Starting from Seneca Falls

by Karen Schwabach

  “The other choice is Canada,” said Mr. Douglass. “We send people on by ship across Lake Ontario, but it takes time to raise the ticket money. Meanwhile, we can squeeze you into the attic at my house. There’s a family there already, but they’ll be moving on soon.”

  The man and woman had clearly already decided. “The attic, please,” said the woman.

  Their children, meanwhile, were staring around the office. “This is your newspaper?” one of them said.

  “Say ‘sir,’ ” said his mother.

  “Such as it is,” said Mr. Douglass.

  The two little boys went off to explore.

  Mr. Douglass turned to greet the girls. Rose curtsied, and Bridie left the printing press and went over and curtsied too, and Lavinia stood there and stared.

  “Young Rose and Phoebe, and…is this the missing party?” Mr. Douglass asked, nodding at Lavinia.

  “We came on the canal,” said Lavinia, still staring.

  “Mrs. Stanton sent word back on the train that you were to get on the next one and she’d pay for it,” said Mr. Douglass. “She hadn’t time to go after you herself. Well, as soon as my messenger boy shows up I’ll have him go and fetch her.”

  Rose and Bridie exchanged a glance. They were to be rid of Lavinia at last.

  Bridie went back to watching Mr. Nell set type. She’d been looking at the case and the composing stick before, but not at what the letters were spelling out. Now she looked at the galley, where the newspaper page itself was being assembled.

  “That’s the Declaration of Sentiments!” she said.

  Mr. Nell looked up. “You can read backwards?”

  Bridie nodded. “You’re printing the whole thing!” She pointed. “Here’s the part about women not being allowed to go to college and have different kinds of jobs.”

  Jobs like being a printer. Or being a scientist.

  “Reading backward is an important knack for a printer,” said Mr. Nell. “Can’t do the job without it.”

  Bridie waited for him to say what she hoped he would.

  “Would you like to set some type yourself?” he said.

  Eagerly, Bridie put on the blue apron he handed her and set to work, picking the letters out of the case. …

  “This girl’s got ink in her veins, Frederick,” said Mr. Nell.

  “Do you need an assistant, Will?” said Mr. Douglass.

  Bridie looked at him quickly. She was sure he was joking. But oh, if only he weren’t! Imagine getting up every morning and, instead of hauling water and tending the fire and scrubbing and ironing, coming here to set type that would go out into the world forever!

  “I could use some extra help,” said Mr. Nell, thoughtfully.

  Did he really mean it? Bridie couldn’t tell. And Mr. Douglass had gone off to speak to his messenger boy, who had just arrived.

  Her heart beating fast, she went back to setting type. Rose drifted over to watch.

  “I was just about to write to you, Rose,” said Mr. Douglass, coming up. “I’ve had a letter about your father.”

  Bridie’s hand froze over the letter case. She looked at Rose. Rose looked terrified, and Bridie felt for her. She knew that moment before bad news falls.

  Mr. Douglass took a folded paper out of his pocket. “A sailor in New Bedford said he saw your father in England last year.”

  Bridie wilted with relief, but Rose cried, “Why hasn’t he written!”

  “Letters go astray,” said Mr. Douglass. “I shall be writing to friends in England today to see if they can find out more.”

  He handed Rose the letter, and she read frantically.

  “It will be at least three weeks before I hear back from them,” he said. “Probably longer if they need to conduct inquiries.”

  “Can I stay with you?” Rose blurted. “So that I’ll know as soon as you do? Please,” she added.

  “Certainly. Everyone stays with me. Even William here stays with me.” Frederick nodded at the printer. “Mrs. Douglass will be pleased to have another girl around the house—not but that there are quite a few already.”

  Rose took a deep breath. “And-I-can-go-to-school-with-your-children?” she asked all at once.

  “Of course.”

  Mr. Douglass went back over to the fugitives. Lavinia was wandering around, poking at things. Bridie watched Rose. Rose was still clutching the letter.

  “I…I’m sure they’ll find something out,” said Bridie. “Something good, I mean. I hope.”

  “Someone saw him,” said Rose.

  “If anyone can track him down, Frederick can,” said Mr. Nell. “He knows everybody.”

  There was a commotion at the door, and Mrs. Stanton and Lavinia’s mother came in, their wide skirts brushing the door frame. Mrs. Stanton swept past the fugitive family without noticing them, but stopped to talk to Mr. Douglass.

  Mrs. Kigley rushed right over and smacked Lavinia on the ear, which Bridie didn’t really think was fair under the circumstances. But then, she’d often wanted to smack Lavinia herself.

  Mrs. Stanton finished talking to Mr. Douglass and came over to the printing press.

  “Good morning, Will.” Mrs. Stanton nodded to the printer. “And here you are, girls!” She looked at Bridie, then at Rose, then back at Bridie. “I understand you’re the heroines of the hour. How on earth did you get to Rochester?”

  “On the Erie Canal,” said Rose.

  “How very clever and resourceful of you! You simply hopped on a barge?”

  “Mr. Moody’s barge,” said Bridie.

  “My landlord,” Rose added. “He’s a boatman.”

  “How wonderful. I shall have to try and do something for him.”

  “I think he would like it better if you didn’t,” said Rose. “I mean,” she added hastily. “Because he was helping, you know, and helping people is what people do and all….” She trailed off.

  “No, no, I quite see. You’re right, of course, Rose. I hadn’t thought.”

  Bridie looked at Rose and Rose looked at Bridie; it was the first time they could remember Mrs. Stanton saying someone else was right.

  “Now,” said Mrs. Stanton, “we have to see about getting you girls back to Seneca Falls.”

  “I’m not going.” It was Rose who spoke first, but Bridie surprised herself by saying the same thing at almost the same time.

  “I’m going to stay with the Douglasses.” Rose gestured with the letter, now slightly crumpled because she was holding it so tightly. “And go to school. And Mr. Douglass is trying to find my father.”

  “I see.” Mrs. Stanton nodded. “I suppose that makes sense. Well then, Phoebe—”

  “I’m not going either,” said Bridie.

  “Nonsense. You can’t stay here. How would you live?”

  Bridie took a deep breath. “Mr. Douglass has offered me a job.”

  She looked toward the door, but Mr. Douglass and the fugitives had left. So had Lavinia and her mother.

  She turned to Mr. Nell, waiting to see if he would say that he and Mr. Douglass had been joking, that of course Bridie couldn’t be a printer, and that she should go back to Mrs. Stanton’s house and dust and scrub and mind children and be glad of it.

  “It’s true: he did offer her a job, Lizzie,” said Mr. Nell.

  “But—”

  “She’s got a natural talent for printing.” The printer tapped a section of backward metal print with his knuckle. “There’s something in your declaration here about how men have ‘monopolized all the profitable employments,’ Liz.”

  “Well, but naturally that refers to being an attorney, or being a physician,” said Mrs. Stanton.

  “Girl wants to be a printer,” said Mr. Nell.

  The two adults glared at each other, but half-smiling. They were enjoying
the argument, Bridie thought. But it was her life. It was time to be heard as well as seen.

  “It’s true, I do want to be a printer. And I could stay with the Douglasses!” Surely that would be all right. Everyone did, it seemed.

  Mrs. Stanton frowned at Bridie, and then at Rose, and then at the still-open door.

  She looked at the Declaration of Sentiments, sitting half-finished in the galley.

  She seemed to be thinking.

  Then she smiled suddenly. “Very well. We shall hate to lose you, but I suppose that is what the Declaration means.”

  Bridie jumped up in the air, she was so happy.

  “I’ll send your things along, then, when I get back to Seneca Falls,” said Mrs. Stanton.

  Bridie had things now. She hadn’t when she’d first come to the Stantons’ a month ago. Now she had a spare apron, and the green hair ribbon Mr. Stanton had given her, and a book Mrs. Stanton had given her called The American Frugal Housewife. Besides that, there was a new bonnet she’d bought with her wages. And the wages she hadn’t spent, tied up in a red handkerchief.

  The stone from her mother’s grave, of course, was in her pocket.

  “And mine too, please?” said Rose. “We left in kind of a hurry. Mr. Moody will probably bring them for nothing. Oh, and…er…Tell him I’ll pay the rent I owe him when I can.”

  “One of Frederick’s wealthy abolitionist friends has paid it already,” said Mrs. Stanton. “So that’s no worry.”

  “Oh.” Rose looked somewhat deflated.

  “I must be getting back,” said Mrs. Stanton. “So goodbye, and good luck, Phoebe and Rose.”

  Bridie thought about telling Mrs. Stanton that her name wasn’t really Phoebe. Then she looked at her friend Rose, who had given her the name. She couldn’t hurt Rose’s feelings, and Mrs. Stanton didn’t need to know.

  She could be Bridie and Phoebe both.

  “Goodbye, Mrs. Stanton. Tell the boys goodbye for me,” said Bridie.

  And Rose said goodbye, and Mrs. Stanton left, off to the second-ever women’s rights convention.

  “You can find out who paid your rent, and pay them back later,” Bridie said.

  “Or you could not.” Mr. Nell found an apron for Rose so she could set type while they waited for Mr. Douglass to come back. “It does people good to give, you know.”

  Rose put the apron on. “I will, though.”

  Bridie and Rose hunted out letters. They set out all the words in the Declaration of Sentiments, and they slid them into composing sticks, and set them into the galley.

  These words they were setting into print now would go out into the world, starting from a little newspaper office in Rochester—no, starting, really, from Seneca Falls…and they would keep going, and Bridie couldn’t imagine where they would end up. But she didn’t have to.

  She was going to be a printer. And she wasn’t all alone anymore, she was going to stay with her friend Rose. If the Douglasses didn’t mind. And Rose’s father might be found. And maybe Rose would grow up to be a scientist even though girls couldn’t, and maybe Bridie would grow up to be a printer even though girls didn’t.

  And maybe someday they’d go to Chicago, that brave new city in the west, or to California, where there were bears and earthquakes and gold. But for now, they were here, and there was work to be done.

  The year 1848 was a chaotic one. Revolutions were breaking out all over Europe. Refugees were fleeing famine-stricken Ireland. Gold had just been discovered in California. A deadly cholera pandemic was sweeping the world. In London, Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto. In Washington, DC, a treaty was ratified in which Mexico ceded a large portion of its land to the United States.

  And in a little town in upstate New York, some women gathered at a tea party and planned the world’s first women’s rights convention.

  The Seneca Falls Convention

  The convention was held on July 19 and 20, 1848, and resulted in the adoption of the Declaration of Sentiments. The battle to win the right to vote would last for the next seventy-two years.

  If you drew a timeline between the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, on August 18, 1920, the Seneca Falls Convention would fall in the middle…almost to the day.

  This ad ran in the Seneca County Courier on July 11, 1848.

  We don’t know how many people stayed at the Stanton house during the convention. We know Harriet Cady Eaton and her son, Daniel, did. Lucretia Mott wrote a letter to say she and her husband would be staying, and we know Frederick Douglass had stayed with Stanton on an earlier visit. Since Amy Post traveled with him, it’s likely she stayed too. Neither women nor African Americans could count on being welcome at hotels at the time.

  Which Characters Are Fictional?

  Bridie and Rose are fictional.

  Everyone else who attended the women’s rights convention and the tea party in Waterloo is real, including the children.

  Rose’s landlord, Ferris Moody, is real, but the other boatmen are made up.

  Most of the other people in Seneca Falls are real.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton and two sons in 1848

  Rose’s teacher is made up. The Kigleys are made up. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her family are real. Stanton ended up having seven children, but only three had been born by 1848.

  The people at the poorhouse are made up, but the poorhouse was real.

  Frederick Douglass is real, and so is his printer. The family on the doorstep is made up, although many people freeing themselves from slavery did show up on the steps of the North Star. Frederick and Anna Douglass sheltered hundreds of fugitives in their house and helped them get to Canada.

  Frederick Douglass

  The Douglasses always had lots of guests, some of whom stayed for years. So it’s perfectly conceivable they would have added Rose and Bridie. At one time the abolitionist John Brown stayed with them. Unlike everyone else, Brown insisted on paying for his room and board.

  The Poorhouse

  Poorhouses existed in almost every county in the United States. Living conditions ranged from adequate to dismal.

  At the time it was opened in 1830, the Seneca County Poorhouse was judged to be adequate by the men who opened it. In 1851, a state commission declared the building uninhabitable. A new poorhouse was built of stone, and still stands. It has been converted into an apartment building, looking very incongruous among the rolling fields and woodlands.

  Poorhouses in New York were required to have school for three months a year. In Bridie’s day, there was a separate oven house for baking bread, with a schoolroom upstairs. This warm location suggests that the school probably “kept” in the coldest winter months, when there was little work to be done in the fields.

  In the twentieth century, social security and other government programs began to help people in need. The poorhouses had all closed down by the 1970s.

  There was probably a poorhouse not far from where you live. It may still be standing but used for something else.

  Could Rose’s and Bridie’s Dreams Really Have Come True?

  Could Bridie become a printer? Yes. Even though nearly all skilled trades were closed to women, throughout American history we find exceptions—a female blacksmith here, a female printer there. Often there’s no explanation of how they got there. But it must have taken a lot of determination.

  Could Rose become a scientist? Again, yes. All colleges except Oberlin were closed to women—but soon that would change. Colleges were only just beginning to teach science, anyway. Science was something one did largely on one’s own.

  Four woman scientists are mentioned in this book. They are:

  Maria Mitchell, an astronomer who discovered a comet in 1847
and later became a professor at Vassar College

  Elizabeth Blackwell, who in 1849 became the first woman to graduate from medical school in the United States

  Rebecca Lee Davis Crumpler (the “young colored lady” mentioned by Frederick Douglass), who in 1863 became the first African American woman to graduate from medical school in the United States

  Eunice Newton Foote, whom Rose and Bridie see by the lemonade stand, who in the 1850s discovered that changing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would change the temperature of the earth—the beginning of understanding human-caused climate change

  School

  The focus of most children’s lives was work, not school. Some states had free schools by 1848. New York was one. But you weren’t required to go, and in most communities the school only “kept” for two or three months in the winter, and sometimes two or three months in the summer.

  Children learned reading, spelling, and handwriting. They moved on to more advanced subjects if they stayed long enough, including a little math. Girls were only taught to add, subtract, multiply, and divide whole numbers.

  The textbooks Rose has are all real. Her New York Reader No. 3 wasn’t a third-grade book; schools weren’t organized into grades. The anti-slavery dialogue she is made to read is real. The textbook was first published while New York was still a slave state.

  In 1855 the textbook Rose quotes from was changed to say that girls should have the same education as boys. Change was coming, slowly.

  There was usually only one math book, and it went all the way from very simple problems to very complex ones. You bought your own books. Schoolbooks cost eight cents each, a real bargain. Most other books cost twenty-five cents.

  Were the schools segregated? In New York State in 1848, it depended on the school, the school board, and the teacher.

  In Rochester, Frederick Douglass had continual fights to keep his children in school. Sometimes he hired a governess to teach them at home.