Something Worth Doing

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  Idaho wasn’t so grand as Oregon’s panoramas, Abigail didn’t think. Oregon could claim the ocean’s blue and the mighty Columbia as well, though Idaho had the Snake River and its massive canyons. This might be a place to live after her suffrage work was finished and women had the vote, when children were off and married and she and Ben had a quiet place for him to brush his horses and deliberate in small-town liveries about the merits of the latest leather harness or breeding stock; and for her to write.

  She’d imagine that quiet life, but then she’d be in the throes of statehood or suffrage with the mix of men and women and she would see how her words inspired, celebrated the local heroes while singing the praises of Thomas Jefferson and reciting the preamble to the constitution, something she’d required every student to know when she taught school. The words refreshed, and who could deny their call that “all men are created equal”? She merely had to get the legislative men to think loftier, more expansively, that man in this instance meant human. She wrote out her speech for the paper, infused with the goodness of the Idaho landscape and her men and women. But once written down, Abigail never looked at the paper on the podium when she gave her speeches. Instead, she let the words from her heart inspire the efforts of the suffrage men and women. Then she’d be back in Oregon, pushing her still hunt, the landscape in the background—legislative corridors at the front.

  Clara Belle’s husband had sold his Bee, and Kate, instead of returning to the New Northwest as Abigail encouraged, took instead a position editing the Evening Telegram.

  “It’s Pittock’s paper. He owns Harvey’s press. Why—”

  “Abigail, it isn’t personal,” Kate said. “You’re still on a hummingbird’s budget in an eagle’s flight path. You can’t afford me. And Pittock asked me to stay on. He’s changed the name. Don will manage and sell subscriptions, but he has other interests. I’ll have total editorial control. I rather like that idea.”

  “What are Stearns’s other interests?” She got most of her news about Clara Belle through Kate. She hoped that wouldn’t stop. She wanted to visit Clara Belle, but . . . she still couldn’t forgive her, that was the truth. And then there was Abigail’s schedule, always pulling at her.

  “He’s hoping for his land speculation to be productive. The prune orchard.”

  “In Washougal? He’s finally moved them there to the middle of nowhere.” She remembered the hardscrabble farm and the terrible loneliness. “We’ll be fortunate if Clara Belle and Earl can get through the winter without pneumonia.”

  Kate sat across a large desk, tidy as always. “Clara Belle seems excited about the move. She is so optimistic, that girl. She loves little things. Her music. Stitching. She always looks so fashionable too. She’s an attentive mother.”

  “So was I.”

  “It wasn’t a criticism, Jenny. Merely an observation.”

  Abigail stepped over her defensiveness. “What does she know about pioneering in remote places? She has no idea how much work it’s going to be in that undeveloped land.” Abigail remembered how the little girl had hung on to her skirts in their log home, sometimes standing on her mother’s toes, the two pretending to be an elephant thumping around the wide room, bonded together as one. Abigail had made it fun despite her own pain and debilitation, especially after Willis’s delivery. Maybe she should have made it harder—as her own childhood had been—to better prepare her daughter for the realities of life. Then Clara Belle might not have married for love but for pragmatics.

  “Perhaps she likes the idea of pioneering the way her parents did it.” Kate left the desk and sat in the chair next to Abigail. “You advance that spirit in your speeches. We’re going to reprint the one you have in the Idaho Territory.”

  “We can all relate to pioneering. It’s a romantic period in people’s lives. And it calls up our forefathers, so it brings into their minds and hearts, I hope, the idea of liberty and the inevitability of it, if we pursue the goal. The world keeps moving—”

  “And women are moving with it. I know. I’m glad your trip went well.”

  “And now the road takes us to the legislative session. Cross your fingers.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  They spoke of Kate’s children, talked of her daughter’s engagement to a doctor in town, but conversation came back to Clara Belle. “She is helping to support him. I do know that,” Kate said.

  “And who will she give music lessons to in that swamp?”

  “The paper will pay her for some correspondence. The area is growing. They have a new dock, and a farm produce boat leaves at seven in the morning and returns by 2:00 p.m., so Clara and Earl could visit. Or you could go and spend the night.”

  “Not with that man. No. I’ll send my prayers for her. Are they taking her piano? I hope so.”

  “Try to see her before they move completely.”

  “I will. Ben will make sure we do.”

  “He already has. While you were off in Idaho.”

  “I enjoy that territory. I even thought Ben might like it too. When we get old. We could live in a lodge in the wilderness.” She made her voice light.

  “It’s always good to have a place to think of final settling, but I thought you had left log cabins behind.”

  “I said a lodge, not a log cabin. I’ll want a little luxury in my old age. If I can keep the paper going and get a little money for my speaking. Once we get suffrage, we can sell the paper. Until then, I have much to do until all the West’s women have the vote.”

  “You’ll always be a reformer. I just wish for your sake you’d take more time for being a grandmother and a wife. I get wistful sometimes, seeing you leave Ben as you go off. Makes me miss John so much.” Kate cleared her throat. “And I’m sad for you that you’re passing up moments you’ll never have again, experiences I so wish I still could have.”

  Kate was right, of course. But Abigail couldn’t see her way to memorialize the pleasures, let alone permit them to take precedence over the cause that drove her life, even if that cause kept her from enjoying it.

  “Give Clara Belle my regards. And tell her I’ll come see her. I will.”

  And she fully intended to do so.

  She was invited to speak to the Oregon senate on behalf of Resolution 2. The associations had been working toward making this happen for ten years. Abigail had been given twenty minutes to speak to SR2, and Ben and Willis sat in the gallery. Abigail hoped her son was proud of her. He was quite an orator himself, and she hoped he’d speak well of whatever she had to say.

  The resolution giving Oregon women the vote would have to pass the senate. Then be introduced in the house and passed there. Another resolution, related to prohibition, had also been proposed, and she clearly wanted the two separated so didn’t speak to it at all. She spoke to what united men and women with this proposed law, but more, using her most ceremonial speech, she appealed to the men as husbands and fathers, reminding them that the Negro had been given the right this resolution called for now for Oregon’s women. “Ought not your mothers and sisters and daughters have the same freedom?” Wasn’t this the very end those who died in the Revolutionary War had given their lives for? She used a term, “aristocracy of sex,” that had resonated when she’d spoken to the Illinois Legislature.

  Abigail had to appeal to these senators, not through the mundane of referring the resolution to the men of Oregon for a vote two years in the future, but to the larger issue of liberty. And she’d loved it that she was introduced by Senator Hirsch, whom she’d known since the days when his partner, Jacob Mayer, had loaned her money for her millinery. And Willis saw it all.

  The next day, the women in the gallery watched as the SR2 passed 21–9. Applause broke out but quickly turned to the flashing of white handkerchiefs the way Chautauqua audiences expressed their glee. The women were pleased beyond words and wanted the senate to know it but didn’t want their noise to get them removed for lack of decorum. The following day, Abigail was asked to speak to the
same resolution in the Oregon house where there’d been a more lively and disunifying debate. She held her tongue and said only that she felt the resolution spoke for itself but that passage would put them all on a winning track for women and for themselves. It passed 29–25. White handkerchiefs fluttered the air.

  A grand celebration at the Salem Opera House followed. Men and women of the cause sang the praises of the supporting legislators, and Willis gave a rousing speech. She was so grateful Ben and her sons were behind her. She wished Clara Belle had been there.

  “You’ve done your part, Ma,” Willis said as they rode in the coach back to Portland. “You birthed five votes and Pa’s is the sixth from the Duniway house. The beginning of a precinct.”

  “Not the recommended way to achieve votes. Better to win them over from another mother’s womb.” She patted his hand. “But I’m glad you’ve taken up the cause.”

  Harvey’s Oregonian published her senate address the day after the house passage; New Northwest carried the senate speech the day before the Oregonian. Harvey had made no editorial comment against the passage, for which Abigail was pleased, though she wished he’d find a way to support her life’s effort.

  “Harriet, we’ve one battle left.” Abigail spoke to the vice president of the Oregon State Women’s Suffrage Association after the vote. Abigail called Harriet Loughary the “Patrick Henry of the new dispensation” and knew this mother of nine could have made as strong a case as Abigail had. Harriet was a fine speaker with a teacher-husband who, like Ben, was a partner who supported the cause. “I should let her present more,” Abigail told Ben. But she hated letting loose of the limelight.

  The first two steps were climbed. The resolution had passed in two consecutive sessions. It would now go to the vote in 1884.

  “We must work even harder to educate the public, praise the legislature, and try to hold the arguments about prohibition as far from suffrage as brew masters are from coffee grinders.” Abigail expounded to the association gathering.

  “We might take a moment to applaud our efforts,” her vice-chair said. “And some of us take a well-deserved rest.”

  “If you’re speaking about me,” Abigail countered, “never you mind. This effort is my lifeblood. If I stopped now, well, I’m not sure but that my blood would stop flowing.”

  “Perhaps you Scott sisters could focus on your dear brother and silence his opposition.”

  “We’ll do better than that,” Abigail said. “We’ll get him to support us.”

  Kate gasped. “Jenny,” she whispered when Abigail sat back down. “That’s so unlikely.”

  “Nothing is impossible. Who but us could make this happen? I’ll schedule an appointment with Harvey next week.”

  But later, lying awake with sleep escaping her like the wayward sheep of Sunny Hillside Farm, she wondered if she hadn’t pushed too far, promised too much in response to the vice-chair’s assertion that Abigail rest a bit. Am I so strident to the cause? No. I’m the very reason we have come this far. They could push Harvey to their side. After all, the legislature—his colleagues and friends—had seen the light and voted for the referral. His sisters would bring a little sunshine to his countenance. They just had to find the correct lamp.

  Abigail saw her opening with her brother and how the New Northwest could assist. It had to do with Harvey’s alma mater, Pacific University in Forest Grove. She named the woman in her article, Bridget Gallagher, and told of her story, of how as a young girl, she’d been taken advantage of by a married man. She’d given birth to a child out of wedlock. Few means of support were available to this young woman tending her child as best she could. She became a woman of “negotiable affections,” Abigail called it. Eventually, the woman became a madam of an ill-reputed house. She made donations to the community, gave loans to young girls so they didn’t have to resort to her “profession” which men kept possible. She wanted more for her son and had sent him to live in Forest Grove, a town founded by Congregationalists, Abigail made sure to note, where she attempted to enroll him in Harvey’s alma mater.

  She was coolly informed by a professor that the child of such a mother could not be received in their ranks! And yet this school is a noted asylum for Alaskan, Japanese, and Chinese pupils, and is just now preparing to receive in its Christian fold a reinforcement of fifty young Indians of both sexes. Who checks to see if their mothers are all chaste and of the highest reputation? No wonder there are infidels in the land. No wonder they are multiplying in Forest Grove. Ah me! A.S.D.

  Harvey sent her a note suggesting that she did her woman’s cause no good deed by consorting with prostitutes. She replied that since the men of the state had relegated all women to the class of idiots and prostitutes in their inability to vote that she saw no harm in attempting to aid the son of such a woman in gaining an education. Kate had wondered if she might have gone too far in bringing up their brother’s educational institution.

  “I’m going to appeal to his Christian nature in this. He asked me to publish a series he’d written on religion and I agreed. It’s fitting for us to have this discussion.”

  “But it doesn’t help us get him behind the vote.”

  “It can’t hurt.”

  “Yes, it can, Jenny.”

  But she’d gone to visit him anyway, praying she could hold her intemperate tongue.

  “It’s your alma mater, Harvey. You ought to stand for its motto to educate and to perform its Christian duty to the same.” His office walls were covered in wood so polished she could almost see her reflection in them. Tall, narrow windows brought in summer light. It was the office of a legislator-in-waiting and it reeked of power. She inhaled. She would not be intimidated. “And I hope you can see that this is one of the very reasons women should be allowed the vote. So they’d have a say about fair treatment, be able to make their own way when men destroy their reputation, without resorting to prostitution.”

  “The woman is a prostitute.”

  “Yet even our Lord consorted with such women, seeing into their souls and past a tarnished reputation. As a full citizen, with rights to vote, she might well have made different decisions. Perhaps she could have taken the child’s father to court, gotten him to provide for their child. Perhaps she could have gotten a loan and started a boardinghouse? She’d surely have had more options. For now, she wants the best for her son.” Abigail looked at a portrait on the wall. Of Harvey. That would have cost a fortune. “How can your school deprive him of that when it’s said to be a Christian academy? Are we not charged to look after widows and orphans?”

  “This child you speak of is neither.”

  “He might well be with his mother a nonentity in the public eye or, worse, the lowest of women. That did not stop our Lord.”

  He was quiet, so she knew she’d hit a nerve. He sat, fingers made into tents, his forehead wrinkles deep and familiar in their groves.

  “One day you might run for public office,” Abigail said. “Might it not be wise to be able to show that you have compassion for all your constituents? In this instance, you’d be educating a voter.”

  “I can see the value in educating the lad.”

  She remained silent.

  “I’ll write to the professors.”

  “And urge them to allow him into school? Not just be tutored privately somewhere?”

  “Yes. I’ll urge that.”

  “Good, because I’ve had a fair number of letters from supporters, including other professors. You’ll want to be on the winning side of this one, Mister Scott. Editor Scott. And am I assuming too much, perhaps one day, Senator Scott?”

  Harvey’s face turned tomato-red above his dark beard.

  And with his revealing countenance, she saw her suffrage argument, the one her sisters could make with their brother.

  “He’ll want to be with winners. We simply have to convince him that the referral will pass. Because it will, I know it.” Abigail reported to her sisters taking tea at the Duniway house. “And
that women will vote for reasonable, good men.”

  “I don’t know,” Fanny said. “I think if we can keep him from writing editorials against the vote, we’ll be doing good. To get him to write one in favor? That’s an enormous task.”

  “But one we have before us.”

  “You put it before us, Jenny.” Sarah Maria crocheted as she spoke. “You might have gone too far.”

  “Nonsense. We have less than two years, but we’ll canvass the state, get a show of hands at every meeting, monitor the numbers coming out for the presentations, count our yes legislators, and spend time in their districts.”

  “We can give out little premiums when people come to the events.”

  “All right. But no parades,” Abigail said. “No flashing banners or taking over saloons.”

  “I wasn’t proposing that. Small reminders, pins to wear, that show they are supporters. Quietly, but that might open up discussions for them while they shop or get a dress fitted. We’ll give them things to say.” Sarah Maria held up the baby bib she’d been working on. “I could perhaps stitch in Votes for Women.”

  Her sisters laughed, but Abigail tapped her finger to her lower lip. “You might have something there, but an opposing man will surely say that babies spit up on the very idea of a woman voting. No, our biggest task is to give supporters words to counter negative conversations. And to convince Harvey that it will pass and that those same women who get the vote will want to vote for a man like Harvey—educated, wise, and a supporter of women’s rights—when he runs for Senate.”