Something Worth Doing

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  “Ben will be dismayed if it’s reported that we spoke inside a saloon,” Abigail said.

  “No one ever made any gains without ruffling a few feathers.”

  “I know, but being married—”

  “It’s why I never did. I have enough to manage myself without the additional weight of family.”

  “They aren’t exactly a burden. Do I make it sound that way? It’s that I have to consider them in what I do, Ben especially. I never want to lose his support.”

  “From what I see, that wouldn’t be possible. He adores you.”

  “Yes. He does.” But he might have his limits. “Let’s not speak in the saloon. Let’s make our presentation outside it. We might gain more votes one day that way than forcing ourselves into the bar. And women on the streets can hear us. Our umbrellas and our ideas will give us something to share with our audience.”

  They collected money for their expenses and sometimes shared the take with those who needed it, leaving them barely able to cover their meals and hotel lodging when they couldn’t secure a bed from a sympathetic suffragist in Olympia, Washington, or in a tiny frontier town like Umatilla, Oregon. In every village, Abigail sold subscriptions to her New Northwest, and at every rest stop, sharing beds with children or with Aunt Susan, Abigail wrote, telegramming her reports from the field for the paper to Kate, whom she’d contracted to do the layout. Sometimes they were in an actual field when she prepared her articles. She also wrote chapters for a long poem she serialized and created a rhythm for corresponding while on the road, her arthritic fingers scribbling away well into the night. She was writing with a purpose, covering their trip and experiences and advancing a cause.

  She’d feel depleted by a short and interrupted night’s sleep, exhausted by the stage or wagon box that took them to the next town, frustrated by changes in where they’d be allowed to speak once they arrived, at times a little frightened by the vitriol spewed by both men and women who were threatened by what they stood for: change.

  But once they stood onstage, Abigail would feel something coming to her from the crowd. Her spine would tingle as she stood before a mass of mostly women who hungered for the hope Abigail and Aunt Susan’s presence inspired.

  Abigail was counting on this evening of the fair being a grand finale to the tour. She’d had posters printed and the boys handed them out. She hoped they’d get a couple of hundred people to attend that evening. She wanted the tour to do Oregon proud for her eastern friend. Of all the Northwest states, she hoped Oregon women would be the first to vote, and she saw this canvasing in the Northwest and her newspaper as in service to that goal. This event at the fair was to be the crown on their royal trip.

  “How many do you think were there, Ben?” Abigail shook the quilts, then placed them back over straw to freshen the beds. It had been a long but satisfying evening.

  “Over a thousand, easily.”

  “We sold a lot of subscriptions to the paper,” Willis said. At fourteen, he towered over his mother and stood nearly head to head with Ben.

  “Imagine having a thousand people hear about the importance of freedom and the vote for women.” Abigail placed a shawl around Susan Anthony’s bony shoulders as the night had chilled. Musicians played in the background, and one could still hear the murmuring of fairgoers chattering as they made their way toward the exits. “Could you ever have imagined a crowd like this when I was writing my ‘Farmer’s Wife’ letters?”

  Ben nodded. “I knew you were destined for bigger things the day I met you.”

  “Your invitation to speak to the Oregon legislature as the first woman to do so may take the cause further than our presentation this evening,” Susan said. “That’s quite an accomplishment. And you quadrupled the influence by being able to write about it in your paper.”

  “Five hundred subscribers and climbing. My Clara and Willis and even Hubert are quite the newsboys. News-people.” She ruffled eleven-year-old Hubert’s curls. “Who can refuse that smile.”

  “Your paper probably has a wider audience, but flesh and blood coming out to hear, that word of mouth will bring you more readers than smiling sons, good hawkers that they are,” Susan said.

  “The anti-suffrage crowd was out too.” Clara heated up tea on their little camp stove. “But I think they only had forty or so attend. I slipped in the back just to check. You and Aunt Susan are the novelty.” Her sister Sarah Maria had started a suffrage group in Forest Grove where James was the sheriff and Kate taught school. And the sisters also acted as agents for subscriptions or ad sales, working from Albany or Forest Grove or wherever they lived. Even relatives back in Illinois had been conscripted to read the New Northwest and find new subscribers.

  “Women of many persuasions are being allowed to speak in public,” Susan said. “And that is an advancement as well. We cannot push the rights of some women. We must work for all, even those who resist our efforts to improve their lives.”

  “That is a paradox, isn’t it? To have women not want more freedoms?” Sarah Maria shook her head.

  “They think they’ll be taken care of by their husbands and fathers, and many will. But they’ll never know what they might have been able to accomplish if they had the opportunity.”

  “One can be both a good wife and a promoter of a worthy cause,” Abigail said. “Somehow, in our writings we must make the case for issues other than the vote. It’s a means to an end, not the end itself, that’s the story that matters.”

  “Well spoken, Abigail. If we can advocate for improved property rights, for legal protections for women, the journey to those reforms will be the underpinnings of the suffrage fight and perhaps keep our organizations from tromping in the mud over issues like temperance and prohibition.” Susan sounded like she was still on the platform. She stopped herself, then added, “I think you may be right, my friend, about not having our eastern groups come into Oregon with a campaign. The Northwest is unique. You can promote that singularity in your newspaper and your ‘still hunt’ attitude. We have to employ a number of methods to reach our goal. And we have a huge roadblock before us.” She cleared her throat and this time did pontificate as though on a stage. “The Supreme Court just wrote this: ‘The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.’”

  “So if we operate outside that, we are defying God’s laws?” Even Sarah Maria sounded aghast.

  “So the court has ruled.”

  Abigail thought of the verse in Jeremiah about God having plans for everyone’s life. Shouldn’t a woman discover what her own destiny and mission were in order to be in step with Scripture, even if that meant stepping outside of her home?

  “We can challenge that in the newspaper, mine and yours.”

  Susan blinked several times. “Did I not tell you? I had to close Revolution. My newspaper has, as they say in the West, ‘bit the dust.’”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “It was one of the reasons I undertook the tour, to make a little money to dissolve my debt.”

  A bitter taste of reality made Abigail swallow. She was entering in to risk larger than what Ben had put them in by signing the notes those years before. He had done it to help a friend. If I’m doing it for something greater than myself, will that guarantee that all will turn out well? She didn’t say those words out loud. Instead she said, “And still you gave more than half your share of the gate in Olympia for the victims of the Chicago fire.”

  “‘Give, and it shall be given unto you,’ as Scripture says.” Susan sighed. “It hasn’t failed me yet. Look here what luxury has come my way since I gave away my take: friends to share tea and shelter with and a straw bed on which to lay my head.”

  Abigail exchanged a glance with Ben, wondering if he might be thinking what she was. If the famous Susan B. Anthony couldn’t succeed with a newspaper with the large subscription base in the populous East, a newspaper that captured the action of the politi
cal capital of the country, with renewals easy to come by, however would her little paper make it in the West, where horses and cattle far outmatched readers living in sparsely settled areas. To move forward, she’d have to believe that something was worth doing no matter how it turned out.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Shaping

  1876

  _______

  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.