The small, California-based Equal Rights Party drafted Lockwood as its presidential nominee in August 1884. On the one hand, the nomination was political theater, a lighthearted antic meant to draw attention to the question of why the “fair sex” was not permitted to vote. At the same time, it was also a serious political strategy devised by newspaper owner Marietta Stow in response to the rebuff given suffrage leaders, including Lockwood, at that year’s Republican and Democratic conventions. Stow had long argued that women could create their own terms of engagement in American party politics. She proposed that they run for elective office and establish a political party both as a way of educating themselves about politics, in anticipation of the day when all women could vote, and as a statement that women were to be taken seriously.

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Lockwood accepted the party’s nomination on September 3 and immediately made it clear that she intended to be taken seriously on matters of political substance. She outlined a “grand platform of principles” that expressed bold positions and comfortable compromise. Lockwood promised to promote and maintain equal political privileges for “every class of our citizens irrespective of sex, color, or nationality” in order to make the United States “the land of the free and home of the brave.” She pledged the fair distribution of public offices to women as well as men. She opposed the “wholesale monopoly of the judiciary” by men and said that, if elected, she would appoint a reasonable number of women as district attorneys, marshals and federal judges, including the nomination of a “competent woman to any vacancy that might occur on the United States Supreme Bench.”

On the thorny issue of free trade, she initially supported high tariffs on imported goods to “protect and foster American industries,” but moved to a middle of the road position. She urged the extension of commercial relations with foreign countries to promote friendship, and advocated the establishment of a “high Court of Arbitration” to settle international commercial and political differences.

Lockwood stood fast with most liberal reformers in her support of citizenship for American Indians and the allotment of tribal land. She broke ranks, however, with many of her West Coast party colleagues on immigration, calling the controversial 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act “anti-Christian and unconstitutional.”

The media immediately added Lockwood’s candidacy to the mix of news. On September 17, the popular humor magazine Puck featured a cover cartoon lampooning Lockwood and Ben Butler, the presidential nominee of the Greenback/Anti-Monopoly Party. Three days later Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, a literary and news weekly, ran an article endorsing women’s right to be political candidates titled “Woman in Politics: Why Not?” Lockwood’s campaign picture accompanied the article. Washington newspapers reported her kick-off rally at Wilson’s Station and her eminently quotable quip, “I cannot vote, but I can be voted for.”

Despite the novelty, and even notoriety of a female candidacy, most journalists treated Lockwood with an even-handed professionalism. She encountered no greater mockery than did the male candidates. True, she had to endure silly lies about hairpieces and sham allegations that she was divorced, but Republican candidate James Blaine was portrayed so harshly that he threatened to sue the publishers of Puck . The Democratic hopeful, New York State Governor Grover Cleveland, was taunted about his out-of-wedlock child in cartoons and with cries of “Ma, Ma Where’s My Pa?” Lockwood, thick-skinned, realistic and a bit of a publicity-hound, took the press coverage in stride, and later commented that a campaign cartoon depicting her was a prized possession.

Suffrage women were divided over the wisdom of her campaign. West Coast activist Abigail Scott Duniway thought it would give opponents of women’s rights new pretexts for lies, ridicule and scorn: How, she asked, could “a disfranchised candidate of a disfranchised people” make anything but “a sorry run for any office?”

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