by Jill Norgren
Despite Jessie’s death, determination and news from within the women’s rights community also fed Lockwood’s resolve to find a law school that would admit her. She knew Ada Kepley had been attending law classes at Union College in Illinois, while Belle Mansfield apprenticed with Henry Ambler, and Lemma Barkaloo and Phoebe Couzins matriculated at Washington University in St. Louis. She had met Couzins at the 1870 National Woman Suffrage Association convention and, of course, followed Myra Bradwell’s effort to upend the Illinois Supreme Court’s ruling against her.
Sometime in 1870, Lockwood thought that she had a found a way to join this small band of rebels. Officials at Washington’s new National University Law School invited Lockwood and several other women to attend classes, presumably to increase enrollment (and tuition). She later insisted that the offer was “part of [their] plan to admit women to membership on the same terms as men,” and that the program would be coeducational.16 In the winter of 1871 fifteen women, including Lockwood and twenty-year-old Lura, enrolled in the law program. Most of the women matriculated as a novelty without an adequate idea of the work involved.
The students came to the school believing that the administrators sympathized with the idea of equal opportunity, but once there they discovered that they were wrong. They would be permitted to attend certain lectures with the male students, but their regular recitations would be sex-segregated. Lockwood called this a compromise between prejudice and progress that the group accepted.17 Even this compromise, however, caused the male scholars to “growl” and the administration to capitulate, pushing the women into a completely segregated program.18 The resulting rancor, and the work, prompted most of the women to resign. Only Lockwood and Lydia Hall, a government clerk, completed the year-and-a-half course of study. Just before graduation day, when they expected to sit with the men, receive their diplomas, and, through the District’s “diploma privilege,” gain automatic admission to the D.C. bar, school officials told the two women that they had not studied sufficiently long, and could not graduate.19
Not surprisingly, Hall and Lockwood fought back. Belva spoke about the situation wherever she could. In May 1872 Bradwell invited her to Chicago. In the Windy City Lockwood delivered her talk, “Woman and Her Relations to the Law.”20 Bradwell and Lockwood liked one another, in subsequent years visiting when possible and exchanging professional news. Lockwood recognized the importance of the Chicago Legal News as a public relations venue for professional women. She fed Bradwell items about Washington women that the newspaper owner presented with tremendous sympathy to her male and female readership—just as she did news about all women lawyers.
Like Lavinia Goodell, Hall and Lockwood enlisted the aid of male attorney friends who supported women’s rights. Francis Miller arranged for the two women to stand an oral bar examination. They were tested by local practitioners and pronounced proficient in the law. Anonymous lawyers, however, blocked their admission by privately speaking against them.21 Hall gave up, married, and left the city. Lockwood waited three months, prevailed upon Miller again to nominate her, and was reluctantly administered yet another (three-day) examination. Several weeks passed without word from the committee. Full of fury, Lockwood called the men of Washington’s bar old-time conservatives, culprits “opposed to innovation,” lawyers who had created a protectionist league.22
Temporarily beaten, Lockwood, just before the 1872 presidential election, accepted an offer from New York newspaper editor Theodore Tilton to make a three-month tour of the South as a canvassing agent and correspondent for his paper, The Golden Age. She wrote travel accounts and commentary on Reconstruction policy but avoided the issue of women’s rights until arriving back in Washington, when she sent Tilton a column devoted to the accomplishments of the professional woman of the nation’s capital. In “Women of Washington,” she identified and praised women who dared to think and act on their convictions, an “advance guard” in public opinion.23 She did not mention suffrage but, by implication, made the point that Washington was full of sensible, educated, independent women deserving the ballot.
And then, after the election of Ulysses S. Grant, Lockwood once more attempted to obtain her law school diploma. This time she did not petition the faculty, or the university’s chancellor. Rather, she wrote directly to Grant, who, by virtue of his political office, was president, ex officio, of National University. In this January 3, 1873, letter Lockwood documented the facts of her case and the “manifest injustice” experienced by the fifteen women matriculates. Her text observed the rules of decorum while the tone of the letter reflected a sober and patient, if disappointed, supplicant. She wrote about studying through the “long hot days of Summer” and having been “deprived of an honest means of livelihood, without any assignable cause.”24 No record of a response exists.
Lockwood then tried unsuccessfully to matriculate in the law program at Georgetown College. She did receive permission to attend law lectures at Howard University but apparently did not go. Friends and family asked for legal advice, which she gave. Well-liked by several men of the bench, Lockwood was recognized, in the winter of 1873, as counsel by the justices of the peace, Judge William B. Snell of the police court and Judge Abram B. Olin of the probate court.25 By the end of the summer she was fed up, and convinced that her contest with officials of the National University must be renewed. She again approached President Grant with a short and alarmingly rude note:
September 3, 1873
Sir,—You are, or you are not, President of the National University Law School. If you are its President, I desire to say to you that I have passed through the curriculum of study in this school, and am entitled to, and demand my diploma. If you are not its President, then I ask that you take your name from its papers, and not hold out to the world to be what you are not.26
President Grant did not send a reply but two weeks later the chancellor of National University presented Lockwood with her long-denied law diploma. The “culprits” previously opposed to her stepped aside and on September 24, 1873, Belva Lockwood was admitted to the District of Columbia bar. She became the second woman in the capital to be licensed to practice law. The first woman admitted to the District bar, Charlotte E. Ray, had enrolled at Howard Law School in 1870, completed the course of study, and won admission to the District bar in March 1872, when the names of her entire class were forwarded to the bar committee. Debate continues, however, as to whether Ray used her initials and was thought to be a man, or employed the influence of her father, the nationally prominent African American minister Charles B. Ray. She practiced in the District for a few years but then moved to New York City, where she taught school.
Lockwood was not at all apprehensive about her place in the vanguard of women lawyers, and while she was a very active member of the National Woman Suffrage Association, she did not enter law specifically to become a women’s rights lawyer. Rather, she expressed a love for reading law and desired the greater professional status and financial security offered by legal work. She liked the fact that law was a man’s game and that it could be “a stepping stone to greatness.”27 She always smarted, however, at the way some of Washington’s men had treated her. Years after Lockwood had been kept from her law school graduation, she retold, with unvarnished sarcasm, the story of her first months as a woman attorney. “I had,” she wrote, “already booked a large number of government claims, in which I had been recognized by the heads of the different Departments as attorney: so that I was not compelled, like my young brothers of the bar who did not wish to graduate with a woman, to sit in my office and wait for cases.”28
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Any snoop has the ability to find out a great deal about Belva Lock-wood’s law practice. Thanks to the now-dusty docket books and court case files kept at the National Archives, and the fact that Lockwood was a publicity hound who loved to give newspaper interviews, the records of her professional life are abundant. At first, the new attorney worked out of the family’s apartment in downtown W
ashington. She did not search out law partners, but until his death in 1877, Ezekiel maintained a desk in his wife’s office space, putting his signature and notary seal on many of her work documents. Lura joined her mother’s business as clerk and office manager and, later still, a young niece became a member of the office staff.29
Lockwood had lived in Washington for seven years when she opened her practice. She and Ezekiel were well known in their circle of middle-class strivers. Belva printed business cards, placed occasional ads in the local trade paper, the Washington Law Reporter, and benefited from newspaper publicity about her struggle to obtain a legal education and admission to the bar. Belva said, “The attention that had been called to me in the novel contest I had made not only gave me a wide advertising, but drew towards me a great deal of substantial sympathy in the way of work.”30 She attracted a multiracial clientele of laborers, maids, tradesmen, small property owners, representatives of at least two Indian nations, an occasional lady in distress and, aided initially by Ezekiel, veterans with pension claims. The working-class background of her clients helped in Lockwood’s success. As a woman, despite the boldness of her personality, she would not have been able, in the words of a female colleague, to make “an extensive acquaintance among business men in an easy, off-hand way, as men attorneys make it in clubs and business and public places.”31
Her office, eventually on the first floor of a house that she purchased in 1877 at 619 F Street, NW, was similar to those of local male attorneys with small practices. Early on, with Ezekiel and Lura helping, she needed no apprentices, and had none. Within a few years, news of her practice brought women to her door who wanted advice, and mentoring, which she was delighted to give.
Lockwood’s goal was a competitive Washington-based legal practice. Initially, after her September 1873 admission to the District bar, she accepted cases that brought her before the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia. Created by Congress (under its constitutional power “to exercise exclusive legislation” over the District), this court was “an unusual hybrid” that had been given most of the trial and appeals authority of other federal courts, but that also heard criminal and civil cases that elsewhere in the United States came before state and local courts.32
In her first year of licensed practice, Lockwood appeared primarily as plaintiff’s attorney in the Law Division or the Equity Division of this court, a pattern that maintained itself to a lesser degree from l874 to l885. She argued cases in which damages were sought following allegations of seduction and breach of marriage contract. Like local male attorneys, she also had her share of debt and repossession proceedings as well as cases involving injunctions, probate proceedings, and trustee appointments. Half of her courtroom equity work, however, centered upon divorce actions. She attracted female clients, and represented wives as complainants against defendant-husbands. After divorce actions, Lockwood’s most frequent equity work involved injunction proceedings, lunacy commitments, and actions requesting the partition of land. Much of her civil law work did not bring her to court and is not recorded in docket books, but it is likely that, along with the other storefront lawyers of her day, she worked up bills of sale, deeds, and wills in order to stay busy and make money. Ezekiel Lockwood introduced his wife to guardianship work and to the business of veterans’ pension claims. Just as a few early women attorneys living in the West pursued work in natural resources law, Belva’s residence in the nation’s capital encouraged her specialization in claims against the government and patent filings. Claims works, along with divorce and probate filings, constituted the bread and butter of her practice.33
For many people, including U.S. Supreme Court justice Joseph Bradley and Wisconsin chief justice Edward Ryan, the post-bellum emphasis on gentility made the thought of women working in the criminal courts egregious, even loathsome. Society’s morally repugnant dramas played out in criminal court—a place, therefore, off-bounds to ladies. Lockwood could have refused criminal cases. Yet, despite her religious rectitude and middle-class aspirations, she, like Lavinia Goodell, did not turn away from criminal cases and criminal court argument. Lockwood began with minor offense cases in police court in a room teeming with people, many down on their luck, charged with drunkenness or simple assault. By 1875 she had begun to attract clients charged with more serious crimes, representation that brought her before the judges of the criminal division of the D.C. Supreme Court.
For the next decade she represented dozens of criminal defendants in this court. They were charged with virtually every category of crime, from mail fraud and forgery to burglary and murder. She won “not guilty” decisions in fifteen jury trials and submitted guilty pleas in nine. Thirty-one of her clients were found guilty, while five others were judged to be guilty of a lesser charge. An entry of nolle prosequi ended four cases. She won retrials for several others. She handled most of these cases on her own with only an occasional male co-counsel.34 Before the all-male juries of her day Lockwood showed neither the natural female timidity, nor the delicacy, described by Justice Bradley in his Bradwell opinion.
Bradley and Ryan sought to keep Bradwell and Goodell from practicing law. In Washington, the men of the bar continued to be a problem for Lockwood even after she had been admitted to the D.C. bar and had begun to practice in the local courts. In order to serve clients with cases in the federal courts, Lockwood needed to obtain bar privileges, in particular with the U.S. Court of Claims and the U.S. Supreme Court. She had hoped, since she had prevailed with the District bar, that admission would be a simple matter. But it was not. In the end the struggle required five years and became the crusade of a novice attorney who wanted the full opportunities of her profession, for herself and all qualified women lawyers.
This new contest began when Charlotte Van Cort engaged Lockwood to file a claim against the U.S. Navy for the use and infringement of a patent, an action that led client and attorney to the U.S. Court of Claims. Early in April 1874 Lockwood asked A. A. Hosmer, a D.C. attorney, to sponsor her for admission to the claims court bar. They appeared in a room in the Capitol Building where the court held its sessions, and presented themselves. They were met with stunned silence as the five judges looked at Lockwood. Then court of claims chief justice Charles Drake announced the obvious: “Mistress Lockwood, you are a woman.”35 He cited the court’s Rule 13, which specifically referred to the admission of men, refused to act on Hosmer’s motion, and announced a one-week continuance. When she returned with Ezekiel and local friends, Drake charged her with being a married woman, subject to the common-law doctrine of coverture. Lockwood replied that the application was made with her husband’s approval but this did not satisfy the court, which, again, ordered a continuance.
Five years before, coverture had stopped Myra Bradwell’s initial application to the Illinois Supreme Court. Lockwood, however, believed that Drake’s position was easily attacked. The Supreme Court of the District of Columbia had not raised the issue when admitting her to its bar because Congress, in 1869, had enacted a married woman’s property act for the District that “exploded” the notion of coverture.36 Lockwood dismissed the fact of her gender by citing new congressional legislation providing rules for the construction of statutes: “[I]n all acts hereafter passed … words importing the masculine gender may be applied to females … unless the context shows that such words were intended to be used in a more limited sense.”37
A unanimous court rejected Lockwood’s application. She was forty-three and the very model of a proper and ambitious attorney. The court’s opinion in Mrs. Lockwood’s Case was written by Charles Nott. A liberal in racial matters, Nott proved to be a conservative jurist when gender was at issue, content to rest his reasoning on tradition-bound common law.38 Belva called the decision a “squelcher” and went back to work in the courts that would have her. She understood the disadvantage the rejection caused: “My clients lacked the confidence in me that I would have commanded had I stood fairly with the court.”39
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In July 1877, several months after Ezekiel Lockwood’s death, his widow bought the house on F Street that they had been renting. The building, a substantial four-story structure with twenty rooms, was a clear statement of Belva’s solid middle-class professional status. Although the house was heavily mortgaged, the purchase made good business sense. F Street would be a home, an office, a boarding house, and a long-term investment. Women came to F Street who hoped to become attorneys.
Marilla Ricker, a well-off widow and suffrage activist from New Hampshire, arrived at the F Street house in 1877, drawn by Lockwood’s reputation and because the D.C. bar admitted women. Ricker had attended lectures on criminology and wished to become an attorney in order to reform the criminal justice system. Ricker had a strong sympathy for criminals, whom she believed to be “morally diseased” (a contemporary term used by progressives to suggest victimization).40 Ricker read law with Lockwood as well as several male attorneys and won admission to the D.C. bar on May 12, 1882. The two women established a lifelong personal relationship. Ricker drew Belva into her campaign on behalf of prisoners’ rights, while Lockwood brought her protégée into the struggle against employment discrimination. In the perfect meeting of cause activity, the two worked from 1877 to 1882 to overcome the sex discrimination that prevented Ricker from obtaining an appointment as a notary. After President Chester A. Arthur made the appointment, Ricker, “the prisoner’s friend,” used her office to take depositions without charge from women and men who could otherwise not afford to make a formal statement.41
