by Marge Piercy
One field where she had a free hand—since Henry took little interest—was the children’s upbringing. She gave them freedom to run about, to climb trees, to go down to the river. She encouraged them to read and discuss with her. The neighbors regarded them as undisciplined hellions. She preferred energy to obedience. She made her own medicines. As for the conjugal embrace, they both enjoyed that a great deal. The only advantage she could find in Henry’s constant, almost compulsive traveling was that when he came home they were new to each other and not at all an old married couple who might have lapsed into boredom. In the bedroom, Henry did not bore her, nor she him.
Otherwise, he was not the most stimulating companion these days. He still talked politics, but his were party machinations, who was running for what and who was supporting him, who controlled what committee in the legislature—not ideas and ideals. She listened and offered her comments, but it was a far cry from the excitement ignited by their days sharing anti-slavery activities. He confessed that he was considering changing his party affiliation. He had talked with Democratic politicians who had indicated they might support him if he ran for state senator on their ticket. She was shocked, as he had always derided the Democrats as pro-slavery But she could feel the heat of his ambition for public office. He loved being in Albany. He liked speechmaking, the intrigue of the legislature, behind-the-scenes maneuvering, the constant courtship from lobbyists, the feeling of power and influence.
Sometimes after a day with the help of her maid, Kathleen, a day of mending torn clothes and washing linens and bleaching them, of making puddings and collecting eggs and hauling water to heat, a day of wiping runny noses and getting potions down Neil, who was sick in bed, of scrubbing the stairs and cleaning the windows and taking the horses out for exercise, of making bread, of replacing buttons, of knitting for fall, of reading stories to her sick boy, of spreading manure on what would be a bigger kitchen garden, of tidying behind the children and gluing a broken wooden soldier, she felt as if her head were both huge and empty, like an immense toy ball. Sometimes she wanted to pound the walls and scream. Sometimes she did. This was not living, this was picking up after living. Women of all classes came to her for medical advice, for comfort or help when their drunken husbands beat them or their children, for advice on finances—but what could she do to enlarge her own life?
She felt so depressed that she imagined simply going to sleep and never getting out of bed again. Women did that. Doctors had fancy names for it, neurasthenia, whatever, but she thought it was just that the drudgery became too much and they could not endure going on for the rest of their lives like a mule bound to a mill turning round and round pulling a heavy weight but never going anywhere. She looked into the faces of the women around her and she saw staring back at her the same bleak depression, the same exhaustion, the same sense of being imprisoned in a very tight place. She started to write an essay about women’s dress, to keep her mind alive, when baby Gat fell down the steep narrow stairway that led from the boys’ room. The doctor said he had brain fever and would not live, but she nursed him back to health. A daily, weekly, monthly, yearly round of repetitious, mind-numbing chores broken only by crises.
She loved her children, although she longed for a girl. She loved her children more than Henry and sometimes wondered if that should be so, but they did not fill her brain. She applied her intelligence to their upbringing, applied Graham’s ideas of loose clothing, exercise, healthy foods, firm beds and lots of fresh air. Gat might have a cold this week, but no child of hers had died yet. Her mother had lost half her children and grown so depressed she had taken to her bed for years. Henry and Elizabeth had named their house Grasmere, after Wordsworth’s house they had visited on their abolitionist honeymoon in England. But this Grasmere was not a place of high thought, lofty ambitions and excellent writing. It was a place of endless, tedious housework. Sometimes she muttered to herself in frustration, in rage that had to be contained: Was she not human too? Didn’t she have a brain? A will? Ideas? At least she used to.
The second year in her drafty white clapboard house on the river overlooking the stinking tannery, Lucretia came to visit. Elizabeth poured out her frustrations. They talked about the lives of women. Although her father had given her the house, it was not hers. If Henry left her, he could take the children, and if she earned or inherited any money, it was his. Men owned their children. Women who gave birth to them and raised them had no right to custody. A woman’s body belonged to her husband, no matter how brutal or syphilitic he might be. If a woman was raped, it was her disgrace. A woman giving birth out of wedlock could be imprisoned. She would certainly lose her job, even if her employer was the father and had forced himself on her. Few jobs were open to women—mostly domestic service, teaching children and prostitution. Churches preached obedience for women, no matter how stupid or how outrageous the behavior of the husband. Church and society demanded chastity from women. Men had sexual needs; women had children. The American Medical Association was conducting a war against women doctors and midwives, against women who provided contraception for other women or helped them abort unwanted pregnancies. The so-called regular doctors hated the alternative medical practitioners, like Graham, like almost every woman in medicine. She believed in natural medicine, in water cures, in exercise, in herbal remedies, in healthy diet. Her three boys had caught malaria in May and she had nursed them back to health without benefit of any “regular doctors,” who would have bled them weak and purged them hollow.
Women were barred from almost all decent-paying professions. Women were exiled from society for missteps men committed with impunity and boasted about. No woman could vote, while any white male idiot had the right.
Lucretia folded her thin wrinkled hands together in her lap. “We have been talking about calling a meeting to discuss woman’s rights for eight years, Elizabeth. Do thee not think it is time to cease talking and writing long letters to each other, and finally to call such a meeting? Where do thee think it should be? Boston? Philadelphia? New York?”
“If I’m to organize it, it’ll have to be right here. I can’t haul my children or my household to a city.”
“Do thee think we could bring enough women to Seneca Falls to make such an event substantial?”
“The time is ripe. Women will come. You’ll see. It need not be large to have an effect. Forty women would be quite ample.”
Lucretia beamed at her. “Do thee know, Elizabeth, that thee are about the only female of my acquaintance who would not say, I think women will come, but who can make definite statements without waffling or blushing or hiding behind a man’s opinion. Therefore I believe we will make it happen.”
“But Lucretia, you have great confidence too. You have not lived an ordinary woman’s life.”
“I was born on Nantucket, where the men go to sea for years at a time chasing whales, and women run everything. Now let us fix a time for our meeting.”
“When? In the fall?” Somehow she would find the time to write an appeal.
“Right now. Or the time and opportunity will slip away. I leave in ten days to go back to my family. We’ll call it for next Saturday.”
“Lucretia!” Elizabeth seized her friend’s hands. “That’s five days away! Are you mad?” She felt a surge of pure panic.
“People will certainly think so. But if there’s sentiment among women to right our wrongs, then enough women will come. Perhaps not forty. Perhaps only twenty or twenty-five, but it will be a start—at long last, a start.”
Elizabeth agreed to write a document to be presented to however few women were present. Five days! She began several documents and none of them struck her as strong enough, bold enough. Then, as she was drifting off to sleep, an idea struck her. Why invent a new format when there was a document celebrated every Fourth of July that provided a perfect framework? She got out of bed, lit a candle and began writing:
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion
of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…
The next day, she set up a work table in the nursery. She knew the Declaration of Independence by heart. There were many cross-outs, many interstitial scribblings on the pad of foolscap on which she was writing, but within an hour she had a good start on the document. She intended to append eighteen injuries, just as in the document she was using as a template for her Declaration.
He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.
He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners.
Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.
He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
He has taken from her all rights in property, even to the wages she earns.
A wave of fatigue swept over her. She looked at the pages she had covered with her wild scrawl. Later she would continue until she had a sturdy eighteen clear grievances. Henry was due home the day after tomorrow. She hoped to finish by then so she could show him her writing—and also because there was always more work when he was home. Unpacking him. Larger meals. Tending to his clothes. Laundry and repairs and ironing. Starching his shirts. Sometimes entertaining colleagues with large formal meals till all hours. Cleaning up after same. It would be best if she finished her Declaration today. Lucretia could look it over before Henry saw it.
Lucretia liked it. Elizabeth was waiting for an opportunity now to show Henry. He was in good spirits because of a meeting with politicians who promised to back him if he ran for state office. He insisted she get the boys into bed early. As soon as the house was quiet, he came up behind her, slipping his hand under her skirts and hugging her against him. “Little wifey, my sweet Lizzie Lee…”
“Oh, sweet am I now? I know what you want.” But she swung around and embraced him. They clung together in the hall and then he urged her toward their bedroom. Bumping into the doorpost and then half tripping over his valise, they fell onto the bed together in a roil of tossed-up clothes.
“Wait… Let’s get properly undressed,” she wheedled, her voice coming out huskier than usual.
“There’s nothing proper about undress,” he said in her ear, then got her petticoats untied, one after the other. She turned for him to undo her corset. If women wore less cumbersome clothes, how much easier and more convenient it would be for lovemaking, she thought, but forbore saying it. He did not like her to talk much in those moments.
She helped him out of his frock coat and waistcoat and trousers and then his long underwear, cotton for summer, his braces and stockings. He pulled off her drawers and silk stockings and they settled into the already stirred-up coverlets and face-to-face began to embrace. He was hard already. He came home eager for it unless he was ill. She loved that warm deep stirring in her, she couldn’t help it, she didn’t want to help it. “My dear, my dearest,” she whispered, running her hands down his back. She loved the way his spine disappeared into his buttocks, like a tree going to ground. She loved the feel of him against her, so unlike her own body. They rolled back and forth as if wrestling till finally he put himself into her and they moved into a familiar rhythm. She knew from talking with other women that many husbands did not care if their wives enjoyed the conjugal embrace, but Henry did. He was more considerate in bed than out of it. He held off until she had her pleasure before he quickened his pace and moved high into her to spend.
She felt enormously close to him afterward. They had a little hard cider from her store in the basement—made from their orchard—neither wanting to sleep yet while he recounted stories of his travels and the legislature.
“There’s something I want to show you.” She bent over him to press her lips to the crown of his head where there was a bald spot the size of a nickel. She went to get her statement.
Henry read it, his face slowly contorting into a scowl. “You can’t possibly mean to read this in public! You’ll make a fool, a laughingstock out of me.”
She was stung almost to tears, but angry also. She knew it was not badly written, not banal, not silly, not naïve: she knew it. “I do mean to read it. Your attempting to prevent me rather reinforces what I’m saying, doesn’t it?” How could he come from bed with her and turn so cold and selfish?
“If you intend to stand up in public and make a spectacle of yourself reading this, this pack of nonsense, then I will leave town so I am not humiliated.”
“If you so desire.” She would not back down. She felt betrayed. He had been her hero, never afraid to stand against the crowd for his principles. Now he was cowering with fear. He had been her lover not half an hour before and now he was withdrawn and threatening.
“You can’t stand up in public and read this manifesto of a termagant. You’ll make both of us outcasts! And what arrogance! To imagine the public would care what a housewife in a small town thinks about anything.”
So that was what he thought she had become: a small-town housewife. “There is nothing written there I don’t stand behind, Henry. And I would have expected you to stand with me!”
“What do you expect to accomplish with this shameless nonsense?”
“I expect to have an impact, to count for something, yes!”
In the morning, Henry left. She was angered and shocked by his response, but it was easier with him gone. She could concentrate on preparations for the meeting. No matter how small it might turn out to be, there was much to arrange. She persuaded a neighbor to take her boys for the two days of the meeting—if it went for two days. Lucretia helped her polish the eighteen grievances, with a little more emphasis on economic hardships. In the middle of their work, Elizabeth’s father, Judge Cady, arrived in his gig.
“Have you lost your mind!” he bellowed. “Henry told me what’s going on.”
Lucretia folded her hands together in her lap. “Thy daughter appears to be of sound mind to me and sound heart also.”
“This is a farce! You’ll be laughed at from one end of the county to the other.”
“Then people will hear of what we are doing,” Elizabeth said, although it was hard for her to keep up a façade of confidence and calm in the tempest of his anger.
The morning of July 19 arrived. Lucretia and Elizabeth with a few other women including her sister Mary, who had come with her son, went to the Methodist church reserved for the meeting. A crowd of women and some men were milling about outside. The streets were blocked with carriages. Elizabeth was astounded and almost frightened. They had placed only a small notice in the local paper. She had written the great Negro orator Frederick Douglass, since she’d gotten to know him in Boston and now he lived in Rochester, nor far away. She didn’t expect him to come but wanted to tell him what she was doing.
Lucretia murmured at her ear, “We forgot to say women only. I think we assumed men would not be interested.”
“Too late to think of that. We’ll seat them.” The church door was locked. Elizabeth was sure that someone had gotten to the minister and scared him. She boosted her nephew up to a window he could open. He slid into the church and a few minutes later let them in. By the time everyone filed in and those who could be accommodat
ed were seated, they counted 267 women and 40 men. Elizabeth felt overwhelmed. Even Lucretia, who was used to making speeches, seemed reluctant to start. Her husband James took the podium, welcomed the overflow crowd and formally opened the meeting.
He called upon Elizabeth. Waves of hot blood and cold fear washed through her. When she stood, her knees trembled under her heavy skirts. Was she out of her mind, as Henry and her father thought? Questioning the roles of men and women was like questioning the rain. It just was. She began, “We gather here today to discuss our wrongs, civil and political.” Then she began to read the Declaration of Sentiments. She felt faint with worry, remembering Henry’s response. Would they laugh her out of the building? Would they rise and walk out? Her voice quavered at first. Her script shook in her hands till she could scarcely read it, but she knew what it said. She cleared her throat and continued. People were stirring in their pews, women fanning themselves in the heat of the humid July morning, people greeting each other, waving, women with babies on their laps jouncing them up and down. But before she had read halfway through her second paragraph, she felt something she had never experienced before, the intense mesmeric response of a crowd whose attention had been utterly captured. Between her sentences she could hear horses outside and a passing carriage, the cries of robins and sparrows in the trees, but inside the church, except for her strengthening voice, a silence received her words. When she looked up from her text, every gaze was intent upon her.
