TWENTY-FOUR
Shaping
1876
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Purposefulness: Abigail hadn’t realized how important having a goal was in keeping one balanced and able to pick back up after challenges and change. The first half of the seventies whizzed by, with Abigail helping found the Oregon State Women’s Suffrage Association and hiring Kate full time to be the editor of her paper so she could travel, interview, investigate, and write and send back news. She missed the buying trips to see Shirley Ellis in San Francisco, but Clara Belle traveled alone for purchasing stock and also managed the millinery. Abigail sometimes took the youngest boys with her to remind everyone that she was a “strong-minded mother” and not just a “risk-taking, outspoken businesswoman,” as some detractors wrote.
In 1876 she set out to visit New York City and be in Philadelphia for Centennial Day, where the national suffrage association had numerous plans to present women voter proclamations to the president. She’d said her goodbyes to her children and boarded a stage heading east. The venture cost money, yes, but she’d have ample copy for several issues of NNW (as she often abbreviated her newspaper now), and she was touring and speaking in Idaho, Utah, Iowa, and her home state of Illinois on the way.
“I’m hesitant to have you up on stages so far away,” Ben told her as he carried her carpetbag to the carriage.
“You know there’ll be like-minded men with their wives and sisters at the meeting houses. I’ll be fine.” She kissed him discreetly as he helped lift her up and gently settled her on the leather seat. He handed her the cane she used, a piece of bone for the head he’d attached to it, smooth in her hand. “I’ll imagine you on the sideline.”
“I’ll be praying for you anyway.”
“I know.”
Public speaking invigorated, and she’d managed to convince Ben that such an activity was necessary in these times to both extend the cause of women’s rights and to increase subscriptions and gain renewals. “Those poor women out there selling the paper see my speaking as both a stimulation and reward for their efforts. I can’t let them down.”
Her first event in Idaho challenged her position. Mid introduction to her speech, she felt a thump on her chest scarf and then another on her jaw. Audience shouts interrupted, and she realized she’d been egged by angry women who felt she was overstepping her domestic bounds.
Shouts and “Calm down” and “Shame” from both sides of the aisle rose up. She lifted her hands as though giving a benediction and said, “Let them speak. Then I will.” She heard the hecklers out, then said, “My commitment as wife and mother are not strained or impaired by my presentations here. I’m the mother of six, remember, and have a daughter who has waited to marry if she ever does, choosing instead to give music lessons and to operate a millinery. I’ve not hurt my family one iota.”
Several men began to escort the egg throwers out, but Abigail urged them to wait. She wiped her chin and neck of the scum, hoping not to ruin the hand-crocheted edging on the handkerchief she used. Clara Belle had done the fine needlework. “My husband approves and supports my efforts, for he sees that women and girls are kept in bondage by the laws preventing them from voting, from helping them define their own destinies—as well as how domestic duties can prevent men and women from moving forward. He has always helped with laundry, for example, inventing a washing machine any number of men here might purchase for their wives and mothers.”
“Here! Here!” she heard a man shout out. Several applauded.
“But more, his willingness to let me be the woman I feel God created me to be is one of the greatest acts of love anyone can show another. I am first and foremost—as are each of you—a created being. ‘Do not hide your light under a basket’ speaks to each of us. Mister Duniway has been the reflector of that light for me, illuminating the path I believe has been chosen for me, and that having the right to vote will only make that light brighter. For each of us. Now, let me tell you about why I’m heading to Philadelphia,” she said. The egg-ers sat down and the women selling papers had a bonus night after the loud applause following her speech.
She loved the countryside of Idaho and kept pictures in her mind of its scissor-sharpened mountain peaks, the artist’s palette of colors as fall approached, the sounds of raging streams that cut through deep canyons. She’d regale Ben with the pictures of the Pahsimeroi River when she returned. The landscape would be perfect as the backdrop in a new novel she had brewing in her head.
As she moved east, though, flooding spread through the country. Trains she’d planned to pick up were delayed. She rode in stagecoaches around flooded tracks and had been gone four months already when she finally reached New York City where she hugged Aunt Susan B.
“Your book, it’s selling well here in the East,” Susan told her. David and Anna Matson, her long poem, had gotten published, and the reviews continued to be good ones.
“I can learn from my mistakes,” she said, still embarrassed by the negative comments that first book had brought her.
“A necessary skill for any successful woman,” Susan told her. The women attended the Exposition together, applauded at the Women’s Convention where she heard inspiring speeches, and then visited the Women’s Pavilion, outside the exposition area, as women’s inventions were not deemed worthy to be inside the main center. She picked up a self-heating iron to hold and imagined owning one. Interlocking bricks and a frame for lace curtains fascinated her. An odd traveling typewriter was featured too. She could use one of those. Each had been invented by an enterprising woman.
“These are wonderful. Oh, and there’s a dish-washing machine.” She would write about it and her adventures, along with her tasting something called Heinz ketchup and drinking Hires Root Beer, but those latter were offerings inside the exposition, as they’d been inspired by men.
Susan B. Anthony was scheduled to present to the vice president a proclamation on women’s voting rights, but instead President Hayes was there to receive it. Abigail felt proud to be in the room where women were willing to put forth laws to advance the citizenship of women.
Her telegrams to Kate for the New Northwest served as teasers of stories she’d write on her return. So much she wanted to share. But her journey home was interrupted in Illinois with a terrible cough and a weakness she’d never known. For weeks she was tended by relatives and did recuperate, having lost ten pounds before she finally headed back to Oregon in the spring.
When she arrived in Portland at the stage stop—ten months after she’d left—Ben greeted her with open arms. “You will never be gone so long again,” he said as he kissed her.
“I agree.” Home. The Oregon air never felt so fine.
Ben lifted her carpetbag into the family carriage as he shared news about the paper. The boys had done a good job in her absence, and Kate was invaluable as an editor. His own health had been good, mostly, he answered when she asked. “I lost a few days of work in December. I think the cold rains get inside my back bones and twitch there until I lie on the carpet in front of the fireplace and ferret them out.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here to look after you. I’ve never been so sick as I was in December.”
“Clara Belle was a good nurse.” He hesitated, but Abigail didn’t notice, chattering like a squirrel to him as he drove her back, laughing when she did, shaking his head at all the marvels she’d seen. “I’m glad you’re healthy now,” he said.
“Oh, I am. I can take on those prohibitionists and anti-suffrage voices with new vigor.”
They pulled up to the house. And Ben put his hand on her wrist, urging her to wait. “I’ve been authorized to prepare you, so you can gear yourself up for the shock—”
“What shock?” She grabbed his arm. “The children, they’re all right? You would have telegrammed.”
“Everyone is fine. However—” He put out his hands as though to shush her. “Clara Belle is now Mrs. Donald Stearns.”
“She’s who?”
“The wife of Donald Stearns. They eloped in December.”
“And you never told me? Why wouldn’t you have told me?”
“There was nothing you could do about it. You’d have tried to come back, and you were ill in Illinois. You said so yourself. Besides, bad news is better handled in the spring than in the rage of winter.”
“Aren’t you the philosopher.” Don Stearns. “He’s a losing newspaperman, starting that evening rag last year. How could you let this happen, Ben?”
“She’s her mother’s daughter with a mind of her own, Jenny. As we’ve raised her. Don’s all right. Young. Allowed to make mistakes as we did when we were newlyweds. And you gave them the idea in the first place, musing about starting an evening edition. He decided to do it. And he has a wise partner who knows a little about newspapering, so she can help him.”
“This is awful.” Abigail had jumped out of the carriage before he could help her and had stomped up the stairs. She turned to him. “Are they in there?”
“All your children await your arrival.”
“She got her brothers to defend her. Oh, Clara.” She raised her voice to the sky. “Why didn’t you wait? You could have gone on the stage with your voice, your musical talent.”
“She still can, she’d say to you,” Ben said. “She’d say you taught her how to be both a wife and mother and a businesswoman.” He opened the door to the cheering of her children.
“You were gone so long, Momma.”
“Working on behalf of women and girls. For you, my daughter.”
“And yourself,” Don Stearns said. He was tall and skinny as a split rail. Weak.
“Oh, dander,” Willis said. “You’re in for it now, Stearns.”
“He’s right, Momma.” Clara Belle stepped closer to her husband. “You do work for girls and women, but you also do it because you love it. And no one begrudges you that—we don’t, even though we miss you terribly. Ten months you’ve been gone, and we’ve carried on without you. But we have to do things that move our lives forward too. And then you got ill and I didn’t want to worry you.”
“But I praised you for not marrying young, for waiting for the right man.”
“And I did. Momma. Mother, please, your face is getting all red and you look like you’re going to faint. Please—”
Abigail growled, her fury uncontained, her face a dark cloud of rage. She knew it. Could stop it.
Clara Belle sank to the floor.
Don Stearns dropped beside her, held her head in his lap. He glared at Abigail. “See what you’ve done?”
“It’s what you did, eloping with my daughter.” Abigail shook as she reached for the smelling salts to revive Clara Belle.
“Stop it now,” Ben said as he moved Abigail aside. “What’s done is done.” He and Don Stearns bent over the awakening Clara Belle, who with woozy eyes blinked.
“Am I all right?” she asked.
“Yes, you are,” Ben told her. “Stearns, take your wife home. We’ll have breakfast in the morning and plan the reception to invite our friends to celebrate. Won’t we, Abigail?”
“You two don’t live here? You have your own house?”
“They’re on their own, Abigail. Let them be.”
“No small feat,” Ben said later. “A man who stands up for his wife against a tyrant—”
“I wasn’t a tyrant.” Abigail plopped on the side of their bed.
“You were. Your daughter fainted, she was so upset.”
“I am sorry about that. But holy cow chips, she shocked me. And you could have told me earlier.”
“They’re happy, Jenny. No man would have been good enough for Clara Belle, from your point of view. They’ve had four months together to gird themselves before seeing you. It’s too late for you to even think about an annulment, and besides, she’s twenty-three years old, well able to make her own decisions.”
“I hoped she wouldn’t marry young like I did.”
“Hey,” Ben said. “Has it been so bad? Your marrying at eighteen—almost nineteen.” His words choked.
I’ve wounded him. “No, it hasn’t.” She patted his arm.
“What haven’t you done that you might have done if you’d waited to marry or perhaps never married at all?”
“Nothing. And more, likely because you’ve been there to support me—us.”
“And haven’t you said the greatest joy of your life are your children? Would you deprive your daughter of that same great joy?”
“You’re right. Of course. We’ll have a reception for them. I’ll announce it in the paper.” She unhooked her high-button shoes. “But Stearns is a competitor, Ben.”
“Competitors make us better.”
“I suppose they do in the end.”
“By the way, while you were gone, Harvey returned as the editor of the Oregonian. New administration—he lost his customs post. He’s bought a controlling interest in that paper, so if you want to focus on a competitor to rail against, choose him and let Don Stearns and Clara Belle make their own way. Return to your purpose—using the New Northwest to get women the vote.”
“You’re absolutely right. We’ll win Harvey over and get Oregon to be the first of the Pacific coast states where women can cast their coveted ballot. There’s a purpose I can work toward.” One didn’t have control over much—certainly not one’s children—but she could control what mattered and have the courage to act on that.