Some items in the TriCollege Libraries Digital Collections may be under copyright. Copyright information may be available in the Rights Status field listed in this item record (below). Ultimate responsibility for assessing copyright status and for securing any necessary permission rests exclusively with the user. Please see the Reproductions and Access page for more information.
'My Efforts to Become a Lawyer"
Article in which Lockwood discusses her early life and her career as a lawyer, with a focus on the discrimination she faced as a woman.
Lockwood, Belva Ann, 1830-1917
1888-02
15 pages
reformatted digital
Belva Ann Lockwood Papers, SCPC-DG-098
Belva Ann Lockwood Papers, SCPC-DG-098 --http://archives.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/resources/scpc-dg-098
Lockwood-0068
990 MY EFFORTS TO BECOME A LAWYER.
ladies. This good dame looked upon the innovation as not only im-
modest, but as highly irreligions. -The roller-skate and the skating-
rink had not then been dreamed of. “So use doth breed a habit in a
man.”
One year of teaching at Hornellsville, and three more in charge of
a young ladies’ seminary at Owego, New York, carried me through the
never-to-be-forgotten struggle of the civil war. War is distasteful to
me under any circumstances. I dislike contention and quarrels of all
sorts, and have always avoided them when possible, preferring often to
suffer ills rather than to make complaint. And yet my whole life has
been in almost direct antagonism to all the old-established usages of
society and the prejudices of centuries.
I was opposed to slavery from the first moment that I was able to’
lisp from my school reader,— -
“ Fleeey locks and black complexion
Cannot forfeit nature’s claim:
Skins may differ, but affection
Dwells in white and black the same ;”
but I deprecated the methods to which we were compelled to resort for
its eradication,—the fearful cruelties and cost of war,—-and would much
have preferred a peaceful arbitration, to the sad carnage that followed.
But no woman’s advice was asked about the war; no woman voted a
subsidy to maintain it; though all over the land, North and South,
women’s hearts were wrung over the loss of loved ones whom they
were powerless to shield, A war waged without the consent of a ma-
jority of the persons who are called upon to maintain it is unjust and
tyrannical ; but war is wrong per se.
But the war closed. The arm of the strongest prevailed. The
slave went free. It was a grand step onward in the liberties of the
world, but taken at the cost of a vast amount of blood and treasure,
which will prove sufficient, when the great outlay is summed up, in- -
eluding the amount paid and to be paid for pensions, to have bought
up every slave owned by the South six times over,
The next great contest that is about to sweep over the country and
break up the old party lines (bloodless, T hope, for rum has already had
her share of blood) is prohibition. The earth-rents made by the recent
earthquake-shocks will be nothing compared to the rents made in party
by the great tidal wave of prohibition that is about to sweep over the
land. That one of the great dominant parties now prominent in the .
political world that dares boldly to incorporate a stanch prohibition
plank in its platform will lead on to victory; while the party that
rejects it will die as the old Whig party died in 1860. There is no
dodging the issue. The controlling political power in this country for
the next ten years will be the reign of the common people, °
The Labor party, the Prohibition party, and the woman, are loom-
ing up on the horizon in a magnitude not to be undervalued by one
who chooses to read the signs of the times.
The vocation of the old machine politician is gone. The masses
“q
Lockwood-0068_06
reformatted digital
Belva Ann Lockwood Papers, SCPC-DG-098 --http://archives.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/resources/scpc-dg-098
Lockwood-0068_06