I just started writing this series. Welcome your feedback. Im thinking of writing a little bit at a time... ---------------------------------------- Lizzie is a dear friend, perhaps even my dearest and closest one at the moment. I can tell her anything. She listens patiently to my indecision, vacillations and mood swings, then either gently nudges me or roughly shoves me in the right direction. She always knows the answers to my problems, yet always lets me figure them out on my own. She is now my inner compass, my intuition and my conscience and I couldnt imagine living my life without her by my side. I first met Lizzie three years back. We had moved to a new neighborhood and were helping our children transition into their new schools with their new teachers. My daughter needed help with her school project, the biggest one of the year. Everyone knows Susan, of course, and she was one of the first people I reached out to for help. It was Susan that first introduced me to Lizzie, but it was only much later that I discovered how close the two of them were. Ours was a casual acquaintance at first. Lizzie gave us what we needed to know for the project, and that was that. There was something about her that intrigued me even back then, something that made her different from everyone else I knew, but my usual shyness and skepticism at meeting new people coupled with my packed schedule kept me from getting to know her better. At first, I didnt think we had much in common. After all, she was a gregarious white American housewife whose seven children took up nearly all of her time. While I was an Indian working mother of two desperately juggling a demanding Wall Street career with never-ending apologies for not having enough time for social engagements. What could she possibly understand about my daily struggles? Sure, I admired her for the way she mobilized her community to fight for womens rights, a subject near and dear to my heart, but honestly, do two women ever agree about the best way to promote womens rights? I assumed that she, like everyone else, would find fault with the myriad choices I had made in my life, which have too often been labeled as too radical. I had been burned and judged too often by people who didnt understand me, and I wasnt about to take that risk again. And then there was the age barrier. She was much older than me, and I feared that she may be very old-fashioned. So we went our own separate ways. The following year, as we planned our summer road trip through upstate New York, I remembered that Lizzie had a family home in Seneca Falls, which would be directly on our route. She had moved there from Boston five years after her marriage, with three small sons in tow, and had spent several years there before moving to New York. I wondered if we might stop by for a visit. Lizzie was thrilled and insisted on giving all of us a tour of the town. She met us at the Wesleyan Chapel on a bright sunny August morning. It was in Seneca Falls that she had first faced the hardships of housekeeping for a growing family. Her husband, like most husbands, had left her completely alone to deal with everything, while he occupied himself with more important work. And so Lizzie had slowly come to realize that she herself must fight for her rights. She showed us the pulpit at which she had taken her first nervous steps towards public speaking, described to us the sentiments that had driven her towards those steps and the opposition she had faced from her own family. As I stood there looking out at the big empty church reliving the instant when Lizzie had stepped out of her own role as housewife and taken up the fight for all housewives everywhere, I knew exactly what she meant. She hadnt been alone that day, but she had been the leader, the rebel, the one who had put everything at stake for an idea that she believed in with all her heart and soul. Even my children sensed the depth of the moment as they slowed their pace and gently ran their hands over the crumbling walls of the church. Oh, how my heart went out to the woman who had had the unmitigated gall to have the phrase promise to obey removed from her wedding vows, because she obstinately refused to obey one with whom (she) supposed (she) was entering into an equal relation! Once outside the church though, Lizzie was back to her playful self and we were both scampering around with the children trying to drench one another with water from the water wall. Then she jumped in our car and directed us to the exact spot on the banks of the river where her friend Amelia had first introduced her to Susan. How fondly she spoke of both of them and how she laughed at their decision to trade their cumbersome skirts for practical pants, a scandalous decision for those days! From there, we drove on to her house. An ordinary two-bedroom thing, whitewashed and clean, but hardly anything that one would have noticed in a drive-by. How did she ever fit seven children in here, let alone raise them! Laughing, she told us that they did manage to drive her up the walls often, and even once onto the roof. She also told us about the time one of her sons had put the baby in a basket and let it float down the river. What an amazing woman! From room to room we went, and story after amazing story poured out of her. Here was the room in which she had paced up and down like a caged lion; there was the desk at which she had sat writing, forging thunderbolt after thunderbolt for Susan to fire. She lovingly referred to her house as the center of the rebellion. Every floor panel, every wall and window, every single thing in the house was overflowing with Lizzies spirit, energy and warmth. I was blown away. For this was not just Lizzies story. It was the story of how one woman, sitting in her own kitchen in the midst of her noisy family, through the power of her pen, had changed the course of human history, and then had slipped completely into obscurity, forgotten by the very history she had created, because her vision has been too radical even for the progressive times in which we live. We followed Lizzie up the stairs to the bedrooms. There was something very special she wanted to show us. Pictures of her grandchildren. I admit I was a bit apprehensive. I wasnt sure if we had budgeted enough time to go through a humongous album of soccer games and violin recitals. But I neednt have worried. Lizzie only wanted to show us one picture. This was her favorite one. It was a picture of her, with her second daughter, Harriot. On Lizzies lap, and held closely in her embrace, was her granddaughter. I started to make the usual polite comments when suddenly my eyes jumped to the caption below the photo that listed out their names. Lizzie had named her granddaughter Nora, after the lead role in Henrik Ibsens play A Dolls House! I was speechless. That was my favorite play. I had produced it on behalf of the womens dorm in my engineering school, IIT Delhi, where the women engineers had been outnumbered 25 to 1. And we had won prizes for our production. In that silent instant, the distance between Lizzie and me melted away. Our widely different births, backgrounds, cultures, families, career paths - none of that mattered any more. All that mattered was the similarity in our thinking. I came to know and trust her, but I had yet to discover how invaluable her friendship would turn out to be. (To be continued...) A word to the reader: Lizzie is Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), the author of the Declaration of Sentiments presented in 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention in Wesleyan Chapel. It was in that nervous first public appearance of hers that Lizzie asked for the right to vote. The audience was shocked by her audacity. Never before had anybody suggested something as crazy as this, and that too a common housewife! Susan is Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906), Lizzies lifelong best friend, who was widely accepted as the leader of the womens suffrage movement in the United States. Lizzie and Susan drafted the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that gave women the right to vote. It was ratified in 1920, 16 years after Lizzies death and 72 years after she had first asked for it. Amelia is Amelia Bloomer (1818-1894), the editor of the first newspaper for women, The Lily. The most shocking thing she ever did was strongly advocate that women be given the right to wear pants instead of skirts. Sounds silly today, doesnt it? But in those days, women who wore pants would be followed by crowds of young boys who would tease them, sing songs about them and throw mud and stones at them. Even something as simple as that is a right that somebody had to fight for. Nora is Nora Stanton Blatch Barney (1883-1971), Lizzies granddaughter. In 1905, three years after Lizzies death, Nora was the first woman to receive any type of engineering degree in the United States. She became a civil engineer and worked as a real-estate developer and activist for womens rights. A Doll’s House is a controversial play by Henrik Ibsen that was published in 1879. It acknowledged that society was unfair to women and suggested that they have the right to leave their husbands and children. My favorite memory of producing this play in college is running around trying to find a Christmas tree in the middle of New Delhi. I finally found one that was very expensive and no more than three feet high, but it was a huge hit in the play! Lizzie would have been 198 years old today - like I said, shes a lot older than me! She died 72 years before I was born. I have not travelled in a time machine (this is not a science fiction story) and Ive never met Lizzie in person and yet, she is my friend. Everything I know about her is from reading her speeches and books and reading the things that others said about her. I dont think peoples minds ever die. They live on through their words. And so my dearest young readers, write! Write often, write from your hearts and write about the things that you love. Write about the things that make you laugh out loud and the things that drive you to tears. Write because your words have the power of thunderbolts and are immortal photographs of your minds. Who knows? Maybe they too will one day make friends who are more than a century younger than you!
Posted on: Fri, 01 Aug 2014 16:36:45 +0000