Sylvias Marriage | Page 2

best of my bargain. I became to outward view a beaten drudge; yet
it was the truth that never for an hour did I give up. When I lost what
would have been my fourth child, and the doctor told me that I could
never have another, I took this for my charter of freedom, and made up
my mind to my course; I would raise the children I had, and grow up
with them, and move out into life when they did.
This was when I was working eighteen hours a day, more than half of it
by lamp-light, in the darkness of our Northern winters. When the
accident came, I had been doing the cooking for half a dozen men, who
were getting in the wheat upon which our future depended. I fell in my
tracks, and lost my child; yet I sat still and white while the men ate
supper, and afterwards I washed up the dishes. Such was my life in
those days; and I can see before me the face of horror with which
Sylvia listened to the story. But these things are common in the
experience of women who live upon pioneer farms, and toil as the
slave-woman has toiled since civilization began.
We won out, and my husband made money. I centred my energies upon
getting school-time for my children; and because I had resolved that
they should not grow ahead of me, I sat up at night, and studied their
books. When the oldest boy was ready for high-school, we moved to a
town, where my husband had bought a granary business. By that time I
had become a physical wreck, with a list of ailments too painful to
describe. But I still had my craving for knowledge, and my illness was
my salvation, in a way--it got me a hired girl, and time to patronize the
free library.
I had never had any sort of superstition or prejudice, and when I got
into the world of books, I began quickly to find my way. I travelled into
by-paths, of course; I got Christian Science badly, and New Thought in
a mild attack. I still have in my mind what the sober reader would
doubtless consider queer kinks; for instance, I still practice "mental
healing," in a form, and I don't always tell my secret thoughts about
Theosophy and Spiritualism. But almost at once I worked myself out of

the religion I had been taught, and away from my husband's politics,
and the drugs of my doctors. One of the first subjects I read about was
health; I came upon a book on fasting, and went away upon a visit and
tried it, and came back home a new woman, with a new life before me.
In all of these matters my husband fought me at every step. He wished
to rule, not merely my body, but my mind, and it seemed as if every
new thing that I learned was an additional affront to him. I don't think I
was rendered disagreeable by my culture; my only obstinacy was in
maintaining the right of the children to do their own thinking. But
during this time my husband was making money, and filling his life
with that. He remained in his every idea the money-man, an active and
bitter leader of the forces of greed in our community; and when my
studies took me to the inevitable end, and I joined the local of the
Socialist party in our town, it was to him like a blow in the face. He
never got over it, and I think that if the children had not been on my
side, he would have claimed the Englishman's privilege of beating me
with a stick not thicker than his thumb. As it was, he retired into a
sullen hypochondria, which was so pitiful that in the end I came to
regard him as not responsible.
I went to a college town with my three children, and when they were
graduated, having meantime made sure that I could never do anything
but torment my husband, I set about getting a divorce. I had helped to
lay the foundation of his fortune, cementing it with my blood, I might
say, and I could fairly have laid claim to half what he had brought from
the farm; but my horror of the parasitic woman had come to be such
that rather than even seem to be one, I gave up everything, and went
out into the world at the age of forty-five to earn my own living. My
children soon married, and I would not be a burden to them; so I came
East for a while, and settled down quite unexpectedly into a place as a
field-worker for a