Sex Wars

by Marge Piercy

  The president once again passed through New York and stayed with the Corbins. Gould lent Grant’s party a private railroad car to Pennsylvania. Everyone said that Grant was in Gould’s pocket and that he was in on the gold manipulation. Vanderbilt invested nine million. She was in for two million herself, on scant assets. Now Gould had Fisk play the bull and conspicuously buy gold, to pump up the price daily.

  Then the president wrote Corbin an angry letter telling him to stop his speculations and leave him out of it. Grant had had enough scandal and didn’t crave more. He was, Victoria thought, a naïve man politically, but he wasn’t an idiot and he had finally guessed what had occasioned Fisk and Gould’s presents and favors. Wednesday morning, September 22, Corbin called Gould and Fisk to him to give them the bad news, and it was reported, by Josie who had it all secondhand from Jim Fisk, that Corbin had wept and pleaded with them to take the gold off his hands. Gould refused, but offered him a compromise if he would keep the president’s rebuff a secret. That he did, but it was no secret to Josie, who heard it all in bed, and thus no secret to Victoria. Thursday morning Gould and Fisk met at Josie’s, where they felt no one would overhear them, to plan a strategy to sell off the bulk of their gold secretly, while pretending to bull up the gold market further.

  Victoria came by in the afternoon with a great bouquet of the pink roses Josie liked, a bottle of Boal Madeira and a honey cake. Over the course of the wine and cake, Josie told her of all the excitement and speculation swirling around the two men.

  She sent a note to the Commodore saying that the spirits had an urgent message for him. His own mother had appeared before her in the daytime to relay it, so she felt it must be important. He sent her back a scrawled note saying to come at seven-thirty to his house. So far his wife had not objected to the visits of either of the sisters. Victoria considered that Frankie might be a very bright woman indeed. She seemed to possess a keen grasp of what was dangerous and what was to her advantage. Victoria wished Frankie nothing but the best.

  His revered mother, Victoria told him in trance, said that he must sell when gold reached $150 and not wait a penny more, even though it might momentarily go higher. Vanderbilt seemed startled and thoughtful when she came out of her induced trance. “Was the news bad?” she asked, careful to maintain the illusion.

  “Could be good. We’ll see tomorrow. I got to move carefully, on eggshells, so’s nobody gets wind of what I’m doing. If you’ve taken a flurry in gold, I advise you to sell slowly and by various hands. Spread it around, but get out now.”

  Friday, Victoria drove down to the Exchange with James in a rented carriage. If all went well today, soon she would buy her own. When gold opened at $150, James left her in the carriage and went to carry out the selling. She had orders with a couple of brokers to do the same. The price continued to rise. She had never seen such excitement in the crowds of men pushing each other off the sidewalks and into the street, speculators gone mad with excitement, some desperate to cover their shorts, others madly buying on the assumption that gold was being cornered and would soon rise to $200. Men rushed about in the clear hot September morning, gesticulating, yelling, grimly silent. She saw Josie in sky blue and mauve sitting with Fisk in his carriage. He seemed calm. He was on top of the action. He appeared to be buying, but she was sure he was secretly selling too. Then at one point he entered the Gold Room and sent the carriage away with Josie.

  The frenzy continued past noon. Then, shortly after one, the local representative of the U.S. Treasury announced that Grant had ordered the government to sell four million in gold. The price began to drop. It dropped and it dropped and it dropped. Victoria tried to figure out how they had done. When James joined her in the carriage and they began to work their way out of the mob of angry, hysterical speculators, James brought out a small pad and did the arithmetic. If their sums were correct, they had cleared over seven hundred thousand dollars. Vanderbilt too should be grateful.

  This was only the beginning. She had an idea that she had been waiting to suggest to him, waiting until he was properly in her debt for her advice and she could claim a great favor. She held James’s hand as the carriage struggled through the pond of men pushing each other and shoving and screaming in their frustration and rage. Many speculators had been ruined today, and not a few fine merchants. Gould and Fisk had much to answer for, but she was for the moment well satisfied. The spirits had told her years ago that she would be rich. Now she was. The next step was to be famous, and then to change the world. She held James’s gloved hand in hers and smiled at him. They were both feeling wonderful, she could tell, and they would go home, drink champagne and go to bed together. Then they would make plans—a fine house, a carriage, appropriate furniture and furnishings, a tutor for Zulu Maud, a caretaker for Byron who would be kind to him and keep him from getting in trouble when she was out. And an office from which she could carry out her plans, her new project that she intended to confide in James that evening before she approached the Commodore. The papers were full of “Black Friday” and the resulting panic, the ruin of banks, brokerage houses and merchants, the suicides of some. The newsboys were crying themselves hoarse in the streets. She wondered how Fisk and Gould had done. Josie would tell her soon enough.

  1870

  TWENTY-THREE

  ELIZABETH HELD OUT a crisp white envelope of heavy paper that had come in the morning mail. “Look what the mailman brought.”

  Susan put on her spectacles to examine the writing. “Paula, it seems. Why are you looking like a cat in cream?”

  “The youngest of the Beecher sisters, Isabella Beecher Hooker, has shown some interest lately in woman’s rights…”

  Susan frowned. “I’d rather get hold of Harriet Beecher Stowe.”

  “Paula’s Isabella’s friend. She wants Isabella to be ours too.”

  “It’s fine to make friends, but she’s been buried in domesticity for years. Harriet is world-famous. I suspect the American group made Henry Ward Beecher their president in order to rope her in, for she adores her brother.”

  “Isabella is supposed to be a bit more independent. Paula thinks she’d be an asset if we could wean her away from the Boston ladies.” Isabella had written for the Revolution, but Elizabeth had never met her. Until recently, nobody had known Isabella, one of two nondescript Beecher sisters, as opposed to Harriet, the famous author, and Catherine, who wrote books of advice Elizabeth could not abide. If a woman did everything in the household as Catherine laid out her duties, she’d never read a book, never hear a piece of music, never have a thought that did not pertain to the correct method of bleaching muslin or laying out the silverware for an important dinner. Harriet was harder to pin down—a strong abolitionist with some interest in suffrage, but pride in being a Beecher, daughter of a prominent minister, sister of seven prominent ministers, with a lot of the lady nonsense that vitiated so many wellborn women. Elizabeth was not sure how she had escaped it herself, but she was too strongly opinionated, too sensual perhaps, to fit into the rigid mold of the proper lady. Harriet probably was too, but she expected propriety of other women. However, she had recently broken every rule when she decided to champion Lord Byron’s wife and to reveal Byron’s incest with his half sister. A lady was never supposed to think of such things, to know about them, and certainly if she had the misfortune of doing so, never to reveal such unseemly facts in public.

  Paula wanted to bring them together with Isabella in her palatial house in Providence. Elizabeth never begrudged Paula the fortune she had married, for she used her money for the cause. Whether Isabella Beecher Hooker turned out to be as interesting as Paula claimed or whether she proved to be too timid to be of use, Elizabeth felt she owed it to Paula to get on the train and chug off to Providence.

  Paula had an Italianate mansion on College Hill, near the grave of Roger Williams, for whom Elizabeth had a great deal of respect. She felt in his tolerance of all beliefs and his unwillingness to have any religion declared the establish
ed one of the settlement he founded, he had been far ahead of his time and perhaps well ahead of hers, in which there was a strong movement to have Christianity declared the official religion and God introduced into all manner of legislation.

  It was relaxing to visit Paula, to have fine meals served on Limoges china and spotless linen tablecloths, to have baths drawn for them and their clothes taken away, cleaned, mended, ironed, all invisibly, silently as if the labor of a household which she had worn herself out doing for so many years were here carried out by elves. Such labor could never be truly invisible to her, but Paula was used to luxury. Isabella was there when they arrived, a woman of small stature with well-coiffed brown hair, just a trace of gray at forty-six, large slightly fixed gray eyes, thin and bony in spite of having borne three children. Elizabeth rather envied Isabella, because with each of her own seven children, she had put on weight she had never taken off.

  Isabella was obviously wary of them, no doubt having been fed tales of how they were man-hating fiends wearing trousers and smoking cigars, as suffragists were always pictured in newspapers. Elizabeth had no idea if Isabella might become a friend, but she would try to neutralize her. They talked of their children, their upbringing, their schooling, their health problems, their marriages and families. Two of Isabella’s children were married. One boy was still at home. Isabella spoke lovingly of her husband, John Hooker, a successful lawyer. Elizabeth could tell from Isabella’s questions that she did not know that Elizabeth and her husband were separated. Unlike Elizabeth, Isabella had never supported herself or her children, so she had little interest in the economic problems of poor or working women. She did, however, exhibit a keen grasp of constitutional law and the arguments for women’s right to vote. Her mind was sharp and well organized. Elizabeth compared notes with Susan.

  “She’s able,” Susan said. “She could be a good speaker. She doesn’t seem to have the timidity that makes so many of our sisters unable to speak in public and say what they mean outright and powerfully.”

  “Paula says she’s gushing over you. You tell me you have no charm, Susan, but women are always getting crushes on you. You disarm and then you mesmerize.”

  “Nonsense! I’m approachable and friendly. I’m like a comfortable chair. That’s all, Mrs. Stanton. You’re the one who sparkles.”

  “Well, we’ve both been working on her, and we may be getting someplace.”

  Susan gave her a certain smile that made Elizabeth feel the world had promise after all. “I think we may win her.”

  INDEED, WHEN THEY RETURNED to Tenafly, an affectionate letter from Isabella arrived with a note from Paula shortly thereafter telling them, “Isabella won’t break with the Boston faction, for some are old friends, but she will not hear slander of either of you from them.”

  Within a month, Isabella organized a woman’s rights convention in Hartford. Elizabeth was heartily sick of conventions, but she went with Susan, as Isabella was inviting both the Boston and the New York factions, hoping to reconcile them. Within an hour of their arrival, it was clear that Lucy Stone could scarcely bear the sight of them. William Lloyd Garrison called Elizabeth an ingrate to her face. He was accustomed to being the grand old man of the abolitionist movement and he expected deference, even reverence. Elizabeth remembered how badly he had treated Frederick Douglass years before, when Douglass had started a newspaper Garrison considered a rival to his own. “Abolitionists,” she said sotto voce to Susan, “want us to remain in chains of gratitude. They think they created us.” Elizabeth looked over at Garrison, who had come because Isabella had called this convention and she was a Beecher, the same reason the Boston contingent attended. Garrison was glaring at them from under his impressive brows. Lucy Stone, wearing a plain black dress with a white bodice, with her hair pulled back as Susan wore hers, pretended she did not see them. Lucy’s husband, Henry Blackwell, brushed past them without a glance. Isabella sped about from one group to the other trying to bring them together.

  Isabella obviously adored Susan, but she confided in Elizabeth that she thought Susan’s problem was lacking a husband. Elizabeth felt like laughing, but she controlled herself. “Don’t you think her spinsterhood frees her? Enables her to travel and choose without coercion what she will or will not put her energies into?”

  “Motherhood is our strength,” Isabella said. “It is the basis of our potentiality. It is because we are mothers that we care for others, for the world, for the future as we care for our own offspring. We are finer than men because we are more connected to the generative power. Susan has relinquished that power. It’s noble of her. A more dignified, more authentic woman I do not know, but she hasn’t experienced her own power because of her spinsterhood.”

  Elizabeth thought of her children, beloved consumers of her time, her energy, her intelligence. They had almost eaten her alive. Motherhood had given her joy and pain, sweetness and sorrow, but she could not see how motherhood had given her power. Perhaps women had power in the sense that a woman could harm her babies, could turn into Medea and kill—but fathers did so as often or oftener. She considered Isabella’s glorification of motherhood a fantasy, but she was not going to fight about it. If Isabella wanted to feel superior to Susan because she had a husband and Susan had none, let Isabella enjoy her opinions.

  Husbands had many overt and subtle ways of influencing their wives: getting them pregnant, controlling how much money was doled out for household expenses, giving or withdrawing their presence, moving a woman out of a comfortable and stimulating situation into a small town where she seemed weird for having a notion in her head, making fun of the wife’s projects, making sure she lacked time to carry them out, playing on her weaknesses. Isabella had a supportive husband in John Hooker, who seemed to encourage her feminist activities, but he was one in ten thousand.

  Still, she was grateful to Isabella for trying to make peace, for the cause would be better served if they all pulled together. Isabella reminded Elizabeth of herself when she had begun to be active outside the round of drudgery in the house, but John Hooker had provided far more abundantly than Henry had been able to. Elizabeth noticed that Isabella had the full range of complaints that better-off women seemed prone to suffer. Prone was the word, Elizabeth thought as she surveyed Isabella across the room full of attentive women dwelling on Isabella’s speech about the constitutional basis of woman’s rights. Isabella suffered from excessive menstrual flow, a displaced uterus, headaches, back pains, dyspepsia, constipation, nasal polyps, a diseased nervous system. The excessive menstrual flow was probably one of those common symptoms of menopause that Elizabeth had endured for a year or two. She herself had been healthy until her last child, dropping her babies with hardly a pause. Henry had said she was like a peasant woman, who had her child and went out to plow the field an hour later. He had not said that with admiration. Her hardiness shocked him. Ladies were not so vigorous. But Isabella, all that neurasthenia aside, seemed to have plenty of energy for what she really wanted to do. Perhaps Isabella’s problems were due to tight corseting. Boredom was the lot of many women kept by well-off husbands and confined to the home.

  Isabella was drawn to Susan and to her because they were radical, because they championed causes that shocked other women. Isabella could not resist the excitement of breaking taboos. The American had a hierarchical structure based on delegates. Members had to be elected from local organizations, turned into auxiliaries of the American. Elizabeth privately thought this structure represented the influence of the many men involved in running the American. The National was intentionally much looser. Anyone who paid a dollar to join and attended meetings had a vote. The National had minimal structure, all women from bottom to top. Elizabeth overheard Henry Ward Beecher telling Isabella that her Connecticut organization must join the American. Isabella’s brows drew together as she stretched her long aristocratic neck and narrowed her eyes at her half brother. “I do not consider such affiliation necessary. Our organization’s growing. We d
on’t need to be anyone’s auxiliary.”

  “If you affiliate with the National, you’ll be tarred with the brush of radicalism. Cady Stanton and Anthony are dangerous women.” Henry tossed his head, letting his long hair swirl. He was going bald on top but made up for it with extra length all around. He had a strong build and a strong face. Elizabeth noticed several women gazing at him over their fans with passionate interest. She viewed him with a strong splash of skepticism, but he was catnip to many women. He exuded a kind of animal magnetism and energy.

  “They were friends of yours not long ago. They used to dine with you.”

  “They have plunged into dangerous waters. Their demands are scandalous.”

  “More scandalous than our sister’s publication of Byron’s sins? Really! I hardly think so.” Isabella was smiling sweetly but her foot tapped under the outermost petticoat of striped blue and silver silk.

  “I don’t approve. Harriet makes wild mistakes at times. But she’s writing for my paper now, not for the Revolution. Such a violent name.”

  “The revolution whose benefits we enjoy daily was fought with guns, Henry, not with lace handkerchiefs.” Isabella turned on her dainty heel and with a swishing of multiple petticoats under her overskirt of fine blue velvet, swept away, looking flushed and proud of herself.

  “We have a convert in Isabella,” Elizabeth said to Susan.

  “There is fire in her soul, Mrs. Stanton. You will see.”

  “You may be right. If she’ll help us with our bills, I’ll adore her too.”

  The American shortly brought out its own periodical, the Women’s Journal, dealing only with suffrage and printed on fine paper with a heft to it that reeked respectability. It was well financed, well distributed and designed to appeal to professional women—doctors, lawyers, educators, teachers, women running businesses—and to club women. It said with every inch of print, suffrage is nice, suffrage is safe, you can be a lady and support suffrage. Elizabeth ground her teeth. The American would draw most of the money available. The Republican Party would be satisfied with it, the men married to suffragists would be satisfied with it, they would hold endless meetings debating who to let in and who to keep out. It would be a long tea party and club meeting. She would have merged the groups if she could, but not at the price of becoming respectable and banging away at one issue only and letting all the other problems and concerns of women go hang.