Sex Wars (13 page)

When they came into their hot and airless rooms, they sat down across the table they ate on. Sammy was sulky. Another would have thought he was angry about what she had said, but she knew him better. He was afraid. Afraid to hope. Afraid she did not mean it. She had come to feel strong affection for him. If she was never to have children of her own body, then she at least could take in a child who needed a family as much as she did. But she wouldn’t push things. They sat there in silence for a while and then she said, “I’m going to change into something that isn’t sopping wet.”

She went back to the airless little bedroom. Her body felt clammy, even chilly under the wet clothes, but a few minutes out of them would restore her to being too hot like everyone else on the bottom of Manhattan. “If you felt like going down to the courtyard, you could bring up a bucket of water and we could sit with our feet in it. That would give us a little relief.”

He thought about it, head propped on his hand. “Okay.” He did not move for several minutes, but finally he took a bucket and went out to climb down the four flights of steps.

Below in the street, a drayman and his helper were trying to remove a dead horse. It had been worked to death, poor thing, and died of the heat or thirst. It was as skinny as Giborah from the river, but still weighed more than two men could easily shift into the wagon. The horses pulling it were not happy and kept snuffling uneasily. They knew what they were expected to carry off, and they did not like it. Some fellow feeling among horses for their fallen, she thought. Horses she was not comfortable with. Cows, chickens, sheep, those she knew familiarly. She had lived with
them. But horses were something else. Dangerous feeling. A man up on a horse felt superior and had an advantage. But horses were not to blame for how men behaved once astride. Horses were probably good creatures left on their own.

Across the street, every fire escape was loaded with people. She had tested theirs carefully, and when Sammy came back they could sit out there. When the sun began to set, they could go back to work on their rubber project. They were not natural chemists, either of them, but she was determined.

Loud voices brought her to the window again. A fight had broken out between two groups of young men, so far only a matter of shouting and strutting, but those scuffles could turn deadly fast. They were all in their shirtsleeves, brandishing their fists and shouting in German. She could understand them, but the reason for their fury was obscure. Something about a debt owed for a bad bet. Bored men could always find something to fight about. Sammy should have been back up by now. The last thing she felt like doing was going down four flights of steps to look for him, but the fight could turn violent any moment. If he was her foster son, the way she had said, then she had to look out for him. Never mind that as a street arab he had seen hundreds of fights and probably been in plenty himself. That wasn’t his life now, and she could not let him risk getting hurt by standing too close. Even watching a fight was dangerous. She heaved herself out of the chair and went down the steps, as quickly as she dared in the dark. In the stairwell, it was always midnight. Hot and dark and steep, without a breath of air other than fetid smells.

As she had suspected, there was Sammy on the stoop with the full bucket beside him. The door was open to the street and he was watching as the first blow landed. All at once it was a tangle of shoving and punching bodies, shrieks and curses. She grabbed him by the shoulder and drew him in.

“Hey, I want to watch.”

“Upstairs you got a good view and no trouble. Come on.” She took the bucket from him and pushed him ahead of her down the hall, up the stairs. She could tell he was annoyed, but she was bigger than him and he could not get past her to climb down. Realizing he was stuck, he began to run up the steps in order to get to the window in the flat.

He reached the room a good two minutes before her, puffing along with the full bucket and careful not to spill any. He was out on the fire escape already. She put down the bucket and climbed out beside him. One
man was swinging a club. Another went down cursing and after a moment she could see a comma of blood seeping out from under him. Another was kicking a man who had been pushed down on one of the stoops. From a window above a woman threw down the contents of her chamber pot on the fighters, splattering them. They cursed at her.

“There’s more where that came from!” she yelled in German. “Now go back where you belong and let our lads alone.”

“Who says this block belongs to you, bitch!” The man shouting up at her was suddenly smashed in the face. His teeth exploded.

“Brass knuckles,” Sammy said knowingly.

Suddenly they were all scattering and the man who had fallen now lay in a widening spiral of dark blood, the back of his head caved in.

Freydeh took Sammy by the elbow. “Look. That’s how the street life ends. If you ever think it’s boring with me, look at that poor stupid lad bleeding out his life. I don’t want that for you. Do you want that?”

Sammy was staring down, his mouth fallen open. “I knew him. He ran numbers out of a parlor on Orchard. He used to give me little jobs sometimes.”

The draymen had come out of the courtyard where they had taken refuge and went back to trying to lift the dead horse into the cart. When they finally had it loaded, they picked up the corpse of the numbers dealer and carried that off too. If he wasn’t dead already, he soon would be. It was all the same to them. Just garbage to haul.

M
RS. STANTON, YOU’VE
alienated folks by what you’ve said about ignorant Negro men having the vote while women are denied. How can you say that, being such a close friend of Frederick Douglass?” Susan stood over her with arms crossed.

“I feel betrayed. We fought for their rights, but they won’t stand with us for ours.” She winced as if struck. The pain was still raw in her. Frederick
kept saying it was the hour of the Negro, but apparently not of Negro women. “He’s far from ignorant. There isn’t a better orator in the country.”

“Nonetheless, we must watch whom we alienate.”

Elizabeth sighed, cheek against hand. “Contributions are drying up.” Since they’d started the National Woman Suffrage Association, they had not drawn donors. Women who could afford to give judged them too controversial.

“Money is the least of our problems. My Quaker upbringing has taught me how little I really need.” Susan smoothed down her plain gray dress.

“My dear Susan, you may not need money, but the movement does. The press costs money. Paper, printing, postage. Meetings eat up money. Conferences run on money. Travel is expensive—railroads, stages, hotels, meals. Publicity for lectures and meetings. Money is the engine that moves us down the track. Without it, we’re stalled. And we
are
stalled.”

“Why won’t the Boston women come in with us? We should stand as one.”

“They see us as too radical. They want a very nice movement.” Elizabeth said “nice” as if the word stuck in her teeth.

“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 writing 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.