Died in Washington, D.C. at age 86; buried in Congressional Cemetery.
Belva Ann Lockwood died on May 19, 1917, in Washington, D.C., at the age of 86. She was laid to rest in the historic Congressional Cemetery in the capital, the city where she had built her extraordinary legal and political career over more than four decades.
Lockwood's death came just a few years before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, which finally secured women's suffrage nationwide — a cause to which she had devoted much of her adult life, both through her twin presidential campaigns of 1884 and 1888 and through decades of legal advocacy and public speaking. She did not live to see full national suffrage achieved, but her legal victories — particularly her admission to the Supreme Court bar and her sponsorship of the federal legislation enabling it — had already permanently altered the landscape for women in the American legal profession.
At the time of her death, Lockwood was remembered as a pioneering lawyer, suffragist, peace activist, and the first woman to run a full campaign for President of the United States. Her legacy endured through the generations of women lawyers who followed the path she had forced open, and her name remains closely associated with the history of women's entry into the highest levels of American law and politics.