The Scarlet Sisters (44 page)

Tennie fit in with the “progressive woman of today who… says anything she likes… penetrates the foulest slums to study social questions…
addresses legislatures without a tremor… travels around the world alone… enters every trade and profession unchallenged… speaks boldly on every issue under the sun.” This was a rosy description of emancipation in 1905, but at least by comparison, women could not dream of the restrictions of 1870. When the sisters “invaded Wall Street thirty-five years ago… No epithet was too foul to be applied to them.” It was “improper for a woman to walk on Broadway alone,” to be out on evenings alone, or to be seen in Wall Street “even in a carriage, unless the blinds were drawn.”

Tennie returned to America repeatedly to fight for the vote. In February of 1907, she sat down with President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. She told the president, “By putting us on the same plane of suffrage with our servants and our former black slaves, you could rise to the greatest height in the world.” At a press conference afterward in the Willard Hotel, where Tennie first sought legislative help thirty-seven years before, she laughed. “I told him the women would elect and re-elect him until he was too old to continue as President.” He had not vowed to take the issue up with Congress, however. The president “told me he did not see that much good had come as a result of giving women the voting privilege… notably in Colorado and other States.” He told her the vote alone would not be “their redemption”—an argument the sisters had made decades before with their cry for economic independence.

Tennie was supportive of the more militant British
suffragettes
, a new term coined to distinguish their militancy from the comportment of
suffragists
, a general term for men and women who sought the vote. Led by Emmeline Pankhurst, the suffragettes chained themselves to fences, smashed windows, and endured forced feeding in prison. Pankhurst drew five hundred thousand suffragettes to one protest rally in Hyde Park. Tennie spoke passionately about England’s suffragettes who “brave mobs, court arrest and suffer imprisonment for the cause we know to be just.” Perhaps it was time for “my American sisters” to do the same. It would take another nine years, until 1916, before Alice Paul would lead American suffragists in marches and demonstrations, picket the White House, and go on hunger strikes in prison after some demonstrators were beaten unconscious by police.

In the fall of 1908, Tennie was now being praised as “one of the earliest and best known suffragettes in America.” She announced from Paris that she would again return to the United States, this time to stump for William Jennings Bryan in the last days of his presidential race. “Lady Cook is convinced that Bryan will take a more active interest in her ideas than Roosevelt,” a reporter wrote. “If he will agree with me on woman suffrage and the improvement of the marriage law,” said Tennie, “I shall spend plenty of money working for him.” Bryan lost to William Howard Taft.

While in America in 1908, Tennie once again tried to vote, receiving large headlines:
THEY WOULDN’T LET LADY COOK VOTE
. A crowd collected when an automobile disgorged Tennie and friends in front of a Manhattan registration site. “Keep in line, ladies,” shouted a policeman, who was ignored. The registrar looked at Tennie and said, “ ‘Not eligible.’ ‘On what grounds?’ asked Lady Cook in an unruffled tone… ‘only male voters are allowed to register.’ ” Tennie tried humor: “But I am a male and more—I am a FEmale.” The registrar shot back, “Just leave off the ‘fe’ and you can vote.” Lady Cook said pleasantly, “I shall have to take this matter to congress as I did in 1871,” taking credit for Victoria’s famous memorial to the Judiciary Committee. Her voting attempt was the “first small gun fired… They say women will get suffrage when they want it,” she declared. “I am going to try to arouse the women so that they will see that millions want it.”

Tennie was now routinely acclaimed as a brave and feisty veteran of the suffrage war, worthy of honor, not calumny. A large contingent of American suffragettes rode out in tugboats to greet Tennie the next year, 1909, when her ocean liner arrived in New York. She now vowed to spend her total fortune—$1 million, she said—to get the vote. She planned to meet with President Taft “to see if I cannot get him to do what Lincoln did, but by peaceable measures… The constitution says only idiots, the insane, and convicts may not vote and I want to know if that bars women.” Whether she met with Taft or gave money to the cause is unknown, but the fight for the vote dragged on for another eleven years.

Her titled name was used in all headlines:
LADY COOK IN HER OLD CELL
. On that 1909 visit, Tennie cheerfully took reporters on a tour of
the Ludlow Street Jail, pointing out, scratched on the wall of the cell but faded after thirty-seven years,
TENNESSEE CLAFLIN AND VICTORIA CLAFLIN WOODHULL, WE WILL NOT COME HERE AGAIN.
The jail official, not sure how to greet a jailbird turned nobility, bowed deeply. Tennie explained to a throng waiting outside, “My sister and I in 1872 were publishing a suffrage magazine… We didn’t say anything in it which would now be considered very harmful… Arrested on a charge of publishing ‘obscenity,’ we were locked up in the jail… We found the jail ill-kept, malodorous and hideously dirty, but we survived it.”

Not all the press was good. In 1910, Tennie was plagued by two strange incidents. Her sister Polly applied for a writ of habeas corpus ordering a newspaper friend of Tennie’s and his wife to “produce in court the body of Tennessee Claflin Cook, known as Lady Cook.” Sparr claimed that Tennie was “old, feeble, of advanced years,” and, most important to Sparr, a woman of “large means.” She alleged that the couple was holding Tennie captive, as she had not visited her. In fact, Tennie was willingly staying with these friends. She won over reporters with humor: “Well you’ve seen the body at any rate.” She laughed about being held against her will: “I have never signed even a check that I didn’t want to. Mrs. Sparr is a good deal older than I am, and we do not get along very well together, and that is all there is to it.” A few months later, a shyster lawyer made headlines by parking an ambulance outside a New York courtroom “in anticipation of Lady Cook feigning a fit.” She was inside, defending herself from a “breach of contract” suit brought by a writer who said she had verbally told him she would pay him $30,000 to write her biography. The suit was thrown out.

For the most part, however, Tennie was considered an oracle on all things relating to women. At sixty-eight, she announced, “Do you know if I had the vote I wouldn’t go across the street to cast a ballot for any man; there isn’t one good enough—not yet.” In 1913, headlines trumpeted
LADY COOK HANDS A STIFF JOLT TO CLOTHES CRANKS
. She supported modern dress and blasted the “shameless revelations of women’s anatomy which the old-time crinolines made… the wind blew those huge skirts around—well it was awful. And then came the great bustles, which weighted down the
body and brought weakness… Puny, sickly babies by the hundreds were one result of the bustle monstrosity” and “tight corsets, which squeezed in the waist.” She added: “Trailing outer skirts, which gathered up all the microbes on the street and carried them through the house, were more prolific of disease… among women than anything else that could be named.” The woman of today, “with her light-weight, outer skirt, one thin petticoat, low-heeled comfortable shoes and skirts short enough to clear the ground… are gowned a hundred times more sensibly than they have been since the days of Grecian draperies.”

Tennie kept to an amazing schedule, hopping from Paris to Naples, then back to the United States and England to lecture in major halls in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Albany, Pittsburgh, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, and London. Yet she wrote Victoria from New York on January 31, 1911, about her nervous stage jitters before a Carnegie Hall performance. “My dear sister, By the time you receive this my lecture will be over and I shall be very glad… I feel that it will be a success… early all the boxes and reserved seats are taken… but I will be glad when it is over.”

Tennie seemed impervious, however, once onstage. At Carnegie Hall she drew laughs when she tailored her speech to an American audience. “Why, I love the American men, for they trust their wives.” Pause. “Some of them trust their wives so much that when they want to evade payment of a debt or avoid business trouble, they put their property in their wives’ names.”

She was a huge success when she faced vast audiences at Royal Albert Hall in December 1909 and then again in May 1910. She was but one of several speakers at the December mass meeting organized by England’s Women’s Freedom League, yet she stole the show. One observer at her December performance marveled that she had delivered her lengthy lecture “without the assistance of a single note.” While Tennie spoke “with the force of a mountain torrent, the immense audience listened as if petrified with admiring amazement.” This critic praised her “ever-present humour” and her shift to “beautifully modulated tones.” She brought tears to her audience when she addressed the “hapless condition of her sisters in all countries and
under all forms of government, going back to Biblical time.” Tennie’s performance was the “most stirring plea for women’s equality ever enunciated in a building which has vibrated to the notes of the world’s greatest singers and musicians and to the fervent addresses of our Salisburys, Balfours, and Chamberlains.” She received a “hurricane of applause.”

On May 6, 1910, the stage was hers alone. Fans wondered how she would fare; “it was held to be impossible that one solitary woman, no matter who she might be,” could attract and hold an audience of upward of seven thousand in that vast structure. In addition, a grim obstacle loomed. Gloom was hanging over London as bulletins reported that King Edward was near death. Thousands were streaming into the hall when news came from Buckingham Palace that the end was imminent. It was too late to postpone the lecture. Tennie faced the audience alone onstage. She expressed sadness over the death of the monarch who had opened the Alexandra House twenty-five years before: “I had prepared a special lecture for you; but on learning that our beloved King is now, perhaps, in the death struggle, it has grieved me very much, and I am sure everyone in this great hall to-night shares that feeling. But I hope you will bear with me in what I have got to say.” (The King died just before midnight.)

The sympathetic audience interrupted Tennie’s speech constantly with applause and laughed at her light asides. “Although she has to her account some four decades of incessant and strenuous work, she retains the personal charm, extraordinary vitality and activity, and invincible courage in the enunciation of her unchangeable opinion.” Lady Cook, however, had indeed modified her opinion since her days as Tennie Claflin. Her Albert Hall speech of more than seven thousand words quoted the Bible, endlessly praised Jesus Christ and God, but circled back repetitiously to her main theme: “the purity of the sexes” and the necessity of mothers to teach their sons to respect women. Like her sister, Tennie now exalted marriage.

While extolling “Our Savior, the best friend that women ever had,” Tennie still could sting. She blasted the teaching of priests, ministers, and other religious leaders as an explanation for “why women have been treated like slaves and worse than beasts during the last few centuries.”
She quoted from a popular “Guide for Priests,” which contained antifemale passages: “She is the gate by which the devil enters, the road that leads to sin.” She attacked the Inquisition, which burned thousands of women as “witches”: “How can you expect much from women in the face of such treatment?… a Galician Bishop declared that she was not human. At the Council of Macon the Bishops debated whether she had a soul.” The audience cried, “Shame, shame,” after she mentioned that a judge had recently said, “ ‘When women go into the witness-box they will swear to anything.’ It is about time,” Tennie cried, “we called for our sons to give us back our good name.” Huge applause followed.

Her repetitive call to teach sons respect for women was laced with arguments for birth control and eugenics, demands for the women’s vote, and attacks on the promiscuity that led to venereal disease. Churches should open their doors to events for “young people to meet in a pure and holy place” and maybe eventually marry. “Yes, I am a matchmaker, and I believe in it.” Applause and laughter ensued.

She edged into the topic of birth control by opposing large families. “It is not quantity we want. We want quality.” She assailed those who “breed like flies.” The populace of insane asylums and jails were the “offspring of ignorant mothers, and of debased, debauched, and diseased fathers… The women have got to act, and they can stop it in one or two decades by stopping the supply.” Her sympathy for prostitutes, whom she had characterized in her youth as victims of economic poverty, was long gone in her Albert Hall lecture. Prostitution “creates our degenerates, and it is the cause of over a million children dying every year before they reach the age of one with infantile syphilis and other causes.” Now, in an age when the effects of sexual diseases were confirmed, Tennie dismissed the plight of prostitutes. Despairing of men who “sowed their wild oats” and then contaminated pure brides, she suggested that those men remain with people they had been “debauching and living with.” She no longer talked about women exercising sexual freedom, and she swore that she had never advocated free love and now termed it
free lust
. In her youth she had shown compassion for an unmarried woman “following the instincts
of her nature and the dictation of her soul.” Now she sanctioned “purity” before marriage for both sexes.

(In a less public arena, however—a one-on-one interview five years before—Lady Cook did sound like the Tennie of old when she derided the “society mother” who holds “the theory that marriage is instituted for the purpose of getting daughters ‘well provided for’—in other words to live the lives of drones. This is all wrong and false.” And she defended poor prostitutes. “I hold that the woman who offers herself in the streets is a lesser offender than one who sells herself at the altar for a fortune or a title.”)