Jill Norgren

I cannot remember a time when the local public library was not an important part of my life. I contrived, while in elementary school, to obtain a card for the adult section because the "really good stuff" was in that part of the building. For me, all that good stuff included biography and autobiography about women. I was not surprised, then, when I recently discovered Belva Lockwood (1830-1917) -- whose biography I am now writing -- in a public library in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

I was rummaging there for books one Saturday morning with my then eight year-old daughter and noticed a juvenile biography about a nineteenth century woman attorney: Belva Ann McNall Bennett Lockwood. I had only once read a passing reference to her. I quickly discovered that no adult biography existed, and so a project was born.

Writing biography is intimidating to someone who previously has written scholarly articles and books, and a textbook. While the archival research has involved the same methods as my earlier work, getting the "voice" of another person -- particularly someone who did not leave a diary -- is a challenge. I must presume that I understand the lens through which Lockwood saw the world. She and I share a deep intellectual interest in the workings of government, as well as the experience of being working women and mothers.

But a century of history and Victorian sensibilities separate us. I know that what I write will, in some fashion, take liberties with her life. It is unavoidable. Still, I bring to my work decades of study of women's experience in the United States as well as an expertise in American law and courts. I began the study of women and law while a political science graduate student at the University of Michigan. Curiosity about the possibility of an expanded federal policy on child care diverted me; I wrote a doctoral dissertation on the politics of day care in the United States. This was in the early 1970s when some Americans thought that the development of a comprehensive policy for early childhood was long overdue. Other groups, however, believed that the involvement of government in the lives of very young children intruded upon the prerogatives of families. Pat Buchanan wrote President Nixon's veto message of the 1971 comprehensive child care bill.

Thirty years later, the United States still does not have a comprehensive early childhood care policy. The defeat of the 1971 child care act discouraged me; I turned back to the study of law.

In 1976 I began a study, with my colleague Petra Shattuck, of federal Indian policy with an emphasis on the role of law and courts. Petra and I focused first on Native American land claims, and we later co-authored Partial Justice: Federal Indian Law in a Liberal Constitutional System. After Professor Shattuck's untimely death, I joined with anthropologist Serena Nanda to continue this exploration of the role of law and courts in the lives of different American religious, racial, economic, and gender groups. We developed a course at the time quite new in the curriculum of American colleges and, at the request of our students, wrote a textbook, American Cultural Pluralism and Law.

Developing and team-teaching this course has been one of the great joys of my career. The idea of writing Belva Lockwood's biography came slowly. I was asked to write the Lockwood entry for the new American National Biography project. Researching this article crystallized my interest while also revealing a daunting problem: many of Lockwood's papers had been destroyed at the time of her death. So, while I had the appropriate expertise and sympathies from my years of experience reading and teaching women's studies and legal topics, I could not be certain I could uncover the materials essential to doing her story justice. This became both the challenge and the reward of the project. An additional pleasure was the discovery that my knowledge of federal Indian law would be called upon: for thirty years, Lockwood was the attorney for the Eastern Cherokee, successfully bringing their claims to the United States Supreme Court -- and to noteworthy victory, in 1906.

At the Wilson Center I will be writing this biography, a volume that will explore how Lockwood in particular and women in general -- still years from the constitutional amendment by which they finally gained suffrage -- used First Amendment rights of speech and association to press upon society new ideas of women as professionals and as full partners in the democratic experiment that is the American Republic.
 

Expertise

American Politics and Constitutional Law; Law and Society; Women's Studies; Federal Indian Law