and many times amusing. I have never lacked plenty of good paying work, but, while I have supported my family well, I have not grown rich. … There is a good opening at the bar for the class of women who have taste and tact for it.
—Belva A. Lockwood, 1888
BELVA LOCKWOOD, like Lavinia Goodell, dreamed of a life in law long before she could make that ambition a reality. Lockwood was the second child, born October 24, 1839, of Hannah and Lewis J. Bennett, farmers who eked out a modest living in the Niagara County town of Royalton, New York. The Bennetts were removed from the cosmopolitan world of professions, and wedded to the conservative words of scripture in the matter of woman’s submissiveness. Social status was not theirs to bestow, nor the higher education that their bright, assertive daughter craved.
With her family in need of money, at fourteen Belva stopped her own schooling and became a rural teacher. As a female instructor she received half the salary paid to her male counterparts. Young Miss Bennett complained to the wife of a local minister that this was “odious,” and was counseled that such was the way of the world.1 The bitter taste of this experience never left her. Later in life, she used it as an example of the kind of economic discrimination that women must end.
Belva Ann Lockwood (1830-1917). (
Collection of Jill Norgren.)
Belva had a large, closely knit, extended family but she found no role models among its members. Turning inward, as an eighteen-year-old she began to imagine a life different from that of her mother and aunts—the life of a great man. Belva asked her father’s permission to return to school but Lewis Bennett refused her request. He had little money and did not believe that women needed a higher education.2 Defeated, his daughter did what was expected of her: on November 8, 1848, at the Bennett home, Belva married Uriah McNall. The 22-year-old groom was a promising local farmer and sawmill operator.
The couple appears to have worked well together. Belva helped with accounts at the mill and, after July 31, 1849, took care of their infant daughter, Lura. She said, however, that Uriah had joined with an unconventional wife who did not wish marriage to be “the end of her personality, or individuality of thought and action.”3 As Mrs. McNall, Belva had little time to find the permanent direction of her domestic star. Uriah suffered a mill accident, and by the spring of 1853 Belva McNall was a widow with a three-year-old daughter to care for.
Tragedy freed Belva McNall from the comforts of a settled arrangement and challenged her to act on long-buried ambitions. At first, the responsibility of caring for Lura made her indecisive. As she gradually formed a plan to return to school, friends and family ridiculed her, saying her desire for education was improper and unwomanly.4 At eighteen she had yielded but now she persisted, catching up on high school classes, taking on a teaching job in order to save money, and, finally, in 1854, being accepted at Genesee Wesleyan (Women’s) Seminary sixty miles away in Lima, New York. Using powers of persuasion that would later win her court cases, Belva arranged for Lura to stay with the Bennetts, on their way to relocating in Illinois, while she went to live in a women’s dormitory for nearly three years.
On June 27, 1857, Belva graduated with honors from Genesee College, having been admitted soon after her arrival into the newly coeducational college program. Reunited with her daughter, she began eight years of teaching in various New York State schools. She again experienced wage discrimination because of her sex but fought back, agitating for equal professional status and pay at upstate teachers’ conventions with her new friend Susan B. Anthony, with whom she also designed curriculum to give girls some of the same learning opportunities as boys.5
While at Genesee College, Belva had attended law lectures in the town of Lima conducted by a local attorney. Her fascination with law had been growing, but her responsibility for Lura, the public’s attitude toward anything as unheard of as a woman lawyer, and then the Civil War made it impossible to devise a plan for regular study. Months after the northern victory, however, Belva decided to visit the nation’s capital. It was a natural destination for a woman long active in local civic issues, restless, and fascinated with politicians and power.
She stayed in Washington for a few months, keeping herself by working as a teacher, used the summer of 1866 to visit her family in Illinois, and by autumn had settled on the capital as her new home. Belva later wrote in an autobiographical Lippincott’s article that she came “to see what was being done at this great political centre,—this seething pot,—to learn something of the practical workings of the machinery of government, and to see what the great men and women of the country felt and thought.”6 The city throbbed with political ego and the demands of a wounded nation. The outspoken schoolteacher, the woman whose secret dream was to live the life of a great man, sensed that in this place she could break the restraining bonds of custom and forge a new identity.
Belva was ambitious, but she was no fool. While she shaped her dreams into a concrete plan, she opened McNall’s Ladies’ Seminary in downtown Washington. Lura, who had gone to school at Genesee Seminary, assisted her mother by conducting French and Latin recitations. When Congress and the Supreme Court were in session, Belva, perhaps with Lura, walked up Capitol Hill and listened to political and judicial arguments. Belva ran the school to make a living, but her heart and mind were already elsewhere, engaged by other, more provocative plans.
One of these endeavors involved an effort to open the American Foreign Service to women. She had been told about a vacancy at the U.S. consul’s office at Ghent. She brushed up on her German and read through books on international law. She memorized the contents of the Consular Manual and then submitted an application to President Andrew Johnson and his secretary of state, William H. Seward. To her “chagrin and disappointment,” the application was not acknowledged. She let the matter drop but later criticized herself for having been “weak-kneed.”7 But Belva was harsh in this judgment. She had acted fearlessly, taking aim at the federal government, defying custom, and risking ridicule. Her application represented direct action, something that would become the signature of her politics. With a few pieces of paper, she had challenged the hiring practices of the United States government.
A year after settling in Washington, 37-year-old Belva McNall met Ezekiel Lockwood, a dentist and lay minister in his mid-sixties. On March 11, 1868, the couple married in an evening ceremony at their new home. Ezekiel was a temperance man who cultivated opportunity. His advertisements promised, “Teeth extracted without pain.”8 In addition to dentistry, he worked as a rental agent and a veterans’pension claim agent, and had just won a commission as notary public. Although modest, this was the kind of striving that Belva expected and admired.
Belva had been reading law books before she and Ezekiel married. She confided her dream of becoming an attorney to her groom and continued to study. Like Lavinia Goodell, she spent a good deal of time learning William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. After Jessie Lockwood was born in late January 1869, Belva reported that marriage and motherhood had not cured her “mania for the law.”9 That winter the new mother read James Kent’s commentaries on American law when not caring for her small daughter.
Several months after Jessie’s birth, her parents received an invitation to attend a lecture by the Reverend George Samson, president of Washington’s Columbian Law School. Samson, Ezekiel’s fellow parishioner, had attended the Lockwood’s wedding but presumably knew nothing about Belva’s “mania for the law.” Still, his summons, innocent as it undoubtedly was, marked the beginning of Belva’s public struggle to become an attorney.
Columbian College had been founded by Baptists in 1821. The Law Department, abandoned in 1828, had been revived and in 1869 was offering lectures in the late afternoon and evening in order to encourage the enrollment of government clerks. Samson’s efforts at Columbian were part of a national movement to institutionalize legal training by moving apprentice education out of law offices and into college classrooms. On the day that Lockwood went to hear Samson, she was nearly thirty-nine, the mother of two daughters, one barely a toddler.
Belva was already helping Ezekiel with his claims work, and told people that she had “wearied” of teaching. She believed that law “offered more diversity, more facilities for improvement, better pay, and a chance to rise in the world.”10 However, any efforts she had made to become a law apprentice had not succeeded.
Lockwood knew women who had risen in status. Her suffrage, temperance, and peace reform work brought her into close contact with an unconventional vanguard, women with public and professional lives. Josephine Griffing, among the first of Belva’s women acquaintances in Washington, was an established figure in the National Freedmen’s Relief Association and an accomplished lobbyist. Julia Archibald Holmes joined their circle and became the first president of the Universal Franchise Association (UFA), an organization launched by Lockwood and others. Holmes and her husband operated a printing office that, against custom, employed women as typesetters. UFA meetings also gave Lockwood the opportunity to befriend Sara Spencer, who ran the woman’s department of the Spencerian Business College, as well as doctors Susan Edson and Caroline Winslow. Elsewhere, she met journalists, including Emily Briggs (who wrote under the pen name Olivia), Mary Clemmer Ames, and Dr. M
ary Walker, writer and physician.
Women’s rights activism commanded a good part of Lockwood’s time. In 1870, working with Tennessee congressman Samuel M. Arnell, she had lobbied for the first major employment legislation addressing sex discrimination in the federal government.11 As a member, and later president of Washington’s Universal Franchise, as well as at the National Woman Suffrage Association, she poured endless hours into the fight for woman suffrage—speaking, writing, and marching. In April 1871 she led a vanguard of local women to City Hall in an attempt to be permitted to sign the book of registered voters.12 Locally, she was the face of women’s struggle for professional advancement. In 1874 Lockwood emulated Myra Bradwell’s and Alta Hulett’s earlier action in Illinois and petitioned Congress for legislation barring discrimination toward women attorneys. In the same period, Lockwood joined with eight other Washington women who together incorporated a school, called the Women’s National University, to provide women “a thorough knowledge of Science, law, Divinity, and Medicine.”13 The venture did not succeed.
The women Lockwood worked with in the women’s rights movement had a profound effect on her. They were tough, assured, and accomplished. In them, Lockwood found a circle of friends and associates who would encourage her, educate her, and, critically, respect her. When, after attending Samson’s lecture, Lockwood presented herself for matriculation, ready to pay the entrance fee, they supported her, even after Samson said no. In a brief note, the president had written, “Madam,—after due consultation [the faculty] have considered that such admission would not be expedient, as it would be likely to distract the attention of the young men.”14 Lock-wood viewed the decision as a slap in the face but, after granting a few newspaper interviews, let the talk and hard feelings die down. Months later Jessie died, with symptoms of typhoid fever. While grieving, Lockwood resumed her public activities, intent upon being resilient. To protect other people’s children, she lobbied for a local anti-liquor law.15
