Lockwood had never expected women’s united support. “Women,” she told a journalist, “are divided up into as many factions and parties as men.” She also understood the irony of a voteless woman running for the presidency but seized on the nomination as a way not only to promote herself but also to awaken the country to the issue of women’s rights and the need for a constitutional amendment mandating woman suffrage. She showed that women could, as Marietta Stow was fond of saying, help to run “the great household of the nation.” Even those who insisted that the nomination was initially nothing more than a joke, admitted that Lockwood had become an effective candidate who, in the words of California attorney and suffrage activist Clara Foltz, “carried herself splendidly.” She succeeded, as she had hoped, in making the presidential candidacy of a woman a part of American political history.

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Like 20th-century politicians, after the election Lockwood used her fame to ramp up her lecture appearances and to endorse commercial products such as nerve tonics. She was pleased to learn that babies and towns were being named for her. In May 1888, the Equal Rights Party again nominated her as its candidate. She accepted the nomination and again found herself criticized by some members of the suffrage movement. One male activist described Lockwood’s candidacy as “wholly unauthorized and in no sense representative.” Although she claimed to have ballots in several states, no votes were recorded for her in the final tally.

Lockwood was certainly as much of an opportunist as any male politician. She understood the art of self-promotion, but she was deeply interested in politics—in 1887 she had been part of a failed effort to start an Industrial Reform Party—and knew that public office would never come to women without a fight. Months before her 1888 campaign, Lockwood advised other women, “[T]o gain strength and to get organization…put nominees in the field at once….The country is prepared to-day for a boldly aggressive movement on the part of the women of the country….It is too late to take a weak or vascillating [ sic ] stand.”

Bold action and the pursuit of ideals continued to shape Lockwood’s life. She had long lobbied Washington on matters of foreign policy as a member of the Philadelphia-based Universal Peace Union. After her second presidential campaign, she increased her public appearances, in the United States and abroad, on behalf of the human rights organization, advocating, in particular, the use of arbitration and international courts as a means of preventing war.

Lockwood also maintained her small law office in Washington. She enjoyed the practice of law despite the prejudice that barred her from the expanding fields of corporate and railway law as well as judicial appointments. In 1906 she had a great triumph, winning for the Eastern Cherokee a share of a multimillion dollar judgment in a case argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. Lockwood had first become involved in the complicated case, which involved settlements from the sale of tribal land, three decades earlier.

The cause of woman suffrage was never far from Lockwood’s thoughts. Well into her 80s, she made public appearances, including two before Congress, urging passage of a constitutional amendment guaranteeing all women the right to vote. She died in 1917, three years before the 19th Amendment was ratified. A trailblazing attorney and presidential contender, Belva Lockwood wanted nothing more than an equal playing field on which women could engage the game of politics.

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