Читать книгу Belva Lockwood - Jill Norgren - Страница 10

No woman shall degrade herself by practicing law…if I can save her. I think the clack of these possible Portias will never be heard at Dwight’s moot courts. “Women’s Rights-women” are uncommonly loud & offensive of late. I loathe the lot.

George Templeton Strong, a founder of Columbia

University Law School, Diary entry, October 9, 1869

In antebellum America the profession of law belonged to men, who, in accordance with tradition, passed on their knowledge through legal apprenticeships held by their sons and nephews and neighbors’ boys. When the Lockwoods married in 1868 there were no women attorneys in the District. Belva had begun her private study of law shortly before the marriage and found that she loved reading legal commentaries. She could not, however, find a lawyer willing to take her on as an apprentice.¹ In October 1869, Ezekiel’s fellow parishioner, the Reverend George Samson, invited the couple to attend his lecture at Washington’s Columbian Law School, where he was president. This invitation marked the beginning of Lockwood’s public struggle to become an attorney and to join the small sorority of pioneers still unknown to her—Barkaloo, Couzins, Kepley, Myra Bradwell, Arabella Mansfield, and Charlotte E. Ray—who had also set out to open the profession of law to women.²

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.³ Samson’s decision was part of a national movement to institutionalize legal training by moving apprentice education out of law offices and into university classrooms.

On the day that Lockwood visited Columbian, she was approaching her thirty-ninth birthday, the mother of two daughters, one barely a toddler. She described herself to a census taker as “keeping house,” although she worked as a rental agent and helped her husband with his claims business.⁴ She told people that she had “wearied” of teaching, and believed that law “offered more diversity, more facilities for improvement, better pay, and a chance to rise in the world.”⁵ While the profession was closed to women, Lockwood had, as she put it, a “mania” for law and counted, among her friends and UFA colleagues, many unconventional professional women who no doubt urged her on.

The Lockwoods went to Samson’s lecture at a time when, with regular discipline, Belva was reading the major legal authorities of her time, William Blackstone and James Kent. She gave herself daily assignments, having set her sights on winning admission to one of the new law school programs like Columbian that were hungry for students.⁶ After listening to Samson’s lecture, she returned to the school a second time and then, before a third lecture, presented herself for matriculation, ready to pay the entrance fee.⁷

Her radical act quickly became a matter of public attention. An article in Washington’s Morning News describing the law school’s opening exercises observed, “the noticeable feature of the evening was the presence in the school of the irrepressible Mrs. Lockwood, of Union League Hall—women’s rights discussion notoriety. It is understood that she is anxious to study for the bar, and will endeavor to be admitted to the school.”⁸ Many people thought her rash and provocative, and once again, as with her application for the consul position, she found her way blocked. The entrance fee that she offered was refused on the pretext that the question of her admission needed review by the faculty.

On October 7, 1869, a brief note arrived from President Samson: “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.”⁹ Belva later described Samson’s action as a slap in the face, a dismissal of her rights and privileges because they were thought to conflict with those of men.¹⁰ At the same time, officials at Columbian refused the offer of Mrs. Maria M. Carter to endow scholarships for female students in the undergraduate program, a gift that would have initiated coeducation at the school.¹¹

Samson’s letter put Ezekiel in the difficult role of supporting his wife’s ambitions while not antagonizing his church colleague. He counseled Belva to keep silent, but reporters got hold of the story—quite possibly from the rejected candidate—and came around to speak with her, and to see the letter. Ezekiel protested but his wife, asserting her independence and her cause, read Samson’s reply to the local press, who published it.¹² It went out on the wire service. Two days later the Evening Star reprinted an article from the New York Commercial agreeing that coeducational law school was a poor idea, although suggesting that “an exception might be made in favor of these ladies on the shady side of forty, who are classed under the head ‘Rawboned,’ and wear spectacles.”¹³ A flurry of talk continued but eventually the furor, and hard feelings, died down.

Lockwood was anxious to study for the bar but, not wishing to leave Washington and the family claims office, she continued to face the problem of where. Hearing Couzins and achieving a certain success with the Arnell bill only increased her “irrepressible” interest in the law. But only weeks after the final vote on the bill, tragedy struck the Lockwood home when eighteen-month-old Jessie sickened and died. In the Victorian idiom of her time, Belva memorialized her “little blossom,” writing that Jessie had been a comfort and blessing “and had awakened…maternal love to a depth that an uncultivated individual can never comprehend. But the flower wilted, and…the immortal gem of purity was set by the Eternal Jeweler in his own coronet to be worn eternally.”¹⁴

Lockwood faced tragedy and disappointment throughout her life. Her genius, first demonstrated after Uriah’s death, lay in accepting misfortune and moving ahead with new plans. Jessie’s death was no different. Determined to be resilient, she resumed her public activities, using the well-being of the community to justify a short period of mourning: “[O]ther people’s children were soon to be worse than dead, if a prohibitory law were not passed in the District.”¹⁵ She joined the acrimonious debate over proposals to regulate alcohol and obtained seven hundred signatures on a petition to be presented to the government. She never again wrote publicly about Jessie, whose death seemed to increase her desire to become a lawyer.

Sometime in 1870, she thought she had found a way. In that year officials of the District’s new National University Law School, perhaps in order to lard enrollment in the program, invited a number of women, including Lockwood, to attend classes. 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 Early in 1871, fifteen women, including Belva and Lura, enrolled in National’s law program.¹⁷ Most of the ladies, Lockwood wrote, matriculated “as a novelty…certainly without any adequate idea of the amount of labor involved.”¹⁸ They believed that the school’s administrators sympathized with the idea of equal rights, but when they came to class, the women discovered that while they would be permitted to attend certain lectures with the male students, their regular recitations would be sex-segregated. Lockwood called this a compromise between prejudice and progress that the women accepted.¹⁹

The male students, however, were locked into their old-fashioned ideas. They rebelled at any presence of the opposite sex, sending up what Lockwood described as a “growl,” with some of them declaring they would not graduate with women.²⁰ The administration capitulated and the female students were notified that they could no longer attend the lectures. Under pressure, the officials gave them the option of completing their studies in a completely segregated program. The rancor and the work prompted most of the women to leave at the end of the first quarter. A few ladies, including Lura, stayed for a year and then resigned. Only Lockwood and Lydia Hall, a government clerk who was also a member of the UFA, completed the course of study.

Despite the behavior of the male students, the two women finished their studies with the expectation of being granted a law degree. If officials had ever said otherwise, Lockwood did not let on, and she was furious when the faculty told the two women that because they had not studied long enough they were not going to receive diplomas, or be permitted on the stage with the men on graduation day.²¹ Lockwood was already giving legal advice to friends and neighbors and called the school’s decision “a heavy blow to my aspirations, as the diploma would have been the entering wedge into the court and saved me the weary contest which followed.”²² She knew that, as a matter of diploma privilege, the successful candidates of a graduating law class would be presented as a group for admission to the District of Columbia bar. Without their diplomas, she and Hall would be excluded, and would not become members of the bar.

Bar admission was a contentious issue in post–Civil War America. In the late eighteenth century, following the Revolutionary War, the American legal profession had begun—state by state, sometimes county by county—to shape a system of training and accreditation distinct from the one used in England. American lawyers settled upon apprenticeship, and later law schools, rather than replication of the ancient English “juridical universities,” the Inns of the Court and Chancery.²³ The course of implementation of this American system was not smooth. Early law schools were founded and became insolvent; apprenticeships varied in length and quality of supervision. Legal knowledge was frequently considered to be insufficient, and practitioners bankrupt in their personal conduct. As a remedy, lawyers established bar associations hoping to regularize expectations concerning professional knowledge and moral character. This system of professional licensing became popular, although in some states legislators tried to limit the growth of such associations, describing them as undesirable protectionist leagues.²⁴

Hall and Lockwood refused to be defeated by the denial of diploma privilege. In late April 1872 they turned to Francis Miller, a colleague from the Washington women’s suffrage movement, and asked him to press their cause before the local bar examination committee. As a result of his intercession, the committee agreed to administer oral tests to the two women, who appeared before a panel of local practitioners. The men tested the two women and declared each proficient in the law. Apparently without warning, however, anonymous members of the bar spoke against the admission of the women to the D.C. bar and successfully blocked their admission.²⁵

For a time Lockwood yielded “quite ungracefully to the inevitable,” while Hall, a woman past forty, “solaced” herself by marrying and soon after left the city.²⁶ Lockwood wrote caustically of Hall’s defection, saying she supposed her friend had become “merged” in her husband but that she would not be so easily squelched.²⁷ After a respectable interval, Lockwood visited Miller and again requested that he nominate her for the bar. In late July the sympathetic attorney petitioned for her admission, and her application was referred, once more, to an examining committee. She said that the members came together “with evident reluctance,” administering an oral examination that lasted three days.²⁸

Several weeks passed, days of unrelenting summer heat, but the committee did not submit the necessary evaluation. Lockwood filed a complaint with D.C. Supreme Court Justice David K. Cartter, but still nothing happened. Cartter may have requested a third committee, or he may have pressed the second group to make its report, reminding its members that the judges of his court recently had urged that the word “male” be struck from local bar qualifications.²⁹ The applicant, full of fury, had nothing but stinging words for the men of Washington’s bar. They were, she said, old-time conservatives and culprits “opposed to innovation.”³⁰ In the matter of sex, these men had created a protectionist league. Name calling, however, did not assuage her misery: she told friends that she felt “blocked” and “discouraged.” But she was also “the irrepressible Mrs. Lockwood,” who quickly declared that she “had not the remotest idea of giving up.”³¹ Becoming a lawyer was a dream that she had nurtured for a long time and, as one of Washington’s notorious women’s rights ladies, she felt great pressure not to look foolish. Ezekiel’s health was beginning to fail. That, too, weighed on her, making her all the more anxious to take over support of the household. But without bar membership she could do little more than file pension claims and chase small cases in police court. She wanted to establish a full general legal practice, and had come too far to let go of the idea that a qualified woman should have the same rights and privileges accorded men. At summer’s end, however, even the irrepressible Mrs. Lockwood seemed to have been stopped.

Fate stepped in when New York newspaper editor Theodore Tilton offered her a temporary job, one few women would consider. He wanted her to make a three-month tour of the South as a canvassing agent and correspondent for his newspaper, The Golden Age. She would travel alone, make her own arrangements, and be responsible for finding local informants. The trip would take her, a northerner, to some of the most socially conservative towns in America, where her solitary traveling, college education, and support of woman suffrage would mark her as a very different sort of person.

Tilton and Lockwood knew one another from suffrage circles. He was a respected journalist who, the year before, had started the newspaper he called “a free parliament,” open to all points of view.³² She had engaged him for a lecture sponsored by the Universal Franchise Association, and had met him again when she joined the loosely organized group supporting the presidential aspirations of New York publisher Victoria Woodhull.

In these meetings Lockwood must have impressed Tilton as someone who could handle a tough assignment. Despondent over her stalled legal career, she accepted his offer, saying she was “desperate enough for any adventure.”³³ She also calculated that this trip might launch her as a journalist or lecturer, salaried work that could be combined with a legal career. Although technically not a law school graduate, Lockwood felt that her unique status as a woman attorney would play to her advantage. She had already drawn on this notoriety in the spring of 1872 when she delivered several paid lectures in upstate New York. Writing had long appealed to her and working for Tilton would give her the chance to break into journalism with a national paper.

Before she headed south, Tilton made another request: in addition to writing and canvassing for his paper, he asked if she would campaign for Horace Greeley, the presidential candidate backed by The Golden Age. Greeley, a well-known reformer and New York Tribune newspaper editor, had won the nomination of the newly formed Liberal Republican Party at its Cincinnati convention. He was a controversial candidate, criticized for his lack of experience in elective office, his support for a conciliatory policy toward the former Confederate states, and his refusal to endorse woman suffrage.³⁴

Lockwood agreed to Tilton’s request despite her otherwise outspoken support for women’s right to vote. She did not discuss her reasons. Other reformers had already joined the Greeley camp. In addition to Tilton, who was managing the candidate’s campaign, the famous Anna Dickinson had abandoned the Republicans for the upstart editor. Senator Charles Sumner, the great voice of racial justice, also had endorsed Greeley. But woman suffrage leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton had not minced words when she said she would rather see “Beezlebub (sic) President than Greeley.”³⁵

Funds were low in the Lockwood household, and she and Ezekiel were uncertain whether she would ever win the fight to become an attorney. Like other activists, she may have found it necessary to compromise her politics for financial reasons. After all, Stanton and Anthony had accepted funds for their newspaper from the notorious racist George Train. Trying to accommodate her commitment to women’s rights, during the tour she focused on Greeley’s “soft peace” proposals to end Radical Reconstruction and his long history as a temperance man and remained silent on the subject of his opposition to woman suffrage.

The trip began in late July. Lockwood was expected to solicit subscribers, to find opportunities to speak in support of the Greeley-Brown ticket (Benjamin Gratz Brown, governor of Missouri, was the vice-presidential candidate), and to conduct informal political polling. She went first to North Carolina, then went on to northern Georgia, and then swept across Alabama and Mississippi, turning north into Tennessee. From Memphis, she traveled to Nashville, and then went north again to Louisville, Kentucky, on to Indianapolis, east to Columbus, Ohio, and, finally, home to Washington through West Virginia and past Harper’s Ferry. The trip and the work provided her with an apprenticeship in the rigors of travel and the basics of grass roots campaigning.

In each new town, Lockwood would arrive, visit the owner or editor of the local newspaper (seeking an endorsement for Greeley and information about the community), sell pictures of the candidates, and canvass informally for the Greeley-Brown ticket. Where possible, she gave a campaign speech. In some towns the local press mocked her. The editor of the Republican-controlled New Bern, North Carolina, Times offered up an extravagant denunciation, telling his readers that this newcomer was a “women rights mulatto Democrat Greeleyocrat Spiritualist free-love agent.”³⁶

Elsewhere, however, she was shown considerable courtesy. In Huntsville, Alabama, she was offered the use of the courthouse for her campaign talk, causing the northern suffrage newspaper, The Woman’s Journal, to remark that the revolution was still going on.³⁷ The Huntsville audience had never before heard a woman speak in public. Lockwood reported that they listened with interest and respect and that she was later received by the town’s prominent citizens. In other states she met with governors and mayors. If these officials thought a northern woman touring the South for Greeley a bit “mad,” they kept it to themselves.³⁸

Tilton published a dozen of Belva’s articles. They were travel accounts in the style made popular by Dickens, de Tocqueville, and Fanny Trollope in their antebellum romps across America. But unlike the Europeans Lockwood had a campaign to report, requiring that she mix the pleasantries of travel with political observation. In Raleigh she described maturing corn and full-blooming cotton fields, scarce money, and a dull economy. Everywhere, she revealed her good feelings for the people of the South. In North Carolina she was happy to find “almost every white man and woman are for Greeley.” He had been an enemy during the war and she thought it “magnanimous” that these Americans were now willing to support him.³⁹ Given that she was an emissary of the “reconciliation” candidate, this was the appropriate stance to adopt, an attitude that was also consistent with her own deepening opposition to war and conflict. She also reported on the “colored voters” who, she wrote, having heard the inflammatory scare talk of Republican politicians, could be expected to support Grant.⁴⁰

Tilton published her most interesting article, “Southern Immigration,” in mid-October. Written in Memphis, and very much mirroring Greeley’s reconciliation and migration policies, the entire column was a plea for northerners to invest in, and move to, the South, particularly the fertile country she had just crossed on the Memphis and Charleston Railroad. These states, she wrote, “cry out for capital and labor.”⁴¹ They were “desolated and impoverished” by the war but have rich natural resources. “It is false!” she told her readers, for northerners to believe that they are not wanted, or would not be safe in the South. She acknowledged the Ku Klux Klan’s six-year reign of terror but argued that violent incidents were now isolated and exaggerated, and that “the spirit of a whole people” could not be judged by exceptional instances of wrongdoing: “Southerners are not all doves and lambs, but they are not hyenas, nor are they donkeys.”⁴²

While Greeley’s name was never mentioned, the logic of his “soft peace” policy flowed naturally from Lockwood’s argument, and from her closing words: “There are as many true-hearted men and women, in proportion to the population at the South as in the North. Human nature is the same here as in the North. Kindness begets kindness, and charity leads to charity. The issues of the war are settled. Why not come together…Americans once more.”⁴³ “Southern Immigration” was the most political column that Lockwood contributed to The Golden Age, safe in its support of Greeley but disappointing in its failure to explain that a tense, and not infrequently violent, struggle for control raged across much of the former Confederacy six years after the armistice.⁴⁴ She consciously chose to present an optimistic picture, failing to discuss the growing exclusion of freedmen from the polls and betting on hard work and market forces to revive the South and promote well-being for former slaves. She did not avoid the discussion of race but was cautious, perhaps feeling herself insufficiently knowledgeable to say more, or concerned about contradicting Greeley in some way.

In November Lockwood completed the tour, saying little more about the campaign and nothing about the women’s issues that were otherwise so important to her. Back in Washington, however, she forced the issue, presenting Tilton with a column devoted to the accomplishments of the professional women of the 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.⁴⁵ She named doctors, teachers, writers, journalists, and government clerks. She denounced as ridiculous the idea that the few American women who had been permitted to train as physicians were “unsexed” because of exposure to dissecting rooms and hospital wards. Without raising the question of suffrage, Lockwood made her point: Washington (and by implication, the nation) was full of ordinary women and extraordinary women—educated, sensible, independent—deserving of the vote.

After incumbent Ulysses S. Grant was declared president, Lockwood decided to resume her effort to obtain a law school diploma. She applied to matriculate in the law program at Georgetown College but was bluntly notified by officials that the school was not a coeducational institution.⁴⁶ After this rebuff, she began to attend lectures at Howard University’s law school but then stopped, saying that “the fight was getting monotonous and decidedly one-sided.”⁴⁷

Lockwood presented the fight as one-sided but, in fact, the men of Washington were divided over the question of women’s rights. Debate of various franchise bills, the fair employment legislation sponsored by Arnell, and male membership in the UFA attested to support of women’s aspirations and rights in certain quarters. This included a number of the judges of Washington’s lowest courts. Lockwood had been giving legal advice and occasionally arguing in court. The first notice of this lawyering appeared in one of Lura’s column’s for the Lockport Daily Journal, where she reported that “Mrs. Lockwood” had appeared in early February 1872 at a District court “as attorney for her husband, and plead [sic] and won her suit amid many congratulations.”⁴⁸ In a later account Lockwood wrote that when she had “ventured to bring suit on a contract in a justice court” the procedure was considered so “novel” that it was telegraphed all over the country by the Associated Press.⁴⁹ Practical, persuasive, and likable, she had won to her cause several men of the bench: the justices of the peace in the District, Judge William B. Snell of the Police Court, and Judge Abram B. Olin of the Probate Court had notified her that she would be recognized as counsel in the trial of any case in their courts.⁵⁰

This encouragement pleased her, but it was not enough. She wanted her degree. Only after she held a diploma could she make the point that women were entitled to, and could succeed at, equal educational and professional opportunities. In the late summer of 1873 Lockwood decided to renew the fight with officials of the National University, an institution, she later wrote, that “shut up like an oyster” after admitting her and one or two African-American men.⁵¹ Instead of petitioning the university’s chancellor or faculty, she wrote to President Grant, who, by virtue of his political office, was president, ex officio, of National University. Two letters went out on September 3 under her signature. In one, presumably the first to be written, she documented the facts of her case, and the “manifest injustice” experienced by the fifteen women matriculants. The tone reflected a sober supplicant while the text observed the rules of decorum:

Sept. 3, 1873

Dear Sir:.…Sometime in February 1871 I was invited to enter this Institution as a student…and to use my influence to induce other ladies to join, with the assurance, that if faithful to the recitations, we should receive diplomas at the same time with a class of young men.…We went regularly to the recitations, and for two or three times were admitted to the lectures, when this means of knowledge was denied us, without any explanation being given.…[O]nly two, Miss Lydia S. Hall (now Mrs. Graffam) and myself completed the Course. We continued faithfully, patiently, and with the deepest interest so long as the recitations were continued; studying through the long hot days of Summer.…Judge our disappointment when diplomas were refused us on the ground that we had not studied long enough.…Having received a liberal education, and graduated in a College composed mostly of young men in the State of New York as far back as 1857…I cannot appreciate or understand this (to me) manifest injustice. I am not only wounded in my feelings, but actually deprived of an honest means of livelihood, without any assignable cause.⁵²

Apparently, only hours after posting this letter, she again wrote Grant. The envelope addressed to the president contained nothing more than a note, short and alarmingly rude.

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.”⁵³

President Grant did not answer her, but two weeks later the university chancellor presented Lockwood with her long-denied diploma.

Obtaining the diploma was the key to bar admission. On September 24, 1873, the “culprits” so opposed to innovation stepped aside and Belva Lockwood was admitted to the District of Columbia bar. She became the second woman attorney in the capital, and one of the very few in the nation, to be licensed to practice law. Ironically, 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 of 1872, when the names of her entire class were forwarded to the bar committee. Ray was the daughter of the nationally prominent African-American minister Charles B. Ray. Had Lockwood attended Howard, she might never have had to endure “the weary contest.” She never said why she had not started law school at Howard or why, when she attended lectures there after working for Tilton, she chose to quit. It seems less likely that “the fight was getting monotonous” than that she and Ezekiel could no longer afford the tuition. She did, however, maintain good relations with the faculty at Howard. She later received invitations to speak there and saw at least one of her female acolytes graduate from its law program.

In the nineteenth century most Americans felt that women would “unsex” or degrade themselves if they undertook professional work. Female brains were thought to be unfit for the strain of mental exercise. Wombs, it was also believed, could be weakened by mental exertion. Women first broke through the barriers of workplace prejudice in the field of teaching. With greater struggle, before the Civil War, Elizabeth Blackwell and a handful of her sisters opened American medical education to members of their sex. They faced resistance from male physicians but they succeeded, in part, because of the belief that women doctors should attend female patients.⁵⁴ In the 1850s Jennie Jones invented women’s-interest news for the daily newspapers and was thought to be the first woman to work in a newsroom.⁵⁵ Organized religion also resisted women’s importuning. Olympia Brown matriculated at St. Lawrence Theological School in Canton, New York, and was ordained to the Universalist ministry in June 1863, but she was a lonely pioneer.

The hostility toward women with professional aspirations was so great that only the very brave voiced their interest in public. Lockwood was not apprehensive about her place in the vanguard, and while she strongly supported women’s rights, she did not enter the field of law specifically to plead the cause of her sisters. Rather, she expressed a love for reading law and desired greater professional status and financial security. She loved the fact that law was a man’s game and that it could be “a stepping stone to greatness.” But she would always smart at the way she had been treated. Nearly three decades after she had been barred from graduation she retold, with unvarnished sarcasm, the story of her first months as a woman attorney improperly denied a license. “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.”⁵⁶