Something Worth Doing Page 24

  Abigail had sent letters to her brother thanking him for remaining quiet about the suffrage question, for allowing the “good citizens of Oregon to make up their own minds.” And the Oregonian had not spoken about the referral at all as yet. They’d kept him neutral. Now they needed to turn him to their way.

  “The Oregonian will have to take a position before long,” Abigail said. All the living Scott sisters met at the Duniway house, preparing the final stage of their plan. “Kate has gotten us a meeting with him, at his home, so he’ll see this as a family issue.” They agreed to let Fanny and Kate do most of the talking in his ornate parlor.

  Something burned between Abigail and Harvey. She was the older sister and he the fair-haired baby boy, and perhaps it happened with all siblings that way, between older sisters and loving younger brothers, both longing for the same approval to witness in their parents’ eyes—and each other’s. Her parents never knew of their arguments out in the field, the anger they could arouse in each other. Once, Harvey was so infuriated with her that he took a stick to Abigail, beating her back. Barely able to walk back to the house, she withheld her tears, wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. She couldn’t even remember what it had been about now, but sometimes, with the raise of an eyebrow or the grimace on his mustached face, she felt her stomach clench. It was the visage he’d chosen just before he struck. It became a warning sign, like the rattle of a snake. She didn’t want to provoke him.

  The sad thing was that she did love him, had rescued him from a laundry fire, admired his accomplishments while still being envious. He had everything she’d ever hoped for. So why he was so oppositional to her still escaped her. But then, she was oppositional to him as well.

  She would keep her words to herself. He knew where she stood and the arguments in favor of suffrage. She would let her sisters make the case with him.

  “So that’s our hope, that before the actual election in June, you might see yourself writing an editorial promoting the referral.” Kate had concluded her presentation.

  Harvey adjusted his glasses. “You know my concern about women getting the vote and then ushering in prohibition, something I oppose.”

  “We know,” Fanny said. “We oppose prohibition too, not because we think control of liquor would be a bad thing, especially on the streets of Portland, but because, like you, we believe in individual freedom. People ought to make their own choices of whether to sip wine or not.”

  “You’ll have to work hard to assure the powers that be that enfranchised women are not of that persuasion. The liquor industry has already placed ads opposed to your referral based on that assumption.”

  “Which is why your opinion is so crucial, dear Brother.” Abigail kept her voice calm. She sank back in her chair with Fanny’s grimace at her.

  “My own wife does not share your views. I’ll be inviting dissension in my household, to do what you ask.”

  “Ah, but a man is still the master of his castle, is that not so?” Abigail leaned forward. She wondered if they ought to be courting Mary rather than Harvey. It surprised her that he would even acknowledge his second wife’s opposition. He’d been widowed eleven years when he met his wealthy second wife. Not only had he landed wonderful jobs, but he had wooed an intelligent (though misguided when it came to suffrage) partner as well. He wants to show us how generous he is in going against his wife in order to satisfy his sisters.

  “Master, indeed.” Harvey tapped his finger on the blotting pad.

  “The most important thing, Harvey,” Sarah Maria said, “is that in our canvassing, we believe the resolution will pass. You wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side.”

  “Your electoral instincts will be up for scrutiny,” Abigail said. “There are rumors of your interest in a Senate run.”

  He jerked his head toward her. “No decision has been made.” He tapped again. “It’s your judgment that there is support for the referral?”

  “Yes.” Harriet said. “Southern Oregon, Eastern Oregon, we hear nothing but positive words. When Abigail speaks, men come to her events and applaud.”

  “Do they now?”

  “The legislature is simply following their constituents, as good lawmakers should. That’s why the referral passed last session and why men are going to the polls to vote for the very first time on this momentous occasion,” Kate said.

  “The Oregonian needs to be on the winning side.” Abigail said the last with a fist punch to the air.

  “I’ll think about it. I have to maintain my integrity. And I do have an editorial board I need to respond to. I can’t do this simply because you ask.”

  “You could do it for Papa,” Sarah Maria said. She had a childlike voice. “He supported the cause.”

  “He did. Well, he had a house full of smart women.” A small grin leaked beneath his bushy mustache. “But I have to think of the man who lives with a shrew or a scold or an idiot. Who will speak for him if I don’t?”

  “Let him speak for himself,” Abigail said. “He already has the right to vote.”

  She watched to see that raised eyebrow. It did not come. But the frown returned, and she vowed to keep her distance from Harvey until the vote.

  Six weeks after the sisters met with him, Harvey posted his editorial. It was written in response to an Oregonian reader who had objected to Washington’s passage of women’s suffrage.

  Harvey started by saying the reader noted objections raised by those who hadn’t really thought through the issue. He didn’t say that ignorance was the cause of opposition, but he implied it. “And listen to this, Ben.” Abigail read from the paper, her hands shaking. “‘And is any man really prepared to claim that his wife, mother and sisters’—he said sisters, Ben—‘are inferior to his own judgment, in patriotism, in love of good government.’” He went on to note that they weren’t disqualified from getting the vote as people who might not perform certain citizen functions like building roads or serving on a jury or fighting in wars, because “half the citizen men avoid doing these things too.”

  Harvey concluded with words Abigail breathed in. He had heard them. He was behind them. “‘A woman is capable of exerting an influence in public affairs which the state needs, and this influence can be made effective only through suffrage. Prejudice may for a while prevent it, but no argument can stand for a moment in its way.”

  “Holy cow chips, he’s done it! He’s supporting us! The referral is ours!”

  She sent a note to Harvey expressing her thanks, valuing his influence, calling on their father’s memory to say how he would be so pleased, “looking down upon us and using his influence from that sphere—along with our mother’s—to bring about this outcome that the Scott women had so long proffered.” It was the culmination of a lifetime of work. She just knew the referral would pass.

  A certain giddiness prevailed in the Duniway household. Abigail sang with Ben as she packed her carpetbag for travels to speak and support the effort. She found herself smiling on the stagecoach for no reason at all. Harvey has come through. Back in Oregon, suffrage women and their groups spent hours at small gatherings in agreeable churches, courting women whom they urged to convert their husbands toward the cause or support the men who already furthered their campaign. Letters went to newspapers throughout the state. Abigail wrote editorials quoting her brother and serialized novels that sang the praises of women who had to be capable because of the poor decisions by their men. She celebrated the legislators who had the referral voted in, and she wrote of how a woman could govern herself and her family, so why wouldn’t one expect her to govern her fellow citizens with wisdom and grace. The women hung posters and they wrote songs of suffrage—Abigail wrote one that she wished Clara Belle was available to sing—and their meetings rallied the faithful with the hope that they won a few converts to their cause.

  Around April, with barely a lamppost free of a “Votes for Women” poster, Abigail swallowed hard when she saw that the Oregonian had published letters both in support
of suffrage and in opposition. The paper itself had not repeated Harvey’s earlier stand.

  “I’m surprised Harvey hasn’t come out in favor as he did last November,” Abigail said. She and Kate stood in the dappled sunlight beneath an elm tree after worship one May Sunday. “Other papers have made their opinions known. You’d think the mighty Oregonian would have too.”

  “I haven’t wanted to ask Harvey,” Kate said. “He’s built a moat around his newspaper castle where family isn’t supposed to cross.”

  “So, no inside information about when they’ll take their stand. It’s getting close to the election.” Abigail turned slightly to avoid the bright sunshine streaking through the trees.

  “I haven’t wanted to say, but he’s scheduled to be back east on election day. He leaves a week before.”

  “Will he post an editorial? Has he done that in the past?”

  Kate shrugged her shoulders.

  “But he does support us, right? We are so close. His November editorial sang the highest suffrage note.”

  The night before the vote, Abigail lay awake. She thought of how her life’s work had been shaped by her mother’s words, wishing she’d had sons because a girl’s life was so hard. She considered the decision to marry Ben, which had been hers and came from love, but with a tinge of resentment that it had to be so rushed because of her father’s own wish to marry again. And the losses—of Sunny Hillside, but more, of her sister’s death from following her husband to the wilds of the Oregon coast where she’d died of tuberculosis, having no other choice but to do his bidding. And Clara Belle’s decision. At least she now lived in a territory where she had the vote. Abigail had put so much of her life into this effort. And tomorrow would be the culmination.

  She woke Ben. “What if it fails?”

  “Not likely. And if it does, you’ll begin again. You won’t have to wonder what you’ll do with your time.” He punched the pillow and went back to sleep.

  It has to pass or all our work—all my efforts—will have been for naught. “It must pass,” she said to her sleeping husband. “It was divinely inspired. How could it not?”

  She read every issue of the Oregonian, looking for encouraging words, supportive editorials, a repeat of Harvey’s fine deliberations. Nothing. Not a single word in favor—and none against. He chose a neutral stand. The coward. He kept his his light under a bushel. She’d have thought better of him if he had openly changed his mind. Maybe not. But the euphoria of that November editorial had sunk like a rock in the river.

  The vote was held June 2, 1884, but it took three weeks to tally the ballots that had to come from hither and yon over the mountains and through the canyons of this massive state. Still, Abigail could see from the first reports in the Portland precincts that it was going down. “It does not look well,” she wrote in her June 5th editorial. The sisters stayed on pins and needles, planning the celebration yet fearful of jinxing it by assuming too much. Abigail could hardly write her articles for the paper. She sketched out another novel, a shorter story. She tried to pay attention to Hubert’s wedding plans. It would be such a year of merriment, and yet the foreboding of that spring night crept over her like a heavy fog rolling in from the river, holding her hostage.

  Then the tally was counted and reported. They were defeated: 28,176 opposed to 11,223 in favor.

  It was as though she’d lost a child. She didn’t say that out loud at the suffrage meeting, for with her sat her niece and her sister Fanny, who had lost children, but the depth of Abigail’s grief took her to that tearful trail. When at last the vote was complete and the numbers available for posting at the capital for publication in the newspapers across the country, it was Abigail who had to tell her sisters and then the state and nation that the referral had failed. Her New Northwest carried the story. She added in the announcement “We are not defeated,” even though she felt they were.

  THIRTY

  Postmortem

  How could the vote have been so strongly opposed when their face-to-face discussions had nearly always ended with words of support? How could such a worthy cause, an inevitable hope, something so worth doing, have lost? Negroes had the vote, a race many men thought inferior in every way but who now began to be seen as equals, as citizens at least. Equal in their ability to vote, though she had read of poll taxes and other encumberments local jurisdictions flaunted against those people. Still, they had the right. It had to happen for women, too, and even Harvey had supported it. What had gone wrong?

  “We’ll have to analyze what precincts we won and where we lost,” Kate noted. They had gathered at what Abigail called the “postmortem” to take apart the body politic.

  “It appears we won in the countryside.” Sarah Maria looked at the tiny marks recorded on the clerk’s report. “Those farmers and ranchers know we women are no threat but rather helpmates. It’s in the cities where we lost. Actually, it was Portland who voted against us.” She turned to her youngest child, a four-year-old daughter, who leaned into her side. “We’ll get you the vote yet.”

  “It was the liquor industry.” Harriet crocheted while they sorted through the embers of defeat. “Washington Territory’s women voters have been blamed for stricter liquor laws, and Portlanders likely saw empty glasses in their future.”

  Abigail had written that Washington women were at risk to lose the vote because of the heavy spending by San Francisco and Portland liquor interests funding a repeal of the women’s suffrage there.

  “We Washington voters have passed prohibition kinds of legislation,” Clara Belle said. She had taken the produce boat to offer solace to her mother. “And they don’t like it that women are on juries, and we might find for plaintiffs against corrupt liquor industries. Did you know they pay three dollars for jury duty? One woman told me it was better than a trip to San Francisco, that she got a day of rest, her family was still there when she returned home, and she had money to put aside for a rainy day.”

  “I’ll write about that,” Abigail said. But how will I write about this defeat?

  Earl played with a cousin in the yard. Children’s chatter was a wind chime sounding through the open windows, lightening the timbre in the room.

  “Even the brewers turned against us.” Fanny sighed.

  “And they said as much in those German newspapers that reach most of Portland, despite your newspaper’s efforts to counter them, Abigail.” The vice-chair of the association shook her head. “We worked so hard. Maybe we should have brought National in.”

  “No. Oregon’s men would have their backs up if we had brought in eastern women,” Abigail said. She had to defend their tactics and yet, her strategy had not won them the vote. “Though we could have used more of their money returned from our dues, that’s certain.”

  “They weren’t keen on being asked to stay out while we requested funds,” Kate said. “But I agree, Oregon flies with her own wings, as our state motto reads. When Aunt Susan’s group said they should ‘leave Oregon severely alone,’ she was right.”

  At least she’d helped those Washington women get the vote. But here in this blessed state, she’d failed. Perhaps she should have come out for prohibition, but people ought to make their own decisions about the morality of drinking. And supporting it, she knew, would bring the liquor industry down upon them.

  “What a waste of our effort.” Another young reformer spoke up. “All those posters and meetings and—”

  “We had nearly twelve thousand men who understood and voted for us,” Fanny said. “Next time, we’ll double that. We must refocus our efforts in Portland before the next referral.”

  “The next referral.” Abigail’s despair dropped into the room like a horse stepping on a woman’s toes. “With biennial legislative sessions, that means getting passage again in the ’86 session, ’88 session, too, with a hope for a referral vote in 1890. Or later. It’s another long walk toward uncertainty.”

  “There’s a move to permit citizen initiatives, where with a certai
n number of signatures, ordinary people can make proposals for a general vote. We can move faster if that passes.” This from a younger member.

  “Maybe the men are right. Do they know something we don’t know?” said another member.

  Still another acolyte to the cause raised her voice. “Perhaps we should go back to our kitchens and parlors and bring up our sons so when they are men, they will grant their mothers the vote, if not their sisters and wives.”

  The young woman’s comments held merit for Abigail. She was tired. Maybe staying home, spoiling Earl, and waiting on other grandchildren, writing her novels, tending to Ben, perhaps that is what she should be doing with the rest of her life. She’d be fifty years old this October and her bones felt it. She could lay down the sword of truth and righteousness, having witnessed her daughter be able to vote in Washington. They could sell the paper, the Portland home, and move to Idaho, where Ben had fallen in love with land near Hailey. Why not? That beam of light that had led her to spend her days promoting this cause, maybe it was only sunshine coming through the window. If it had truly been God’s work, wouldn’t the referral have passed? They’d misunderstood, she and Ben. And she’d led her brother down the primrose path, telling him they would win. And he’d supported them—safely, months before the vote. He probably wouldn’t ever talk with her again. But then, she wasn’t sure she ever wanted to speak with him again either.

  “You told me it would pass. I believed you.” Harvey paced his office where Abigail had gone to lament that they’d both lost something that mattered.

  “I . . . I had reason, strong reason, to believe it would pass. In the rural areas, it did.”