Marmee & Louisa (29 page)

“Great rubbish!” nineteen-year-old Louisa said of “The Rival Painters” when it appeared in print on May 8, 1852.
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Without naming the author, she read it aloud to her mother and younger sisters. Only after her mother “praised it” did she triumphantly announce the author, “Louisa May Alcott!” This first success emboldened her to submit hundreds of poems and stories to periodicals, which purchased many of them for a few dollars each.
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In her mother’s eyes, Louisa was a “fine, bright girl [who] only needs encouragement to be a brave woman.” For her “literary treasures,” Abigail bought Louisa a new desk for Christmas. In private she remarked of Louisa, “I am inclined to think the approaching crisis in women’s destiny” arising from the equal rights movement “will find a place of no mean magnitude for her.”
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Abigail had long suspected that Louisa would do great things, although it was hard to imagine exactly what. One of Louisa’s jobs during their tenure on Pinckney Street, in 1853, was as a “second girl,” a resident domestic servant, in Leicester, Massachusetts, washing linens and clothes for two dollars a week, most of which she sent home.

At the end of 1852 Louisa joined two thousand others at the Music Hall in Boston to hear the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker lecture to “laborious young women.”
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Parker’s prayer, she told her mother, was “unlike any I had ever heard.” It was “not cold and formal as if uttered from a sense of duty, not a display of eloquence nor an impious directing of Deity in his duties toward humanity.”
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It sounded instead like a “quiet talk with God, as if long intercourse and much love had made it natural and easy for the son to seek the Father.” His phrase “Our Father and our Mother God” sounded “inexpressibly sweet and beautiful, seeming to invoke both power and love to sustain the anxious overburdened hearts of those who listened and went away to labor and to wait with fresh hope and faith.”

In Syracuse a few months earlier, while visiting the May family, the Reverend Parker had spent a day with Samuel Joseph at an Indian reservation in upstate New York where the latter was trying to establish a library and school. Parker wrote in his journal for February 2, 1852, “To-day I went with Sam Jo May—the best man in this world; and, if there are any better in the next, I shall be all the more glad when I get there—to see the Onondaga Indians. . . .
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Sam Jo is at work . . . for the Indians, and with the Indians . . . and will do much more.”

Samuel Joseph’s middle son, Joseph, who was three years younger than Louisa, entered Harvard College in 1853, following at least five generations of men in the family. Abigail and her daughters often hosted Joseph in a spare room on Pinckney Street, where Bronson referred to Joseph as “the Collegian.”
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There is no record of Louisa or her sisters remarking on the inequality of their educations and that of their male
cousin, which despite the idealistic efforts of their parents resembled the educational inequities of the previous generation. Louisa’s cousin Charlotte, however, did resent her younger brother. Joseph May was their “Mother’s undisguised favorite,” Charlotte told her daughters later.
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Charlotte’s education entailed a few years at Miss Bradbury’s school for girls in Syracuse and a year or two as a boarding student at the Lexington Normal School, where her father was once principal.
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The year her brother went to Harvard, Charlotte opened in Syracuse “one of those Peabody Sister schools” for boys and girls.
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“How do you like being a school marm?”
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Louisa asked her cousin in a letter that year. “Fascinating amusement is’nt [
sic
] it?” Charlotte mentioned that a boy in her class had asked her one day, “Would you ever play cards on Sunday, Miss May?” Sensing that he “wanted a direct answer but an answer that might require courage,” Charlotte had replied, “Why, yes, Ross, if I could give pleasure to a lovely or sad or sick old woman, I’d play cards on Sunday.” When Charlotte indicated in a letter to Louisa that she, too, wished she were rich, Louisa wrote back, “Dear Lottie don’t wish to be rich, for it cannot make you more kind and generous than you already are.”
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Louisa took a vacation from her labors and her “Pathetic Family,” as she now referred to them, at the end of the summer of 1853, when she and her mother traveled together to Syracuse. Louisa stayed a good deal longer than Abigail, who had to return to her younger daughters. In late September, when William Lloyd Garrison and his daughter arrived for a weekend at the May house, Louisa was planning to return to Boston with a care package that Lucretia was preparing for her son at Harvard. “Dear Jody,” Lucretia wrote to seventeen-year-old Joseph on September 29, “I have your bundle ready to go by Louisa, and I hope I have not forgotten any of the various articles you wished either of soft or hard ware.
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If I have notify me & the mistake shall be rectified. The saw you will not find, but I will send that by Mr. Garrison on Monday.”

Louisa must have indicated to Lucretia that Abigail needed more paying boarders, and that Joseph’s belongings prevented her renting his room when he was not there. “Do you suppose it is convenient for you to go to your aunt Abba’s on Saturday?” Lucretia suggested gently to Joseph.
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“Louisa says she has taken boarders, if so she may need all her rooms. I dare say after a while you will not care whether you go into the city or not.”

In addition to running a boardinghouse, Abigail had time to return to her long neglected passion: women’s rights. Women in several states were circulating petitions demanding suffrage and equal rights. At her desk on Pinckney Street in 1853 Abigail took up her pen to petition the Massachusetts legislature.

All women, residents of the Commonwealth, who have attained the full age of twenty-one years, shall be entitled to vote . . . [and] their votes shall be counted as of equal value and potency with those of men. . . .

On every principle of natural justice, as well as by the nature of our institutions, [woman] is as fully entitled as man to vote, and to be eligible to office. . . .

[O]urs is a government professedly resting on the consent of the governed. Woman is surely as competent to give that consent as man. . . . Our Revolution claimed that taxation and representation should be co-extensive. . . . Crowded now into few employments, women starve each other by close competition; and too often vice borrows overwhelming power of temptation from poverty. Open to women a great variety of employments, and her wages in each will rise; the energy and enterprise of the more highly endowed, will find full scope in honest effort, and the frightful vice of our cities will be stopped at its fountain-head.

She submitted her petition, signed by seventy-three women, her husband, brother, and cousin, Garrison, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips, the Reverend Theodore Parker, and many others, to the Massachusetts legislature. A legislative committee promptly rejected it, reasoning that only one percent of the state’s 200,000 women had supported this suffrage effort. Similar efforts in Wisconsin, Ohio, New York, and Indiana yielded similar results.
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Abigail knew that her efforts to give women the vote, even if they succeeded, would not benefit her. But they could benefit her daughters, who might someday hold property, support themselves, and vote or run for public office. “Keep up,” she often said to Louisa. “
Be
something in yourself.
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Let the world know you are alive!”

Not long after Abigail returned from Syracuse, Bronson headed
there himself, at the start of a lengthy trip to the American West. From this year on he traveled west every winter for three to six months, giving conversations as often as he could. This year, as would become his habit, he spent several weeks at the Mays’ “excellent” house in Syracuse, where Anna was still teaching and also studying German. “I have had some good hours with Sam and to profitable ends,” Bronson reported to Abigail, suggesting a gift of cash.
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Samuel Joseph invited Bronson to speak at his church, explaining, “I wish to promote your interests here.” He introduced Bronson to his friend Gerrit Smith, an abolitionist and philanthropist from Peterboro, New York, who had run as an antislavery candidate for president of the United States.
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Samuel Joseph’s reform work was expanding as the abolition and women’s rights movements grew. He and Garrison, Lucy Stone, Gerrit Smith, and Wendell Phillips had been conveners of the 1850 national women’s rights convention, in Worcester, Massachusetts, that nearly a thousand people attended. He, Stone, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton signed the call to the 1852 women’s rights convention in Syracuse, which he opened with a prayer. Samuel Joseph’s most controversial public act was the “Jerry Rescue” in 1851. Jerry was the nickname of William McHenry, a mulatto man who had lived and worked for years as a cooper in Syracuse after escaping from slavery in Missouri. But the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act prompted Syracuse authorities to arrest, shackle, and jail Jerry. That October Samuel Joseph, Gerrit Smith, and other local abolitionists arranged for thirty men to break into the police station, overwhelm the officers, free Jerry, and smuggle him to Kingston, Ontario. A small injury to a police officer during the raid became national news. Judges indicted May and several other leaders of the raid, but public opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act prevented any convictions.
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Every October from then on Samuel Joseph organized in downtown Syracuse a huge public celebration of “Jerry Rescue Day,” one reason that the city was known as a “laboratory of abolitionism, libel, and treason.”
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The first annual Jerry Rescue Day, in 1852, held in the railroad roundhouse after being banned from City Hall, was attended by three thousand people including Frederick Douglass, who stayed with the Mays.
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Bronson headed west from Syracuse at the end of 1853. Abigail, who heard nothing from him for weeks, feared he had died. When a letter from him finally arrived, she forwarded it to Anna in Syracuse with a
note: “I had really almost pined for some indication of his whereabouts, and no sign that he even lived since he left Syracuse. . . .
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He never can realize how much I love him. . . . Long after you and I dear Anna are gathered to . . . the great congregation, his name and excellencies will be monuments on the face of the earth, of priceless value to his descendants.” This was not the first or the last time she told her children of their father’s brilliance. It was Abigail’s habit to idolize her husband and imagine him superior to herself, especially when he was at a distance. She wrote to him in Cincinnati congratulating him on finding “a Cozy home [there] where Art, beauty and hospitality were all inmates.
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It is too good to believe. Enjoy it dear, all you can.”

In February Bronson returned from his western tour. Years later Louisa recalled the “dramatic scene” of his arrival in Boston. The doorbell woke her and her sisters and mother. Abigail jumped from her bed and “flew down” to the door, crying, “My husband!” Louisa and her sisters “rushed after, and five white figures embraced the half-frozen wanderer who came in hungry, tired, cold, and disappointed, but . . . serene as ever.” Only the youngest dared ask if he had made any money. With a “queer look” he opened his pocket-book and revealed one dollar. “Promises were not kept,” he said, “and travelling is costly, but . . . another year [I] shall do better.”

Louisa’s memory was somewhat faulty. In fact, Bronson returned to Boston with Anna, who was taking a break from her work in Syracuse to see her family. The recollected scene—of four girls and a loving wife racing to greet their brave father and husband—is more sentimental than the reality of two young women and a teenager greeting their twenty-two-year-old sister who lived elsewhere to help support them, while their haggard mother greeted their itinerant father. Like her mother, Louisa was proud. Appearances mattered to her. If the facts of her life embarrassed her, she would alter details to protect herself.

Throughout that winter and spring Louisa continued writing and marketing her stories. She earned more money now, sometimes fifty dollars a piece, and sold to larger publications, such as the
Saturday Evening Gazette
. The publisher George Briggs paid her more than thirty dollars (about $700 now) for a volume of the fairy tales and poems she had invented for the children in the Hillside barn,
Flower Fables,
to be printed and distributed at Christmastime. As often as possible Louisa retreated
to a desk in the quiet garret above the third floor of the house, a bowl of apples by her side.
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To keep warm she donned a heavy green and red wrap she called her “glory cloak” and a green silk cap with a red bow sewn for her by her mother.
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Louisa was relieved, she wrote to her cousin Charlotte, that Abigail had “at last retired from public life to the bosom of her family.
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If she would only repose there it would be highly agreeable, but she
wont
[
sic
] and tires herself most perseveringly. . . . We keep her toasting like a large muffin and luxuriating in the rest and quiet she is obliged to take.”

Louisa took another trip to Syracuse in June. “Cousin Louisa arrived safely at Colvin Hill at about 12 o’clock,” Lucretia informed Joseph in early June. “She was a good deal chilled & fatigued, I thought, but is brightening up and seems quite herself. We were all glad to see her . . . & grateful to any[one] who was willing to come to us, it has been so very lonely without your father & Bonnie [George],” who were in Boston. “They published in our daily [newspaper] that your father was absent, so the usual stream . . . have abstained from visiting us, which is a blessing not in disguise.”