by Jill Norgren
As a Washington insider, Lockwood also attracted women who sought her help lobbying Congress. After winning her release from the Illinois Hospital for the Insane and escaping the grip of Theophilus Packard, his wife, Elizabeth, became a reformer working for the rights of mental patients. She came to Lockwood intent on promoting a “mailbox law” that would guarantee incarcerated patients a way to send and receive mail, uncensored by hospital staff. In January 1875 Lockwood and Packard secured a hearing before the postal affairs committee, but the bill that Packard proposed stalled and died in committee.
Marietta Stow, later Belva’s running mate in the 1884 presidential campaign, enlisted Lockwood’s help late in 1879. A California widow, Stow had become a passionate spokeswoman on the question of marital property and estate laws after, she asserted, being cheated out of two hundred thousand dollars by the self-interested executors of Joseph Stow’s estate. Marietta wanted Lockwood to help her with a radical idea: reforming domestic law in the United States by nationalizing it. She had drafted a six-section bill titled “An Equal Rights Marriage Property Act.”71 In her law practice Lockwood worked with clients who had suffered humiliation and poverty as the result of marital property law that, she said, had the “vestige of heathendom.”72 Stow’s bill interested her. She took Stow to the Capitol, where they lobbied for the bill but met opposition from legislators who felt such legislation would antagonize male voters, as well as the local officials who jealously guarded the right to control marital and estate law. A compromise version of the bill found its way to the House Judiciary Committee where Stow, Lockwood, and a handful of supporters testified. The bill died in committee, but Stow and Lockwood had the satisfaction of having prodded legislators to think about an issue they wanted to avoid.
Other reform issues concerning women commanded Lockwood’s attention. In 1874 Boston women had won the right to run for election to the city’s school board. In Washington, as elsewhere, women argued the importance of their sex in fashioning school policy and the logic of women serving on the boards that administered schools. In 1879 Lockwood petitioned the D.C. board of school commissioners for the appointment of women as school trustees. After a particularly acrimonious exchange between Lockwood and opponents, she let the matter drop, shifting her energies to winning support for the recruitment of women police officers in the District as well as a separate Washington reform school for girls.73
Lockwood lobbied for provocative causes that seldom enjoyed popular support. Nothing aroused the people of the United States like the question of Mormon polygamy, and the perceived theocracy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS/Mormons). Beginning in 1862 the church faced constant attack from members of Congress. When, in 1870, Utah legislators extended the franchise to the women of the territory, Congress responded with legislation that would disfranchise plural wives and ban them from serving on juries.
The hostility pouring out of Congress put the women’s rights community in the position of having to decide whether to defend the right of polygamous women to enjoy the voting right withheld from most American women. In 1871 the NWSA took the courageous step of endorsing the first of many resolutions supporting the right of all Utah women to vote. Lockwood slowly adopted this position, and by 1876, speaking as an attorney at the NWSA convention, she reminded the delegates that Utah had conferred woman suffrage in a constitutional and lawful manner. The delegates backed her resolution supporting Utah against Congress and appointed her to a three-woman committee to “watch over the rights of the women of Utah.”74 Out of this work came Lockwood’s lifelong friendship with many Mormon women, her appreciation of the Mormons as a hard-working people and, perhaps, her paid lobbying for the church.75
Even earlier, Lockwood had joined the Universal Peace Union (UPU), the most radical peace organization in the United States. The principles of the UPU combined a belief in living the Christian gospel of love and nonviolence with an emphasis on promoting the prevention of war through concrete policies, including disarmament, arbitration, and public education.76 It was a young organization, open to the imprint of members and different from other peace societies in the full welcome given to women. Social justice also commanded the attention of the membership.77 Lockwood joined the UPU’s executive committee in 1875, beginning forty years as an officer and the group’s Washington lobbyist.
The many strands and interests of Lockwood’s life, including her work on behalf of women, came together in her promotion of policies of peace. She was an avid student of foreign affairs and a great enthusiast of arbitration as a tool of dispute resolution. This came from her training in the law and her recognition of the increasingly interconnected nature of the world. She argued that arbitration should be a part of international diplomacy, saying that its use by disputing nations was a “rational and competent substitute for war.”78 Lockwood made the case for an international system of arbitration in many articles, in face-to-face meetings with elected officials, in appearances on the paid lecture circuit, at several world’s fairs, and at international conferences. She also included support for arbitration in her presidential campaign platform.
Lockwood made the decision to campaign as a candidate for United States president in August 1884. She was looking for a larger stage after a dozen years of practicing law. She got the nod from her acquaintance, Marietta Stow, who spoke for the newly formed, California-based Equal Rights Party, and from Stow’s activist colleague, attorney Clara Foltz. The nomination began as a lighthearted prank, a joke pointing out the absurdity of women having the power to make such a nomination but not the right to vote. Lockwood, however, saw the opportunity to tease something significant out of the prank. She was not a theorist. Rather, she believed in direct action. Marietta Stow argued that women would not be viewed as equals until they were willing to “share and invite scrutiny.”79 She believed that women’s engagement in politics would be empowering. Lockwood took her lead from Stow. Drawing on her strong ego, restless nature, and keen eye for publicity, Belva shaped the ironic act into a serious piece of political theater intended to further the cause of woman suffrage. Newspapers, magazines, cartoonists, and, critically, lecture managers paid attention. Victoria Woodhull had initiated the idea of a female candidacy in 1872; in 1884 (and again in 1888) Belva Lockwood became the first woman to run a full campaign for the office of president. She had electors pledged to her in more than a half-dozen states, and polled forty-seven hundred votes.80
Lockwood’s life changed as a result of the 1884 campaign, but not as much as she would have liked. She hoped that the serious nature of her campaigning, along with her lawyer’s credentials, might win her appointment as a public official. Sex discrimination continued to deny her career choices open to her male lawyer friends, several of whom had run successfully for elective office, or had become judges or district attorneys. Rather than remain within the prison created by this prejudice, she launched a career as a paid lecturer, which she combined with her law practice. She gave talks whose subject matter ranged from “Women of To-day” to “Is Marriage a Failure? No Sir!” There were also travelogues and offerings about the Mormons, and arbitration. As she journeyed around the country, Lockwood also circulated flyers advertising for veterans pension claims.
Law, lecturing, and reform activism filled Lockwood’s life until the mid-1890s when income from lecturing and law fell off, something the normally proud woman reluctantly revealed to relatives.81 She lived principally from her rents and a widow’s pension. One important case, however, remained.
Lockwood began representing the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in 1875. She collaborated with Cherokee James Taylor, who had been sent to Washington to lobby for U.S. recognition of the Eastern Cherokee and, when recognition was granted, to press treaty-based monetary claims against the United States. Taylor hired Lockwood in 1875, and for thirty years until she won at the U.S. Supreme Court, Lockwood argued that the citizens of the Eastern Band, although geographically separated from
the Cherokee Nation (West), were equal tribal members of the nation who must be allocated an equal share of disputed fees, as well as proceeds from land sales, past and present.82
The case and Lockwood’s representation, like most late-nineteenth-century Indian litigation in U.S. courts, were tied to tribal politics, acts of Congress, and the vagaries of leadership at the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. For two decades events moved in an agonizing dance of promise and uncertainty. When, in 1901, Congress authorized the Cherokee to bring a finding-of-fact case at the U.S. Court of Claims, Lockwood and Taylor decided that this was the opening they had long sought, and Lockwood filed a motion to intervene in the case already underway—a motion that the Claims Court allowed.83
Again, there was stalling, but, finally, on January 16, 1906, Lockwood, who had first argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1880 execution-of-deed case of Kaiser v. Stickney (making her the first woman to argue before the high court), presented the appeal of the Eastern Cherokee.84 She was seventy-five years old. Three months later, in a unanimous decision, the Court ruled for her clients, affirming a one-million-dollar award plus interest, five million dollars in all. Lockwood was ecstatic. Anticipating victory, she had written to her good friend, journalist Clara Colby, “[The judgment] gives me a great reputation as a lawyer, which will help all women, and will give me eventually money enough … to make my old age comfortable.”85 It did not entirely work out that way, as attorneys in the multi-party case brawled and bickered over the division of the three-quarters of a million dollars in fees and expenses.86 Lockwood received a cut but not the sum that she had expected to make her last years comfortable.
A quiet life had no appeal for Belva Lockwood despite her advancing age. She worked with her Cherokee clients on the distribution of the court award, pulled in a few more court cases, and made several trips to Europe to attend international peace meetings. In 1913, when she was eighty-three, Lockwood led a group from the American Woman’s Republic on a tour of central Europe where, at conferences, the women hoped to argue for the end of war-making.87 A year later, she took on her last legal client, Mary E. Gage, a wealthy Washingtonian charged with threatening to kill a well-known local banker.88 Lockwood marched for suffrage and international peace until her final illness.
Belva Lockwood died in Washington on May 19, 1917, at the age of eighty-six. Like Goodell, as a teenager she had dreamed of a life in law, and as with Goodell, the road that Lockwood traveled was infused with ambition and ego. Lockwood had what, today, we would describe as feminist goals. She spent considerable time pushing public officials to open professional positions to women. She sought to build a successful legal practice and lobbied extensively for the use of arbitration as a tool to prevent war. More often than not, she was a fee-for-service attorney with little interest in pro bono work. Senator Conkling saw Lockwood as a troublemaker who wanted to force changes in traditional practices. There is no question that she used her long life to alter the opportunities available to women lawyers. In many ways, she was similar to West Coast rebel Clara Foltz, who also committed herself to challenging discrimination toward women and, in the face of significant barriers, forged a viable legal practice while authoring the idea of an office of public defender.
6
Clara Foltz’s Story
Breaking Barriers in the West
Let the criminal courts be reorganized upon a basis of exact, equal and free justice; let our country be broad and generous enough to make the law a shield as well as a sword.
—Clara Shortridge Foltz, 1893
IF BELVA LOCKWOOD was restless and ambitious, persistently seeking opportunities and trying new things, Clara Shortridge Foltz was even more so. Ardent in all that she pursued, Foltz led a life that reads like the nomadic road map of a woman in search of work, status, and a more equitable society. Like Lockwood, Foltz fought her way into the profession of law only to spend decades frustrated by the norms and prejudices that made it impossible for her to win appointment as a judge, election to public office, or selection as a corporate law partner.
Courtrooms suited Clara Foltz. Like Goodell and Lockwood, she relished the intellectual challenge and public notice of trial work. And as much as or more than those women, she shone at shaping legal strategies for her clients and speaking to all-male juries. She also excelled as a public thinker, a lecturer and writer particularly original in her contributions to the reform of the criminal justice system.
Clara Shortridge was born in Indiana in 1849 to Talitha and Elias Shortridge. Shortly after “Carrie’s” birth her family moved to Iowa, where she spent a number of her early years in the socially and politically progressive town of Mount Pleasant, the community where Belle Mansfield found acceptance as a young lawyer.
Clara Shortridge Foltz (1849-1934) (Reprinted from A Woman of the Century, ed. Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore [Buffalo, NY: C. W. Moulton, 1893].)
Clara was the Shortridges’ bright daughter, their lone girl sandwiched between two older and two younger brothers. Her father, Elias, trained as an attorney with Oliver Morton, one of the great civil rights leaders of the period and future governor of Indiana. Shortridge dinner conversation followed Republican talk as well as the theology of the Campbellite (today Disciples of Christ) Church, in which both her parents were raised.1 Presaging, perhaps, the twists and turns of Clara’s later professional life, in middle age Elias Shortridge abruptly quit lawyering and became an itinerant preacher. By the time his daughter was ten or twelve, he headed a Campbellite congregation in Mount Pleasant. Later, Elias would return briefly to the law, and then spend many years mining for silver and dealing in Arizona real estate.
A foundation of racial and gender equality shaped the philosophy of Howe’s Academy, the school Carrie attended for several years before the Civil War. She was a good student. Indeed, Elias observed that Carrie had the makings of a lawyer, including a talent for “abstruse thinking,” which, as a girl, she could not really use.2 Though she dreamed of “oratory, politics, and fame,” Carrie was sidetracked by romance.3 In 1864, at age fifteen, she eloped with 25-year-old Jeremiah Foltz, a Union Army soldier, and set up housekeeping as a farm wife. In 1866, their daughter Trella was born. By 1871 Clara had four children and a husband with a restless soul, and perhaps also, a wandering eye. Jeremiah headed west in 1871 to Portland, Oregon. If he intended to desert his young family, he misjudged Clara, who had no intention of being chaff in some man’s life.
The Shortridge family was a close one. When Jeremiah left, Clara gathered together her parents and brothers, and they made the decision to join her in a move to Oregon with her four young children. The family hunted down Jeremiah, and shortly thereafter the Shortridge and Foltz families moved to Salem, a farming hub and the state’s capital. Jeremiah worked at a farm store while Clara sewed and took in boarders, including members of the legislature.4 In the decade since Elias Shortridge had lamented Clara’s gender, attitudes had loosened enough that one of her more progressive boarders gave her James Kent’s four-volume Commentaries on American Law, with the advice that she become a lawyer. Over the next several years, in the mid-1870s, Clara learned what her father knew: law was power. She taught herself enough about local codes and statutes to reclaim a sewing machine seized to pay her husband’s debts and to fight a neighbor successfully over a cow that was a public health nuisance.
Around 1874 the two families were again on the move, this time to San Jose, California. In 1876, Virginia Foltz, Clara and Jeremiah’s fifth child, was born. The event did nothing to bring the couple closer, and by the next year it appeared that Jeremiah, the man with a wandering eye, was about to desert his family. In 1878, he left his family for a woman in Oregon. The next year Clara divorced him. She was twenty-eight. Blessed with curiosity and intellect, she began paying more and more attention to politics despite the demands of raising her children. Her dire economic situation as a single mother with five children to feed intensified Clara’s long-standing interest in
woman suffrage. It also drew her to the labor philosophy of the Workingmen’s Party of California (WPC), which opposed the rapacious rich, as well as the effects of Chinese immigration on employment and wages.
Shortly after Virginia’s birth, Clara had concluded that neither teaching nor sewing nor boarding strangers—all forms of “women’s work”—would feed her large family. The reality of her situation helped Clara to decide to use her near-photographic memory and the family gift for oratory as a paid public lecturer.5 A number of suffrage women had taken to the platform. Laura DeForce Gordon, with whom Foltz would soon join forces to lobby for employment and suffrage legislation, began years earlier on the Spiritualist circuit in the East. Moving west in 1865, Gordon shifted to the cause of woman suffrage, and in 1868 she delivered the first public lecture in California on women’s rights.6 In some years, she delivered more than one hundred talks.7
At the same time, Elias Shortridge, who had resumed the practice of law and liberalized his views about women becoming lawyers, took his daughter on as a student. Critically, Clara’s mother, who relieved her daughter of many child-care and housekeeping duties, and had “uniform faith” and “ready soothing words” for her, joined Elias in supporting Clara’s new ambitions.8
Beside intellect, Clara Foltz benefited from youthful, fair good looks, graceful mannerisms, and a pleasing voice. She made woman suffrage the subject of her first lecture, which she titled “Impartial Suffrage.” Word-of-mouth, and good newspaper reviews, brought bookings and reasonable receipts. Lecturing would become part of her lifetime repertoire of employment.