July 1, 1871

WOMEN ITEMS

The woman’s club—The broomstick.

Women should never be lawyers; they would constantly have writs of "attachment."

A strong-minded lady writes to the Woman’s Own Journal: "John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, John Bright and other English statesmen assert that women understand political economy better than men, because they have been drilled in the habit of husbanding small resources. Some are obliged to husband very small resources, in the shape of the men they have to take care of."

Every newspaper you pick up just now contains a story relating how some woman ran a needle into her foot and pulled it out of her elbow seventeen years afterward. We know of a stranger case than this. There was a woman in the Tenth Ward who swallowed a five-dollar gold piece just before the [Civil] war. Well, she heard nothing about it all those years until a day or two since, when she felt a pain proceeding from a swelling on her left shoulder. The doctor lanced the tumor, and it actually discharged five dollars’ worth of currency in fifty, twenty-five and ten cent notes! The doctor thinks they must have changed just about the time specie payments were suspended. With wonderful accuracy does Nature conform herself to the laws of circumstance!

LETTER FROM HAWK’S NEST PEAK, NC, JUNE 12, 1871

Tennie C. Claflin:

I am a wild old rover in the mountains of North Carolina. Very near I am to Tennessee, if not dear to Tennie C. Only a line divides us—I mean from Tennessee. I drop a line to see if it won’t unite us—I refer to Tennie C.

I saw your picture, beautiful as life, at Brady’s the other day. I took a good absorbing look at it and brought it with me, in my mind’s eye, down to these wilds; so I know to what manner of woman I am writing.

And now, today, descending from the crags and peaks to the nearest post town, I am surprised to find your paper strayed to this most unlikely part of the world, and all the young Ku Klux of the neighborhood warmly discussing and generally denouncing it. The pronunciamento of St. Mary Darl was especially shocking to them, and yet each one of her propositions was approved by someone; and, on the average, her whole article received the sanction of the crowd. Learning that I was from New York, one of them appealed to me to know if "Mrs. McFarland was not a first class" courtesan in that city (only he didn’t phrase it so politely). "Oh, no," I said; "but there isn’t much old-fashioned close communion marriage any more in New York. The best women are pretty much all ‘first-class’ owners of themselves. There is a terrible commotion there about marriage slavery, as there has been here about Negro slavery, and the whole thing is getting itself abolished." The poor man went away sorrowful. The Yankees had taken away his black slave, and now they may again invade the South and take his white one also.

So you see, dear Tennie, I am with you in your crusade against the last of the slaveries. Though I am of the master class, I am willing every woman should be as free as I am.

Maybe you would like some sketches for your paper of mountain life in this region to sandwich in between your heavier propagandist articles. At the long intervals when I arrive at such things as pen and ink I may write you something.

QUARTZ

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