1884 One Hundred Years Ago

On September 3 Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood accepted the nomination of the Woman’s National Equal Rights party, which had convened in San Francisco, and became the first woman to run for the office of President of the United States. She was also the first woman admitted to practice before the Supreme Court.

Her concern for the rights of women began when, as a widow of twenty-four with a child to support, she taught school in Royalton, New York. Men doing the same work, she found, were getting paid twice as much. She complained to the trustees and to the wife of the Methodist minister and was told by that lady, “I can’t help you; you cannot help yourself, for it is the way of the world.”

Against this absurdity she fought until her death in 1917.