The next female lawyer was =Mrs. Belva Ann Lockwood=, a graduate of the Law School of the National University at Washington, D. C. Having been admitted in 1873 to practice before the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, she applied in October, 1876, for admission as practitioner of the Supreme Court of the United States, but was rejected under the following decision: “By the uniform practice of the Court from its organization to the present time, and by the fair construction of its rules, none but men are admitted to practice before it as attorneys and counselors. This is in accordance with immemorial usage in England, and the law and practice in all the States, until within a recent period; and the Court does not feel called upon to make a change until such a change is required by statute or a more extended practice in the highest courts of the States.” [Illustration: BELVA A. LOCKWOOD. ] But if the members of the Supreme Court had entertained the hope of scaring away women once and for all, they soon enough found that they were mistaken. Mrs. Lockwood drafted a bill and secured its passage in Congress, providing “that any woman who shall have been a member of the bar of the highest court of any State or Territory, or of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, for the space of three years, and shall have maintained a good standing before such court, and who shall be a person of good moral character, shall, on motion, and the production of such record, be admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States.” This bill was approved on February 15th, 1879. Since then Mrs. Lockwood as well as a number of other female lawyers have been admitted under this law to practice before the highest court of the United States. A “Woman’s International Bar Association” was organized in 1888, for the purpose of establishing law schools for women and of promoting the interests of female lawyers as well as of securing better legal conditions for women. According to the Census of 1910 there were 1010 woman lawyers in the United States.