by Marge Piercy
“You infuriated them when you wrote that article about men assaulting women and said that every woman should get a large Newfoundland dog and her own pistol.”
“They are ladies, Susan, fine ladies. You and I are no such animals.” Elizabeth raked her hand through her curls. Her hair always soothed her. She still loved her hair; even at fifty-three when it was graying, it was still curly and abundant. One of her vanities was to have it done by a woman she trusted. Susan wore her hair raked back severely, but since she was a girl, Elizabeth had always been proud of her naturally curly mane. She envied Susan for the fact that her hair, no matter how plainly she wore it, was still a smooth glossy brown.
“We should have started our own group years ago.” Susan removed her glasses and polished them carefully.
Elizabeth didn’t want to argue, for there was a bond between them that she hoped would last as long as she did. There was no one’s opinion she valued more or whom she trusted as she trusted Susan. “My dear, let’s not be so testy with each other. We must put our good heads together and plan strategy. I’ve made mistakes. So have you. Don’t try to walk forward looking over your shoulder. Please!”
Susan carefully fitted her glasses back on her nose. “Of course. We must woo the Boston women. They have the money and resources we lack.”
“And the respectability.” Elizabeth laughed. “Look, I’ll offer to resign as president of the National.”
“No! Don’t sacrifice yourself to them!” Susan sat upright, frowning.
“It’s no sacrifice. Office never meant a thing to me. It doesn’t bother you that you aren’t president. You always choose a lesser office when you could have any office you wish.”
“I hate to see you immolate yourself for them.”
She could never make Susan understand that resigning would mean liberation, time to write, time to read. “I’ll make the offer. See if they want a symbolic rather than a real auto-da-fé.” She stood, fanning herself. “I hear Amelia bringing Robbie and Harriot back from the beach.”
Susan darted to the window. “You have sharp ears, Mrs. Stanton. Indeed, it’s our children. I didn’t hear a thing.” They walked out onto the porch to greet Robbie along with his little shovel, Harriot with a beach umbrella and their wet towels hanging around their wet suits.
The women didn’t have leisure to talk further until well after supper and evening games, when the children were at last in bed and the work of the household quieted. Susan was rocking in a chair she loved, out on the wide veranda. Fireflies winked on the lawn, a sight that made Elizabeth nostalgic for her childhood, when she had run about freely and when her father had seemed to approve of her intelligence and spirit. Later, he did not. All he wanted was a living son, and that he had been denied. Fireflies were the soul of hot summer evenings with her siblings, with her friends in the stately family home where they had played hide-and-seek or blind-man’s buff among the shrubbery while there was faint light in the sky. Their upbringing had been strict. They ate by a rigid regimen: breakfast at six, dinner at noon, supper at five and pie at eight. They were permitted horseback riding; let loose, she rode like a demon. There were fairs, parties, but she was forced to wear a cotton dress in red or blue with stiff neck ruffles, black alpaca aprons and, even in the hottest weather, knit stockings. She hated her clothes. They confined her. Her mother would announce, “If you think those are a hindrance, wait till you grow up and have to wear a corset and dresses that weigh half a ton.” Elizabeth never wanted to come in on those warm summer nights to her stuffy bedroom where she lay in bed with her sister Tryphena sweating in her long nightgown until her hair and body were drenched.
She realized with a start that Susan was speaking, her voice low and thoughtful. “…also at the meeting was a young woman who makes collars. She gets twenty-two cents a collar. She can only make thirty a day.”
“Susan, forgive me. I was woolgathering. What meeting is this?”
Susan frowned over her glasses. “Mrs. Stanton, the lives of these girls are very difficult!”
“I’m listening now. You know I’m interested.”
“I’ve started Working Women’s Association Number Two at a boardinghouse. I met with working girls—close to a hundred from the neighborhood. Their pay is so pitiful I don’t know how any survive.”
“Employers assume girls can live on air.”
“They don’t care how the girls live. They say there are always more where these came from. And of course there are.” Susan clenched her hands in her lap. “Every day girls come to the city who’ve never been on their own. Get off the train, off the stage, and walk into what they cannot imagine. Every day girls land by boat or train and are dumped into a life for which they’re pitifully unprepared. No one reaches out to them except madams and pimps and the proprietors of sweatshops.”
“And you, Susan.”
“I had a letter today about a young girl in Philadelphia, an English immigrant who went into domestic service. Her employer forced himself on her, then turned her into the street when she was expecting. She had her baby in an unheated garret, alone, and the baby died. She was close to starvation and had puerperal fever, but she has been tried for murder by a jury of men and is to be hanged. The judge outright said at sentencing he was making an example of her to scare other women.”
Elizabeth stood. “Get me the name and the facts, and we’ll take a delegation down to Philadelphia. We can’t let her die. Get me the facts!”
That night she was working on a speech she had promised Susan about women workers when she got stuck for a phrase and began doodling. When she looked at what she had drawn, she saw she had made a big heart and inside it were two figures. One was all circles piled on circles including little curlicues for the hair. That was herself, obviously. A woman of curves and bulges, round face, breasts and belly and hips. Then next to it with joined hands was a stick figure, all straight lines. Susan was an arrow pointing to a target. Certainly they were Jack Sprat and his wife, Susan all lean and abstemious and herself plump and far more sensual and pleasure-loving. Susan had only the movement and her female friends. Elizabeth suspected Susan thought women simply shouldn’t marry. At the same time, Susan believed marriage was eternal and continued in the afterlife, so not only did she disapprove of divorce, she frowned on widows or widowers marrying again. Elizabeth wanted marriage to be a legal contract, to be broken by the will of both parties or by any breach of the contract—excessive drunkenness, adultery, criminal behavior, wife-beating. When a marriage didn’t work, the parties should be able to end it without great fuss and certainly without a church getting involved. Women were often stuck in hellish marriages that were sometimes fatal. On questions of love and sex and marriage, Susan and she could not find common ground.
However, it was certainly a great convenience that Susan had never married. It meant Susan was far more available to her as well as to other women. Furthermore, Susan alone among all the women of the New York contingent—and this was true of the Boston women as well—was unmarried and thus could sign contracts. Susan and she could never have started the Revolution if Susan were married. Married women, like idiots and children, could not sign contracts. Susan was the sole proprietor of the paper because Susan alone had the legal ability to sign for loans and arrange to contract out jobs. Everyone else on the editorial board was married, and so were most of their contributors. Susan was the only legal adult.
Susan and she had invited two of the Beecher sisters, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the famous novelist, and Isabella Beecher Hooker, who had just begun to involve herself in woman’s rights, to join the Revolution as contributing editors. Both had said they would do so if the name of the paper was changed to something less controversial. Harriet let them know that Henry Ward Beecher, their brother, the charismatic preacher, disapproved of the name. Elizabeth and Susan refused to change it. They were trying to make a revolution, nothing less, so why lie about it? Harriet withdrew, but Isabella capitulated and began writ
ing for them.
Elizabeth had frankly been surprised at Isabella’s response. She had more independence from the Beecher clan than they had suspected. The Beechers were one of the most prominent American families, wielding great clout. Lincoln had called Harriet the little woman who started the big war. Catherine, the eldest sister, wrote books about education and running a household properly, although she, like Susan, had never married. She was equally famous as an educator and as a rule-maker for housewives. Isabella had always been under the shadow of her famous half sisters and half brother, Henry. She had married a successful lawyer, John Hooker, and raised two daughters. Sometimes a woman could seem in her domestic role meek and without gumption, then blossom when she was permitted a more public role.
Elizabeth had seen that with Lib Tilton. Susan and Elizabeth had begun talking with her away from Theo. Lib proved to have a keen intelligence. Lib was one of many women in the Plymouth congregation who adored Beecher. Elizabeth had gone to hear him, of course, and found him theatrical—a great performer but not much of a thinker. He was a stout man with flying gray hair around a central dome and an actor’s voice and style. He strode up and down his platform waving his arms, stomping, acting out parts, bringing the audience to laughter and sometimes to tears. She did not quite trust him. She had heard rumors of his affairs with women of his congregation. She would not be surprised if the stories proved true. At any rate, Lib now acted as poetry editor of the Revolution. Theo was sarcastic about that, saying how could a woman who had never written a poem act as a poetry editor, but Elizabeth, who had seen Theo’s verse, thought that Lib could prove to have better taste in poetry than her husband.
She tried to separate her disgust at the way Theo treated his wife from the man who worked hard for woman’s rights as he had for the rights of Negroes, the staunch liberal who had not deserted her cause when so many had. She liked to talk politics with him, she enjoyed an occasional game of chess. He admired her and showed it, and she could not help basking a little, at a time when Susan and she were being vilified not only by their enemies but by their old allies in the Republican Party. After all, had her husband treated her with more respect than Theo showed to Lib? She was hard put to think of a man who actually took his wife’s politics seriously. Perhaps Henry Blackwell, married to Lucy Stone, was the exception. They always seemed to be at one politically—but whose head gave the real direction? She was convinced that Blackwell was unfaithful. All those Boston women were so proper and so shocked when a woman brought up issues they considered controversial, anything to do with bodies, sex, marriage, divorce, childbirth, but their lives were not as conventional as they liked to pretend in public. Several of them had long-term serious relationships outside their marriages. These were times when the family was adored in public, when every preacher and public official and journalist praised fidelity and chastity and then in private did his best to escape the first and destroy the second.
Theo had become infatuated with Newport when he had stayed with Paulina Wright Davis during a rights convention. Paulina had been a workhorse of the woman’s rights movement since 1850, but because she was also a clotheshorse, she incurred disapproval. Susan was a bit uncomfortable around Paulina, who wore Paris gowns—her second husband was wealthy—and had several mansions to flit between. Paulina’s answer to those who equated frumpiness with woman’s rights was that she was a living rebuttal to the popular cartoon of suffragists with beards and mustaches smoking cigars. Theo had been even more impressed by Laura Bullard, a widow and patent medicine heiress. Elizabeth had heard from Paulina that he and Laura were having a passionate affair with a lot of high-toned rhetoric about spiritual affinities. Theo certainly cut a romantic figure with his flowing locks, and women pursued him.
She laid her cheek down on her arm and let herself doze. Then she snapped awake. An argument had formed in her mind. The assumption of employers and the government was that women’s wages were supplemental, while men had to be paid a family wage. But that ignored how often women were the heads of families, because of desertion and death or injury. Susan would enjoy delivering that speech. Women had to be financially independent. Money squatted in the middle of Elizabeth’s life like a troll with greedy jaws spread wide, all teeth and appetite. She wondered if she would ever be done driving herself to take yet another tour of speaking engagements to promote the movement, yes, but also for money, money, money.
Four days later, she and Susan were on the train to Philadelphia and thence to Harrisburg to confront the governor about Hester Vaughan, the woman to be hanged. They had written to a number of Pennsylvania women to meet them in Harrisburg. First they stopped to meet Hester in Moyamensing Prison, where she was confined. She stared at them when she met them, barely able to speak at first. Then she burst into tears and embraced them.
“I don’t want to die! I want to go home. My mum wants me home. I didn’t want to lose my baby, but I was so sick I couldn’t crawl out of bed.”
She told her story while Susan wrote down the account. She was thin as a piece of paper and as pale, only nineteen.
“We’ll save you,” Elizabeth promised. “I swear it on the heads of my children.” She wrote up the story and sent it to the Working Women’s Association in New York, urging them to get it into the papers. The more publicity they could stir up, the better. The Revolution would be coming out with a headline SHOULD HESTER HANG?
They worried and harassed the governor every day They sent petitions, they harangued him wherever they could catch him. Elizabeth stood in front of his carriage and would not move. Susan waited in front of his house to buttonhole him. They called in the newspapers and gave them stories to make readers weep. Elizabeth cornered legislators and told the pitiful tale again and again. Susan pulled out troops of women. They held mass meetings in Philadelphia and New York where Elizabeth told Hester’s sad history. Back and forth they went to the prison to cheer her up. The guards all knew them and Elizabeth did her best to charm them, hoping for better treatment for Hester.
“Ladies,” the governor said, pulling on his beard, “don’t you have anything to do but pester me? You’re like a cloud of mosquitoes.”
“Oh, we can bite worse than any mosquito.” Elizabeth beamed at him. “Do you wish to be known in history as the man who hanged a sweet and wronged woman?”
Finally the governor pardoned Hester, and she was free. The governor insisted she be sent back to England, to her family. Hester wept with relief. Elizabeth, Susan and the contingent from the Working Women returned to New York with at least one little victory to warm them. The story had been carried in newspapers all over the country. Perhaps a judge somewhere else would think twice about killing a woman for her hard luck.
TWELVE
VICTORIA AND TENNIE were dining with the Commodore at Delmonico’s. Dinner with Vanderbilt was always a long-drawn-out matter, not because of conversation or because he ate slowly—he didn’t—but because he ate such an enormous amount. Tennie was working on his habits, but so far she had only managed to cut back his girth an inch at the waist. He put up with admonishments from her he would not accept from anyone else. He had already eaten a turbot and a tenderloin of beef. Tennie and Victoria were sticking to woodcock on toast. He was in a great mood tonight because Union Pacific had gone up—as Victoria and the spirits had advised him it would. Victoria sometimes wondered why an extra thirty thousand meant so much to him when he was worth a hundred million. Money to her meant freedom, power, the chance to fulfill the grand public destiny she had felt hovering before her since the time in her childhood when she began to experience visions and when the spirits began to talk with her. To him it seemed an entity in itself, far more real and potent in his life than his wife hidden away upstairs or his children, whom he despised. Money was his real lover and had certainly proved faithful. His other passion was winning. She doubted he had ever really loved a woman, but he was fond of Tennie. He preferred her company to just about everyone else’s and she hersel
f probably came in second. But the company of his money was more stimulating by far.
“There’s a giant bim-bam-bang rally for Grant tomorrow,” Tennie said. “Are you for him or Greeley or whoever the Democrats are running? I forget his name.”
Victoria said, “The Democrats joined in with the radical Republicans and are for Greeley too. Before, they had somebody who dropped dead.”
The Commodore grunted, waving a leg of turkey at them. “Whoever they got don’t stand a chance. Even though the Congress didn’t succeed in impeaching Johnson, no Democrat could get elected. They could run George Washington and he’d go down to defeat.”
Victoria felt a gaze upon her, hard and determined. The man was perhaps thirty with a thick head of hair, lean, flashily dressed. Vanderbilt had noticed the whole thing. “That’s Alfred Kumble giving you the eye. Don’t bother with him. A minnow. One day he’s rich and the next he’s trying to rub two cents together to warm his mitts. Tries to corner stocks with no success. He used to follow Dan’l Drew around but now he’s on his own. If he didn’t have family money, he’d be sleeping in the street.”
“I’m not interested. I was only curious who was staring at me.” She was telling the truth; something predatory in the man’s gaze chilled her. She did not need that kind of lover.
“Why, who wouldn’t stare. I’m here with the two prettiest women in the place. Let them stare all they want. I won’t charge them for looking.”
“Old boy, you didn’t answer me, who you’re voting for.” Tennie tapped his knuckles with her fan.
“I ain’t voting. I don’t give a damn. I can buy and sell politicians by the carload. I go up to Albany and I pay them off, and some other businessman goes up there and buys them off for more money. An honest politician is one who stays bought. That’s all there is to it.” He liked pie. He had already had two pieces, one of apple and one of cherry heaped with vanilla ice cream and whipped cream on top of that.
