The Scarlet Sisters (45 page)

A harsh eugenics warning from Tennie was followed by cries of “Hear! Hear!” from the thousands in Albert Hall: “Over a million children die every year before reaching the age of twelve months. They ought never to come into the world at all. We want to bring forth pure and healthy children, and then we shall not have to make war to kill off the mob of the unfit.” With appalling insensitivity, she said, “If they only killed off the unfit we would not mind, but when you have a war you take the flower of our flock. You take our best and healthiest children, while you leave the degenerates and the paupers to breed, and we have to pay the taxes for their keep.”

She remained serious about fighting to change marriage laws, and to get the vote, but she added an astonishing premise, given her feisty cries in the past: “We only want to put some decent men into Parliament… We do not wish to go there ourselves.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Last Acts

War made Tennie’s 1872 battle cry to be a Joan of Arc willing to fight in combat less revolutionary. In the slaughter of World War I, Tennie sought to mobilize in three months a combat-trained army of 150,000 British women “wearing khaki uniforms, just like men, with the possible addition of knee-length skirts.” Her Amazon Army was not ridiculed, and the
New York Times
wrote, “Lady Cook, pointing out the fact that the women would be the logical defenders when men were sent abroad, said ‘I am going to rouse the women of England to defend their homes, to resist invaders, fight for their homes, their honor, their children.” Britain had entered the war less than two weeks before, on August 4, 1914, in a mood of grand optimism that the fight would be over by Christmas. Tennie, who had rattled through a ravaged, war-torn country on a fortune-telling wagon as a teenager, was not so sure.

She started her mission by visiting Buckingham Palace and leaving a letter for Queen Mary: “Women have been brave in the past. We aren’t all dolls.” She praised the women for “knitting socks and doing Red Cross work,” but England also needed women trained in arms. The War to End All Wars soon brought home to Britain the horrors of modern combat: aerial bombs screaming from the sky, trench warfare slaughter. The Battle of the Somme, in 1916, still stands as an appalling bloodbath, with the British army alone suffering nearly sixty thousand casualties in one day of
the five-month siege. On the home front, British civilians were vulnerable to war’s new destruction: aerial bombardment. In 1917 a bombardment on London killed 162 civilians, 18 of them children, when one bomb hit a school.

Britain was never invaded, but the fear was palpable as the war dragged on. Tennie’s plan to arm women went nowhere, but British women did lobby for rifle training. Having no success with the male Home Defence forces, they were luckier when the Women’s Defence Relief Corps was organized. Despite a major outcry that women should be seen as “gentle mothers” who did not bear arms and were designed to “bear armies,” the Women’s Defence Relief Corps organized a semimilitary section of women trained in drills, marching, scouting, and the use of arms.

The sisters were pleased to see women finally taken seriously as an economic force, although both decried the war as the reason. They had lived to see a new era for women—in the United States, too, but especially in Great Britain. Some eighty thousand British women served in the forces as noncombatants, and nurses served in combat areas. The need for women in the workforce hastened the collapse of domestic service, as maids left in droves for radical new employment opportunities, becoming bus conductors and civil service clerks, joining trade unions, and working in munitions factories. However, employers circumvented wartime equal-pay regulations by employing several women to replace one man.

Although women found out after the war that they were dispensable and quickly replaced by returning veterans, Britain’s rigid class culture was dealt a blow, and in 1918, two years before the United States, British women got the vote, albeit for women age thirty and older. When asked if the age should be lowered, Victoria said that twenty-five would be low enough. Tennie never gave up her fight for women’s rights and in old age was honored by younger as well as older suffragettes, who stood around her as she sat in the center of a group of them for a photograph, wearing a wide suffragette sash. Although American citizens, the sisters elected to stay in England throughout the war. Victoria hated the war, but as a supporter of Anglo-American alliance, she was deeply upset that the United
States stayed out until 1917. When the troops did arrive, she wrote, “Night after night, as I hear the rumble of the trains bearing the American boys to the front my heart turns—to the mothers who sent them, some to return, some to stain the earth with their blood freely given.”

She sat in her study in Norton Park scrawling on scraps of paper her vivid and strong reactions. She “hoped to live until I could see… England’s victory over savagery.” She slashed her pages with underlines as she penned eloquent antiwar sentiments, written in such a rush of anger that she no longer cared about misspellings: “The Christmas bells can no longer ring out the message ‘Peace on earth and good will to men.’ Is it not hell on earth and death to men?—Is it not time to take stock of our souls
and
question the environment that led us blindfolded into this awful slaughter…? What is this awful quarel [
sic
]
over
? When the roar of cannon is heard
no
more, then hearts that have given loved ones on the alter [
sic
] of slaughter will demand an answer.… The Church… has outlived its funcion [
sic
]… You are no longer your brothers [
sic
] keeper. He is toiling up the hill of investigation, blood stained and rebellious. No sophistry will answer what made this
hell
on earth possible.”

At war’s end, critics echoed her views. President Wilson admitted that the war happened “because Germany was afraid her commercial rivals were going to get the better of her.” Warren G. Harding successfully rode into the White House on this message: “From the very beginning it was a lie to say this was a war to make the world safe for democracy.”

Illness finally caught up with Tennie. In 1916 she wrote to Victoria, hoping to leave London: “My darling Sister, I want to come and stay with you at once and stay a good while, with whom should I love to be but yourself, when all the years of our youth we were so much to each other. We must be so now towards [either the “evening” or “ending”] of our lives.”

It is unknown if she visited Victoria, but two years later she wrote a letter dated November 19, 1918. She requested that Victoria send someone to help her for a day or two and then “bring me right on down to you for there is no where I shall be so happy as with you. I must stay sometime
with you & get thoroughly better.” Now without raids, “there is nothing to fear with the war being over thanks [
sic
] God.”

Whether Victoria, who had just turned eighty, ignored her sister’s pleas is not known. Tennie did not have someone like Zula to collect her memorabilia; therefore few letters written
to
Tennie remain. Tennie sent a telegram on September 4, 1919:
YOU & I MUST HOLD TOGETHER IN OUR OLD AGE. WE HAVE FEW OTHER PLEASURES LEFT NOW BUT OUR LOVE FOR ONE ANOTHER & OUR MEMORIES OF THE PAST
.

Then came Tennie’s frightening letter, a year later, in 1920, about her fistula and another operation. Her writing was now a difficult scribble. Age and illness had all but obliterated the fun and fancy-free woman of another time. The doctor “was annoyed to think I had got up today. Says I must not leave the house for several days now… I am very feeble and thinking more of my health and meeting my God.”

Tennie hung on until the beginning of 1923, dying on January 18, at the age of seventy-seven. She was not with Victoria, dying suddenly while visiting her grandniece Lady Beecham at the home of Sir Thomas Beecham. Her obituary in the
New York Times
twinned the sisters as “the most widely-known women in the country fifty years ago.” It retraced the familiar milestones with a sarcastic edge: “They dabbled in spiritualism, took up finance, and with the supposed aid of Commodore Vanderbilt founded a brokerage house in Broad Street, sponsored eugenics and equal rights, and generally impressed themselves on the public. Then they both went to England and married men with large fortunes.” Even in death, Tennie could not escape dismissive smirking in a paper that had hounded her and Victoria a half century before. The
Times
quoted extensively and unfairly banker Henry Clews’s scathing comments about Tennie. Slightly kinder in March, the
Times
described her as a “woman writer and pioneer of woman’s suffrage,” noting that she left property valued at £149,540, worth millions today. Tennie left no will, granting letters of administration to Victoria. Polly Sparr argued that she was an heir. There is no record of what Victoria Woodhull did with her sister’s fortune.

Unsigned jottings in family archives mentioned that Tennie would be
“buried at Norwood in the Cook’s vaults.” The writer wished to reassure others that Tennie did not suffer: “very peaceful & happy & talked so sincerely & lovingly of Mrs. Martin” (Victoria). The intriguing mystery is to whom the next sentence was referring. The note stated that Tennie’s grandniece and dear friend Lady Beecham “will see that message is put with Lady Cook.” Who still living was so close that a message would be placed in the casket with Tennie? It seems likely it was Victoria who had once written to Tennie so passionately, “I have loved thee with an everlasting love; with a love that passeth understanding. Your sister Victoria.”

Victoria continued to foster Anglo-American alliances, flying both flags and meeting with English and American dignitaries who gladly visited the
grande dame
at her country estate. Her hostile treatment by the villagers had long evaporated, and she was praised for her beneficence, despite her aloofness. She had transferred her love of automobiles to the airplane. She announced she would give $5,000 to the first man or woman who flew across the Atlantic. Charles Lindbergh made his solo flight just weeks before she died, with no time for a reward from the ailing Victoria.

To the end, Victoria was unquestionably a seeker of knowledge, an eclectic hoarder of the written word: scraps, snippets, scrawls, poems, biblical passages; gushingly sentimental sayings mingled with bitter comments and some surprisingly witty observations, given her few excursions into humor. One spoke to her bitter treatment by writers: “It is well to remember that a dead diarist is also a dead liarist.” She remained loyal to eugenics, clipping a sermon in which the pastor said he would marry only people who produced a doctor’s certificate that stated they were free of venereal disease. And Spiritualism: “No where in the Bible does God condemn genuine seership… A knowledge of psychic phenomena is therefore the key to the understanding of the bible.”

She collected lofty phrases that she felt pertained to her: “Martyrs today and heroes tomorrow.” And underlined: “noble souls are sacrificed to ignoble man.” Her love of mankind in her progressive phase seemed
gone, according to this salty phrase: “Many people are not human beings. They are conditions, if they were my books I would discard
them
.”

Victoria lashed out at family, perhaps both Claflins and Martins who had snubbed her. Save for Robert Holland-Martin, the nephew with whom she was close, there had been little communication. “I give all my shares and interests in the Martins [B]ank to my daughter Zula Maud Woodhull, to use as she wishes. I hope that
none
of what the
world calls family will
in any
way
make her any trouble or annoyance as she has
no
sympathy or desire to have them take any part in her life.”

As she aged, Victoria grew more eccentric, refusing to shake hands as she obsessed about “microbes” dragged into houses by trailing skirts. She slept upright in a chair. She could be dictatorial with Zula, but upon her death, her daughter sobbed a tribute to a “darling” mother “who was comrade and friend… My heart is desolate… to go on is a terrible problem… it is like awakening on a different planet… where for am I called upon to endure this agony. I cannot reason with my heart.”

Victoria outlived her enemies. She died in her sleep on June 9, 1927, having lived eighty-eight years, eight months, and sixteen days. As she requested, her ashes were scattered at sea, to symbolize the alliance of the two countries across the ocean. Stabs at an autobiography went unfinished, and Zula, who lived until 1940, never completed the task. (Zula’s last burden, Byron, ended with his death in 1932.)

Nor had the sisters penned their collaboration. Yet in death they were twinned once again. In Victoria’s obituary, Tennie got top billing in the London
Times
, which stressed her marriage to Sir Francis and praised her “vigorous championship of what used to be called women’s rights.” Exaggerations included Tennie’s studying “law, medicine, and surgery and finance and banking.” The
Times
article astoundingly positioned Victoria as one who “contented herself with banking” and later “scientific agriculture.” She was characterized second as an orator: “like her sister, she became an excellent platform speaker.” There was no mention in the
Times
article of Victoria’s bid for the presidency, nor of Henry Ward
Beecher and the scandal that had so consumed America a half century before and had led to the sisters’ astonishing final chapter in England.

Among Victoria’s scrawled notes was a rare sentence of self-examination: “My life has been a long struggle to do right to the best of my ability, and God knows, if I have failed in many things, no one regrets it more than I
do
.” In another sentence she is not far afield from her long-ago spirit guide expressions in the Tilton biography of her: “From my early childhood,” she felt herself “being lifted above the earthy conditions by which I found myself.” She called herself a “faithful servant” who never penned the opus that would “put me right before the world & for the coming generation.”