A Proper Pursuit (10 page)

“Speaking of family, may I ask you a question, Aunt Agnes? Everyone commented on my skin tone, which is quite unlike my father’s. Did I inherit my dark coloring from my mother, by any chance?”

“We will not discuss your mother, Violet Rose, under any circumstances. Do not mention her ever again.”With that, Aunt Agnes’ lips drew closed in disapproval, as if they were attached to an invisible drawstring.

Once again I had encountered a wall of silence from my relatives. I was beginning to wonder if there was more to my mother’s story than I had imagined.

Chapter

7

Friday, June 9, 1893

V
iolet … Violet!”

I opened my eyes to find Aunt Matt standing alongside my bed, whispering my name in an urgent voice. I sat up in alarm.

“What’s wrong?”

“You need to get up and get dressed, quickly.We don’t have much time.”

I swung my legs out of bed and sniffed the air. I had been dreaming about the Great Fire again, and I expected to smell smoke. Instead, I smelled bacon.

“Not much time? To do what, Aunt Matt?”

“There’s going to be a march today, and I think you should see it. Your father is dead set against my work, and he told Florence and Agnes to keep you well away from it, but Florence left for the settlement house and won’t be home until this afternoon.”

I stared at her sleepily, trying to digest her words.

“Well, come on. Why are you wasting time? Don’t you want to come with me and help shape the future for all women?”

“Yes, of course. I’d love to go with you.” Especially if my father had forbidden it. I was still angry with him for lying to me and for bringing Maude O’Neill into our lives. Besides, if I armed myself with Aunt Matt’s ammunition, perhaps I could scare Maude away by myself.

I climbed out of bed and opened the doors to my wardrobe. What did one wear to a march for women’s rights? I couldn’t recall ever studying that in school. I decided to take my cue from Aunt Matt’s prim attire and chose a long, dark gray skirt and a highcollared white shirtwaist. I pinned up my long hair in a tight bun. But when I came downstairs, Aunt Matt was so focused on the upcoming battle that I don’t think she would have noticed if I were wearing only my muslin undergarment.

“Do you want breakfast?” she asked. “There isn’t time for it, but I suppose if you’re really hungry I can find you a hard-boiled egg.”

After feasting on sugary tea cakes and watercress sandwiches the past two days with Aunt Agnes, I could see that the battle for women’s rights was going to involve great personal sacrifice.

“No, thank you, Aunt Matt. I’m not hungry.”

“Good. Let’s go, then.”

I barely had time to pin on a straw boater hat before we marched out the front door. I had a hard time keeping up with my aunt as she charged down the block to the nearest streetcar stop. I should have worn sturdier shoes. Thank goodness I hadn’t laced my corset very tightly.

“Now the first thing I want you to do,” Aunt Matt said when we reached the streetcar stop, “is to forget everything you were taught in that ridiculous finishing school you attended.Women aren’t silly, delicate creatures, incapable of grasping intelligent ideas. They are not the weaker sex. The act of childbearing alone should tell you how strong we are. Women are perfectly capable of going to the same universities as men and getting an identical education. There is already a school for women physicians, and someday women will be scientists and judges and company presidents too.”

My facial expression must have revealed my shock and disbelief because she quickly added, “I doubt if I’ll see it my lifetime, but why not, Violet? It isn’t a question of ability—it’s a question of opportunity. Women aren’t going to tolerate being tied down much longer.”

Her words reminded me of my mother. Father said she had hated her life, hated being tied down. Could this be what he’d meant?

A streetcar approached, the horses’ hooves clopping noisily and raising a cloud of brown dust. We climbed aboard and Aunt Matt paid our fares. I waited until we were seated and the streetcar had lurched forward before asking, “Is that why my mother left us? My father said that she felt tied down.”

“I really couldn’t say. But I doubt if she left in search of educational opportunities.” I detected scorn in Aunt Matt’s tone.

“Then why did she leave?”

My aunt gave an impatient wave. “Listen, you aren’t paying attention to the bigger picture, Violet. That’s what I’m trying to show you. Our individual lives as women aren’t nearly as important as the overall movement.”

“Will this march take long? I’m afraid that if Aunt Agnes comes—”

“Too bad for her. She had you all week, and now it’s my turn. I want you to see that there are alternatives to the life my sister has planned for you. You don’t need a husband in order to be fulfilled as a woman.”

“Are you against marriage?”

“Certainly not. There are some very good men in the world who treat their wives as equals. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s husband is one of them. But marriage is not for me. I see no reason to surrender my independence for a life of servitude.”

“Aunt Birdie says I should marry for love.”

“I suppose it’s possible. She and Gilbert did seem to love each other. But who knows what sort of a husband he would have turned out to be over the years if he had lived.”

I suddenly realized that I should be paying attention to where we were going and watching the street signs we passed. I needed to learn my way around the city if I ever hoped to find my mother’s address on my own. It had been impossible to see any signposts at all when riding inside Aunt Agnes’ carriage.

“Every married woman is an actress,” Aunt Matt continued. “Each time she’s with her husband it’s as if she is onstage, playing the part that he expects her to play. The only time she can stop acting is when he leaves the stage.”

I thought of the act I had been taught to play, the delicate art of flirtation I had rehearsed with Nelson Kent the other day. Would I have to continue acting, continue smiling enigmatically even after I was married?What if I could never be myself again, reading detective novels and letting my imagination run wild? The thought made me shudder.

“But I want you to understand, Violet, that if you do marry, it should be to someone who allows you to be your own person, not his ornament or prize. Let me ask you this: do you enjoy all that socializing and calling-card folderol that you do with Agnes? Do you really want to get married and be like those women, serving tea and gossiping for the rest of your life?” My grandmother had asked a similar question.

“I confess that I did find it a little boring when we discussed the weather for twenty minutes. But Aunt Agnes says we’re going to attend cultural events too. And book discussions.”

“Book discussions,” Matt said derisively. “Those women should read something with substance, like Mary Wollstonecraft’s masterpiece,
A Vindication of the Rights of Women
.”

I didn’t say so, but I couldn’t picture Aunt Agnes’ crowd delving into a book with such a formidable title. “What is it about?” I asked.

“Mary Wollstonecraft was years ahead of her time. She wrote that book one hundred years ago, in 1792. She said it was time for women to rise up and revolt against the status quo—the way our ancestors rebelled during the revolution. The patriots protested against taxation without representation. But do you realize that, as a woman, I’m forced to pay taxes on my home, yet I cannot vote for the man who imposed those taxes?”

“That doesn’t seem fair.”

“Of course it isn’t fair. As one woman in the suffrage movement has said, ‘I don’t know what women’s rights are, but I have suffered under a sense of women’s wrongs.’ ”

People were getting on and off the streetcar as Aunt Matt lectured, and at times the car became quite crowded. She paid no attention to the other passengers, nor did she seem to care if anyone overheard the controversial things she was saying. Her booming voice was filled with righteous indignation as she lectured me.

I was listening so intently to my aunt’s speech that I almost missed the signpost as the streetcar rumbled past LaSalle Street. That was it! LaSalle was the name of the street where my mother lived. It would be easy for me to retrace my steps and find it again. All I had to do was board the same streetcar, ride it straight to LaSalle, and get off. I could figure out which direction to turn on LaSalle once I got there, but hopefully it wouldn’t be a long walk to my mother’s house from the intersection.

“Are you paying attention, Violet?” Aunt Matt asked. I had swiveled around in my seat to get a good look at the street, but I quickly turned back again.

“Yes, Aunt Matt. Please go on. It’s very interesting.”

“Thousands of women became involved in the abolition movement before the War Between the States, and we worked very hard to bring an end to slavery. It was easy for us to sympathize with the slaves, you see. We understand what it’s like to be considered inferior and to be denied all of the privileges that white men take for granted.

“Then the Fifteenth Amendment was passed, allowing Negro
men
to vote—but the women who had fought so hard to help them win that right were left out! The new amendment stated that no one could be denied the right to vote on the basis of race, color, or the fact that he was previously a slave. It said absolutely nothing about gender. Now tell me, Violet: If it was wrong for a Negro man to be held in bondage, to be considered the property of a white man, then why is it all right for a woman to be enslaved to her husband? To be considered his property? For her wages to go to him?”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I admitted. The more I listened to Aunt Matt, the easier it was to understand why she always looked so furious. I was starting to clench my fists too.

“Another of our leaders, Susan B. Anthony, made up her mind to register to vote in Rochester, New York, along with her sister and several friends. Of course the men tried to intimidate them, but on election day, Miss Anthony and sixteen other registered women cast their votes. The U.S. Chief Marshal served her with a warrant, charging her with voting illegally. The court fined her one hundred dollars. She refused to pay it. That was twenty-one years ago, and she still hasn’t paid. Miss Anthony is the current president of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association, by the way—at the age of seventy-three.”

“What’s the point of women voting?” I asked.

“What’s the point!”

I knew by her look of horror that I’d asked the wrong question. “Madame Beauchamps told us that it isn’t feminine for women to take an interest in politics,” I quickly explained.

“What?”

I lowered my voice to a near whisper after my aunt’s shout drew stares. “Madame said that ladies needed to know only enough about politics and things like that to attract a man’s interest. She said men didn’t like women who were too intelligent.”

“Lies! Male propaganda!” she sputtered. “What a horrible thing to teach impressionable young girls! How could your father send you to such a ridiculous institution? He’s just like all the other men, trying to keep women in subjection! I don’t suppose they taught you anything about modern science or mathematics or …”

My aunt was raving. I knew she didn’t expect me to reply, so I didn’t. Besides, I was busy trying to sink down in my seat to avoid being noticed.

“I can see that you’ll require an entirely revised education,” she continued. “The question is where to begin? You’ve obviously been wrongfully indoctrinated already. But you seem very bright, Violet. Have you ever thought of furthering your education?”

“I have a high-school diploma,” I replied. I remembered all the hard work it had required to balance books on my head and to memorize names, and I added, “I graduated from Madame Beauchamps’ School for—”

“Not that moronic place! I mean a real college, where women are allowed to learn alongside men, studying the sciences and so forth, not how to bat your eyelashes and flutter your fan.”

I felt hurt that she would insult my school. But in truth, I had been terribly bored there. My friend Ruth and I hated all of the restrictions we faced as “proper young ladies.” And so we had rebelled by covertly reading detective stories and dime novels.
“If I were a
man,”
I often told Ruth,
“and I could be anything I wanted to be, I
think I would become a detective.”

“I must show you the Woman’s Pavilion at the World’s Columbian Exposition,” Aunt Matt said. “All of the planning, as well as the daily operation, has been under the guidance of the Board of Lady Managers. Even the building was designed by a female architect, Sophia Hayden.” Aunt Matt pulled herself to her feet as the streetcar slowed to a halt. “Come, Violet. This is where we get off.”

We stepped off the streetcar and walked two blocks to where a crowd of women had gathered outside a brick building. A sign above the storefront read:
Women’s Suffrage Headquarters
. A second sign in the window read:
Come in and learn why women ought to vote
.

“Hurry,” Aunt Matt said, tugging me by the arm. “The speeches are about to start.”