1

A Crazy Patchwork

I found her always sincerely repentant for any misdemeanor, and striving to gain under difficulties a self-control that she saw others exhibit.

—Mary E. Austin, New Bedford High School teacher

All her life people tried to make sense of Marie Equi. To her father she was “overly enthusiastic about anything she set her mind.” Her high school teachers found her either a “very earnest scholar” or an “exceptionally unruly, headstrong girl.” At age twenty-one a small-town newspaper touted her “A Queen Today” for the public horsewhipping she inflicted upon a scoundrel of a minister. The US Army commended her medical care for earthquake-stricken San Franciscans in 1906 but later vilified her politics as a threat to the nation. Other radical women described her as a “crushed falcon” needing care and comfort or a “stormy petrel” foretelling trouble. And once, during a dark, questioning period in her life, a friend assured Equi that she was “perfectly sane, though perhaps unusually out of the ordinary.”1

Equi once remarked on an aspect of character she shared with everyone else. “Aren’t we a crazy patchwork of ancestral and environal expressions?” she wrote. Her own particular patchwork—one that led to radical activism—stitched Old World ancestry with a large working-class family in a high-minded, wealthy Massachusetts city in the latter half of the nineteenth century.²

Giovanni Equi, Marie’s father, jostled onto a steamship with three hundred others for a month-long transatlantic voyage when he was twelve years old. He had spent his childhood in Fornaci di Barga near the walled city of Lucca in Tuscany, where his ancestors had lived for generations. The Equi clan was believed to reach back to medieval, perhaps ancient, times, and the family took pride in its lineage and homeland. But Giovanni left behind his parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters—most of whom he would never see again—for the chance of opportunity and prosperity in America. In May 1853, after seemingly endless days on the passenger ship Gondar, Giovanni and his cousin Luigi rushed the gangplank for the docks of New York, a burgeoning city of a half million people. Several days later, they boarded a steamship for New Bedford, Massachusetts, situated below the flexing arm of Cape Cod on Buzzards Bay.3

New Bedford thrived as the whaling capital of the world when Giovanni Equi arrived. The city’s harbor bristled with the masts of three hundred whaling ships that drew ten thousand sailors and landmen from ports worldwide. Hundreds of casks of whale oil were unloaded almost every day. The whale trade grossed $30 million annually for the city, making it one of the wealthiest in the nation. Everything about New Bedford seemed to thrum with the arriving and departing ships—the smell of the oil on the docks, the sailors carousing on Johnny Cake Hill, and the riches tallied in the dockside counting houses. The fine public buildings near the harbor and the turreted mansions with manicured gardens along the outer County Road dazzled newcomers. Two years before Giovanni arrived, Herman Melville extolled the city’s beauty with its “long avenues of green and gold” with maples shading the cobbled streets.⁴

Here Giovanni joined his older brother, Dominico, a stonemason who had settled in the city during the 1840s. Dominico purchased property and built a house along Second Avenue near the waterfront where he, Giovanni, and, later, their two brothers lived. Giovanni learned masonry, anglicized his name to John, and settled into his new life.⁵

The whaling trade brought sailors and laborers from ports around the world, and New Bedford’s twenty-one thousand residents represented one of the most diverse populations in America. But the Equi brothers and a handful of others were the only Italians in the city. A dozen years later when John started looking for a wife, he found few eligible women from his homeland. But while Italian emigration to America remained a trickle at the time, the Irish flooded the country seeking relief from famine. More than 20 percent of Ireland’s population—approximately 1.7 million people—came to America between 1840 and 1860. They were the lucky ones. More than one million back home died from starvation following the devastating potato blight and the neglect of the British government. Among the thousands of “famine immigrants” who made New Bedford their home, John Equi found his wife.⁶

Sarah Mullins, Marie’s mother, was born in 1849 in County Tyrone, one of the original nine counties of the ancient Celtic kingdom of Ulster. She missed the worst of the famine and the scourge of cholera that terrorized families in her early years. Sarah’s parents—Thomas Mullins and Catherine McGreevy—were fiercely opposed to Britain’s rule over Ireland, and Marie believed her grandparents bestowed a kind of ancestral fervor for independence. In 1858 when Sarah was nine, her father had already died, and she and her mother fled the country for America. Little is known of her early years in New Bedford, but she and her mother settled in the city as the United States sank into its own whirlpool of strife leading to the Civil War. Sarah’s future husband, John Equi, is not known to have fought in the war, but he, too, had experienced a land of conflict in a pre-unified Italy. A year after the Civil War ended, in April 1866, twenty-five-year-old John Equi married Sarah Mullins, age seventeen, in a Catholic service. The young couple settled in the family compound on Second Street.7

Six years later, on April 7, 1872, Marie Diana Equi was born at home. She was John and Sarah’s fifth child and fifth daughter. The next week she was baptized in the St. Lawrence, Martyr Catholic Church, a massive Gothic structure with a soaring bell tower. Marie later described her father as a non-practicing Catholic, but he had helped lay the foundation of St. Lawrence and regarded it as the family church. Thereafter, the Equis celebrated all their baptisms, confirmations, and marriages under the oak-framed, vaulted ceiling amid a profusion of red, green, and black marble.⁸

Sarah Equi gave birth to six more children—another girl and five boys—bringing the total to eleven over a sixteen-year period. The size of the Equi family was not unusual among immigrant Irish and Italian Catholics, although a wide variety of birth control devices were available in general stores and pharmacies during the 1860s and 1870s. Marie and her siblings were far removed from the notion of a protected childhood free of chores and early employment. Her early years revolved around her mother’s several pregnancies, care of her younger siblings, and housework. She later recalled how much she hated doing the family laundry.9

Before she was ten years old, Marie witnessed firsthand the limits of medical science. An older sister succumbed to what was called “paralysis of the brain,” a brother died from croup, and another from diphtheria. Three of her young cousins also died. The deaths in the Equi households were typical in New Bedford and nationwide at a time when tuberculosis, cholera, and a slew of other maladies posed a constant threat.¹⁰

Marie remembered her early years fondly, and she worshipped her father for his good spirits and easy manner. Slim and angular with a moustache and goatee, John Equi at six feet tall towered over other men. He was a dependable provider and a skilled tradesman, and, although well liked and caring, Marie later confided to friends that her father sometimes flew into drunken rages so frightening that her mother hid the children.¹¹

During Marie’s childhood, New Bedford shifted from dependence on whaling to the massive industrialization that had begun its sweep across the country. Petroleum was discovered in northwest Pennsylvania in 1859, and whaling soon lost its dominance on the market. Extracting oil from the land was cheaper, safer, and yielded greater profits than hunting whales on the open seas thousands of miles away. The city’s capitalists transitioned to modern manufacturing, specifically in textile production, and exploited new steam power technology to dominate the market for fine cotton fabrics. New Bedford and its Wamsutta brand soon became known nationally for high-quality shirting, muslin, and bleached sheeting. By 1871, the Wamsutta Mills hunkered down on five acres at the north end of the waterfront while the Potomska Mills secured the south end. In the years to follow, dozens of other mills crowded between, and the thicket of ship masts so familiar to Marie’s parents gave way to a crowded stand of smokestacks.¹²

The “better families” of New Bedford seldom ventured near the waterfront district that served as a neighborhood haunt for Marie and her siblings. The Equis’ neighbors were the working-class families who toiled in the mills, on the docks, and at the factories. Workers flooded in from other parts of New England and Canada. Highly skilled operators from England demanded a guaranteed ten-hour workday, better working conditions, and guarantees of no wage cuts. Marie recalled that when she was young her father invited hungry strikers to family meals, and she heard all about their grievances.13

Although Marie later described her family as working class and struggling, her parents managed to acquire real estate a year after her birth. New Bedford’s population had increased by more than 20 percent during the 1870s, and the city expanded beyond the waterfront district and west of County Road with its grand mansions. In this new western district, John and Sarah Equi purchased an undeveloped lot and spent the next few years constructing a small apartment building. Five years later John Equi and his siblings inherited the family house from their recently deceased brother, Dominico, and John purchased the property from the others. At the time, only 49 percent of the adult male population in the country managed to own real estate, yet Marie’s father, working as a stonemason, claimed two lots.¹⁴

When Marie was eight years old, her family relocated to their new West End house on James Street. Their neighborhood was in a demographic jumble of a district that included wealthy whaling-era families, recently rich textile barons, and working-class Irish. In this mix Marie’s Italian-Irish family struggled to find a niche. They represented New Bedford’s largest immigrant population, the Irish, as well as the least prevalent, the Italians. In 1880 only eleven Italians over the age of eleven lived in the city’s six wards. The Irish ostracized the Equis because they were Italian and everyone else resented them as famine Irish, or so it seemed to Marie as a girl. John Equi may have eased the ill will with his amiable nature, which was so obliging that he altered the spelling of the family surname to “Aque” to match how locals pronounced it.^15*

In later years, Marie referred to a childhood bout of tuberculosis so severe that her parents sent her to Florida to live with family friends. By age ten she had returned to the city and enrolled in Middle Street Grammar, a tough and turbulent school, overcrowded with more than 450 students housed in a poorly maintained building. Hallways were used as classrooms, and every spring thaw, the girls’ outdoor yard was ankle-deep in mud with only a narrow wood plank to play upon. Despite the deficiencies at Middle Street, New Bedford boasted a well-regarded school system led by a progressive superintendent who emphasized cognitive skills rather than rote memorization, rigid discipline, and examinations. Under this regimen, Marie excelled during the next four years in several subjects, especially Reading, US History, and English. One instructor found it a pleasure to teach her because she loved to study so much. “I always found her a very earnest pupil,” she wrote, even if other teachers thought Marie was impulsive and a troublemaker. Marie persevered and graduated from grammar school in the spring of 1886.16

During her studies at New Bedford High School, Marie formed a close relationship with one of her teachers, Mary E. Austin, who listened to her hopes and troubles. Austin thought her young student’s devotion to studying mitigated her lack of self-control and frequent misbehavior. She judged Marie an “excellent scholar” with whom she enjoyed “long earnest talks” away from the classroom. Austin explained later that she came to understand how much Marie regretted her acting out and tried to achieve the self-control she saw others exhibit. Austin may have been the first adult to understand the personal struggle that dogged Marie for years.¹⁷

Although devoted to her studies, circumstances forced Marie to drop out of high school after her first year to work in the city’s textile mills. She was fortunate to complete even that much study as working-class parents seldom kept their children—sons or daughters—in school beyond the required age. Her parents still had three children at home under the age of twelve, and perhaps they could not afford to keep her out of the workforce. Yet a few months before Marie left school, John and Sarah Equi purchased additional real estate—an empty lot near their house.¹⁸

Marie joined nineteen hundred other teenage girls and women who labored in the city’s factories. Given her age, education, and background, she may have worked as a weaver responsible for monitoring the movement of yarn into looms. She would have had little time to dwell on how much she missed her studies. Weavers had to stop the looms and manually replace the bobbins more than one hundred times a day. For their tiring work and long hours—usually twelve- and sometimes fourteen-hour shifts—they earned ninety cents a day, worked five days a week, and earned a total far from a living wage. Inside the factories, men, women, and children endured the whirring, spinning din of the machines that vibrated the floor boards and seemed to shake the building. Workers suffered from headaches and ear-ringing for hours after their shifts. The windows were kept closed—often nailed shut—to ensure humidity for more pliable cotton threads, and the resulting heat was oppressive. Workrooms became so hazy with lint that operators coughed throughout their shifts and sometimes vomited small cotton balls after a day’s work. Already susceptible to a recurrence of tuberculosis, Marie later talked of the labored breathing and pain in her lungs that followed her workdays.19

Marie witnessed children working at jobs that would have been dangerous for adults. Although Massachusetts had set limits on child labor in 1888, children younger than fourteen were allowed to work a half-day and then attend school for the remaining half. Yet the restrictions still left the city’s youngsters representing 8 percent of the workforce. Marie also toiled with women who looked as if they had never been girls. One ex-mill worker recalled, “The souls of these mill girls seemed starved and looked from their hungry eyes, as if searching for mental food.”²⁰

After two years of millwork, Marie might easily have despaired of a brighter future, but a high school companion, Betsey Bell Holcomb, intervened with a bold plan to get Marie accepted in an all-girls school to pursue her studies. The two appeared to have little in common. Marie was a fourteen-year-old first-year student from a large Catholic immigrant family while Betsey, at seventeen, was in her senior year, the oldest of five children from a prominent and well-off Unitarian family. Betsey’s father began his career clerking in the family grocery store, and, in time, he became owner of one prosperous business, directed another, served on the city’s board of trade, and became a member of the local Elks fraternal club. Despite all their differences, Betsey was impressed with Marie’s intelligence, spirit, and passion for learning that matched her own. For Marie, Betsey was an attractive woman with a self-assuredness she longed to possess.21

The same year that Marie left high school for the mill, Betsey graduated and enrolled at Wellesley College, an elite school northwest of Boston that offered one of the best educations available to a young woman at the time. The Wellesley campus boasted its own lake lined with azaleas and rhododendrons. College Hall, where many of the students slept and studied, featured parlors filled with artwork, a dining room with Wedgwood service, a library with ten thousand volumes, and modern laboratories. Betsey appeared to be a popular student, and her schoolmates nicknamed her “Bessie,” a name she adopted for the rest of her life. She completed her first year and returned for a second.²²

If Bessie enjoyed a schoolgirl crush with Marie, the Wellesley community would have welcomed it. In the late nineteenth century, many all-women colleges explicitly supported students who became emotionally or physically engaged with one another. Female faculty members often became role models with their own relationships, often living as couples on campus. During Bessie’s study at Wellesley, Katherine Lee Bates, an English literature instructor who later served as chair of the English department, began an intimate relationship with Katharine Coman, a faculty member and later chair of the economics department. Such arrangements were dubbed “Wellesley marriages”—a localized version of the more commonly recognized “Boston marriages” that involved two wealthy or professional women who established a household together without the help of men. Women could engage in these pairings seeking intimate companionship without acknowledging any sexual conduct, and their associations were considered “romantic friendships.” These women, who would readily be considered lesbians today, enjoyed the twilight years of an accepting, tolerant environment before new theories of sexuality led to a more complex, less accepting atmosphere.²³

During her summer break in New Bedford after her second year at college, Bessie took charge of Marie’s plight with a Christian zeal for social good shared by many of her Wellesley peers. The students deferred marriage and families to delve into the overwhelming needs of immigrants and laborers, often volunteering in settlement houses and tenement slums. Bessie’s interests remained closer to home: she intended to free Marie from the dangerous, mind-numbing millwork and find a way for her to continue her studies.²⁴

At first Bessie proposed that Marie undertake a work-study arrangement at Wellesley. College administrators suggested instead that Marie apply to Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies. With only two weeks remaining before the start of the academic year, Bessie sent an urgent letter to the Northfield principal urging him to admit Marie. She explained that her friend suffered “as hard a blow as could have fallen upon the girl” when she was obliged to leave school. With the certainty that “God’s will is in my plan,” she vowed to send one hundred dollars of her own savings plus later payments from her allowance to cover Marie’s tuition for one year. She depleted her savings, but she was willing to do so, she wrote, “Because I desire to see her develop into a true Christian woman.” Bessie’s generosity was surprising, and her parents’ concurrence even more so. Beyond the first year, she hoped Marie would earn a scholarship, work her way through Northfield, and then gain another scholarship for advanced study.25

After eleven days of hope and worry, admission forms from Northfield arrived, and Bessie rushed to complete them. She described Marie’s traits as “impulsiveness, generosity, kindness of heart, genuine religious feeling, and earnestness.” She wrote that Marie desired most of all to be “a noble, helpful, and well-educated woman.” Bessie also obtained recommendations from her own father, from Marie’s grammar and high school teachers, and from the Equi family doctor. Northfield was a Protestant institution, and Bessie adroitly emphasized Marie’s “strong Protestant tendencies” rather than mentioning her Catholic upbringing. Her efforts won the day, and, in September 1889, Marie entered Northfield’s preparatory department at the junior level.²⁶

Northfield was a picture postcard of a town located in north central Massachusetts near the borders of Vermont and New Hampshire, about 150 miles from New Bedford. Dwight Lyman Moody, a shoe salesman turned successful Christian revivalist, founded Northfield Seminary in 1879 to educate impoverished but talented girls from around the world. The institution was famous for enrolling Choctaw and Sioux students and for graduating a former slave. Marie took residence in Hillside House, a dormitory with gabled roofs, shuttered windows, and covered wooden porches.²⁷

Northfield Seminary proved a good fit for Marie. With so many students from different backgrounds, she was no longer an outsider. Every day she donned the school uniform—a long-sleeved black dress with a large black bow tied at the neck and black shoes. She undertook her studies without worry about money or family responsibilities, and her final examination scores far exceeded her entry marks. She performed well in Essay and Bible Studies, ranked high in deportment, and developed an intense religious devotion. Inside her Bible, she wrote her “Motto for ’89,” a fervent declaration to be “everything good and pure for Christ’s sake.” She prayed that the Lord would give her the strength to conquer her trials and to “lean on him” in her troubles.28

Yet after one year at Northfield, Bessie’s plans for Marie stalled. No scholarship was forthcoming, and Bessie was unable to finance another year of study on her own. In December 1890, Marie left the school and returned to dim prospects in New Bedford. At nineteen, she was at a loss. Living at her parents’ house was not an option, and she had no money of her own. One older sister had married and another was engaged, but Marie had already rebuffed one suitor and marriage held no interest for her.²⁹

John Equi intervened on his daughter’s behalf and arranged for her to stay with relatives in Tuscany. At Fornaci di Barga, “the great furnace of Barga,” situated halfway up the hillside overlooking the Serchio Valley in Lucca Province, Marie lived with one of her uncles and helped tend his terraced vineyards and olive groves. She became fluent in Italian, and, she later told friends and family, she studied at the University of Pisa. At some point, however, she quarreled with her uncle and then returned to the United States in July 1892 on the ship Werra. She cleared customs at the newly opened station at Ellis Island, and, according to a story she enjoyed telling, she arrived in New York with no money and only a banana to sustain her. A well-to-do couple paid her fare to New Bedford.³⁰

Marie found her hometown more dense, urban, and industrial. The population pushed to over forty thousand with more than two-thirds being first and second generation immigrants. Sailors from Cape Verde and the Azores had outfitted many of the old whalers—“floating shipwrecks,” they were dubbed—and shuttled passengers between New Bedford and their home islands. With another nine textile mills in operation, the city had become more intensely industrialized. Electrification of the municipal streetcars had begun, and telephones were in common use. Change was underway, yet Marie’s prospects remained much the same as before. She was a young woman adrift with nothing but millwork awaiting her.

Bessie was no longer in New Bedford or at college. After her exceptional efforts to get Marie into a school, she had dropped out of Wellesley in the middle of her junior year. She was the oldest child, but social custom prevented her from someday managing the family business. She apparently wanted more than to wait for gentlemen callers to offer her a future. Instead she embarked on an adventure in the Far West, one that Marie would soon join.³¹

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* Equi’s father and most of his children retained the “Aque” spelling for all of their lives. Equi changed hers to the original spelling as an adult. For the sake of clarity, the Equi spelling is used throughout this narrative.