Sex Wars (9 page)

“You didn’t…You didn’t want her to work for you, I mean as one of your girls?”

“Too fragile.” The madam looked Freydeh over. “You’re more the type we can use here. We’re not a common house. We specialize. You saw the whips. Some men like to be spanked or whipped or punished. Some want to do the punishing. Either way, we need strong girls.”

“Thanks, but I’m going into business for myself. I’m going to make condoms.”

“Really. You could do worse. I hope you find your sister.”

“So Shaineh quit?”

“She cried a lot while she was here. She’d cry in her bed at night, and the other girls didn’t like it. It was depressing. And she was always afraid of the men… Now, she wasn’t a great seamstress, but she could sew. I used her to fix my girls’ costumes. There’s a lot of wear and tear on clothing in this business.”

“Do you know where she went?”

“No idea. She took her bundle and went out the door, and that’s the last I saw of her.” The madam stood. She was shorter than Freydeh by a head. “Good luck.”

They walked a few buildings along the street and then sat down on a stoop. “Well, that was odd,” Freydeh said. “At least we found her trail, no matter how cold.”

“Freydeh, what’s with those whips? I thought it was a whorehouse, but I don’t see what she does with the whips. I don’t get it…”

“Neither do I, Sammy. Maybe it’s better we don’t understand. I think maybe it’s better we just forget what we heard except for the part about Shaineh.”

“So there’s a thousand places she could be working as a seamstress. Is that what she was in the old country?”

“Mama apprenticed her to a seamstress, but she complained that she was just doing chores for the family. So I don’t know if she really has skills.”

“Well, there can’t be more places that give out piecework for sewing than there are boardinghouses—or whorehouses.” He looked back over his skinny shoulder.

“This is New York. There’s a lot of everything. We just have to find the right one.”

Sammy was silent. He had that look he got when he was upset. She knew it by now. He showed a sullen withdrawal when he was disappointed or afraid of being disappointed. She left him alone as they walked north, having decided not to take the horsecar and walk—saving money, avoiding the chaos and shoving. Once they came out of the district of warehouses, lines of wash were hung over the side streets, thicker than the tangle of telegraph wires in the main and business streets. Broadway when they crossed it, dodging among stalled carts and wagons and carriages, was a crisscross mess. Policemen were shouting at the draymen and coachmen trying to untangle the vehicles going every which way and slamming into each other. It happened every day.

Finally she said, “But things are looking up for us, no? We have a place of our own. The boarder helps pay the rent. We found cheap beds and they don’t have bedbugs. We have enough to eat. We managed to pick up Shaineh’s trail.”

“We’re never going to make the rubber right.”

“Sure we are. We have to practice some more. Nobody’s born knowing how to vulcanize rubber. Izzy, who comes to Yonkelman’s—”

“He’s sweet on you.”

“Yah, that and a cigar will get him a smoke. Izzy has a tiny brain in his noggin, shaking around like a few seeds in a gourd. If he can do it, so can we.”

“Otherwise you got no use for me.”

“Sammy, I took you in and you’re staying. That’s just how it is. I got no family now except Shaineh. You’re stuck with me.”

He squinted at her, half disbelieving, half wanting to believe. She wondered again if he had weak eyes. At some point she could get a doctor to check his vision. But not yet. Doctors cost money.

H
ORACE GREELEY WILL
never forgive what I did at the New York constitutional convention,” Susan said as she sat going over the bills from printing the
Revolution.
They were in the offices of the newspaper in the Women’s Bureau, a large town house on East Twenty-third owned by a sympathizer who let them use the space rent-free. It was airy with thick carpets and white walls hung with portraits of Lucretia Mott and Mary Wollstonecraft. Susan managed the office, paid bills, hired the women printers. Elizabeth was editor and wrote most of the copy about everything from factory women to woman’s rights in France. “That’s why Greeley’s
Tribune
is attacking me.”

Elizabeth put down her pen. “It got his goat, all right.” Greeley had been scheduled to give his negative report on woman suffrage, lumping women with lunatics and idiots and felons as not able to handle the vote. George Curtis, one of their supporters, stood and asked to present a petition in favor of woman suffrage, headed by Mrs. Horace Greeley. That had seriously embarrassed Horace.

“He turned on us long before that.” Susan gave a dismissive shake of her head. Then she sighed. “We don’t have enough in our poor little account to pay half these bills.”

Elizabeth was trying to fit all the articles she had written and commissioned and that had come in voluntarily into the narrow confines of the six pages they could afford to print. They had a reasonable number of ads this time, but since Elizabeth refused those for patent medicine—the most lucrative—ads couldn’t support the paper. She had written about the condition of women tailors, about divorce reform, suffrage in Wyoming, women homesteaders. “Should we go on printing Train’s articles?”

“He gave us the money to start. The Brits still have him in prison. We should give him the benefit of patience until he’s a free man again.” Susan knew Train better than Elizabeth did and was prone to defend him from
their days sharing a platform and the hardscrabble travel around Kansas, often facing hostile audiences together.

“He gave money to Irish independence and went to jail for them. That’s where his heart is now. We shouldn’t entertain fantasies about more aid from your Mr. Train.”

“He’s not
my
Mr. Train. I was saddled with him, but he and I made the best of it.” Susan’s mouth formed a thin line of annoyance.

When Susan had been in Kansas canvassing for a suffrage amendment, she had been set up by people she trusted from the radical Republicans and anti-slavery movement to travel and speak with an Irishman, George Francis Train, eloquent but flamboyant and eccentric, traveling around Kansas in purple gloves and top hat and frock coat. Train had a hard time keeping up with Susan, but his dedication to woman’s rights had been genuine. After their journey, he had been so impressed with Susan he had given them funds to start their own newspaper.

It had come out in the New York and Boston papers—Greeley and his
Tribune
were particularly gleeful—that Train was a rabid pro-slavery Democrat. Susan was tarred with Train’s views and attacked by former Republican allies. She and Susan were considered political liabilities now that the fight for Negro suffrage—Negro
male
suffrage, as Elizabeth kept pointing out—was close to being secured. The Republicans were running the overwhelmingly popular General Grant for president.

Elizabeth wanted to get the newspaper together and quit for the day. They were scheduled to go to dinner at the Tiltons’. They slept in the city when they were putting out the paper, but tonight they would cross to Brooklyn. “Do you think the Republicans arranged for you to work with Train to discredit you?”

“We’ll never know, Mrs. Stanton. But they’ve deserted us.”

“Deserted us, reviled us, trampled us. But at the rights convention we’re going to fight back.” Elizabeth paced to the window, her skirts swishing. Absently she picked a loose brown hair from Susan’s dress as she passed. “We should hurry it up. We don’t want to be late.”

The ferry cost two cents and ran often. At this time of night it was crowded with working people in shabby clothes. The better-off went home much earlier. Susan and Elizabeth were packed in with carts, wagons, horses, a coffin. Brooklyn was a middle-class city of respectable families, tree-lined streets, large houses, many churches and more than its share of ambitious politicos, of whom Theodore Tilton was certainly one. Even President Lincoln had visited the Tiltons. Elizabeth and Susan often
took the ferry over for a social and political evening with Theo and his wife Lib.

It was Theo who greeted them at the door, not the maid. Theodore Tilton was a handsome man, something of a poet who dressed the part with long flowing blond locks and Byronic shirts, towering over them all at six feet three. He wrote mostly for an important church newspaper—church newspapers had as large a readership as the leading secular papers. He was passionately involved in Brooklyn and national politics. Like Susan and Elizabeth, he had been stalwart for abolition for more than a decade and supported woman’s rights. He was a protégé and ghostwriter for Henry Ward Beecher, the charismatic preacher of the important Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. Special ferries ran on Sunday, Beecher’s Boats, people called them, to bring Manhattan churchgoers over to Brooklyn to hear the great Beecher sermonize about the forgiving God of Love, so different from the hellfire Puritanism most had been exposed to in childhood. Elizabeth hoped to make sure Theo and Beecher would support them in the convention and not allow woman’s rights to be sacrificed. Both men were important liberal voices people would listen to. They had been bosom buddies for years, but lately Elizabeth had noticed a strain between them. She was curious but assumed it was political in origin. Theo had been spending a great deal of time in Washington of late because of the attempt to impeach President Johnson, something he had worked for.

The Tiltons occupied a double-frame row house in Brooklyn Heights. It was sumptuously furnished, although the paintings—reproductions of oils—ran to the sentimental and bombastic with Roman motifs. The furniture in the front parlor was decorated with carved cherubs’ heads. Lib was flitting about when they arrived. She greeted Susan warmly and Elizabeth more warily. Lib was also named Elizabeth, a petite attractive woman, with shiny black hair and large dark brown eyes framed by lush lashes—a good wife and mother, presumably, but an odd match for the intellectual activist Tilton, as she seemed naïve. Then, Elizabeth did not think Lib had been given much of a chance to develop her own ideas. She seemed to be mostly maidservant to Tilton, who was all for woman’s rights but treated his own wife like a wayward child and constantly complained that Lib simply did not know how to run a house in a manner he thought befitted a man of his stature—and pretensions. Sometimes he rebuked her in front of company for her lack of intellectual pursuits, but Elizabeth could not see that he gave her time or encouragement to pursue any. Lib was very involved in Plymouth Church, a respectable outlet for her interests.

Lib felt comfortable with Susan. Now she pulled Susan off to see the children. Elizabeth was aware that Lib did not really like her. They had been invited to spend the night. She should take advantage of this visit to win over Lib, for it struck her as preposterous that she should be close to Theo and distant from his wife. Susan thought Lib had potential; she spoke of her as emotionally rich and not unfriendly to woman’s rights, although a bit afraid of women who might overly impress her brilliant husband. Theo had affairs, it was whispered. She had heard of certain liaisons, often with bright and political women, unlike the timid, housebound Lib.

Lib should be brought out, Elizabeth decided. She would work on it, a small side project that would delight Susan. Susan had repeated to her something Lib had said: that her husband might think her silly and stupid, but the great Henry Beecher thought enough of her intelligence to show her whatever he wrote for her critiquing—that is, when Theo did not ghostwrite Beecher’s material. The Reverend Beecher liked to write upstairs in the Tilton house in a sitting room with a stained glass dome, the room Elizabeth agreed was the most charming in the rather ostentatious house.

For the moment, it was Theo they needed. He had come up with the original idea of combining the Anti-Slavery Society and the Woman’s Rights Society into one organization. Both groups of the disenfranchised would gain their rights together. No group should gain equality at the expense of the other, Elizabeth had said countless times. The women had listened, but she was not sure the male abolitionists had digested her plea. It was shameful that she should be subject to laws she had no part in electing representatives to create, to pay taxes for a government not responsible in any way to her, unable to testify in court or sit on a jury or sign legal papers—in other words, she was a child in the eyes of the law. Taxation without representation, indeed.

After a long evening of discussion in which at times Elizabeth thought they had convinced Theo and at times was sure they had not, Tilton brought out his chess set in which the figures were medieval knights, bishops in regalia, the queen a regal figure, the castles with turrets. Susan went off with Lib while Elizabeth settled in to play. Tilton loved chess. Elizabeth enjoyed the game and usually beat him. Tonight her mind was distracted by the coming convention. The real battle sapped her interest in the mock one. Tilton was pleased with himself for checkmating her twice. He lay back in his chair beaming. “I knew my game had improved. I can take you now.”

Elizabeth resisted telling him that his game was the same as ever but her mind had been elsewhere. She simply congratulated him. And to think Henry complained she had no tact.

He wanted to talk about something, she could tell. She waited for him to open up. He did, seemingly flustered. “Do you think it’s possible for a good woman, a saintly woman like Lib, to have…what I might call sensual feelings?”

“Of course,” Elizabeth said simply. “Women can enjoy the conjugal embrace as warmly as men.”

He winced. “I can’t believe that. Lib has always been cold…until recently. I don’t know what to make of her now. It upsets me.”

“Why? Pleasure is something for both parties, don’t you think? Why shouldn’t a woman feel desire?” She certainly had.

“Don’t you think that’s unnatural in a woman, with all her modesty, her inborn purity? Maybe it’s a kind of disease.”

“It’s a natural function, Theo. Accept it and rejoice in it.” But she did not think he was prepared to. How strange that a man who had sought the embrace of several women she knew about should cringe at his own wife’s ardor. Men talked and wrote so much poppycock about women, it was no wonder if Theo felt confused.

T
HE AMERICAN EQUAL RIGHTS ASSOCIATION
convention turned into a brawl. Elizabeth and Susan were not the only women up in arms at the abandonment of woman suffrage and the insistence, which Elizabeth’s old friend and houseguest Frederick Douglass supported, that this was the hour of the Negro and that the hour of women could be put off. A woman delegate stood up to shout, “We want a party that will adopt a platform of universal suffrage for every color and every sex!”

Elizabeth thought she had persuaded Wendell Phillips to support them. By midafternoon she realized he had tricked her.

“By mixing these movements, we will lose more for the Negro than we can gain for the woman,” Wendell thundered.

Elizabeth felt electric with anger. “May I reply to your argument with just one question: Do you believe the African race is composed entirely of males?” She was angry, hot and cold at once—passionately furious and coldly resentful. She would never forgive him for lying to her. Delegates were on their feet screaming while the chair pounded his gavel for order. People were throwing the agenda and programs in the air and trampling
them underfoot. The aisles were clogged with knots of men and women confronting each other.

Elizabeth had been supposed to be elected on the new slate of officers as vice president, and Susan was to be on the executive council. But mysteriously, when the slate was announced, their names had disappeared. That was meaningless to Elizabeth. She did not want to be an officer of this society, now, tomorrow or ever. She stood and walked out, with Susan at her heels.

“They sold us out.” Elizabeth shook her head slowly, leaning on Susan’s arm as they paced in the hall outside where they could hear the new slate being voted in.

“You let Wendell Phillips seduce you.” She imitated him, with that sly way she had in private, “My family has been around since 1630, so pay heed to what I advise.”

“He can turn on the charm. I’ll never trust him again.” Elizabeth sat down heavily in a chair in the hallway outside the room where they had just been handed an overwhelming defeat. She found that sense of betrayal familiar, an old sore reopened. Yes, a betrayal that had happened when Henry and she eloped and then sailed for England with Henry’s Liberty Party comrades to learn about the aftermath of British emancipation in the West Indies, to discuss strategy for ending slavery altogether.

In London, the newly married couple stayed in a boardinghouse with other American delegates, including the female Anti-Slavery Society representatives. Lucretia Mott, a plainly dressed abolitionist speaker and Quaker minister, wife and mother of six, was there, as was Wendell. The question of whether to seat the women delegates caused a huge floor fight. The faction with which Henry, who had been elected secretary, was allied rejected them. Wendell won her approval by protesting. In the meantime, the women were stuck behind a railing off to one side. Debate went on for hours. Clergymen from both sides of the Atlantic said participation by women would be shameful and immoral. The men supporting the women—who weren’t allowed to speak—argued that the women had been duly elected in America. Wendell moved to seat the women but was defeated by a huge majority. The women were allowed to remain as spectators only. Elizabeth was furious. The tone of the speeches against women was frankly insulting. Elizabeth assumed that Henry had voted to seat them.