Elizabeth and Susan frowned on my visit to Madame Singleton’s. They had no patience for the occult. Their struggle in the visible world was difficult without “entertaining ghosts” in the bargain.
“Would you prefer it if I had nothing more to do with Margaret and her friends?”
“It’s not for us to say with whom you may or may not associate,” replied Elizabeth. “That is something men do, especially husbands, although I made it clear to Henry Stanton when I agreed to marry him that I would not tolerate male despotism.”
“It is better to be wed to an idea than a man!” declared Susan.
“I prefer a tyrant of my own sex,” said Elizabeth, gesturing toward her soul mate. “Wait and see, Ellen; one day we shall have a woman president.”
What a preposterous idea! I thought.
“Women willing,” remarked Susan. “For men will never allow it.”
“Why not ‘God willing’?” I asked, hoping to annoy her. I would grow tired of her misandry.
“He is also a man, and one who sent His ghost to impregnate Mary without so much as a by-your-leave. In this, he was no better than Zeus when he ravished poor Leda.”
The heat of indignation rose in me like mercury in a glass column. I’m not particularly religious, but the lessons of the Sunday school do stay with one. “Neither God nor His ghost ravished Mary!”
“I beg your pardon. I get carried away by my own rhetoric. Let us say, then, that God does not think as much of women as He does of men. To be fair, His ministers don’t, since—lacking the omniscience of Madame Singleton—I don’t presume to read God’s mind. But the minds of His spokesmen—Do you hear how men have impregnated our language with their sex? Is this not a kind of ravishment?”
“Speak plainly, Susan.”
“Is it not a rape? Men cannot help seeing women as a territory to conquer and occupy.”
“You’re forgetting good men like Cousin Gerrit, Garrison, Lyman, Wendell, James Mott, Frederick Douglass, Henry Blackwell, and my own misguided Henry, who was once a steadfast ally of women and their cause.”
“How many of them deserted you when you had the gall to demand a woman’s right to divorce the husband who beats her or squanders her housekeeping money on whores and gin?”
“Susan, this is not a lecture platform.”
“Forgive me. I become overheated when I think of how I’m no better than a thing in the eyes of most men!”
“A battleax!” said Elizabeth merrily.
“Ellen, you may visit whomever you like,” said Susan in a voice that called to mind a starched handkerchief.
“You are a free woman, though the world may say otherwise,” agreed Elizabeth with a sniff.
I sensed their disapproval and was curious to know its cause. “Why did you both frown at the mention of Madame Singleton?”
“We have nothing against her,” replied Susan. “An unmarried woman must do what she can.”
Elizabeth picked up the thread, although by the strength of her conviction, it seemed like the steel cable Roebling used to knit the Brooklyn Bridge. “Our argument is with spiritualism. Men see it as frivolous a pastime as tatting doilies. A séance, in their eyes, is nothing but a hen party or a sewing bee. The Fox sisters would have done better by our sex had they joined us at the convention in Seneca Falls and declared themselves men’s equals.”
“Votes for women!” yelled Susan.
“Beware, you rapscallions in your boots and whiskers! We will have our day!” cried Elizabeth as she gaveled the table top with a beefy hand.
“Down with tyrants in pants!” shouted Susan, who then giggled like a parson’s wife who naughtily shows her ankles. Susan bellowed a verse from a suffragists’ anthem:
Is it because that you can drink
More whiskey, beer, and wine,
And not get drunk, and seem to think
Your majesty divine?
Elizabeth joined her in the chorus:
Talk not of freedom, equal rights,
Cold hearted, selfish knaves,
While in our land, around our hearths,
Dwell twenty million slaves.
“How is Margaret?” asked Susan, prompted, I supposed, by the song’s last line, for she could not view “Barnum’s creature” in any light other than enslavement to the great humbug.
“She is as you saw her last.”
“Do you mean ‘abridged’?” asked Elizabeth, still caught up in the madcap current.
“I mean ‘offended.’”
“Does she bear us a grudge?” Both women appeared to have been taken by surprise.
“She did not bother to speak of you,” I replied airily.
“Ah!” said Susan.
“Oh?” asked Elizabeth.
The exclamation of the former and the question of the latter amounted to the same thing—chagrin, a response that would have made me smile had I not taken care to put on a severe face.
“We are embarrassed for having insulted her,” said Susan regretfully.
“We hope to make it up to her,” said Elizabeth contritely.
Unwilling to exhaust the subject, which clearly pained them, I changed it. I wanted to leave something in reserve for their future humbling. As I unfolded the Tribune, a complicated mixture of repugnance and morbid excitement stole over me. “Alferd Packer killed and ate his companions.” Before the ladies could object, I read the account of the cannibal’s testimony:
Old Man Swan died first and was eaten by the other five persons about ten days out of camp. Four or five days afterwards Humphreys died and was also eaten; he had about one hundred and thirty three dollars. I found the pocket book and took the money. Some time afterwards, while I was carrying wood, the butcher was killed—as the other two told me accidentally—and he was also eaten. Bell shot ‘California’ with Swan’s gun and I killed Bell. Shot him. I covered up the remains and took a large piece along. Then traveled fourteen days into the agency. Bell wanted to kill me with his rifle—struck a tree and broke his gun.
I was glad not to have been the court stenographer in the case of Alferd Packer v. the People of the State of Colorado!
“Packer ate five people. James Gould gobbled up ten thousand miles of railroad track and right of way! The plutocrats have made America their dining table, and each day they sit down and devour us!” cried an impassioned Susan.
“The only difference between Packer and the profiteers is the cleanliness of their linen and the correctness of their grammar!” exclaimed Elizabeth, no less heatedly than her friend.
“Men are cannibals!” snarled Susan, showing her teeth, which appeared at that moment to have been filed. I marveled at the transforming effect of rage on the human countenance.
I chose not to mention Elizabeth Donner, who had cooked Samuel Shoemaker’s arm. I was afraid I had lit a fuse that might hoist me with my own petard. The atmosphere in the room was combustible enough to blow Miss Redpath and us to kingdom come. What was Krakatoa’s fury next to that of twenty million women “slaves” incorporated in their most ardent deputies? Neither needed me to set them off, however; they had been well primed at the National Woman Suffrage Association convention.
“We rebuked the so-called justices of the Supreme Court for declaring Native Americans to be ‘dependent aliens!’” roared Elizabeth, who looked as if she could eat the eminent jurists raw. “It won’t be long until the Indians join the bison in extinction, and when both have been dead and forgotten for a century or so, they’ll be resurrected on our stamps and coins.”