Belva Lockwood

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On September 18, 1884, an enthusiastic group of well-wishers gathered outside a farmhouse at Wilson ’s Station, Maryland, not far from the nation’s capital. They had come to ratify the nomination of the most recently announced candidate in the presidential race of 1884. The nominee, an attorney, was smart, well spoken and media savvy. Her name was Belva Lockwood and she was about to become the first woman to run a full campaign for the office.

Twelve years earlier New York City publisher Victoria Woodhull had attempted a presidential bid, and Harper’s Weekly cartoonist Thomas Nast quickly labeled her “Mrs. Satan.” At Wilson’s Station, squaring off against national candidates Grover Cleveland, James Blaine, Benjamin Butler and John St. John, Lockwood knew that she too was challenging the prevailing idea of feminine propriety. Nearly a century before presidential longshots such as Margaret Chase Smith and Shirley Chisholm, and 124 years before Hillary Rodham Clinton’s historic run, Lockwood’s candidacy provoked heated debate across America about whether a woman could, or should, be president.

Born in 1830, Lockwood grew up the child of poor farmers near Niagara Falls, N.Y. Widowed at the age of 22, with a young daughter to care for, she fought family and social convention to become one of the very few women in the country with a college degree. Ten years of teaching in her home state, however, convinced her that she could pull more from life. Astonishingly, although there were no women attorneys in antebellum America, and women were not permitted to vote, she secretly dreamed of a life in law or politics.

In the winter of 1866 Lockwood moved to Washington, D.C., where she scraped together a living as a teacher, learned about Capitol Hill politics and, in 1868, remarried. Intent on pursuing her dreams, she applied for admission to several local law schools. Each turned her down. To post–Civil War America, the idea of female attorneys was still unthinkable.

In 1871, however, perhaps needing an infusion of tuition fees or emboldened by the decision of St. Louis’ Washington University law program to matriculate women, the District’s new National University Law School admitted Lockwood and several of her reform-minded female friends. The women, viewed as unseemly interlopers, were hassled by male students and placed in segregated classrooms. Lockwood persevered but ultimately had to petition President Ulysses S. Grant, titular head of the school, for her degree. A career in law was born out of hard work and struggle.

The 1870s brought Lockwood, now running a one-woman law firm in the capital, a livelihood and more challenges. Refused admission to the U.S. Court of Claims bar, she waged an ultimately successful five-year fight to get qualified women attorneys the privilege of practicing in federal courts. On March 3, 1879, Lockwood was sworn in as the first female member of the U.S. Supreme Court bar. In 1880 she became the first woman lawyer to argue a case before the high court.

Lockwood’s battle to become a fully accredited attorney, along with the publicity surrounding her speeches at meetings of the National Woman Suffrage Association, made her a fairly well-known figure. It was, however, her decision to run for the highest political office in the land that made her famous.

In 1884 women were permitted to vote in presidential elections only in the territories of Utah, Washington and Wyoming. Despite the considerable efforts of reform women and their male allies across the country and in Congress, the cause of woman suffrage had stalled. Liquor interests opposed to the women-led temperance movement, nervous party bosses and social prejudice all conspired to keep half the population from participating in the democratic process as voters.

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