Sex Wars

by Marge Piercy

  Lib felt comfortable with Susan. Now she pulled Susan off to see the children. Elizabeth was aware that Lib did not really like her. They had been invited to spend the night. She should take advantage of this visit to win over Lib, for it struck her as preposterous that she should be close to Theo and distant from his wife. Susan thought Lib had potential; she spoke of her as emotionally rich and not unfriendly to woman’s rights, although a bit afraid of women who might overly impress her brilliant husband. Theo had affairs, it was whispered. She had heard of certain liaisons, often with bright and political women, unlike the timid, housebound Lib.

  Lib should be brought out, Elizabeth decided. She would work on it, a small side project that would delight Susan. Susan had repeated to her something Lib had said: that her husband might think her silly and stupid, but the great Henry Beecher thought enough of her intelligence to show her whatever he wrote for her critiquing—that is, when Theo did not ghostwrite Beecher’s material. The Reverend Beecher liked to write upstairs in the Tilton house in a sitting room with a stained glass dome, the room Elizabeth agreed was the most charming in the rather ostentatious house.

  For the moment, it was Theo they needed. He had come up with the original idea of combining the Anti-Slavery Society and the Woman’s Rights Society into one organization. Both groups of the disenfranchised would gain their rights together. No group should gain equality at the expense of the other, Elizabeth had said countless times. The women had listened, but she was not sure the male abolitionists had digested her plea. It was shameful that she should be subject to laws she had no part in electing representatives to create, to pay taxes for a government not responsible in any way to her, unable to testify in court or sit on a jury or sign legal papers—in other words, she was a child in the eyes of the law. Taxation without representation, indeed.

  After a long evening of discussion in which at times Elizabeth thought they had convinced Theo and at times was sure they had not, Tilton brought out his chess set in which the figures were medieval knights, bishops in regalia, the queen a regal figure, the castles with turrets. Susan went off with Lib while Elizabeth settled in to play. Tilton loved chess. Elizabeth enjoyed the game and usually beat him. Tonight her mind was distracted by the coming convention. The real battle sapped her interest in the mock one. Tilton was pleased with himself for checkmating her twice. He lay back in his chair beaming. “I knew my game had improved. I can take you now.”

  Elizabeth resisted telling him that his game was the same as ever but her mind had been elsewhere. She simply congratulated him. And to think Henry complained she had no tact.

  He wanted to talk about something, she could tell. She waited for him to open up. He did, seemingly flustered. “Do you think it’s possible for a good woman, a saintly woman like Lib, to have…what I might call sensual feelings?”

  “Of course,” Elizabeth said simply. “Women can enjoy the conjugal embrace as warmly as men.”

  He winced. “I can’t believe that. Lib has always been cold…until recently. I don’t know what to make of her now. It upsets me.”

  “Why? Pleasure is something for both parties, don’t you think? Why shouldn’t a woman feel desire?” She certainly had.

  “Don’t you think that’s unnatural in a woman, with all her modesty, her inborn purity? Maybe it’s a kind of disease.”

  “It’s a natural function, Theo. Accept it and rejoice in it.” But she did not think he was prepared to. How strange that a man who had sought the embrace of several women she knew about should cringe at his own wife’s ardor. Men talked and wrote so much poppycock about women, it was no wonder if Theo felt confused.

  THE AMERICAN EQUAL RIGHTS ASSOCIATION convention turned into a brawl. Elizabeth and Susan were not the only women up in arms at the abandonment of woman suffrage and the insistence, which Elizabeth’s old friend and houseguest Frederick Douglass supported, that this was the hour of the Negro and that the hour of women could be put off. A woman delegate stood up to shout, “We want a party that will adopt a platform of universal suffrage for every color and every sex!”

  Elizabeth thought she had persuaded Wendell Phillips to support them. By midafternoon she realized he had tricked her.

  “By mixing these movements, we will lose more for the Negro than we can gain for the woman,” Wendell thundered.

  Elizabeth felt electric with anger. “May I reply to your argument with just one question: Do you believe the African race is composed entirely of males?” She was angry, hot and cold at once—passionately furious and coldly resentful. She would never forgive him for lying to her. Delegates were on their feet screaming while the chair pounded his gavel for order. People were throwing the agenda and programs in the air and trampling them underfoot. The aisles were clogged with knots of men and women confronting each other.

  Elizabeth had been supposed to be elected on the new slate of officers as vice president, and Susan was to be on the executive council. But mysteriously, when the slate was announced, their names had disappeared. That was meaningless to Elizabeth. She did not want to be an officer of this society, now, tomorrow or ever. She stood and walked out, with Susan at her heels.

  “They sold us out.” Elizabeth shook her head slowly, leaning on Susan’s arm as they paced in the hall outside where they could hear the new slate being voted in.

  “You let Wendell Phillips seduce you.” She imitated him, with that sly way she had in private, “My family has been around since 1630, so pay heed to what I advise.”

  “He can turn on the charm. I’ll never trust him again.” Elizabeth sat down heavily in a chair in the hallway outside the room where they had just been handed an overwhelming defeat. She found that sense of betrayal familiar, an old sore reopened. Yes, a betrayal that had happened when Henry and she eloped and then sailed for England with Henry’s Liberty Party comrades to learn about the aftermath of British emancipation in the West Indies, to discuss strategy for ending slavery altogether.

  In London, the newly married couple stayed in a boardinghouse with other American delegates, including the female Anti-Slavery Society representatives. Lucretia Mott, a plainly dressed abolitionist speaker and Quaker minister, wife and mother of six, was there, as was Wendell. The question of whether to seat the women delegates caused a huge floor fight. The faction with which Henry, who had been elected secretary, was allied rejected them. Wendell won her approval by protesting. In the meantime, the women were stuck behind a railing off to one side. Debate went on for hours. Clergymen from both sides of the Atlantic said participation by women would be shameful and immoral. The men supporting the women—who weren’t allowed to speak—argued that the women had been duly elected in America. Wendell moved to seat the women but was defeated by a huge majority. The women were allowed to remain as spectators only. Elizabeth was furious. The tone of the speeches against women was frankly insulting. Elizabeth assumed that Henry had voted to seat them.

  Two days later, she was walking with Lucretia in St. James’s Park admiring the swans when Lucretia said, “Have you forgiven Henry?”

  Elizabeth turned to her in confusion. “Forgiven him for what?”

  “Voting against us. Voting with his faction not to seat us.” “I

  didn’t know. I didn’t know, Lucretia.” No, she would not lightly forgive him.

  Lucretia was more than twenty years older than Elizabeth, but they felt like sisters, joined in their politics, their tastes, their courage. Elizabeth had been appalled that the movement to free the slaves could not endure freeing women to speak and vote. She felt debased. The rest of the time in London, Lucretia and she spent their days together, at the convention, visiting schools and prisons, museums and restaurants, shopping and sightseeing. Henry was not overjoyed by her intense friendship with Lucretia or that she was now an ally of the opposing faction to his. That was the first betrayal this fiasco brought back. In spite of more than twenty years of working together, the men had no intention of releasing their hold upon w
omen who were once again consigned to sitting on the sidelines.

  “How could they turn on us so?” Susan wrung her hands. “How could they forget all those years of fighting side by side?”

  “Maybe that skirmish with Wendell just before the war meant more than we thought at the time.” Elizabeth closed her eyes for a moment, remembering the runaway wife who had come to Susan for help. Juliet Pet-tibone was married to a Massachusetts state senator who had beaten her badly when she confronted him about his other women. He took custody of their children and had her confined to a mental institution. She escaped, managed to take her daughter and flee. Susan brought them to Elizabeth, who hid them in the backyard gymnasium she had built in Seneca Falls, between the house and the apple orchard. She had put it up because little girls were not encouraged to exercise or included in calisthenics and because she did not want her sons hanging around billiard parlors in town. The older boys were now away at a school run by abolitionist allies in New Jersey. She told her younger sons and daughters that the gym was off limits because of an infestation of hornets, the same story she told Henry on his infrequent stays at home. Juliet and her daughter lived there for two months. Eventually the younger Stanton children met them and she swore them to secrecy. In the meantime, Wendell was pressuring them to produce the woman, whom he and Garrison saw as a fugitive from the law. When Susan argued that it was the same as harboring fugitive slaves, both men were furious. Wendell had sat in her parlor only a hundred yards from where mother and daughter were eating their evening meal and berated her for putting the abolitionist movement in jeopardy by interfering in a man’s family. Elizabeth and Susan had hidden Juliet until they found a place for her in the Wyoming Territory They scraped together the money and sent mother and daughter off to a new life. Wendell had not understood their position then and he didn’t understand it now. It was time to stop trying to persuade him.

  “We’ll have to go it alone,” she said to Susan as they proceeded slowly down the hall arm in arm, hearing the boom of voices through the closed doors of the auditorium. In anger, Elizabeth kicked over a brass spittoon, lifting her skirts away.

  “What do you mean?” Susan stopped, turning to face her.

  “We can’t count on men. We can’t count on congressmen or senators, we can’t count on judges or newspapermen. We must build a movement of women, controlled by women, with women officers and a women’s agenda.”

  “I agree.” Susan clasped Elizabeth’s hands.

  “We’ll start our own organization. I won’t be controlled!”

  Susan stood tall and proud as a flagpole. “We’ll put our rights in the forefront and we won’t give an inch.” She seemed to shine with courage and will. Sometimes Susan looked absolutely handsome, almost radiant. It was a beauty, Elizabeth thought, that came entirely from within.

  “Precisely…” Elizabeth beamed at her, squeezing her hands back. “Now let’s go to the Revolution office. I want to tear up the issue I was laying out and put out a call for rebellion. We’re going to war. I feel a need for some downright honest fighting.”

  EIGHT

  VICTORIA WAS NOT immensely pleased but hardly surprised to answer the door of their leased town house—they had no servants yet so she was answering the door herself—and find her father Buck standing there.

  “Give your old daddy a big kiss, Vickie. I had a mite of trouble finding you, but I kept on it like a hound dog on a trail and here I be. Glad to see me?”

  “Of course… Where’s the rest of the clan?”

  “They be coming any day now, soon as I tell them I found you. I bet Tennessee’s here too.”

  Victoria sighed. She would do her best to protect her younger sister from their father’s schemes. “She is.”

  “But I bet she misses her days on the open road with her daddy. Those were the times. From Cleveland to Memphis, from Cincinnati to Wheeling, we rode our wagon and we cleaned up good.” He stepped forward and eyed her. “You’re looking a little peaked but right handsome. Nice dress. Must have cost a pretty penny. You got yourself a sugar daddy?”

  “We have someone who may help us. I’m not his mistress.”

  “Is Tennessee?”

  She wasn’t about to tell him anything he might decide to cash in on. She wouldn’t permit his trying to blackmail the Commodore, who would crush him like a beetle. “She just flirts with him. We’re operating as mediums.”

  “That’s always a good in.” He surveyed the room, strolling back and forth. “Bare as a baby’s ass in here. No money for furnishings, eh?”

  “We’re working on it.” The parlor had only a green plush love seat and a mirror. They were expecting an Oriental via Annie Wood that recently graced one of the Seven Sisters’ fancy brothels. That sister had just changed her decor. Victoria waved her hand at the wall. “We have gas laid on. Also water and central heating.”

  “Central heating? I hear tell that’s unhealthy. Chokes you up.”

  “I think freezing half to death the way we always did is harder on the health.” She turned away toward the fireplace, which was only for decoration. “James and the children are here too, of course.” Buck hated James for taking Victoria away and then protecting Tennie. Those daughters had been his to use for profit, and now James was in the way. Roxanne didn’t like him any the better, for she was jealous of the influence he wielded over Victoria. She and Utica had been Roxanne’s favorites, as Tennie was Buck’s. Roxanne had tried ineffectually to protect her from Buck, but never to the point of truly angering him, or he would beat his wife just as hard as his kids.

  “We can all double up, darlin’, don’t you worry about us.”

  “I’m not. We have the entire house.”

  “You can’t tell me your Colonel is paying for all this.”

  “We expect to be doing right well here.” God, she was slipping back into idioms she never used. “We’ve started selling chemicals to the better houses of pleasure.”

  Buck lit up. “That’s just fine, little darling. I can handle that.”

  “I’ll tell you which ones you can handle. A few of them have to be dealt with by Tennie or myself.”

  “Where is my sweet child Tennessee?”

  “She’s out at the moment. Taking the air.” Tennie was riding in the park with Vanderbilt. He liked to race his bays every day flat out. He had terrified many a passenger over the years. Most men would only ride with him once. But Tennie understood the rules of the game, claiming vivaciously to enjoy the racing as much as the Commodore. It was not exactly a lie to say Tennie wasn’t his mistress. He couldn’t perform the sexual act, but Tennie gave him release in her daily massages. Tennie was not looking for lovers. She said she’d had enough of men to last her a few years. She wanted money, she wanted comfort, and she wanted fun. Vanderbilt was good for most of that. Victoria just had to keep Buck out of it.

  Three days after Buck telegraphed them, they arrived, her mother Roxanne, her sisters Utica, Polly, Margaret Ann and children. They must have been packed and waiting, either back in Ohio or in some wayside town after their money had been exhausted, run out of another town by the law.

  “My sweet baby daughter!” Roxanne, shorter than Victoria, embraced her tightly. “My angel. I been missing you something terrible.” She was wizened like an old raisin, her eyes squinting from poor vision.

  “Where did you get that black eye, Mama?”

  “Some fool give it to me. Like the Good Book says, if he smite ye on one cheek, turn the other.”

  “It wasn’t Daddy?”

  Roxanne was examining Victoria closely, touching her hair, fingering the material of her dress. Now she made a circuit of the room. “Was some sinner who said our cancer medicine made his auntie die. Where’s your darling babes?”

  “Upstairs. I’ll show you.”

  “Is that Colonel man around still?”

  “He’s my husband, Mama. He’s working over in Jersey today with his brother.”

  “Some husband. Can�
��t even walk straight.”

  “Come.” She took Roxanne’s callused hand. “Let’s go to Zulu Maud and Byron.” As a child, she had been tremendously close to Roxanne, who encouraged her visions, her voices, her trances. She had felt as if Buck wanted to use her powers to make money, but her mother truly believed. Her first husband hadn’t been the only drunk in the family. Roxanne liked to hit the bottle. Utica was addicted to opium, but also liked to drink until she collapsed. They were blood, and they had hidden each other from vengeful lovers and furious wives, from bill collectors and sheriffs. When she was close to dying after Byron’s birth, Roxanne had nursed her back to health. She was alive today because of her mother, and only because of her.

  Slowly she was putting the house together. She did not trust Roxanne’s taste or Buck’s, but she entrusted them with shopping for simple necessities—straight chairs, a kitchen table, pots and pans and cutlery, baskets and buckets. Her mother knew a bargain when she saw one, and it was always a good idea to keep her and Buck occupied. Both Tennie and Victoria were getting money regularly from Vanderbilt. Victoria had established contact with his favorite son and his mother. But she needed a lot more than what the Commodore was giving them if she wanted to establish herself as a power for good, as the spirit of Demosthenes had bade her do.