Starting from Seneca Falls

by Karen Schwabach

  “If a woman is working,” she said, “then she’s making, um, money that’s hers. She’s the one that worked for it. And it could be that she wants to share it with her husband, but it could also be that he’s…um, that things aren’t going well, and that she needs to support herself and her children.”

  She looked around. Everyone in the whole vast crowd was listening to her. She clutched the pebble in her pocket and took a deep breath. “But even if her husband is drunk, or beats her, or is never there at all, he can still come around to the factory—or wherever she works, I mean—on payday, and the boss gives her pay envelope to him.”

  Still listening.

  “Then the husband goes off again, and maybe he gets drunk or something with the money, without giving his wife or his children anything.”

  She turned and looked directly at Mr. Bascom. “Maybe that’s not the way it’s supposed to be, but sometimes it’s the way it is, and the law shouldn’t allow it. But it does.”

  She looked back at Mr. Mott, the chairman. “I think I’m done.”

  Mr. Mott nodded at her.

  Mr. Bascom made a slight bow in her direction. “I concede the point.”

  And that was it! The sky didn’t fall. The earth didn’t swallow Bridie up. The conversation simply went on. Mr. Douglass stood up and said, “I should like to observe that had women the right to vote, such questions as diverting their wages to an errant husband would not even arise.”

  Mrs. Mott stood up and said, “Fre— Mr. Douglass, I hardly feel that Woman need enter into the political fray to secure her religious, civil, and social rights.”

  “Pray, how else is she to do it? In this denial of the right to participate in government,” said Mr. Douglass, “not merely the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice happens, but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world.”

  Highfalutin talk. Bridie couldn’t keep up with it. Many other people rose at the same time and started to talk, and Mr. Mott banged his gavel and called for order as Bridie hurried out of the church.

  She had almost made it to the door when a woman she didn’t know grabbed her by the arm.

  “Thee spoke well,” said the stranger. “I think thee has carried the point, and that there will be no more argument against that particular item.”

  “Thank you,” said Bridie, curtsying, and fled.

  * * *

  The convention ended that evening. The next morning, all of Mrs. Stanton’s guests left. As everyone was packing up, Bridie heard about what had happened. All the items in the Declaration of Sentiments had been approved, including the one Bridie had spoken for.

  The one that had given the most trouble was the resolution that women should have the right to vote. “Frederick turned the tide there,” said Mrs. Post. “After he spoke, the measure passed.”

  “Barely,” said Mr. Douglass, hoarsely. “And too soon after my tonsil surgery.” He touched his throat.

  And then the convention had voted to approve the Declaration of Sentiments. After that, one hundred people had signed it. Sixty-eight women had signed, and then thirty-two men.

  And what did that mean?

  Nothing, as far as Bridie could tell. It was just a convention in a little mill town in York State. It didn’t change anything.

  It didn’t mean that Rose could be a scientist, or that Bridie could be a printer. It didn’t stop a man from collecting his wife’s wages, and it didn’t mean Mrs. Stanton could jump in a coach decorated with pine boughs and ride down to the polls to vote.

  “But it means they know what they’re fighting for,” said Rose. “They’ve spelled it all out in black-and-white.”

  “So what happens next?”

  Rose admitted she didn’t know.

  Rose had been hired again, to help clean up after all the guests left. The girls were upstairs dragging sheets off the beds. Bridie looked out the window and saw Mr. Kigley coming up Bayard Street in his wagon.

  Bridie stood at the window, sheets in hand. Surely he was headed for the free bridge and home.

  The wagon turned onto Washington Street, coming right toward the house.

  “That’s him,” said Bridie to Rose, who had joined her at the window.

  “Maybe he’s going to the flour mill,” said Rose, sounding like she didn’t think he was.

  “He doesn’t have any grain sacks with him.”

  And indeed he stopped before the house, hitched Dobbin to a hitching post, and started climbing the steps.

  Bridie and Rose crept down the stairs as quietly as they could. They stopped at the landing where the stair turned. From there they could see the front door. Mrs. Stanton was at her writing desk.

  There was a loud, demanding knock on the door.

  Mrs. Stanton got up and went to open it. Bridie could only see her whalebone-stiffened back, but it was clear from the way she said “Yes?” that she was not happy to see anyone of Mr. Kigley’s description on her doorstep.

  “You Mrs. Shtanton? Lemme talk to your huzhband.”

  “You, sir, are the worse for drink.” Mrs. Stanton started to close the door.

  Mr. Kigley put his foot in it. “Where’sh your huzhband, woman! Want to talk to him.”

  “And yet I am certain he does not want to talk to you. Be off!”

  Rose and Bridie exchanged a glance. Mr. Stanton wasn’t home. He was probably on a train somewhere. Bridie had only ever seen him once, as he passed through on his way from one speaking engagement to another.

  Mr. Kigley suddenly pushed at the door, and Mrs. Stanton pushed back. Her feet started to slide slowly across the bare wooden floor as the door inched inward. Bridie and Rose rushed down the stairs and threw their weight at the door, trying to stop its inexorable opening. Six-year-old Neil came running in from the parlor and pushed with them.

  Bridie felt the door vibrate as Mr. Kigley kicked and pounded on it.

  They kept pushing, struggling against the shaking door.

  Finally it snicked shut, and Mrs. Stanton threw the latch.

  “I had word you’re conshealing my wife and child on these premishes!” Mr. Kigley yelled through the door. “They’re mine and I mean to have ’em back!”

  “Back door,” Rose murmured, and darted off to latch it.

  “I am sending word to the constable right now,” Mrs. Stanton said to Mr. Kigley through the door. Her tone was steely and firm. “And if you are anywhere on my property when he arrives, then I will have you arrested for trespassing.”

  Mr. Kigley delivered himself of some opinions about the constable.

  “And for swearing,” said Mrs. Stanton. “Be off!”

  There was silence from the other side of the door.

  Bridie went to the window and looked out. Mr. Kigley was unhitching Dobbin. He climbed onto the wagon seat, shook the reins, and drove away.

  “He’s gone,” she told the others.

  Rose looked as shaken as Bridie felt. Mrs. Stanton didn’t look shaken. She looked ready to ride into battle.

  “Do you want me to go for the constable, Ma?” said Neil.

  “Not yet,” said Mrs. Stanton. “Not until I understand what is going on in my own house. Am I concealing his wife and child on my premises?”

  She looked at Bridie and Rose, but it was Neil who answered. “They’re in the washhouse, Ma.”

  Bridie looked at him in surprise. She was impressed that he’d found them and known not to tell anyone.

  “They’re mean,” he added. “I don’t like them.”

  “They thought Mr. Kigley was going to kill them,” said Bridie.

  “I’m not at all surprised,” said Mrs. Stanton. “But, Phoebe, aren’t these the people you ran away from? How did they force you to take them i
n?”

  “They didn’t,” said Bridie.

  “Then why—”

  “You have to help people that need help,” said Rose.

  Bridie nodded agreement.

  “I suppose.” Mrs. Stanton sighed.

  “Now shall I go for the constable?” said Neil.

  “No,” said Mrs. Stanton. “Because the constable is quite likely to side with Mr. Kigley.”

  “But—” said Bridie.

  “Not so much on the matter of the wife,” said Mrs. Stanton. “While the law doesn’t exactly allow a wife to flee, it no longer returns her to her husband when she does. The child is another matter. He has the right to her labor until she turns eighteen or marries.”

  “Or he kills her,” said Bridie.

  “I had better go and talk to this woman myself,” said Mrs. Stanton. “And then I shall have to think.”

  “Am I out of a job?” said Bridie.

  “What? No. No, of course not.” Mrs. Stanton gave her a hard look. “You did the right thing, Phoebe. I want you to remember that. Because it’s likely that certain people are going to tell you that you did the wrong thing.”

  * * *

  Rose stood beside Mr. Davis’s desk and opened her arithmetic book. “I started the addition of vulgar fractions, teacher.”

  Mr. Davis took the book from her and peered at it. “Very well. What’s one-fourth plus two-thirds, Rose?”

  “Eleven-twelfths,” said Rose. “But I don’t understand why….”

  “Well, because that’s the answer, Rose,” said Mr. Davis.

  And Rose had the feeling, as she did more and more often, that Mr. Davis was in over his aching head.

  “I think you’ve learned enough to go on by yourself from here,” said Mr. Davis.

  “But—”

  “There are only two weeks left in the summer term, and I shall be seeking employment elsewhere.”

  Rose felt her stomach drop. It was what she’d been dreading. “But you’ll be back for winter term?”

  She tried not to sound like she was pleading.

  “No, they…” Mr. Davis seemed to change his mind about what he’d been going to say. “I have decided not to teach in the winter.”

  “Because of the big boys?” Rose knew she shouldn’t talk about this. “Mr. Davis, they don’t come every winter! And you could move to a school closer to the center of town, they’re not as bad there….”

  She trailed off. She knew she was not making things better.

  “I wish to return to my native Boston,” said Mr. Davis coldly. “But there will be another teacher coming.”

  Yes; the school board would find a teacher who could fight the big boys, Rose thought. Schoolteachers who taught in the winter had to be men, and iron-fisted men at that.

  It wasn’t fair!

  So much wasn’t fair.

  “Carry on studying your arithmetic, Rose, and perhaps the next teacher will be able to help you further with it.”

  “If he even lets me come to school,” Rose couldn’t help saying, bitterly.

  “If he does not, you must seek farther afield,” said Mr. Davis. “I have no doubt you can do it. You are clever and determined, a credit to your race.”

  And with that he stood up to go, and Rose had to go too. A credit to her race. That was not what she wanted to be. She wanted to be a scientist. That was for the future. For now, what she wanted was a teacher who knew mathematics and who couldn’t be taken away from her by complaining parents and big boys.

  Bridie took bowls of hasty pudding and some wrinkled, last-year’s apples out to the washhouse.

  “We have to actually do wash tomorrow,” she told Mrs. Kigley.

  “Speak when spoken to,” said Mrs. Kigley, taking her bowl of pudding and turning up her nose at the apples. “Where do you expect us to hide while you do the wash?”

  “Maybe you could help,” said Bridie.

  “And be seen?”

  “He already knows you’re here,” Bridie reminded her.

  Mrs. Kigley sniffed. “Mrs. Stanton said he was not to be admitted onto the property.”

  It had been several days since the scene with Mr. Kigley. Mrs. Stanton had returned from her interview with Mrs. Kigley and Lavinia that day looking grim and had said that she certainly wouldn’t want that woman in her house.

  “If I had the money,” said Mrs. Kigley, “I’d go to my sister’s in Rochester.”

  “I thought you didn’t have anywhere to go.”

  “Well, I have my sister in Rochester,” said Mrs. Kigley, in tones that suggested that any idiot would have known this.

  A ticket to Rochester cost more than Bridie made in a week. Even if she’d had the money, she wouldn’t give it to the Kigleys.

  She would dearly love to be rid of them, though.

  * * *

  “Well, here’s a fine thing!” said Mrs. Stanton. “There’s going to be another convention, in Rochester!”

  She was at her desk, opening her mail. Bridie was sitting on the floor, reading the younger boys a book Mr. Douglass had brought them from Rochester: The Anti-Slavery Alphabet.

  “ ‘P is the Parent, sorrowing / And weeping all alone,’ ” Bridie read. “ ‘The child he loved to lean upon—’ ”

  “Just think, another convention, two weeks after the first! Perhaps the nation really is ready for our message,” said Mrs. Stanton.

  Bridie waited to see if this was going to require some response.

  Gat pushed the book at her. “More!”

  “ ‘…His only son is gone.’ ” Bridie stopped to let the boys trace the big Q and R with their fingers. Then she went on reading.

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Stanton was opening more letters. Newspaper clippings fell out. She spread them on her desk and scrutinized each in turn.

  “ ‘S is for Sugar that the slave / Is toiling hard to make / To put into your pie and tea / Your coffee and your cake.’ ”

  “We only have anti-slavery sugar,” said Kit.

  “Yes, I know, but the book is telling people who don’t know about anti-slavery sugar,” Bridie explained.

  “Oh dear,” said Mrs. Stanton.

  Bridie looked up. Mrs. Stanton seemed suddenly discouraged. One of the boys shoved the book at Bridie again, but she got up and went over to see what was bothering her.

  Mrs. Stanton was staring at the papers in front of her.

  One was a letter. In all capital letters it said: WHY DO YOU HATE MEN YOU WULD DIE IF IT WERNT FOR MEN YOUR A MAN-HATER. There was no signature.

  But Mrs. Stanton didn’t seem particularly upset about that one.

  She pointed at a clipping. “This one’s from one of the Rochester papers. They call my ideas ‘impractical, absurd, and ridiculous.’ ”

  “They’re not!” said Bridie.

  “They say we ‘seemed to be really in earnest’! Goodness, I wonder what gave them that idea,” said Mrs. Stanton bitterly.

  Bridie didn’t know what to say. Mrs. Stanton looked dejected.

  “Listen to this one: ‘A woman is nobody. A wife is everything. A pretty girl is equal to ten thousand men….” Don’t they understand that that’s the problem?”

  “But, Mrs. Stanton—”

  “And this one—‘The most shocking and unnatural event ever recorded in the history of womanity!’ Womanity, Phoebe!”

  “But there’s the convention in Rochester coming up,” said Bridie.

  “I don’t know if I should even go. It’s expensive, and I’d have to leave the boys with my sister, and…” She trailed off.

  “But you could take the Kigleys to Rochester and get rid of them,” said Bridie encouragingly.

  “I’ve been trying to raise the money for that,” said Mrs. Stanton. “It’s a c
ause no one is interested in.”

  “Oh.” Bridie hadn’t known that. “Because they don’t like the Kigleys?”

  “Because they think I have no business interfering between man and wife,” said Mrs. Stanton. “Well, never mind. I suppose I won’t go. Go back to what you were doing, Phoebe.”

  “Mrs. Stanton, you know that one thing in your Declaration about how a husband shouldn’t have the right to collect his wife’s wages?” said Bridie.

  “Oh yes, there’s a newspaper clipping mocking that here somewhere.”

  “When we first came here from Ireland,” said Bridie, “it was just my mother and me, because my father and brothers had died in the Hunger. My mother married an Erie Canal boatman, because she figured as how it would be easier in a new country if she had a husband and all.”

  Mrs. Stanton looked slightly less despondent; she sensed a fight in the air.

  “Then he brought us to Seneca Falls and got us work in the woolen mill—”

  “A fine anti-slavery manufactory,” said Mrs. Stanton. “They use no cotton.”

  “Maybe so, but John Gerry—that’s my mother’s husband—told the foreman to hold our pay envelopes until he was in town. He’d only show up every few weeks, and then he’d collect them and go on a spree.”

  Now Mrs. Stanton definitely sensed battle. “What! And he gave you nothing?”

  “He gave us a little bit, but we had to beg him for it, and it was never enough to live on. And then Mother got sick and she said as how she wasn’t going to work sick just so he could go on a spree, and I couldn’t make enough for us to get on with even if I would have been allowed to keep it—”

  “Which you should have been,” said Mrs. Stanton. “The law does exempt your pay from his clutches, as you are not his born child. I shall go down and talk to the foreman about that!”

  The fight was definitely back in Mrs. Stanton now.

  “So we ended up in the poorhouse,” Bridie said. “And then she died.”