“Elizabeth brought seven children into the world and can be trusted to know what to do!” said Susan as confidently as if she herself had suffered a woman’s agony and, according to men, her purpose.
“An excellent midwife in sympathy with our movement lives nearby,” said Elizabeth, who at that moment resembled a flour-faced mammy. “Her swine of a husband beats her when he has ‘a brick in his hat,’ as she calls his sprees. By now, he ought to have enough bricks to build a house of ill repute.”
“‘A man can’t close his eyes to pray without falling into a rum-hole!’” declared Susan, quoting from The Lily. “I’m waiting for someone to take a hatchet to the taprooms, bucket shops, spirit vaults, and doggeries that turn men’s fuggled brains to mash!”
“You beat that horse to death!” complained Elizabeth.
“Better that I should beat the horse than a drunkard his wife!”
“Ellen, we are happy that you’re unmarried and with child,” said Elizabeth pleasantly. “We can point to you as an example of the necessity for statutory protection of unwed mothers. Their welfare and that of their children cannot be left to the whim of churches and the discretion of private charities. Bastardy—odious word!—must be expunged from the law books, from the minds of those who set themselves up to judge women, and from the hearts of mankind.”
“Which are seldom kind,” said Susan. “That New York’s married women have a legal right to their wages and to their children is due, in part, to our campaigning.” As if having read my thoughts, she went on to say, “I could not give up my life to become a man’s serving woman. When I was young, if a girl made a poor marriage, she became a housekeeper and drudge; if she made a rich one, a pet and a doll.”
I couldn’t imagine her as a young woman, much less a man’s pet or doll. Her figure was gaunt like an old stick, her face drawn over bone and framed by two taut drapes of gray hair that appeared to have been screwed into place for eternity by her bun. Yet in her girlhood, she was accounted pretty and had been courted. But no man could inspire in her the passion she felt for her mind’s pursuits, which must be kept unencumbered. She refused to be anybody’s property. She agreed with Elizabeth, whom I once heard say, “To be wedded to an idea may be, after all, the holiest and happiest of marriages.”
“Wait and see, Ellen; all will be well,” promised a broadly smiling Elizabeth.
“You will be happy here with us—”
“And a great help to our cause!”
I thought then that I would be helpful and happy.
Sholes & Glidden
THE REMINGTON MODEL NUMBER 2 was the latest thing in typewriters, but I preferred my old Sholes & Glidden machine, whose operation I had learned at the Young Women’s Christian Association on Lexington Avenue.
“Does it bother you that my machine can make only capital letters?” I asked the ladies at the conclusion of the first day’s dictation and transcription. The Remington keyboard had both the upper- and lowercase alphabets in its chassis.
“Not at all!” replied Elizabeth. “It will remind Susan to speak emphatically.”
I guessed that she needed no reminder.
“Elizabeth forges the thunderbolts, and I fire them!” she said.
“Women should be grateful to Mr. Sholes for having chosen his daughter instead of a man to demonstrate his machine,” said Elizabeth. “As a result, the typewriter is considered a woman’s tool, and for the first time in the history of our sex, women work as clerk copyists in offices where previously only men had been employed.”
“A man would never choose to operate a machine so prettily decorated,” observed Susan, tapping, with a gnarled finger, a wreath of painted gillyflowers emblazoned on mine.
“Naturally, Mr. Sholes was not motivated by altruism or sympathy for our cause,” said Elizabeth, who gave every appearance of being omniscient. “He saw women as an opportunity to sell his machine to a boodle of new customers. But we would compact with the Devil in aid of woman’s rights.”
“Speak for yourself, Lizzie!” growled Susan, who wore no stays except those fashioned of an elastic piety. “I will not give the Devil his due, though he gives women charge over the whole world in exchange.”
“I would trade my immortal soul for the vote!” replied Elizabeth theatrically.
“Will you never outgrow the need to be thought of as naughty? Heaven knows why you should find preening in blasphemy and provocation so much fun!”
“Oh, fudge! Heaven only knows how I’ve stood you all these years!”
“Primp!”
“Prude!”
“Poseur!”
“Prig!”
“Humbug!”
“Stickleback!”
“Egotist!” shouted Susan. “Must you always be the biggest toad in the puddle?”
I crossed my arms on top of the machine and, with a pitiable moan, rested my head on them.
“Ellen, what’s the matter?” they asked, competing for my recognition of their sympathies.
“I feel faint.”
“Is your corset laced too tightly?” asked Susan.
“If you cannot renounce it entirely, you must do so until the baby is born!” admonished Elizabeth.
“Rest yourself, dear girl. We shall not disturb you any more today.”
The two women took the manuscript pages I had finished typewriting into the kitchen, where I could hear Elizabeth reading them over slowly and articulately to Susan, who, now and then, would disagree with a word or phrase. They bickered until they remembered themselves—or rather, they remembered the cause that was their common ground and source of amity. Then they would eat a piece of strudel.
Not caring for accounts of other people’s lives unless they’re made up by a wizard like Mr. James, I found the ladies’ History dull. Having fixed my gaze on the machine for nearly three hours, my eyes were tired. I closed them and saw the keys in the darkness behind the curtains of the lids, arranged like a constellation whose stars had assembled into nothing legible.
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 - ,
Q W E . T Y I U O P
Z S D F G H J K L M
A X & C V B N ? ; R
I went out for some air. Underneath its freshness, I caught the unsavory odor of the tidal strait released by the unseasonable heat of a September afternoon. I walked along Forty-second Street, my thoughts not yet my own after toiling at the two women’s prose, until I found myself beneath towering plane trees in Bryant Park, not far from the site of the Colored Orphan Asylum, which immigrant and nativist hooligans had burned to cinders during the draft riots twenty years before. I chose an ornamental iron bench placed in the shadow cast by the Sixth Avenue elevated railway. The person sitting opposite, half-hidden in the gloom, whom I had taken for a girl of six or seven, turned out to be—on close inspection—a little person unkindly called a “midget.”
I observed her discreetly, with sidelong glances, to satisfy my curiosity without causing offense. She was perfectly formed. Her round face was pretty, her dark hair thick and done à la mode. When she turned her head toward the chittering of a squirrel, her movements impressed me with their grace and elegance. Had she been of ordinary height, she would have been the object of a young man’s greedy eyes. Anger arose in me at God or—if He was disinterested, as Deists claim—at the mill of destiny, which will grind human beings into dust. By now, my furtive glances had settled into a stare.