belva

Belva Lockwood Historical Snapshots Sep 17 READ IN APP Belva Lockwood, circa 1870 "People thought I was not quite sane when I added to my curriculum athletics for girls." - Belva Lockwood She didn’t begin with dreams of the Supreme Court or running for President. She began as a teacher, a widow, a mother with too many burdens for her twenty-some years. But Belva Lockwood had a streak of restlessness, a refusal to stay within the small circle offered to women of her time. After her husband’s death, when she petitioned for equal pay to match a man in the same position, she was told, “I can’t help you; you cannot help yourself, for it is the way of the world.” She refused to accept that answer. After moving to Washington in the wake of the Civil War, Belva found herself drawn to the law. The city was alive with debates, lawsuits, and the politics of Reconstruction. To her, the law looked like a lever, one that might shift the world if only she could grasp it. So she applied to law schools. They turned her away. Administrators claimed her presence would distract the young men, and that legal study would strip her of femininity. She applied again and again until at last the National University Law School admitted her. She completed every requirement, endured the lectures and exams, only to find that at the end her diploma would not be granted. A woman, they decided, could not be a lawyer. Belva did what few would dare: she wrote directly to President Ulysses S. Grant. At the time, Grant also served ex officio as president of the university’s board of trustees, giving him authority over its decisions. In her letter she explained that she had completed the full course of study, earned the professors’ certificates, and yet had been denied her diploma. She asked that he see she received it. Soon after, the diploma arrived. With her diploma finally in hand, she applied to the bar of the District of Columbia. Yet again, rejection. The court ruled that women were not “persons” under the statute governing admission. She appealed and lost, but still she would not stop. In 1873, she was finally admitted, one of the first women lawyers in the capital. Belva was forty-three years old. Still, the highest doors remained closed. When Belva petitioned for the right to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1876, she was turned away. A woman had no place there. She pressed her case for the next three years, lobbying Congress and rallying allies, refusing to accept exclusion. Finally, Congress passed a law allowing women to practice law before the Supreme Court in 1879. On March 3 of that year, Belva walked into the chamber of the United States Supreme Court. Chief Justice Morrison Waite administered the oath. In that moment, she became the first woman ever admitted to practice before the Court. Though Belva was the first woman admitted to practice before the Supreme Court, the cases she took on were not small. She fought for veterans seeking pensions, widows defending their inheritances, and the Cherokee Nation in a claim against the government that eventually brought the tribe millions of dollars. Yet perhaps more powerful than the victories themselves was the sight of her standing in the nation’s highest court, a living contradiction of everything the law had once declared impossible, and in many parts of life, still did. Years later, Belva would run for president in 1884, the first woman to receive a formal party nomination and to have her name printed on state ballots in a national election. She faced people who laughed at her audacity. Women couldn't even vote in a federal election yet. But she continued to campaign. And there she gave one of her most famous lines: “I cannot vote, but I can be voted for.” Over four thousand voters did. Belva would say, “The glory of each generation is to make its own precedents.” She lived those words, standing where no woman had stood, and helping push society toward equality.