One Glorious Ambition (27 page)

“The causes are irrelevant. Our duty is the same. Moral treatment may not cure insanity caused by sin or misfortune or even the freedoms of democracy, but the patients still have a right to be safe, comfortable, and peaceful. That cannot happen, I believe, in almshouses or jails. They need a hospital. They need a physician’s care. That’s what this is all about.” She heard the passion in her voice and calmed herself. “I would come to the committee and tell them directly, if that would help.”

Howe shook his head. “Women are not permitted. Against the feminine nature.”

“My feminine nature allows me to witness the horror, to write of it, but not to speak of it to men who can do something about it?” She wasn’t disagreeing with him but noted the irony.

“We must keep you as pure as we can. It’s what I tell Julia, but she doesn’t listen to me and insists on speaking publicly of abolition. I think it lessens her moral authority. I don’t want that happening to you.”

Should I be comforted by his worry over my reputation or is this yet another way for him to use my work for his own gain?
What mattered, she decided, was that he would introduce the memorial to the legislature. He would be her voice and the voice of the mad in securing them a safe and humane place where some might improve. But improvement was not the goal. Being treated as a human being was.

“This is astonishing,” Anne told her. Dorothea’s
Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts
had been introduced on January 19, 1843, with copies printed as a pamphlet for interested readers. A few newspapers decided to serialize portions.

The two friends sat in Anne’s parlor at Brookline, newsprint spread before them. It had been months since they had shared an afternoon. During the legislative session Dorothea sat in the gallery, ready and willing to give Dr. Howe more information, should he need it. Thankfully, he had been named chairman of the memorial committee.

“Your examples of the poor suffering people,” Anne continued. “I know you wrote of some of them, but to read of them here in the way you’ve presented them, it’s quite … moving.”

“Not for everyone, judging from the letters to the editor. There’s more controversy when there should be none. Relieving suffering is part of the human condition. I so hope it moves the legislature to act.”

“The story where you were asked by the insane man if you had lost dear friends too. Do you suppose it was your dark dress that made him think you were in mourning?”

“It might well have been. And I didn’t think him insane. Just lost of his reason. Temporarily.”

“But did the conversation really go as you wrote?”

Even her friend questioned her veracity? “I answered him as I would anyone who would ask. ‘I’ve not lost all my friends,’ I told him. And then he said, ‘Have you any dear mother or father to love you?’ ” Her voice caught at the memory. “Oh, Anne, his gentle question brought tears to my eyes.” Dorothea brought clasped hands to her throat. “Imagine, his being lucid enough to comfort. That he laughed and paced his stall and shouted with his fists to an unseen monster right afterward did not take away from his moment of aware compassion. That he would strike to the core of my orphan state, with no mother or father to love me, to never have had them to love me, speaks to his humanity.” She patted her fingers at her heart.

“One wonders if those people have a special telescope to peer into the soul of others,” Anne said. “Less distracted by the demands of daily living, they perhaps can be more observant of the emotions of others.”

“And might that not suggest that those whose art is recognizing human suffering might be that close”—Dorothea put her thumb and finger to within a smidgeon of each other—“that close to madness themselves?”

“Oh, posh, not you. Though I do worry over your exertions.”
Anne stuck her knitting needles into the ball of yarn and pulled on the servant cord to ask for tea. It was that time. Her sisters would be back from their walk soon.

“I find it interesting that your account of the baby in the arms of the vacant mother was quite different from Howe’s use of it in his article last fall,” Anne said. She cleared the table of books for the tea tray.

“Which did you prefer?”

“Yours,” she said after a pause. She leaned toward Dorothea and lowered her voice. “I also thought he might have inflamed the baser senses by describing the half-naked man in the cell next to the young woman. The image of him pounding on the thin wall, hoping to reach ‘the comely girl’ to do heaven knows what damage. Well, it was quite vivid.” She pursed her lips.
Mock prurient disgust?
Dorothea sat back. What could be titillating about the slippage of humanity?

“Perhaps that sort of sexual image appeals to readers of the
Advertiser
.”

“Such words, Dorothea.” Anne fanned herself.

“I wanted to evoke compassion from the legislators, not fear or voyeuristic emotions. I hope that as brothers, fathers, and husbands, they will see the importance of sensitivity to their less fortunate sisters, mothers, and wives. Even brothers. That man could have been a father.”

“Well, the excerpts in the papers have certainly aroused comment.” She set aside her fan for the tea. “How does your shawl for Marianna progress?”

Dorothea looked at her hands. “The yarn dye blackens my fingers, so I’ve put it off for a time in case I need to remove my gloves to make notes in the legislative gallery.”

“The dye wasn’t set properly if it stains,” Anne said. “There is another letter to the editor today. Did you see it? From the Danforth jail officials. They’re quite upset and said you wrote out of your imagination.”

“I’ve become accustomed to such furor.” Still, her stomach ached with the criticism.

“They called the memorial a series of barefaced falsehoods, false impressions, and false statements. Does it … bother you, that people question your integrity?”

The words hurt as much as the reviews of her book
The Garland of Flora
had. “I wish you had not told me,” Dorothea said.

“I thought you would want to know the truth.”

“There’s little I can do about the negativity, and I’m not new to it.” She sipped her tea. “Truthfully, it’s an added pain to hear those words from your mouth, dear friend, even though you are just repeating them.”

“Oh, I never meant to hurt you! I truly thought you would want to know.”

“I know.” She smiled, trying to lighten the mood she had changed by expressing her feelings. She had no one with whom she could feel safe. No one who would understand that the repetition of an untruthful statement from the lips of a friend pained her more than if she had read it herself. Psalm 57 came to mind.
“ ‘They have prepared a net for my steps; my soul is bowed down.’ Only I will not bow down. I must respond to the Danforth claims, of course. I cannot let such accusations stand now that I know of them.”

“But it makes you so … public if you start a word war. You risk becoming like Julia Ward.”

“I’m not preaching in front of crowds about abolishing slavery.”

“You are becoming known, though, in a public forum.”

“For the suffering,” Dorothea said. “I make myself a public person for them.”

She did not tell Anne that she had publicly solicited letters of support for a new asylum from hospital superintendents around the region. Nor did she tell Anne that she had replied quite firmly to an editorial that had been supportive, but the editor suggested one minor inaccuracy. They had a flurry of letters between them, thankfully not published in the paper. Facts were facts that must be defended, however minute the issues might appear to someone less informed.

She kept to herself the more positive letters she received. Anne would think her prideful, and it might feed an envy she had so casually witnessed. L. M. Sargent, a prominent speaker of temperance reminded her, “Woman was last at the cross and first at the tomb, and she is never more in her appropriate situation, than when placed precisely as you are at this moment.” She reread that letter several times.

Dr. Howe supported Dorothea more privately than publicly. When he did respond to editorials or letters, he never once said that he too had visited many of the same facilities and saw the same things Dorothea described. Once he suggested that perhaps on another day things might have been much better, that the vagaries of treatment in the jails could not be pinned down quite so much as one might like.

Dorothea read his letter and felt her face burn. He was succumbing to the complainers, mitigating the horrors that were real and every day for those who suffered without treatment in cold, smelly jails. It was something of the political world she could not grasp, this weathervane mentality as she thought it, never being certain who one’s allies really were or if they would stay the course or turn as the winds blew differently. If not Howe, then who could she count on to bring the memorial to its perfect solution? She could not do it herself. Her skirts could not cross the threshold of the assembly.

The memorial included a request for one hundred thousand dollars to build a moral treatment hospital. Yes, it was a quarter of the entire commonwealth budget. But she assured Howe that she could acquire donations for most of it, leaving the state to come up with perhaps only twenty-five thousand more dollars and the ongoing maintenance costs. But as a woman, she was not allowed to testify before the committee to these factors.

“I’m trying to keep the discussion of the committee from focusing
on the accuracy of your descriptions and move them toward debate about a new hospital,” Howe told Dorothea. He had taken supper with her. They sat in the parlor now, drinking coffee and eating carrot cake. The fuchsia plant near the window offered a spot of pink color to their surroundings.

“I do understand; I do,” Dorothea said. “But in listening to the debate yesterday, it seemed that the minds of the representatives speak to expanding Worcester’s hospital rather than building a separate one. You invited testimony from the superintendent, and it seems to me you made less use of my arguments—which I could not make myself. Where will moral treatment end up with a mere expansion?”

“The superintendent supported the base of your memorial. We must take what wins we can, Dorothea,” Howe said. “It is the nature of politics.”

“I’m not certain I much like politics,” she said.

“It requires a certain masculine skill.”

She accepted the rebuke. “You do know I wrote to Representative Allen?”

“Yes. Comparing his passion for eliminating slavery in the state to our commonwealth holding the insane in dungeons did not sit well with him. They are two different but very important issues.”

“I appealed to his reason, or so I thought,” she said. “How can he fight for the freedom of slaves and not fight for the freedom of the insane?”

“He does not see the connection. He is not a supporter. And when the vote comes up later this week, which I hope it will, I
believe it will not be for a new hospital as we had hoped but for an addition to Worcester, if that.”

It would be a defeat. Her work—her arrival on the public stage at risk to her private, proper feminine role, where women stayed out of the limelight, knew their place—would all be for naught.

“What could I have done differently?”

Howe shook his head. “I don’t know.”

In the next weeks, Dorothea immersed herself in political schemes and the vagaries of political speech. She discovered that she must provide material daily to the committee members while in session, competing with other interests for their attention. She might meet them in the morning and get a warm reception, but by nightfall someone else had slipped in and placed another bill in a higher position, and she would have to begin again. Nothing ever appeared certain.

Except the suffering of those relieved of their reason.

When the vote came, Dorothea was in the gallery. It went as Howe had predicted. She had raised the issue, kept it on the minds of many, but in the end, only one hundred fifty more beds added to the existing two hundred fifty at the Worcester State Lunatic Hospital would become available. Only one hundred fifty of those hundreds caged and forgotten in the almshouses and jails from Cape Cod to the mountains would have access to a better existence. And none served by the moral treatment approach.

She had reduced the suffering of a few. Thousands more waited.

With Reverend Channing gone and the campaign for the hospital on to new phases that did not need her, Dorothea pondered her future. She wrote to Marianna and to Anne, being honest but cheerful. She kept in touch with the Channing children and Sarah Gibbs, their aunt, writing that perhaps her memorial was not such a failure. After all, she had gotten more beds set aside for the mentally ill, and in the process she had established relationships with several asylum directors in the region, a few of whom had already formed an association. “This could be a powerful group to get behind my objectives to separate the insane from jails and almshouses and move them into moral treatment facilities,” she wrote to Sarah. “Though I’m unsure of their acceptance of a woman’s contribution to the cause.”