Had she acquired clairvoyance in Philadelphia? I mused.
“Overturning the Civil Rights Act of 1875 is shame enough for one year!” fumed Susan.
The month before, the United States Supreme Court had ruled that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment did not guarantee blacks a seat on a ’bus or a train, in an eating house or the necessary one. Only the good Justice Harlan dissented.
“We have Chief Justice Waite and his raven-robed flock of dunces to thank for that particular injustice! There’ve been too many others for one man to take credit for them all.” Elizabeth had worked herself into a rage, which brought color to a usually pallid face.
“Waite would have the negro wait, wait, wait for his rights!” growled Susan.
“Negroes may have been emancipated by proclamation and law, but they’ve yet to achieve equality with whites!”
“White men!” said Susan, glowering handsomely. “In law, women are inferior to black men.”
“God took Adam’s rib and created woman. Centuries later, man beguiled woman into having one of her ribs removed for the sake of the feminine ideal, which is, in actuality, his own vision of womanly beauty. In exchange for her rib, he gave her a whalebone corset, the second symbol of her bonded servitude. Now she pants and faints in wasp-waisted submissiveness, risking death by asphyxiation for her mate.”
Neither Elizabeth nor Susan would submit to the “murderous contrivances of the corset shop,” as Catharine Beecher described the fashion that kept women delicate, out of breath, and near to swooning.
I was beginning to fear that my suffragists would rush out of doors, take the first train to the District of Columbia, and burn Chief Justice Waite in effigy—or else dispatch themselves to eternity by a stroke suffered together in perfect accord. Another change of subject was required.
“The other day on Broadway, I saw—”
“What did you see, Ellen?” snapped Susan, whose brain was nearly pickled in the vinegar of resentment.
I thought an account of the Wild West Show would get them going down another track.
I had stood in the crowd and watched as a General Custer impersonator (the real McCoy having reached an inglorious end at the Little Bighorn), a genuine, if embarrassed, Sitting Bull, and Buffalo Bill led the Congress of the Rough Riders of the World down Broadway. Sitting his horse as he now does his chair in the President’s House, the dude rancher Theodore Roosevelt was conspicuous for his patrician nose pinched by a glinting pince-nez. A bedraggled band of discouraged Indians and a mangy buffalo completed the spectacle, which fired the fancies of onlookers who saw themselves as Buck Taylor, the “King of the Cowboys,” or Miss Annie Oakley, the “Peerless Lady Wing-shot,” who could shoot dimes from between Frank Butler’s fingers.
At the last moment, I stopped myself from describing the cavalcade, foreseeing that it would only increase the ire of the two women for the exploited Indians, as well as the miserable buffalo. I’d heard enough for one day concerning the inequities of the world, which, according to Susan, had begun in Eden, where Adam had been given sway over everything that flew, swam, crawled, and—after the expulsion—bled monthly between their legs.
“What was it you saw?” asked Elizabeth, sensing my hesitation and ready to pounce.
“Alice Vanderbilt’s ‘Electric Light’ gown in Lord and Taylor’s window.” I was pleased with myself for having defused a bomb as deftly as a Confederate miner in the defense of Richmond. Or so I thought; my fiery suffragists were not so easily quenched.
“Well, I never!” spluttered Susan, looking as if I’d worn muddy shoes into the parlor.
“Electric Light gown, indeed! It’s a shocking waste, considering the multitude of poor souls who live in unlighted tenements no better than sties!” raged Elizabeth.
Despite myself, I had provoked them. I blushed shamefacedly and apologized abjectly, asking if they would forgive my frivolity and assuring them both that I was not—at heart—just another “silly female.”
Passions spent, they let the matter drop.
“I have a letter to dictate,” said Elizabeth. “If it is convenient.”
“Yes, of course!” I exclaimed. I would have mucked out the Augean Stables to keep my situation.
“Your willingness does you credit,” said Susan, her expression softening.
“As does your ability,” said Elizabeth, to show that I was forgiven.
Solemnly, I took my place at the typewriter and poised my fingers above the keys as if waiting for a conductor’s baton to release in me the first notes of a heroic overture. The letter, which Elizabeth briskly dictated, was to Julia Ward Howe, president of the Association for the Advancement of Women, a former abolitionist and the versifier who had penned the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” to be sung to the tune of “John Brown’s Body.” Mrs. Howe was the widow of Samuel Gridley Howe, who had been a member of the Secret Six, which financed the insurrectionist John Brown and who fled to Canada after Brown’s attack on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry failed.
September 27, 1883
Miss Julia Ward Howe
241 Beacon Street
Boston, Massachusetts
Dear Miss Howe,
I enjoyed the time we three spent together in Philadelphia, and hearing your thoughts concerning the “Ordination of Man as Earth’s Plenipotentiary.” I agree with Susan’s view that the original injustice committed against our sex occurred in Eden with Adam’s cravenness. In our opinion, man and woman were created in perfect equality, and only much later was the story of the Fall altered to depict Eve as a treacherous being at the mercy of her appetite. Whether the alteration was deliberate or due to a copyist’s error, we cannot know. I would tell the story thus:
“Then the woman fearless of death if she can gain wisdom takes of the fruit. Having had the command from God Himself Adam interposes no word of warning or remonstrance, but takes the fruit from the hand of his wife without a protest.
“When the awful time of reckoning comes, and the Jehovah God appears to demand why His command has been disobeyed, Adam endeavors to shield himself behind the gentle being he has declared to be so dear. ‘The woman thou gavest to be with me, she gave me and I did eat,’ he whines.”
After Adam’s despicable conduct, I am amazed that men can claim superiority to our sex or to the meanest dog in the manger.
Sincerely,
E.C.S.
If you are a son, I said silently, apostrophizing the small being growing under my belly’s hill, I trust that you will one day be worthy of your Eve. If you’re a daughter, I hope you will find an Adam who would shield you from God Himself until you’re able to shield yourself with the same laws granted to men. Whether you’re a son or a daughter waiting to take up your life, I wish that your time on Earth will be just and that you’ll take up your future as heir to a legacy left you by people like Lincoln, Grant, Garrison, Emerson, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and my two suffragists—an inheritance you are meant to share with others. I wonder if those names will be remembered or expunged from the nation’s faulty memory.
You should know this much at least about Elizabeth and Susan: They were famous (or notorious) for their militant dedication to the rights of the disenfranchised. In 1848, as a young married woman, Elizabeth found her voice and purpose at the Seneca Falls convention, which sparked a slowly burning fuse that has yet, in 1904, to touch off the powder keg of revolution but must do so in the fullness of time—not God’s, but that of women, who are more patient than He and infinitely more long-suffering. Three years later, Elizabeth and Susan met by chance on a street in Seneca Falls, where each had gone to hear a lecture given by William Lloyd Garrison, who before the war had been slavery’s gadfly and abolition’s fierce and fearless spokesman. As he had done in aid of abolition and suffrage in the pages of his newspaper, The Liberator, so the two women would do in theirs, The Revolution, which they published together in an office of the Women’s Bureau, near Gramercy Park.