Читать книгу Belva Lockwood - Jill Norgren - Страница 8

Madame de Staël said to Napoleon Bonaparte, when asked why she meddled with politics: “Sire, when women have their heads cut off, it is but just they should know the reason.”

Anonymous nineteenth-century French-Swiss writer

Belva McNall went to Washington and forged a new identity. By luck, or design, the capital turned out to be the perfect place for a woman whose secret dream was to live the life of a great man.

In 1866 the District was a frontier, a town in search of its identity. Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were long-settled cities, defined in their character. But Washington, in the view of Boston Brahmin Henry Adams, was “a mere political camp, as transient and temporary as a camp-meeting for a religious revival.”¹ Transience was the hallmark of District life. The men who were the government, and men having business with the government, lived in boarding houses and hotels. Their families remained at home in places other than Washington. Office seekers came and went with changing administrations, and with the seasons. Those who could do so escaped what Adams called the “brooding indolence” of Washington’s sultry summers.²

Journalists had few kind words for the city Belva decided to make her new home. Mary Clemmer Ames described Washington as a third-rate southern town, physically crude and dirty.³ New York newspaperman Horace Greeley cautioned that “the rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting, the mud is deep, and the morals are deplorable.”⁴ The view up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol was impressive, but the avenue itself had no majesty. Low brick and wooden buildings housing saloons, pawn shops, second-class hotels, and the offices of lawyers and newspapers filled the space that connected the White House to the Capitol. Adams remarked that the city lacked high society or an intelligentsia.⁵ Nevertheless, there was, he said, an ease to life and one could not stay a month without, inexplicably, growing to love “the shabby town.”⁶

During the Civil War former slaves, soldiers, and clerks had poured into the city, which struggled to accommodate a population that grew from seventy-five thousand in 1860 to double that number in 1864. The unkempt city smelled. Sewage was everywhere, as the streets were neither drained nor graded; most were not paved. In 1870 Senator William Stewart discouraged the efforts of local businessmen to organize an international industrial fair in the District: “None of us are proud of this place,” he said, arguing that the city had neither grandeur nor power to display.⁷ Still, the victory of the Union signaled the possibility of an awakening. A District commissioner later said that it was not until the capital had been fought over that Congress showed an abiding interest in it.⁸

Belva McNall went to Washington because it was the seat of expanding national power. She was intrigued by politicians, and by their power. Psychologically, the move from Owego to the nation’s capital was far less charged than her journey to college. She was thirty-six, had acquired a small amount of capital from the sale of her Owego school, and, with Lura nearly grown, was free to decide what to do next. In her autobiographical Lippincott’s article, Belva wrote, perhaps disingenuously, that she “came to Washington, for no other purpose than 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.”⁹ She also said that she had not come to the capital with any idea of making it her home.¹⁰ Something about Washington, however, proved addictive. The city throbbed with political ego and the demands of a wounded nation. Perhaps the outspoken schoolteacher sensed that in this place she could break the restraining bonds of custom.

Belva arrived in Washington during the winter of 1866. It was an extraordinary moment. Members of Congress had assembled in December for the first time since the end of the Civil War, ready to consider President Andrew Johnson’s plan for the nation’s recovery and reconciliation. Questions quickly developed over Johnson’s use of pardons in the South as well as his wavering commitment to freedmen’s rights. Although many legislators were quick to denounce Johnson, neither the House nor the Senate had developed a firm plan of reconstruction. Eventually Congress would pass civil-rights and military-reconstruction acts, and approve constitutional amendments guaranteeing civil and political rights, but in these months the direction of postwar programs was uncertain.

Belva decided to spend a few months in the capital before going to see her parents in Illinois. She accepted a teaching position at the Young Ladies’ Seminary run by Margaret and Mattie Harrover. The school, at Thirteenth Street, NW, between G and H Streets, was advertised as a boarding and day school.¹¹ Although the position did not pay well, it fit her needs as it was located in downtown Washington and she was free to leave each day at one o’clock.¹²

Day after day, indulging her passion for politics, she strode up the hill to the Capitol. At the Senate’s new chamber she sat in the recently opened “Ladies Gallery.”¹³ Here, and in the House gallery, she listened to wide-ranging discussions, which included renewal of the Freed-men’s Bureau bill, naval appropriations, pension reform, proposals to amend the federal Constitution, and the heated response to the president’s veto of a ground-breaking civil rights bill. She also observed the hallway lobbyists and, when it was in session, went to the chamber of the U.S. Supreme Court, tucked away in a corner of the Capitol building, perhaps finding a seat when General Benjamin Butler, the “beast” of New Orleans, argued in defense of presidential authority and martial law in Ex parte Milligan.¹⁴ She took long walks. It is not difficult to imagine the athletic newcomer striding along, indulging her dreams as she visited neighborhoods and dodged into public buildings. Young, ambitious men cultivated political mentors. Women like Belva had a more solitary journey.

Belva left Washington temporarily in the summer of 1866. She traveled south to Richmond to see the former capital of the Confederacy, then turned north and sailed to New York City, journeying on to meet one of her sisters. Together, they went to Chicago and on to their parents’ home in Onarga. Belva, a 36-year-old widow with no financial security, had promised them that she would think about settling in Illinois, joining her brother and sisters who now lived in the Midwest. She inquired about teaching positions in several towns near Onarga, but found none that satisfied her. By summer’s end, despite her attachment to Hannah, Belva abandoned the idea of moving west.¹⁵ Putting rural Illinois behind her, she traveled back to the District by way of Harper’s Ferry, shaping two plans of action. One was easily and openly discussed: in order to support herself she would establish a small school. The second plan was less clear and more radical: she would pursue a life thought unsuitable for a lady, a life in government or law.

Belva had long been fascinated with law and lawmaking. Like most schoolchildren of her generation, she had been assigned the essays and speeches of American statesmen Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay.¹⁶ As a child she had eagerly read books describing the lives of important men, and later reported having discovered that “in almost every instance law has been the stepping-stone to greatness.”¹⁷ Perhaps for this reason, while at Genesee College she had taken the unusual step—for a woman—of studying the Constitution, the law of nations, and political economy. Standing at Harper’s Ferry, the site of tragic insurrection, she must have considered her own rebellious dreams. She had been born a woman “with all of a woman’s feelings and intuitions,” but, she acknowledged, she “had all of the ambitions of a man, forgetting the gulf between the rights and privileges of the sexes.”¹⁸

Belva proved daringly ambitious, but she was no fool. While she shaped her dreams into a concrete plan, she went forward with the task at hand: opening the new school. Early in the autumn of 1866 she placed an advertisement in the education column of the Evening Star: McNall’s Ladies’ Seminary, in the Union League Hall, Ninth Street, would begin classes on October 8, “Terms Moderate.”¹⁹ She planned to teach most of the subjects, but Lura, seventeen, home from Genesee Wesleyan Seminary, would be her assistant, conducting Latin and French recitations. The two women rented one floor of the Union League building, keeping the main section for the seminary, while making the east end their living quarters.²⁰ Belva also earned money as a rental agent at the Union League, Commercial, and Temperance Halls.²¹ She said very little about the school except to suggest that teaching no longer engaged her. For practical reasons she could not stop, but her mind was elsewhere, engaged by other, more provocative projects.

One of these endeavors, in which she failed completely, involved an effort to open the American Foreign Service to women.²² She had been told about a vacancy at the U.S. consul’s office at Ghent and rushed to brush up on her German, while searching the musty basement library of the U.S. Supreme Court for books on international law. Through a member of Congress she obtained a copy of the Consular Manual and memorized its contents. When she felt herself competent to perform the services required of a consular officer, she submitted her job application to President Johnson and his secretary of state, William H. Seward.

To her “chagrin and disappointment,” the application was not acknowledged. Belva later wrote that she had not stopped to consider whether the Europeans would receive a woman officer. Still a novice in the game of politics, she let the matter drop, later criticizing herself as having been “weak-kneed.”²³ But she was harsh in this judgment. She had, after all, acted, fearlessly taking aim at the federal government, defying custom and risking ridicule. The President had ignored her—Belva attributed the inattention to his messy entanglement in Reconstruction politics, a prelude to his 1868 impeachment trial—but he could not undo the challenge, the direct action that would become the signature of her politics. For this reason, the application was an important milestone, and one she often mentioned. Before this test she had been a woman who jousted verbally with local school boards engaged in shameless wage discrimination. Now, with a few pieces of paper, she had challenged the hiring practices of the United States government.

Belva came to Washington knowing only her mother’s nephew, William G. Richardson, and his wife, Sarah. Richardson was a ship captain, four years older than Belva.²⁴ His presence eased the transition to life in the capital. When Lura arrived, she and her mother joined the Wesley Methodist Church at Fifth and F Streets, NW, a few blocks’ walk from their rooms at the Union League Hall.²⁵ Although church and family provided the first network of friends, reform activism endowed them with community. In the ensuing years these new friends and acquaintances would include people of influence, notoriety, and modest rank: government clerks and members of Congress, many women, and more than a few men.

The women that Belva met were an unconventional vanguard, ladies intent on public and professional lives. Josephine Griffing was among the first of Belva’s acquaintances.²⁶ She was an established figure in the National Freedmen’s Relief Association, as well as the fledgling national woman suffrage movement. Griffing had made a name for herself as an outspoken abolitionist. Earlier, while living in Ohio and Indiana and despite the responsibilities of motherhood, she had toured the Midwest as a paid agent of the Western Anti-Slavery Society. She had come to Washington near the end of the war to work for freedmen’s relief and, later, to lobby on behalf of a federal intervention program, the Freedmen’s Bureau.

Griffing and Belva may have become acquainted at Washington temperance meetings, as both women sang the praise of abstinence. It is also possible that they met late in 1866 when Belva and other Washington activists began to talk about forming a local woman suffrage organization. As they puzzled out strategy, Julia Archibald Holmes joined the circle and became the first president of the women’s rights group that they launched, the Universal Franchise Association (UFA). Holmes had lived in the New Mexico Territory and, against local advice, had been the first white woman to climb the 14,000-foot Pike’s Peak. She and her husband were active in the Republican Party and operated a printing office that, against custom, employed women as typesetters.²⁷ UFA meetings also gave Belva the opportunity to make the acquaintance of Sara Spencer, who ran the woman’s department of the Spencerian Business College, as well as doctors Susan Edson and Caroline Winslow. J. Hamilton Willcox, a statistician in the Treasury Department, and Andrew J. Boyle, a congressional clerk assigned to the Committee on Education and Labor, each came to meetings and became friends. These men had political expertise that Belva was quick to appreciate. From her earliest days with the UFA she saw the benefit of working for change with sympathetic men.

Belva also came to know several powerful Washington women journalists. Emily Briggs, who wrote under the pen name “Olivia,” was the first woman to obtain news regularly from the White House. Northerner Mary Clemmer Ames had flirted with writing before the breakup of her marriage opened the way for a move to the District, where, in 1866, she launched her career as a political commentator. She could be observed for long hours in the ladies’ gallery of the House and Senate taking notes for her column. Like Briggs, she wrote about the problems encountered by women government clerks.²⁸

Dr. Mary Walker was a friend of a different stripe. In the eyes of the world, she was an eccentric who, despite her medical degree, sacrificed respectability by wearing male clothing. Walker had emerged as a notorious figure during the Civil War when, against all odds, she won an appointment as an assistant surgeon for the 52nd Ohio Regiment.²⁹ She scandalized the troops by wearing the uniform of a male medic. She served at the front and was captured by Confederate soldiers. Imprisoned for four months, she was released in exchange for a Confederate officer. After the war, she adopted the habit of wearing a man’s frock coat and pantaloons, accompanied by a high silk hat and a slender cane. As the years rolled on, she cast off the pantaloons and frilly shirt collars, and wore strictly male attire. Newspaper editors seldom lost the opportunity to mock her. Lura, more parochial than her mother, was also given to belittling Walker.

Belva liked the doctor. The two women met sometime after September 1867, when Walker returned from a year of lecturing in England and France. They formed a lifelong friendship, though the two women could not have been more different in matters of family life and physical appearance. Walker was a divorced loner with no children. She lived far from her upstate New York relatives and seldom kept house, while Belva followed many of the conventional domestic routines of the day. The friendship rested upon the experience of two independent women who shared a love of ideas and writing, each of whom needed to earn a living, each of whom believed in the movement for women’s rights.

These Washington women had a profound effect on Belva. As professionals and as reformers, they were tough, assured, and accomplished. Before Washington Belva had known hard-working and caring women, her mother chief among them. But during her New York State days, with the exception of Susan B. Anthony, at best an acquaintance, she had lived outside the world of influential women leaders. She needed a circle of friends and associates who would be political confederates, people who would encourage her, educate her and, critically, respect her. In Washington she found that community and a life in equal rights politics.

It is a startling fact that the United States Constitution ratified in 1789 did not guarantee Americans the right to vote. Out of a desire to protect states’ rights, established property interests, and traditional cultural values, the Framers of the Constitution remained virtually silent on a matter that we now agree lies at the heart of democratic government. Hoping to escape the oppressive heat of Philadelphia with a document that would be approved, the convention delegates decided to leave the determination of who could vote to the states, whose laws, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, limited participation in national and local elections to white men who met property qualifications.³⁰ Free African Americans and women rarely qualified. By 1850, most white men had been granted suffrage regardless of their economic status, the result of practical concerns, including the recruitment of militia as well as political-party competition for voters. Women of all races remained disfranchised while, at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, African-American men could vote in five New England states and, with qualification, in New York.³¹

Free blacks had protested their limited voting rights before the Civil War. After the victory of the North, they resumed this agitation, joined by the new freedmen of the South and a small group of white allies, in particular the Radicals of the Republican Party. Some women also disputed their exclusion from full political citizenship and had been lobbying state legislatures on the question of suffrage at least since the mid-1840s. When Belva arrived in Washington in 1866 Congress was debating the question of African-American voting rights. Within months, much to her surprise and pleasure, a proposal that would enfranchise the women of Washington, D.C., also came before the legislature. The bill provoked a heated discussion of universal suffrage. It also strengthened Belva’s identity as an advocate of women’s rights.

Universal suffrage embodied the simple but, at the time, radical idea that neither race nor sex could be used as a bar to voting. In December 1866, following a Republican victory in the midterm election, the Radicals, in alliance with party moderates, seized the moment, believing that they could enact legislation that would expand African-American manhood suffrage. As a preliminary measure, they introduced S.1, “An act to regulate the elective Franchise in the District of Columbia,” legislation that would extend the right to vote without regard to race to “male persons” living in the capital.³²

Pennsylvania Senator Edgar Cowan, who thought it was dangerous to give freedmen the vote, and who was no particular friend of women, immediately stepped forward with an amendment that he hoped would defeat the bill.³³ His proposal struck out the word “male,” changing S.1 into universal suffrage legislation that he assumed would meet an early death—and perhaps humiliate the Radicals.

The Cowan amendment created an uproar. It also produced an unexpected opening for the discussion of woman suffrage, a cause that had been shunted aside by the Radicals in spite of lobbying by activist women. Seeing this opportunity, local suffragists, including Belva, visited the Capitol, where they encouraged members of Congress to speak out in support of women’s right to vote. Cowan’s colleagues also stepped forward, happy to denounce his “prank.” Rhode Island Republican Henry Anthony said that he supposed “the Senator from Pennsylvania introduced this amendment rather as a satire upon the bill itself, or if he had any serious intention it was only a mischievous one to injure the bill.”³⁴ “Injury,” of course, was exactly what Cowan had in mind. He had not anticipated, however, that his proposal would unleash three days of earnest debate on the issue of women’s rights. On December 11, 12, and 13, a handful of senators rose to praise the talents of women leaders, to give lessons in political theory (citing John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer), and to assert that women were every bit as entitled as men to the natural right to vote. Several representatives challenged the idea that politics must be a rude and disorderly sport, insisting that women’s involvement would reduce strife. Without meaning to, Cowan had ignited one of the earliest congressional deliberations on voting rights for women.

Senators opposed to woman suffrage responded with standard arguments, noting woman’s failure “to bear the bayonet” and the desirability, in a republic, of making the family rather than the individual the “foundation upon which to rest suffrage.”³⁵ One opponent argued poetically that “the domestic altar is a sacred fane [temple] where woman is the high and officiating priestess” whose need for purity required that she be “separated from the exercise of suffrage and from all those stern and contaminating and demoralizing duties that devolves upon the hardier sex—men.”³⁶ He warned against making “noble woman a partisan, a political hack.”³⁷ Other senators condemned Cowan for distracting them from the “pressing necessity” of protecting freedmen. When the presiding officer finally called for a vote, nine members supported the universal suffrage amendment, while thirty-seven cast their ballots in opposition. Having held Belva and her confederates at bay, the Senate recessed for the Christmas holiday. After the New Year, the members reconvened, with both houses of Congress taking up S.1 in its original form. The legislation passed quickly, and was repassed over the veto of the president, enfranchising “every male person over the age of 21” in the District while making no change in the political status of women.³⁸ Despite the defeat, Belva said that the amendment had served “a good purpose for all disfranchised classes, as [it] called out a notable debate.”³⁹

Belva and her colleagues were both maddened by the vote and optimistic. Full of fight, after watching the newly enfranchised freedmen vote at a May 1867 District election, a small group decided to organize in behalf of D.C. woman suffrage. Late in the spring Belva and Griffing, among others, met at the home of James and Julia Holmes and founded the Universal Franchise Association. The vote on S.1, as well as the recently broken alliance with the abolitionist movement, had convinced them that in order to recruit more supporters, and win legislative battles, they needed to hold regular public meetings where universal suffrage could be defended.

This decision was not made lightly. Open meetings courted ridicule and assault. Animosity toward women’s rights was intense. Not infrequently a “woman shrieker” speaking in public required police protection and even then, according to one journalist, “she was in danger of being bombarded with addled hen fruit, and very sure to hear the world’s estimate in language profane and nasty.”⁴⁰ Tough and resolute, the UFA women, with their male supporters, faced their fears and made their plans public. At the first association meeting they discussed how to reopen the question of woman suffrage in the District, and announced support for the work of the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), a newly formed national organization whose members were campaigning for a constitutional amendment that would guarantee universal suffrage.

In 1867 37-year-old Belva McNall made the acquaintance of a 65-year-old gentleman. His name was Ezekiel Lockwood and, in less than a year, he would become Belva’s second husband.

Lockwood was a Washington dentist whose advertisements promised “Teeth extracted without pain.”⁴¹ He belonged to the E Street (Thirteenth Street) Baptist Church and, for some time, had also worked as a lay minister.⁴² Beyond that, he was a mysterious figure. Forty-five years after their marriage, Belva told her nephew’s wife that she knew little about Dr. Lockwood’s life: “I cannot give a very comprehensive account,” she said, “and his last son died 2 years ago.”⁴³ Pension records show that Ezekiel was born in 1802 in Jay, Essex County, New York. Like Belva, he came from a farm family. In the 1820s he followed his older brother James west and later won appointment as the postmaster in Galena, Illinois.⁴⁴ He and James bought land.⁴⁵ There was a wife, who died, and decades of middle-aged life about which he was silent. In February 1862, he joined the Union Army as chaplain to the 2nd Regiment, D.C. Infantry. Wartime records describe a decent but aging soldier who won praise for his “comforting words” at the second battle of Bull Run and the battle of Antietam.⁴⁶

Belva and Ezekiel left little record of their courtship. They met at the Union League Hall where Belva and Lura lived and conducted their classes. Like Belva, Ezekiel earned income as a rental agent. Courting was a simple matter as he boarded a few blocks away, near his Pennsylvania Avenue dental office. Few of their friends were aware of the courtship until the couple sent out wedding invitations.⁴⁷ In an autobiographical sketch, Belva introduced the fact of her second marriage humorously, perhaps apologetically: “In the midst of these labors [reading legal treatises], I committed the indiscretion so common to the women of this country, and, after fifteen years and more of widowhood, married the Rev. Ezekiel Lockwood.”⁴⁸

The couple wed on March 11, 1868, in an evening ceremony held at the Union League building. Two local clergymen, the Reverend Dr. George W. Sampson, president of Columbian College, and his colleague, the Reverend Dr. Abraham D. Gillette, had been invited. Each cleric offered prayers and comments before Gillette performed the marriage service. Margaret Renshaw, a widow who lived at Twelfth Street, served as Belva’s matron of honor; Dr. O. A. Daily, a fellow dentist, joined Ezekiel as best man. Lura and her cousins, the Richardsons, stood in line to congratulate the couple, along with the many friends who had been invited for an evening of food and music.⁴⁹ A neighbor described Ezekiel as “a spare man and tall, quite aged yet spry.”⁵⁰ That he did not shine when compared with his wife is suggested by the later comment of passing acquaintance James Densmore, who portrayed Ezekiel as “a man much her inferior in force and ability.”⁵¹

Ezekiel was sixty-six when they married, twenty-eight years older than his bride (and four years older than her father). He was a pious man, which pleased Belva, who attended church regularly and supported temperance. He was hard working and cultivated opportunity. In addition to managing the League Hall, and practicing dentistry, sometime in the late 1860s Ezekiel joined the corps of men who, at the conclusion of the Civil War, offered their services as veteran-pension claim agents.⁵² Shortly after this, he won a public commission as notary public. Although modest, this was the kind of striving that Belva expected and admired. It was also work that could be shared with a wife.

Before their marriage Belva told Ezekiel that she was bored with teaching. She had been reading law books at night and hoped for a new occupation. Although careful not to say as much in public, she imagined a jointly operated claims office with Ezekiel offering respectable cover at the front desk. Beyond that, it is not unreasonable to think that she envisioned Lockwood & Lockwood as a stepping stone to a career as an attorney. Although Belva knew very little about Ezekiel’s past she gambled, correctly, that he was a man who would not be threatened by her life as an activist, or her barely suppressed dreams of breaking occupational barriers. Widowed for most of her adult life, Belva had found companionship and the promise of a new vocation. She understood that the family’s financial well-being would ultimately fall on her shoulders. She accepted this reality. Ezekiel, in turn, won an interesting bargain: the company of a smart woman whose radical challenges to society would make the last years of his life anything but quiet.

The couple continued their work as rental agents for several public halls, including the Union League building. This hall, situated in the center of downtown Washington at Ninth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, stood at a good location, and the Lockwoods were able to fill it daily with social and civic groups, including four separate temperance lodges.⁵³ Veterans’ groups also rented space, as did the Universal Franchise Association. This work, however, caused the neighbors to talk. They said it was a strange business for a woman. Belva disliked the gossip, and she disliked the work, which she found distasteful. Her duties kept her up late at night and placed her, she wrote, “constantly in contact with people with whom [I] had no affiliation.”⁵⁴ But the Lockwoods needed the agent fees and continued in the business for five or six years.

When they married, Ezekiel moved in with Belva and Lura at the Union League building. In addition to managing the building the couple continued, with Lura’s help, to run the school, but only for a few months. Belva had become pregnant. Married in March 1868, Belva knew about the pregnancy some time late in May. Although it was the custom of the day for middle-class women who were “expecting” to withdraw from public life, Belva maintained her active schedule of benevolent and political work. In late September, five months pregnant, she was among the speakers at a UFA meeting called upon to welcome U.S. Senator S. C. Pomeroy as the group’s honorary president.⁵⁵ Four months later, on January 28, 1869, Belva gave birth to a daughter, named Jessie Belva. Marriage and motherhood did not cure her “mania for the law.”⁵⁶ She had finished the British jurist William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England and now spent any time Jessie spared her reading James Kent’s commentaries on American law.⁵⁷

Belva and Ezekiel forged a relationship based upon the creation of a household economic unit and shared interests in social reform. They were relative newcomers to Washington, inhabiting the hard-working world of the emerging urban middle class. Such people resided in boarding houses, toiled as clerks and teachers, and experimented with small enterprise. Belva and Ezekiel entered the radical politics of women’s rights, but the form of their partnership was quite conventional. They were not attracted to the example of the prominent Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, who, when they married in 1855, read aloud at their ceremony, and signed, a “Marriage Protest.” Stone, a nationally known abolitionist and women’s rights activist, had agreed to marry Blackwell only after he accepted a contract in which the couple renounced the social and legal disabilities imposed on women. Their “Protest” decreed not only that Stone would retain ownership of her property but also that she would have complete control of her body and determine if, and when, she would become pregnant.⁵⁸ She also refused to take Blackwell’s last name.

Belva asked nothing so scandalous. She married Ezekiel without any particular concern that he would limit her independence. She remained a member of her Methodist church but also visited his congregation, E Street Baptist.⁵⁹ She adopted his last name, but signed letters and documents “Belva Ann Lockwood” rather than “Mrs. Ezekiel Lockwood.” The new couple participated together in women’s rights and temperance activities. Ezekiel sometimes chaired suffrage meetings that were held at the League building at the far end of their living quarters.

The newlyweds did not always agree. Although Ezekiel supported women’s right to vote, a young friend remembered that Dr. Lockwood took issue with the idea of women governing, insisting that “it would be too sudden a change.”⁶⁰ Belva glossed over these differences, and in 1876 wrote stiffly, “Dr. Lockwood fully sympathized with his wife in her ideas in regard to woman’s enfranchisement, and together they valiantly battled for the Woman’s Suffrage cause.”⁶¹