Sex Wars (16 page)

W
HEN ELIZABETH ELOPED
with Henry, against her father’s wishes, he was a well-known speaker and organizer for abolition but otherwise unemployed. After clerking for her father, the conservative judge, for almost two years in order to mend fences with the family, Henry decided they should move to Boston, where he joined a law firm. Judge Cady bought them a comfortable house in Chelsea. She had three children by then, all boys—Neil, Henry and Gerrit (called Gat). With her firstborn, Neil, she had hired a nurse who swaddled him in tight linen, shut the windows lest the air infect him, and kept him quiet when he cried with laudanum—an opium derivative. After the boy became sickly, Elizabeth fired the nurse and shocked her family by tearing off the linen bands to let his limbs move freely, opening the windows wide and throwing out the laudanum. Neil thrived, and so in turn did her other babies.

When Lucretia Mott came to Boston for a day, they spent it talking about woman’s rights and fantasizing about a meeting of women to start a movement. Except for her short stature, Lucretia was unlike her in appearance, strict Quaker dress, a wrinkled, slightly desiccated face and hands, an expression of calm and sweetness, but her mind was lively and her political sense passionate and shrewd. They were both tiny women who had borne children—Elizabeth so far, three; Lucretia, six. Elizabeth both loved her as a friend and admired her as a mentor.

Lucretia was twenty-two years older than Elizabeth, but Elizabeth had never been bothered by age. After all, Henry was eleven years older. The other love of her life, Bayard, her brother-in-law, was older still. He had helped raise her. Most pleasures of her adolescence had been due to him—he taught her to jump fences on horseback, he took her sisters and her to
dances her mother had forbidden. He taught them to read widely and critically. He made sure the girls had a good education, arguing that Elizabeth must go to a girls’ school that was not a finishing school but something new, where real subjects were taught. But when she was twenty-one, he had proposed they run away together. He was madly in love with her.

She certainly had strong feelings for him, but not strong enough to betray her oldest sister, his wife, Tryphena. She refused, and never again did she permit him to be alone with her. She cared for him, and she could tell whenever she saw him at family gatherings that he still wanted to be with her. Temptations like that were useless. To give in to them would have ruined the lives of Tryphena and her family in widening circles of scandal and pain. Two years later, she met Henry at her cousin Gerrit’s and fell in love. He seemed a dark hero to her, a knight of the abolitionist movement, addressing hostile crowds, persuading people to consider the Negro a fellow human, operating on the Underground Railroad that passed fugitive slaves to safety. Her cousin Gerrit’s house was a station on the way to freedom.

Now she enjoyed Boston with its abundance of political and intellectual events. She met Emerson, Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass and Margaret Fuller. She felt at home among the abolitionists and reformers. But Henry grew dissatisfied. He said the climate gave him chronic lung congestion, but she could tell that what it gave him was the inability to run for public office in Massachusetts. Lacking connections and Brahmin background, he could not compete with local candidates. He felt he would do better in upstate New York, so he chose to move them to Seneca Falls. He was the husband; it was his decision to make and he made it.

Judge Cady seemed to think this move a good idea—they would be closer to him—and bought them a house on two acres overlooking the river, over a mile from the center of town. That is, theoretically it overlooked the river. The actual view from the front of the house was of tanneries, a mill, a foundry and workers’ shacks. He warned them that the house had been empty for some years and was in bad repair. He challenged her to take charge of the work since she seemed to think women were so competent. She left her children and household effects—seventeen trunks’ worth—with her family in Johnstown. She became a general commanding an expensive army of carpenters and workmen painting, repapering with light, pleasant wallpapers, repairing the dilapidated structure, turning a ramshackle porch into a solid columned structure, adding a kitchen wing off the back. It had a central hall with a steep staircase going up, a large
front parlor and a back parlor in which she had French doors installed. She replaced the windows with larger ones to let in more light and air.

Stuck in a house needing constant work, she felt isolated with only her children, an Irish servant girl and few companions with whom she could discuss the subjects—political, intellectual—that she cared about. The road was unpaved. With no sidewalks, it was a trek through mud into town, where she could find only a few groceries, bars and billiard parlors. Seneca Falls was a rough river town with many taverns and many churches, not much else. She made friends with the neighbor women, although they found her forward and unconventional. She charmed them into liking her against their will, but she was lonely. Henry was gone more than he was there. He took the train to Albany and to Washington on a regular basis, to register patents for clients and to conduct business. He also traveled on political business—not so much abolitionist now as Republican Party politics. He wanted to run for some, any state office. He was intensely ambitious for himself but felt she should be satisfied being a mother and housewife. He had gradually lost interest in discussing ideas with her, and when he was home insisted she let him read the paper, smoke his pipe and that she keep the children from pestering him. Basically he came home to relax and be cosseted.

Everyone expected her to be absorbed by family life. What women did beyond that tended to be confined to church activities and perhaps a quilting bee or visits to sick neighbors. She missed the intellectual stimulation of Boston. She also missed all the support she had when they lived in her parents’ home, with servants and relatives to take the children off her hands when she wanted to read or write. She was responsible for the sole running of a house and a farm her father had decided they should oversee a few miles outside of Seneca Falls.

Slowly she identified and gathered people who took an interest in ideas and she began to hold conversationals in the parlor. She collected a dozen regulars, instituting Saturday evening discussions of everything from slavery to women in history, from Sylvester Graham’s ideas of the healthy regimen to the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Emerson’s essays. She enforced a rule that no one could speak twice until everyone had spoken once. She was teaching the women and girls to voice their opinions, teaching them to be more articulate and forward.

One field where she had a free hand—since Henry took little interest—was the children’s upbringing. She gave them freedom to run about, to climb trees, to go down to the river. She encouraged them to
read and discuss with her. The neighbors regarded them as undisciplined hellions. She preferred energy to obedience. She made her own medicines. As for the conjugal embrace, they both enjoyed that a great deal. The only advantage she could find in Henry’s constant, almost compulsive traveling was that when he came home they were new to each other and not at all an old married couple who might have lapsed into boredom. In the bedroom, Henry did not bore her, nor she him.

Otherwise, he was not the most stimulating companion these days. He still talked politics, but his were party machinations, who was running for what and who was supporting him, who controlled what committee in the legislature—not ideas and ideals. She listened and offered her comments, but it was a far cry from the excitement ignited by their days sharing anti-slavery activities. He confessed that he was considering changing his party affiliation. He had talked with Democratic politicians who had indicated they might support him if he ran for state senator on their ticket. She was shocked, as he had always derided the Democrats as pro-slavery But she could feel the heat of his ambition for public office. He loved being in Albany. He liked speechmaking, the intrigue of the legislature, behind-the-scenes maneuvering, the constant courtship from lobbyists, the feeling of power and influence.

Sometimes after a day with the help of her maid, Kathleen, a day of mending torn clothes and washing linens and bleaching them, of making puddings and collecting eggs and hauling water to heat, a day of wiping runny noses and getting potions down Neil, who was sick in bed, of scrubbing the stairs and cleaning the windows and taking the horses out for exercise, of making bread, of replacing buttons, of knitting for fall, of reading stories to her sick boy, of spreading manure on what would be a bigger kitchen garden, of tidying behind the children and gluing a broken wooden soldier, she felt as if her head were both huge and empty, like an immense toy ball. Sometimes she wanted to pound the walls and scream. Sometimes she did. This was not living, this was picking up after living. Women of all classes came to her for medical advice, for comfort or help when their drunken husbands beat them or their children, for advice on finances—but what could she do to enlarge her own life?

She felt so depressed that she imagined simply going to sleep and never getting out of bed again. Women did that. Doctors had fancy names for it, neurasthenia, whatever, but she thought it was just that the drudgery became too much and they could not endure going on for the rest of their lives like a mule bound to a mill turning round and round pulling a
heavy weight but never going anywhere. She looked into the faces of the women around her and she saw staring back at her the same bleak depression, the same exhaustion, the same sense of being imprisoned in a very tight place. She started to write an essay about women’s dress, to keep her mind alive, when baby Gat fell down the steep narrow stairway that led from the boys’ room. The doctor said he had brain fever and would not live, but she nursed him back to health. A daily, weekly, monthly, yearly round of repetitious, mind-numbing chores broken only by crises.

She loved her children, although she longed for a girl. She loved her children more than Henry and sometimes wondered if that should be so, but they did not fill her brain. She applied her intelligence to their upbringing, applied Graham’s ideas of loose clothing, exercise, healthy foods, firm beds and lots of fresh air. Gat might have a cold this week, but no child of hers had died yet. Her mother had lost half her children and grown so depressed she had taken to her bed for years. Henry and Elizabeth had named their house Grasmere, after Wordsworth’s house they had visited on their abolitionist honeymoon in England. But this Grasmere was not a place of high thought, lofty ambitions and excellent writing. It was a place of endless, tedious housework. Sometimes she muttered to herself in frustration, in rage that had to be contained: Was she not human too? Didn’t she have a brain? A will? Ideas? At least she used to.

The second year in her drafty white clapboard house on the river overlooking the stinking tannery, Lucretia came to visit. Elizabeth poured out her frustrations. They talked about the lives of women. Although her father had given her the house, it was not hers. If Henry left her, he could take the children, and if she earned or inherited any money, it was his. Men owned their children. Women who gave birth to them and raised them had no right to custody. A woman’s body belonged to her husband, no matter how brutal or syphilitic he might be. If a woman was raped, it was her disgrace. A woman giving birth out of wedlock could be imprisoned. She would certainly lose her job, even if her employer was the father and had forced himself on her. Few jobs were open to women—mostly domestic service, teaching children and prostitution. Churches preached obedience for women, no matter how stupid or how outrageous the behavior of the husband. Church and society demanded chastity from women. Men had sexual needs; women had children. The American Medical Association was conducting a war against women doctors and midwives, against women who provided contraception for other women or helped them abort unwanted pregnancies. The so-called regular doctors hated the
alternative medical practitioners, like Graham, like almost every woman in medicine. She believed in natural medicine, in water cures, in exercise, in herbal remedies, in healthy diet. Her three boys had caught malaria in May and she had nursed them back to health without benefit of any “regular doctors,” who would have bled them weak and purged them hollow.

Women were barred from almost all decent-paying professions. Women were exiled from society for missteps men committed with impunity and boasted about. No woman could vote, while any white male idiot had the right.

Lucretia folded her thin wrinkled hands together in her lap. “We have been talking about calling a meeting to discuss woman’s rights for eight years, Elizabeth. Do thee not think it is time to cease talking and writing long letters to each other, and finally to call such a meeting? Where do thee think it should be? Boston? Philadelphia? New York?”

“If I’m to organize it, it’ll have to be right here. I can’t haul my children or my household to a city.”

“Do thee think we could bring enough women to Seneca Falls to make such an event substantial?”

“The time is ripe. Women will come. You’ll see. It need not be large to have an effect. Forty women would be quite ample.”

Lucretia beamed at her. “Do thee know, Elizabeth, that thee are about the only female of my acquaintance who would not say,
I think
women will come, but who can make definite statements without waffling or blushing or hiding behind a man’s opinion. Therefore I believe we will make it happen.”

“But Lucretia, you have great confidence too. You have not lived an ordinary woman’s life.”

“I was born on Nantucket, where the men go to sea for years at a time chasing whales, and women run everything. Now let us fix a time for our meeting.”

“When? In the fall?” Somehow she would find the time to write an appeal.

“Right now. Or the time and opportunity will slip away. I leave in ten days to go back to my family. We’ll call it for next Saturday.”