Four of a Kind: A women's historical fiction (25 page)

Opal stopped, her head down. Then slowly she nodded, and resumed her work.

Finally dressed, I bent to Opal and gave her shoulders a tight squeeze. Her hair was smoothed into a uniquely braided bun. “Keep the dresses and wear them as long as you can,” I whispered.

“I’ll deliver these dresses myself,” she said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Poor Jesse must feel like a mailman at times.” She handed me a note she had written:
Hebrews 13:4. Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.

I sighed and said nothing. What would be the point?

Mama was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs in the mudroom wearing a worried frown. “What is wrong with Bess do you think? Send me a note tomorrow with Jesse. Why do you suppose Opal sent a note this morning to Robert? We’ve packed up some eggs, butter, soap, and a fresh-killed chicken for you. All you need do is pluck it,” she said, patting my back. “Remember, you are in my prayers.”

Edith came in with their basket of goodies. She, too, looked worried and sad.
But then when did they not?
I decided. I picked out the chunk of soap. “Oh I forgot about the soap making at spring cleaning. Do you still do that? Why, you can find wonderfully fragrant hard soaps now in town, in all sizes and shapes, even heart-shapes,
for only pennies. And soft soaps you add directly to your washtub. Making soap is such hard work!”

“I was worried when you moved into town, Ruby,” Mama said, “that you would be forever tainted if exposed to city ways and radical thinking. Remember Sodom and Gomorrah? You need to come to church more!”

Opal suddenly showed up, to join in Mama’s tune. “Why do city women want to vote?” she said loudly, as if busting at the seams. “It’s ridiculous! What business would I have at the polls, talking men’s politics when my place is in the home? Where I want to be! If I voted, I’d simply vote the same as my husband to support him. I would certainly value his decisions on such matters, more than mine, just as I would expect him to value my advice on matters, such as, well, canning tomatoes, or birthing babies!”

Mama shook her head adamantly, and for a good moment I thought she was going to scold Opal. “I just can’t imagine! Sinners they are! If this group of women thinks like men, what’s next? Will they start dressing like men as well?” She began rearranging things in the basket.

I could be quiet no more. “Really, Mama! They are simply asking that all women have a right to be heard and counted.”

Opal shook her head adamantly. “I hear you, Ruby, but it makes no difference in the end. The results are the same, for the wife should follow the husband in what he does.”

Edith held the soap under my nose. “Isn’t this the sweetest smelling soap of any in town? I got the idea from you and your dried lavender. I crushed some lilacs and some dried herbs and started experimenting. Pennies go a long way toward feed and farm tools. Making soap costs nothing and uses up all that ash and grease from the winter.”

“Well, anyway, you be careful out there with those city women, Ruby,” Mama said. “Mark my words, girls. We are nearing the end of time when we see the devil move from men to women. Another Eve in our garden.”

What is love?

Ladies, liberate yourselves from the drudgery of dirt! What you long for is a picnic amongst the rabbits, so why stay indoors with the dust bunnies? Ease your burdens and take the rest of the day off with this time-saving Home Washing Machine. For only fifteen dollars this machine will take away your worries and red hands and do the work of mothers and daughters. No rubbing or beating – soiled garments are whitened without friction - so consequently no injury. The currents of water passing through the fabrics cause no wear. Boiling water and a good soap is all that is necessary. The base is made of sturdy pine and the crank is easy to turn. While some labor is required, any intelligent woman will find this a labor of love. The Home Washing Machine promises to be to the housewife what the motor car is to the husband.

I
dropped my pen. What tacky tactics! No substance; like soap bubbles without the soap. No mission except to convince naïve women to buy yet another product. Hardly a cause to work hard for. But work hard I did because frankly those wages came in handy to replace those weathered and worn travel clothes I previously lived in. The remainder I gave to the Lighthouse household account. It was time I started giving back. So I treated each working day as a means of collection to earn my keep. This form of independence I was unfamiliar with. Funding from the suffrage association had paid for my trips and lodging with fellow suffragists for years, and upkeep and menus for my home in the Lighthouse were covered by monthly checks from Thomas to Lizzie.

I was accustomed to taking orders from a woman, so to repeatedly be ordered about by Thomas’ assistant editor, Mr. Shilling (or Chilling, or Shivering, or Shelling I liked to think when perturbed by him), proved a difficult transition. I was given one badly scarred wooden desk holding one drawer underneath, and a typewriter on top with sticking letters of R and T (the most commonly used letters of course), and a barely productive type ribbon.
Dare
may read like
dave
, if you dared read it at all. I was in a long room with all-male reporters who were quite filled with smoking breath and cursing shouts. These men were a crude species and I only had hope for my man-kind when Thomas approached my desk. I gave him a justified smile one such day, when reading over my advertisement for The Home Washing Machine.

“I told these hounds around you that you smiled. I also told them you could be witty in a quaint old-fashioned way.”

I took back my smile and replaced it with pinched lips. “Yes, I have a rather mid-Victorian flavor, don’t I?”

He perched on the edge of my desk with such comfortable ease, I felt envious. He looked down at my hair twisted back into a bun, my back straightened with exaggerated posture, my hands docile in my lap, and he laughed heartily. “You are a modern lady who just doesn’t yet know how to have fun. Someday I might teach you, but it won’t be today. Today I have an assignment for you. Come with me.”

I grabbed my hat and coat and tried to follow closely to his long strides, my lengthy straight skirt having me resort to a silly pony gait.

His motor car was parked out front and he opened the passenger door for me. “A riot is brewing at the textile mill.”

I stopped and waited for more.

“Your sister, Pearl, is working there, correct?”

I nodded.

“The United Textile Workers Union is there asking women to sign up, and it’s creating quite a buzz. Get in and we’ll motor over.”

I obeyed and then waited until he did the same on the driver’s side. His new Duisenberg was a beauty in the daylight, the details of
which I’d heard at great lengths on our ride out to Hullabaloo’s the other night. It hummed quite nicely as we bumped and splashed along the pitted muddy streets through the rain.

“Do you want me to handle the story?” I asked hopefully, wanting some substance to write about.

“No, I already have a reporter there gathering the facts. I thought you would be interested in seeing how the other side lives and why these women ask for labor laws to protect them. Does Pearl not talk to you about working at the mill?”

I squirmed uncomfortably under such direct questioning. I knew little about her. “Pearl and I lead very different lives, Thomas. I don’t even understand some of the language she uses. She’s so crude, really, and the way she dresses.” I stopped here and shook my head, not able to go on with something I didn’t understand.

“She’s not so different, Bess. She’s searching for answers just like we are.”

I was caught off guard by the use of ‘we’ – he seemed to have all the answers - and changed the subject. “You don’t have a Model-T like everyone else?”

“No thanks. Ford doesn’t need my money. He makes two hundred thousand a day making Model-Ts and Model-As. The real reason is I’m on the road so much I need more comfort. I was down in North Carolina a few months ago and slept on my backseat because a rainstorm had muddied the one good road to where I sank into mud up to my hubs. I had to wait two days before the road dried enough to continue. The government is offering federal money for highway construction. It will create more employment, increase use of motor cars, and more people will be out traveling, visiting, and spending money. The growing prosperity of this country is because of the motor car. Remember I said that.”

“Oh, and I thought it was because of my catchy advertisements.” I said, trying to mock his southern drawl, but my words sounded stiff and flat, compared to his soft vowels.

He smacked his palm against the steering wheel. “See, I was right. You
are
witty!”

I glanced over at his profile and felt warmed by his presence. I pulled my eyes away from his mouth and tried to concentrate on the street’s next pothole. I didn’t agree with his motor car theory. I preferred the train as a mode of transportation myself, its metal tracks connecting the states like no road ever could. How could the government afford cutting and dynamiting paved strips of ribbon through farmers’ fields, home yards, mountains and canyons, removing anything in front of them, including houses and villages, only to force families’ added expense of private motor cars?

We soon pulled up alongside the gate to the factory, its two-story building no more ornate than a child’s building block. A tent protected a long table outside the side entrance. A banner sagged in front of the tent like a baby’s wet diaper, reading ‘United Textile Women Workers’.

I tiptoed between mud puddles, once almost losing my shoe to the mud’s suction and finally made my way to the inner tent, more out of a desire to escape the rain, than of curiosity. Ten or so women were standing about or leaning over the table writing in ledgers, two seated women were deep in discussions. No one acknowledged our entrance. I assumed Thomas expected me to ask questions about the purpose of such a union, but when I approached the table my attention was drawn to the easel beside them. Thumb tacked there was my article on Equal Rights with a thick red X marked through it. Written above it in big bold letters was ‘Women ARE Women!” Crude notes were posted around the paper with name-calling I shall not name here. Suffice it to say, my article was not favored.

In my defense, I believed the Equal Rights Amendment would give equal rights to women with men. Yet only with another long uphill climb – many working-class and trade union women opposed it, saying they benefited more from labor legislation that gave a special category of benefits for working women. They had their side, I had mine. Another battle. One I was too exhausted to commit to. So it was with dispassionate belief that I had written the article.

Nonetheless I was livid with the red X, as if they’d used my blood to mark it. How dare this lower working class criticize my learned
research and findings! What did they contribute toward women’s rights? I recognized not
one
of them in any of the women’s parties to fight for suffrage. This was how they supported other women who fought on their behalf?

I leaned over the table, and parroting much of what I wrote, spoke loudly to the two women seated there. “Women are women? This is a common sentimental old argument. What does this mean? Weaker. Defenseless. More susceptible to accidents and disease than men. Mothers or potential mothers, nothing more. We all know that’s not true. What about the Great War? Eight
million
working women took over practically every trade formerly owned by men. While men fought the war, more than a million women provided them the ammunition. For four years, they worked long hours in the war industries of factories, mills, shipyards, workshops, and laboratories. Did they complain that they were weaker and defenseless? Of course not. Why are we doing this now? Approximately seven million women are wage-earners – that is one out of four women in the paid labor force. Nearly two million of these women are married, so the image of the only women workers being the wretched virgins fluttering between the schoolroom and the matrimonial altar is a façade.”

When I paused for breath, I heard someone to the side of me snicker. “You said ‘virgin’.”

I turned to scarcely recognize my own sister. Dressed in men’s trousers and a tweed jacket buttoned to her neck, collar up, a man’s cap completed her ensemble. The sack dress was better than this. I felt terribly embarrassed for Pearl and for me as her sister. I opened my mouth to rebuke her but she beat me to the punch.

“Why are you here?” she asked, her tone not curious but critical.

The rain pattering on the outside of the tent became noticeably louder, as if pounding to get in.

I looked above me hoping to avoid any potential water drops on my wool coat and then brushed some drops off my sleeve. The bigger problem was that I wasn’t exactly sure why I was there.

Thomas stepped in. “Pearl, your sister and I just wanted to make sure you were in good form. We’d heard there were altercations earlier.”