Background
Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood, the daughter of Lewis Johnson and Hannah (Green) Bennett, was born on October 24, 1830 in Royalton, New York, United States.
Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood, the daughter of Lewis Johnson and Hannah (Green) Bennett, was born on October 24, 1830 in Royalton, New York, United States.
She was educated in the public schools, and in the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary. Later she went to Genesee College for further training, graduating with the Master of Arts in 1857. She graduated from the National University Law School in 1873 at the age of forty-three.
Lockwood taught at Royalton, at Lockport, at the Gainesville Seminary, and was principal of the McNall Seminary in Oswego, New York. After the Civil War she moved to Washington, D. C. In 1873 he was admitted to the Washington bar. In her practice she specialized in cases of claims against the government. She was the first woman admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States, and she began to plead before this court at the age of forty-nine.
Her activities centered about a lifelong struggle for women's rights, and she made her law office in her own house the meeting place for national leaders in the struggle to improve conditions for women. For eight years she lectured successfully. She was the first woman candidate for president of the United States, receiving twice, in 1884 and 1888, the nomination of the National Equal Rights party of the Pacific Coast ("How I Ran for the Presidency, " National Magazine, March 1903).
In 1884 she contested the election of Cleveland in the electoral college. She was a delegate from the State Department to the International Congress of Charities, Correction, and Philanthropy in Geneva in 1886 and a delegate to the Universal Peace Congress in Paris in 1889. In 1892 she was made a member of the International Peace Bureau in Berne and was secretary of the American Branch of the Bureau. She was also one of the nominating committee for the Nobel Peace Prize. A few of her papers on peace and arbitration have been published. A life-size oil portrait of her was unveiled by the women of the District of Columbia in 1913 and is now in the gallery of the National Museum. She is on the state honor roll of New York of the National League of Women Voters. She fought incessantly for fifty years for women's rights, using all the legal weapons at her command. An eloquent advocate, she made some of the most effective speeches heard in the long suffrage campaign.
Lockwood was one of the first women lawyers in the United States. In her capacity as lawyer she helped to secure for the women of the District of Columbia equal property rights and equal guardianship of children. She also prepared an amendment to the statehood bill granting suffrage to women in Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico. Belva Ann Bennett was prominent both nationally and internationally in promoting women's rights, temperance, peace, and arbitration.
Lockwood was a member of the National Equal Rights Party.
She had a vigorous, persistent, aggressive personality.
In 1848, at the age of eighteen, Belva married a farmer, Uriah H. McNall, and was left a widow at twenty-four with one child. On March 11, 1868, she was married to Dr. Ezekiel Lockwood, a dentist and claim agent, who died in 1877.
