Josephine, Flora and Maud spent these afternoons visiting women in the towns and villages around Pleasant Valley, explaining the petition, offering it for signing. Excitement mounted, exponentially. They could feel it in church parlours, where they met members of the YWCA, missionary societies and women’s auxiliaries; in temperance lodges, where they attended meetings of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union; in women’s homes, where they were guests of honour at literary societies, tea parties, or sewing circles. In the countryside, they spoke to determined women crowded into farmhouses.
Everywhere, women fanned out, covering the entire province—Carrie and her cohorts, from St. John; other suffragists, from Sackville, Moncton, Fredericton, Campbellton.
On a Sunday evening, coming home on the train, in the flush of an evening sunset, Flora sat on the edge of her seat feeling sharpened, as keen as the point of a pencil. She studied the names written in ink—Gladys Templeton, Beryl Fanjoy, Alice Streetham, Rose Campbell, Marcia Jones, Beatrice Davies, Florence Camps.
Her own name, at the top.
Flora Salford.
She wished that Maria Rye, or Matron, or the men who had bid for her at the pauper auction, or even Jasper Tuck might in some ghostly manner populate the other seats. Exiting the train, she would pause and stare into each of their faces. They would see within her own eyes all the other women who had signed the petition: an irrepressible multitude.
—
By April, Flora and Ellen had prepared everything needed to furnish the new rooms, and the rooms themselves were ready for occupancy. Josephine began to mention, quietly, and to the right people, that she was accepting two new boarders.
Flora acquired a Barred Rock rooster. He woke the entire household at the break of day and rode the hens with a mighty flapping of grey wings. She named him Prince Albert and waited eagerly for the first hen to claim ownership to her eggs. She took the cow to a neighbour’s bull, and watched the mating, and walked her home again. She planted a forty-foot row of peas when the snow still lay on the fields.
—
Lucy’s letter arrived on the day when all the women of the household, even Ellen, were in a frenzy of preparation. They made cold meals for the boarders and a picnic for themselves, packed satchels for the train ride to Fredericton. Tomorrow, the suffrage bill was to receive its second reading in the legislature and women from all over the province were going to witness the vote.
At supper, as they cut into Ellen’s rhubarb pie, Josephine read the letter out loud for the second time.
June 23, 1890
Dear Mother,
I can hardly hold my pen for excitement. I have been accepted into the Wellesley Female Seminary in Massachusetts! Cousin Carrie encouraged me to apply and begs you, as do I, to accept her offer to pay for my education. It may be that after all I might become one of the first women lawyers. I will finish out the summer here at the factory if I don’t get fired! I will begin at the seminary next September. Mother, I will change the laws. I will fight for the rights of women and children. And of course, by then, we will have the right to vote.
Josephine pressed the letter to her breast. Not for me, she thought. Change takes time. But for them.
Maud speared a piece of buttery crust with her fork. “The more I learn about how we are treated by men, it’s as if my heart is actually swollen with anger. It can’t be healthy. It’s like wearing a corset.” She forked the pie into her mouth, chewed, swallowed and turned to Ellen. “You and Enid haven’t been hearing it, but everywhere we’ve travelled this spring, everywhere, women are talking about the laws, and how they work in favour of men, and about how women make no laws. And then we all talk about how most women are more affected by the ills of society than are men. And so, of course, would be in a better position to make…better laws.” Maud threw her arms wide, narrowly missing Flora’s head. “But I am so excited for tomorrow! Mr. Turner has been talking all over the place, encouraging other men to his side. To our side. I can hardly believe it, but…no, I can, I can believe it. Who could have believed Lucy would go from working in a cotton factory to studying at a women’s seminary in Massachusetts? Oh, Mother. Let me see it again.”
“Remember how Lucy wrote that she was growing so thin she was becoming weak?” Josephine said, handing Maud the letter. “I was about to tell Carrie to go and rescue her.”
“Well,” Maud sighed, satisfied. She handed the letter to Ellen. “She has. In a way. Rescued her.”
—
The number of women arriving at the legislature to witness the vote was so great that chairs were set onto the floor of the House of Assembly Room—behind the fixed seats and beneath the tall windows—and all the upper galleries were filled.
Josephine, the girls and Ellen sat in the topmost row of the side balcony; they leaned forward to watch the floor below.
“I just heard that the petition received over twelve thousand signatures from every corner of the province, from both women and men,” Maud said to Flora, as the din of arrivals continued.
Women flooded in, found their way to seats, compressing their skirts, murmuring apologies. Ellen pulled a fan from her bag, endeavoured to make a cooling breeze of the stultifying heat. The tall windows had been opened; over their heads, holes in the ceiling sucked the air, but Flora felt sweat rolling down her cheeks. The balcony at the far end of the enormous room looked so steep that it seemed as if the women were pasted there like wallpaper. On the floor, some men sat tidily and others sprawled at their appointed desks. The clerk spread papers on a marble table, set before the Speaker’s dais.
On the
