Today's Reading
Newspaper editor Garrison loved bringing the Girl Orator to town. When she was only thirteen, Anna Dickinson, the daughter of devout Quakers and abolitionists, had written to The Liberator in outrage over the reported treatment of an anti-slavery schoolmaster in Kentucky. Now in her early twenties, Dickinson spoke with an electrifying and poetic style to standing-room-only crowds on the issue of equal rights for all. She had consumed literary classics as a girl—an example not lost on the bookish Stevenson sisters—and possessed a natural gift for rhetoric.
Daylight streamed through the arched windows at the top of the Music Hall's four stories, casting Dickinson in a cone of radiance as she stood alone on the podium, an unremarkable slip of a girl—until she spoke. Henrietta and Charlotte watched her from the nearest gallery above the stage, rapt. Charlotte paid close attention to how Miss Dickinson used her blazing eyes and animated hands to win over the audience. Charlotte wanted to be an actress, something many in their society considered even closer to prostitution than nursing.
Henrietta, on the other hand, was most intrigued by Dickinson's use of language—especially her homespun ask-and-answer style—to support her plea for women's rights. There were dozens of rhetorical devices one could use for persuasion, and the Girl Orator appeared to be master of them all. Henrietta particularly noted the pleasing rhythm and cadence to the examples and hypotheses Dickinson shared:
The widows who see the homes they have helped to earn, the lands they have helped to buy, the very house with which they have been served their household work—swept away from them by an unjust decision of a dying husband, and a wicked law...
Are these duly represented and have they all the rights they want already?
The toiling wives who, struggling hard to save a home, to educate their children properly and clothe them decently, see their wages week after week, year after year, paid to their husbands or taken afterwards by them to be squandered in folly and vice, yet living on, staying on, enduring all things rather than part from their children whom the law would give to the degrading control of the husband...
Are these duly represented and have they all the rights they want already?
Both sisters enthusiastically nodded at every argument that Dickinson made. Gazing about the audience to witness the impact of the speech, Charlotte inadvertently caught the eye of Denham Scott watching from the gallery opposite theirs. Scott was a foreign correspondent for Reynolds's Newspaper, twice a month mailing dispatches back to London on the Civil War and other American political and legal events. Recently he had begun sniffing about the lyceums and lecture halls, trying to capture the pulse of the struggling nation when it came to women's rights. Although American women were a smidgen ahead of their British counterparts in that arena, agitation was springing up in tea salons and reading circles on both sides of the Atlantic.
Denham nodded at Charlotte, then hurriedly scribbled something down in his reporter's notepad. She did not acknowledge him back, and gently elbowed Henrietta instead. "I'm awfully sorry, Harry," Charlotte whispered. "I must have engaged his eye."
The minute the Girl Orator finished her speech, Henrietta rushed her younger sister out of the Music Hall.
"Miss Stevenson! Charlotte!" Denham Scott called to them from the rush of the exiting crowd. When he wasn't writing, Scott was running. Tall and lanky, with auburn locks falling across high cheekbones, he never appeared worried—just fast. Always in pursuit of a story, always seeking entrance to the very world of privilege he disparaged in print.
"Ladies, please, some words on Miss Dickinson?"
"Harry's the writer," Charlotte called back as she and Henrietta whirled around together to face him. "Your paper would do well to employ someone as eloquent as her."
"I have no doubt Miss Stevenson would excel at anything she put her mind to." Denham cocked his head at her. "And the performance just now, by your Girl Orator? How would you sum up that?"
"You call it a performance, do you?" replied Henrietta.
Denham smiled as if a secret ploy had worked. "I call it theatrically effective, yes."
"But not eloquent?" Henrietta smiled back. "Because surely it can be both. Or is that only the case with male speakers?"
"Do you not think there is something of the mesmerist in her?"
"Why, Mr. Scott, you don't need words from me—it appears you have already written your article." Henrietta turned around to triumphantly shoulder a giggling Charlotte forward through the crowd.
"Harry, Harry!" Charlotte urged her once they were out of Scott's earshot. "I am certain he likes you! He wants your opinion on everything!"
"Some things are meant to stay quiet," Henrietta said with a sigh, while Charlotte grinned.
"Just imagine if he knew of the letter."
...
