Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 3.djvu/62

56 the martrydom of ridicule, misrepresentation and even ostracism of which I was the victim in the early years of my lonely struggle for the equal rights for the mothers of the race which has since become a world-wide movement.

I was not a willing convert to belief in equal rights for women. Blessed with a kind father and a sober, upright husband, I grew up from childhood imbued with the teaching that it was a woman's lot to engage in a lifetime of unpaid servitude and personal sacrifice; and, whether occupied with the wash tub, the churn dash, the cook stove, the kitchen sink, the mop handle, my own often infirmities or those of the ailing baby or older children, I schooled myself to imagine that I was filling my Heaven-appointed sphere, for which final recompense awaited me in the land of souls.

As all history when once recorded, becomes practically a repetition of salient facts, I will now chronicle some reminiscences from my chapter in Mary Osborn Douthit's remarkable book, "The Souvenir of Western Women," which has not been circulated generally because the lady's untimely death ended her earthly career on the threshold of its literary usefulness.

Like the man or woman of ante-bellum days who was ready at all times to assist a runaway slave to gain his freedom, but failed to comprehend the causes underlying his predicament, I for many years contented myself with the bestowal of unstinted sympathy upon women who were not in a position to speak in their own defense. But as the years went on, and I grew in wisdom, I could not help realizing that the women whose husbands would sell our butter and eggs, pigs, chickens and dried berries, to assist in the payment of taxes, in the distribution of which we had no voice, were being "taxed without representation and governed without consent." After leaving the farm and becoming a school teacher—a change made necessary by an accident that befell my good husband in the early '60s—we settled in the town of La Fayette, where for three consecutive years (or until I became a tolerable scholar myself) I gave up the double occupation of teacher and boarding-house keeper, and we removed to Albany-on-the-Willamette. Here, after another year only of teaching (without the boarders) I embarked in trade. Prior to that time I had been brought into contact chiefly with the women of the farms. As it was during the six strenuous years that I spent in trade that I learned the absolute need of woman's full and free enfranchisement, I will, by way of illustration, relate as briefly as possible a few of the incidents that gradually awakened my understanding.

One day, late in the '60s, while I was busy in the work-room of my little store, engaged in making some fashionable millinery for an estimable woman, who, having married or inherited a competence, thought all other women ought to be content with their lot, a faded little over-worked mother of half a dozen children came to me in sore distress, saying that her husband had sold their household stuff and departed for parts unknown. Then she told me of a family about to leave the town who would sell her a lot of furniture and rent her their house at a reasonable figure. "If I could borrow the money in a lump sum," she said, "I could repay it in installments." "Then," she added, between sobs, "I could keep my children together, with the aid of a few boarders." After she had left the store, and while I was inwardly fuming over my inability to assist her, a well-to-do and charitable man dropped in on a little errand, to whom I related her story. "I'll loan her the money," he said heartily. "She t:an give me a chattel mortgage on the furniture." I gladly arranged a meeting between the parties; the exchange was made, and all was going well with the weary woman, when, one day, the husband returned as suddenly as he had departed, and, by repudiating the wife's note and mortgage, the sovereign citizen and law-making husband nullified the transaction and maintained the majesty of the law. It is needless to add that my philanthropic friend lost his money and became a forceful advocate of equal rights for women ever after.