Politics & Power Quote by Belva Lockwood

Lockwood’s sentence is built like a legal brief with a trapdoor in the middle. She starts by rejecting the most basic premise of 19th-century public life: that “sex distinction” should decide who gets to speak, work, vote, or practice law. By stacking “literature, law, politics, or trade,” she isn’t being poetic; she’s being exhaustive, closing loopholes. Equality isn’t a parlor ideal here, it’s a jurisdictional claim.

Then she pivots to “modesty and virtue,” the era’s favorite velvet rope for keeping women in their place. The subtext is clear: if society insists on making women the custodians of morality, it’s not because women are naturally purer, it’s because the standard is selectively enforced. Lockwood refuses the compliment because she recognizes it as a cage. Her move is savvy: she doesn’t dismiss virtue, she universalizes it. If modesty is good, it should be demanded of men in courts, legislatures, newsrooms, and marketplaces - the very arenas they dominate.

The context matters: Lockwood fought her way into the legal profession and became the first woman admitted to practice before the US Supreme Court, in a system that treated women as dependents rather than full civic actors. This line reads like a strategy for winning reluctant audiences. She disarms moral conservatives by affirming “virtue,” while simultaneously stripping them of the argument that women need special rules because they are special beings. Equality, she implies, isn’t a threat to public morality; the double standard is.