Sex Wars (5 page)

“Until you get slammed down again,” Sammy muttered.

“You get knocked down, you get back up. Nobody’s going to help you up. Except if you have a good partner and good friends and a good family. Then somebody will help you. Otherwise, if you fall and you don’t get up, you’ll be stepped on, you’ll be run over and die in the street. Understand me?”

“I got no family.”

“Ah, but you have something better. Me.” She clapped him on the back. “I will find Shaineh, I swear it. But now we got to figure out how to get my money back out of this stupid piece of paper.” She touched the money order in her bosom. She would not let go of it for anything till it was turned into real money. Gold coins, not paper money. Until then, she would sleep with it, she would eat with it, she would wear it to work. It was her future and Shaineh’s and Sammy’s too. Their future in a single piece of paper.

M
ONDAY MORNING EARLY,
Henry Stanton caught the train for the city. In Elizabeth’s spacious house in Tenafly, New Jersey, there was a room for her husband, but it was far easier when he stayed at the flat in Manhattan. Once their parting embrace would have been passionate. Now they spoke a lukewarm goodbye, she waved perfunctorily and returned to her breakfast.

“Has Mr. Stanton gone?” Susan stuck her head around the corner, ready to retreat. Susan preferred when Henry wasn’t around. He demanded too much of Elizabeth’s energy, and since his misconduct in the customs office, Susan had allowed her contempt for him to burgeon. Susan’s family, the Anthonys, were Hicksite Quaker, unyielding in their moral views.

“Gone to the city. He won’t come out again for a couple of weeks.” Elizabeth took another pastry from the platter Amelia had set out. Amelia was more friend than servant, a Quaker woman who had been her housekeeper for a quarter century.

Susan grasped her hand. Elizabeth glared. Susan’s bony hand was tight around her more fleshy wrist. “Mrs. Stanton!” Susan employed that starchy formality even when they were alone, in spite of their twenty-five years of intimate friendship, often sharing Elizabeth’s house. “You must not gain more weight.”

“I enjoy my food. Heaven knows how we fight battles every single day, every week, every month, every year, every decade… You’re badgering me about food the way you used to badger me about the conjugal bed.”

“Every time Mr. Stanton bothered to come home, you’d end up expecting again. Why couldn’t you abstain? For a moment of pleasure, you once again plunged yourself into an exhausting round of child-rearing.”

“I enjoyed it, Susan. I was still in love with him. I liked making love with him. I didn’t wish anything to interfere…” She could never make Susan understand how crazy she had been for Henry—her knight—full of courage, facing down mobs of pro-slavery zealots, fighting passionately for abolition. He had been tall and handsome with a resonant voice, a fine speaker. If now he was shopworn with bad political compromises, she could still remember when he had seemed the epitome of bravery. “I liked motherhood, or I wouldn’t have had so many. Anyhow, there’s never been a woman so happy to reach menopause. Not that I ever had trouble in childbirth till the last. The midwife used to say I dropped babies like a mother cat birthing kittens.”

Susan made a sour face. “You took more care with your children than that!”

Amelia came in with some darning. She winked at Elizabeth from behind Susan’s narrow back, laying a letter on the table. “This came for thee, Susan.”

Elizabeth grabbed it, for the address was printed Susan Bitch Anthony. Another hate letter. They both got enough of them. She tore it in two and tossed it with good aim into the wastebasket. “I just meant the birthing.” Neighbor women in Seneca Falls—even the Irishwomen down the hill among the factories and tanneries—used to come to her for remedies for whooping cough and colic. She never lost a child. She crossed her arms over her full bosom, smiling. She did not know another mother who had not lost babies or children, including her own mother, half of whose children had died. She had not minded being the one who knew best, the woman who had mastered running a household and rearing healthy bright offspring.

Susan frowned. “Yes, you can always call on your authority as a respectable married woman, mother of a tribe.”

“Well, she’s been a good mother to them all,” Amelia said. She didn’t interrupt often, for she had the Quaker sense that she should not speak unless the spirit moved her. She was a quiet but strong presence in the house. “She can love with clear eyes that see what each one needs.”

Elizabeth patted Susan’s shoulder. “My dear, don’t let them get to you when they call you an old maid. You have your freedom, the way I never had for all those years of choking domesticity—years I’d never have survived without you. I simply would have exploded with frustration and rage and you’d have had to scrape pieces of my innards off the ceiling. And the truth is, Susan, you’d have made a perfect wife if you’d wanted. You had proposals.”

Susan let that thin but warm smile of hers spread across her face. “We’ve always helped each other. You’re the brains, Mrs. Stanton. I’m but your mouthpiece.”

That was how it had been for many years, but Elizabeth had observed now that she could travel after a decade housebound in Seneca Falls, she was the better speaker. She could sway a crowd more easily than Susan could. Time after time, they would make the same points, and people would say they agreed with Elizabeth and disagreed with Susan. She knew she came across as motherly and warm, that she had the ability to think of a little witticism in the moment. Susan, who was kind and generous to a fault, never had been able to joke on her feet or tell the anecdote that made something real to people—unless Elizabeth in writing her speech inserted stories. But Susan had the organizational talents she lacked—the ability to sit endlessly in committee meetings, to steer proposals through the maze of subcommittees, to disagree without causing rancor and continue pushing for her agenda without seeming strident. Susan had her own genius. Susan could function in an organization behind the scenes as Elizabeth never could.

Susan rose and walked to the windows, open to the May morning and the garden. The scent of lilacs drifted in. Bees were humming in the honeysuckle outside and Elizabeth could hear mourning doves roo-coo-cooing in the big maples. “We must do something to move things forward. Our movement’s stalled like a carriage in the mud.” Susan paced as if consumed by her own energy.

“Let’s go out to the porch.” As they strolled toward the door, Elizabeth snagged the pastry. Susan was thin as a pole, but Elizabeth enjoyed her girth. She felt her appearance was more grandmotherly and thus less threatening because she was plumpish—with curly hair and a great laugh—a useful façade for a lifelong revolutionary. She had been a flirt in her younger days, and she still carried herself with that ease, the confidence of someone often called charming.

For a few moments they rocked in silence, looking at the side garden
where a smattering of jonquils were still in bloom among bloodred and white tulips. This house was twice the size of hers in Seneca Falls—two full stories and a smaller third story, with six pillars in front. It was not one of the fashionable carpenter Gothic houses going up all around her but simple and grand in an older style. Susan was frowning. “We should never have agreed to amalgamate the Woman’s Rights Society with the Anti-Slavery Society. We thought we were all for universal suffrage, but they have other priorities. Once again they’re pushing women to the end of the line—telling us to be patient, forever and ever, amen.”

For two decades Elizabeth and Susan had given their energy, their passion to abolition. “I supported Wendell for president of the society. I intend to remind him at the convention.” Elizabeth folded her arms and sniffed the lilacs. Somehow that scent was the same color as the flowers, lilac indeed. Wendell Phillips had been a friend and ally since 1840, at the anti-slavery convention in London, when he had supported the women’s desire to be seated as delegates. That defeat had been Elizabeth’s first awakening to her situation as a woman. Wendell was a handsome man who liked women and she got on with him. She was convinced she could get him to support woman suffrage.

“You’re far more impressed by Wendell Phillips than I am, Mrs. Stanton.”

“He’s of old Brahmin stock, but he’s given his all to anti-slavery. Let’s see if he pays his debt to us. I swear on the heads of my children, Susan, I won’t let our sex be put off this time.”

“This meeting is crucial…” Susan turned to beam at her. Her face could soften remarkably. At such moments, she was almost handsome. “Well, are you going to address my typographers? Have you made up your mind yet?”

Susan was organizing the women typographers into a union. “If you really want me to.”

“Why do you let Henry come out here?” Susan returned to the earlier point of disagreement between them, in her dogged way.

Susan would never understand the bond between them that, frayed as it was, made her forgiving. “I’ve had seven children with him. I’m financially independent finally. We live separately. What good would it do to create a fuss?”

“You should never have married him to begin with.”

“I hadn’t met you or Lucretia then. I was living with my father, who wouldn’t let me do anything political.” After she’d addressed the New York
legislature on married women’s rights, he never forgave her for speaking in public, calling her a harridan. He had only reinstated her in his will shortly before he died. “Henry was the breadwinner then—not that he ever earned a lot of bread.” She laughed. Even the house in Seneca Falls on the outskirts of town overlooking the tanneries and mills—a plain house she had come to loathe for its isolation—was only theirs because her father had paid for it. “I can’t imagine life without my children. Sometimes I’ve wanted to run away from them and the constant problems and chores. But I never did and I never will. They give me great pleasure. They tether me to the wheel of life.”

“You could do with a little less tethering.”

Susan was capable of passionate friendship but had never really been in love. It was not that Susan lacked domestic virtues. She could cook and clean and sew and manage a household, if not as well as Elizabeth—who was not convinced anybody could do it as well—then sufficiently to fill in. How often Susan had come and taken over so she would be free to write a speech or a paper making their position on some issue clear. If it had not been for Susan, how would she have endured her marriage, really? Henry was never around when she needed him. He had not been present during the birth of any of their seven children. He loved to travel, so he arranged his life to spend vast amounts of time doing it. He always seemed to find work that required him to be elsewhere. And elsewhere he had usually been, until the scandal in the Customs House forced his resignation from his last grasp at public life. He missed the limelight now. He had a minor position at the
Sun,
writing about politics, and a small law practice in the city. He was jealous of her fame, but she ignored that.

No, she had been married to Susan as well as Henry all those years. Susan had given her the support she needed when she felt as if her brain would burst her skull with the tedium of cooking meals for a big family every day, managing the scant help, dealing with laundry and sicknesses, creating her own medicines and poultices and salves, bringing in and putting up fruit from their orchard, sewing for an army, cleaning and cleaning and cleaning and cleaning again. Indeed, Henry without ever acknowledging it had been married to Susan too, for Susan had run his household when Elizabeth couldn’t—something the children understood, who had grown up calling her Aunt Susan and giving her the love she had always given them. Susan and she had their disagreements, but Elizabeth never doubted they were far stronger together than separate. When they both agreed, they were always right.

Now her youngest Robbie was screaming, so Elizabeth trotted in search of him. He was nine. He had been huge at his birth—twelve and a half pounds—and he was still big for his age. Big and awkward. He had been climbing in a weeping willow tree and had fallen. She examined him quickly with a practiced hand for injuries. “You didn’t break anything. You’ll have a big purple bruise on your knee. A comfrey poultice and you’ll feel like new. Come.”

He was badly shaken from the fall. She put him on the sofa in the back parlor wrapped in a quilt she had sewn with women friends back in Seneca Falls, and set him up with a jigsaw puzzle of
Washington Crossing the Delaware.
She never made the boys ashamed to cry, although Henry had tried. Venting emotions was good for both sexes. Her own emotions—anger, love, passion—were the engine that drove her through all the obstacles an unjust society could throw in a woman’s path.

Susan left for the city and the washing began. Amelia had already fired up the boiler, so the water for the linens was hot. They took turns stirring the suds into the water and then stirring the load with a huge wooden paddle. Amelia started the bluing cooking on the coal stove while Elizabeth rinsed the first two loads. They had a hand wringer that got most of the water out of the less delicate things—the sheets, towels, tablecloths, underclothes, towels, rags. Then Amelia joined her and they hung the damp clothes on lines from the back of the house to the carriage house—not that they had a carriage, but the family occupying the house before her had. They would get done as much as they could today, then resume tomorrow.

Finally the next evening, she sat at the dining room table to begin the speech for the women typographers. Amelia was still ironing. Elizabeth passionately hated ironing, especially the goffering iron that was needed for all the ruffles and little tucks. Four different irons were used for all the linens and clothes. She would focus on the economic disadvantages of women. Yes, and she would talk about divorce and child custody. Some suffragists—the Boston ladies in particular—seemed afraid of working-class women. Elizabeth liked them. Susan was actually more ladylike than she had ever been. Elizabeth was made of coarser, more earthy stuff and understood women’s physical needs and desires while longing for a world in which they could achieve fuller expression without danger, without fear, without condemnation. She had always liked her body and felt at home in it, enjoying the pleasures of the flesh, enjoying riding and dancing. Susan was abstemious by nature. Elizabeth did not want a life of bread and water and stones.

When she’d first been with Henry, they had been disciples of Graham, who advocated loose clothing, cold rooms, lots of exercise, whole grains and avoiding meat and fats. He also advocated sex no more than twelve times a year. They had not stayed on Graham’s program long. The porridge and whey routine had gone out the window, but she retained her belief in fresh air, exercise and loose clothing. She had worn the bloomer costume for two years, but she found that no one could hear what she was saying for the commotion a woman wearing pants seemed to cause. Reluctantly she abandoned its comfort.