3 Light Slices of Life

In this episode we have 3 lighthearted stories that after listening to, you might be surprised to know are from 2 suffragettes.  Our first 2 stories are from Zona Gale, a fellow Wisconsinite.  The third is by Nina Evan Allendar, a political cartoonist for the suffragette movement. 

1. Friendship Village - town modernization
2. The Walk – 3 young girls attempting to be older than they are
3. Women and Bargains – the ever challenging pursuit of finding the best bargain

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to Narrated Archives, the place where we unearth enduring and classic short stories from the public domain.

My name is Sally Barron, and I'm your guide and narrator on this literary journey.

In this episode we have 3 lighthearted stories that you might be surprised to know are from 2 suffragettes. Our first 2 stories are from Zona Gale, a fellow Wisconsin native.

Zona Gale born in 1874 was an American novelist, playwright, and short-story writer known for her portrayals of Midwestern small-town life. Born in Portage, Wisconsin, she based her popular early short stories in the fictional setting of Friendship Village. Gale began her career as a newspaper reporter before shifting to fiction and publishing her first novel in 1906.

Her work evolved from sentimental stories to a more complex realism, which she used to explore social issues like women's rights. This shift culminated in her novel Miss Lulu Bett, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama when she adapted it for the stage in 1921. This made her the first woman to receive the award. An active suffragist and pacifist, Gale also used her platform to advocate for various progressive causes, including the Wisconsin Equal Rights Law. After the deaths of her parents, her later writing adopted mystical themes, which received a more mixed critical reception. Gale remained a prolific writer throughout her life until her death in 1938.

Today we’re stepping into Friendship Village with a description of town modernization.

Friendship Village

We are one long street, rambling from sun to sun, inheriting traits of the parent country road which we unite. And we are cross streets, members of the same family, properly imitative, proving our ancestorship in a primeval genius for trees, or bursting out in inexplicable weaknesses of Court-House, Engine-House, Town Hall, and Telephone Office. Ultimately our stock dwindled out in a slaughter-house and a few detached houses of milk men. The cemetery is delicately put behind them, under a hill. There is nothing mediaeval in all this, one would say. But then see how we wear our rue:

When one of us telephones, she will scrupulously ask for the number, for it says so at the top of every page. "Give me 1-1," she will put it, with an impersonality as fine as if she were calling for four figures. And central will answer:

"Well, I just saw Mis' Holcomb go 'crost the street. I'll call you, if you want, when she comes back."

Or, "I don't think you better ring the Helman's just now. They were awake 'most all night with one o' Mis' Helman's attacks."

Or, "Doctor June's invited to Mis' Syke's for tea. Shall I give him to you there?"

The telephone is modern enough. But in our use of it, is there not a flavor as of an Elder Time, to be caught by Them of Many Years from Now? And already we may catch this flavor, as our Britain great-great-lady grandmothers, and more, may have been conscious of the old fashion of sitting in bowers. If only they were conscious like that! To be sure of it would be to touch their hands in the margin of the ballad books.

Or we telephone to the Livery Barn and Boarding Stable for the little blacks, celebrated for their self-control in encounters with the Proudfits' motor car. The stable-boy answers that the little blacks are at "the funeral." And after he has gone off to ask his employer, who in his unofficial moments is our neighbor, our church choir bass, our landlord even, comes and tells us that, after all, we may have the little blacks, and he himself brings them round at once—the same little blacks that we meant all along. And when, quite naturally, we wonder at the boy's version, we learn: "Oh, why, the blacks was standin' just acrost the street, waitin' at the church door, hitched to the hearse. I took 'em out an' put in the bays. I says to myself: 'The corpse won't care.'" Some way the Proudfits' car and the stable telephone must themselves have slipped from modernity to old fashioned before that incident shall quite come into its own.

So it is with certain of our domestic ways. For example, Mis' Postmaster Sykes—in Friendship Village every woman assumes for given name the employment of her husband—has some fine modern china and much solid silver in extremely good taste, so much, indeed, that she is wont to confess to having cleaned forty, or sixty, or seventy-five pieces—"seventy-five pieces of solid silver have I cleaned this morning. You can say what you want to, nice things are a rill care." 

Yet, surely this is the proper conjunction, Mis' Sykes is currently reported to rise in the night preceding the day of her house cleaning, and to take her carpets out in the back yard, and there softly to sweep and sweep them so that, at their official cleaning next day, the neighbors may witness how little dirt is whipped out on the line. Ought she not to have old-fashioned silver and egg-shell china and drop-leaf mahogany to fit the practice instead of dazzling and wild-rose patterns in "solid and art curtains, and mission chairs and a white-enameled refrigerator, and a gas range?"

We have the latest funeral equipment—black broadcloth-covered supports, a coffin carriage for up-and-down the aisles, natural palms to order, and the pulleys to "Let them down slow"; and yet our individual funeral capacity has been such that we can tell what every woman who has died in Friendship for years has "done without": 

• Mis' Grocer Stew, her of all folks, has done without new-style flat-irons; 
• Mis' Worth had used the bread pan to wash dishes in; 
• Mis' Jeweler Sprague—the first Mis' Sprague—had had only six bread and butter knives, her, that could get wholesale, too ... 
• and we have little maid-servants who answer our bells in caps and trays, so to say; but this savour of jestership is authentic, for any one of them is likely to do as of late did Mis' Holcomb—that was Mame Bliss's maid—answer at dinner-with-guests, that there were no more mashed potatoes, "or else, there won't be any left to warm up for your breakfast."... 
• And though we have our daily newspaper, receiving Associated Press service, yet, as Mis' Amandy Toplady observed, it is "only very lately that they have mentioned in the Daily the birth of a child, or anything that had anything of a tang to it."

We put new wine in old bottles, but also we use new bottles to hold our old wine. For, consider the name of our main street: is this Main or Clark or Cook or Grand Street, according to the register of the main streets of town? Instead, for its half-mile of village life, the Plank Road, macadamized and arc-lighted, is called Daphne Street. Daphne Street! I love to wonder why. Did our dear Doctor June's father name it when he set the five hundred elms and oaks which glorify us? Or did Daphne herself take this way on the day of her flight, so that when they came to draft the town, they recognized that it was Daphne Street, and so were spared the trouble of naming it? 

Or did the Future anonymously toss us back the suggestion, thinking of some day of her own when she might remember us and say, "Daphne Street!" 

Already some of us smile with a secret nod at something when we direct a stranger, "You will find the Telegraph and Cable Office two blocks down, on Daphne Street." 

"The Commercial Travelers' House, the Abigail Arnold Home Bakery, the Post Office and Armory are in the same block on Daphne Street." 

Or, "The Electric Light Office is at the corner of Dunn and Daphne." 

It is not wonderful that Daphne herself, at seeing these things, did not stay, but lifted her laurels somewhat nearer Tempe—although there are those of us who like to fancy that she is here all the time in our Daphne-Street magic: the fire bell, the tulip beds, and the twilight bonfires. For how else, in all reason, has the name persisted?

Of late a new doctor has appeared—one may say, has abounded: a surgeon who, such is his zeal, will almost perform an operation over the telephone and, we have come somewhat cynically to believe, would prefer doing so to not operating at all.

Thus the New shoulders the Old, and our transition is still swift enough to be a spectacle, as was its earlier phase which gave our Middle West to cabins and plough horses, with a tendency away from wigwams and bob-whites. And in this local warfare between Old and New a chief figure is Calliope Marsh. She is a little rosy, wrinkled creature officially—though no other than officially—pertaining to sixty years; mender of lace, seller of extracts, and music teacher, but of the three she thinks of the last as her true vocation.

With us all the friendship idea prevails: we accept what Progress sends, but we regard it in our own fashion. Our improvements, like our entertainments, our funerals, our holidays, and our very loves, are but Friendship-Village exponents of the modern spirit. Perhaps, in a tenderer significance than she meant, Calliope characterized us when she said:

"This town is more like a back door than a front—or, givin' it full credit, anyhow—it's no more'n a side door, with no vines."

Next also from Zona Gale is a delightful memory from her childhood about her and 2 of her friends attempting to be grown up. 

The Walk

“What’s the latest you ever stayed up?” Delia demanded of Mary Elizabeth and me.

“I sat up till ten o’clock once when my aunt was coming,” I boasted.

“Once I was on a train that got in at twelve o’clock,” said Mary Elizabeth, thoughtfully, “but I was asleep till the train got in. Would you call that sitting up till twelve o’clock?”

On the whole, Delia and I decided that you could not impartially call it so, and Mary Elizabeth conceded the point. Her next best experience was dated at only half past nine.

“I was up till eleven o’clock lots of times.” Delia threw out carelessly.

We regarded her with awe. Here was another glory for her list. Already we knew that she had slept in a sleeping car, patted an elephant, and swum four strokes.

“What’s the earliest you ever got up?” Delia pursued.

Here, too, we proved to have nothing to compete with the order of Delia’s risings. However, this might yet be mended. There seemed never to be the same household ban on getting up early that there was on staying up late.

“Let’s get up some morning before four o’clock and take a walk,” I suggested.

“My brother got up at half past three once,” Mary Elizabeth announced.

“Well,” I said, “let’s get up at half past three. Let’s do it to-morrow morning.”

Mary Elizabeth and I had stretched a string from a little bell at the head of her bed to a little bell at the head of my bed. This the authorities permitted us to ring so long as there was discernible a light, or any other fixed signal, at the two windows; and also after seven o’clock in the morning. But of course the time when we both longed most frantically to pull the cord was when either woke at night and lay alone in the darkness. In the night I used to put my hand on the string and think how, by a touch, I could waken Mary Elizabeth, just as if she were in my room, just as if we were hand in hand. I used to think what joy it would be if all little children on the same side of the ocean were similarly provided, and if no one interfered. A little code of signals arose in my mind, a kind of secret code which should be heard by nobody save those for whom they were intended—for sick children, for frightened children, for children just having a bad dream, for motherless children, for cold or tired or lonely children, for all children sleepless for any cause. I used to wish that little signals like this could be rung for all unhappy children, night or day. Why, with all their inventions, had not grown people invented this? Of course they would never make things any harder for us than they could help (we thought). But why had they not done this thing to make things easier?

The half past three proposal was unanimously vetoed within doors: We might rise at five o’clock, no earlier. This somewhat took edge from the adventure, but we accepted it as next best. Delia was to be waked by an alarm clock. Mary Elizabeth and I felt that, by some mysterious means, we could waken ourselves; and we two agreed to call each other, so to say, by the bells.

When I did waken, it was still quite dark, and when I had found light and a clock, I saw that it was only a little after three. As I had gone to bed at seven, I was wide awake at three; and it occurred to me that I would stay up till time to call Mary Elizabeth. This would be at half past four. Besides, stopping up then presented an undoubted advantage: It enabled me to skip my bath. Clearly I could not, with courtesy, risk rousing the household with many waters.

I dressed in the dark, braided my own hair in the dark—by now I could do this save that the plait, when I brought it over my shoulder, still would assume a jog—and sat down by the open window. It was one of the large nights ... for some nights are undeniably larger than others. When I was on the street with my hand in a grown-up hand, the night was invariably bounded by trees, fences, houses, lawns, horse-blocks, and the like. But when I stepped to the door alone at night, I always noticed that it stretched endlessly away. So it was now. I could slip out the screen, as I had discovered earlier in the season when I had felt the need of feeding a nest of house-wrens in the bird-house below my sill—and I took out the screen now, and leaned out in the darkness. The stars seemed very near—I am always glad that I did not know how far away they are, for they looked so friendly near. If only, I used to think, the clouds would form behind the stars and leave them all shiny and blurry bright in the rain. What were they? How came they to be in our world’s sky?

I suppose that I had been ten minutes at the window that morning when I saw a light briefly flash in Mary Elizabeth’s window. Instantly, I softly pulled my bell. She answered, and then I could see her, dim in the window once more dark.

“It isn’t time yet!” she called softly—our houses were very near.

“Not yet,” I answered, “but I’m going to stay up.”

Mary Elizabeth briefly considered this.

“What for?” she propounded.

I had not thought what for.

“To—why to be up early,” I answered confidently. “I’m all dressed.”

The defence must have carried conviction.

“I will, too,” Mary Elizabeth concluded.

She disappeared and, after a suitable time, reappeared at the window, presumably fully clothed. I detached the bell from my bed and sat with it in my hand, and I found afterward that she had done the same. From time to time we each gave the cord a slight, ecstatic pull. The whole mystery of the great night lay in those gentle signals.

It is unfortunate to have to confess that, after a time, the mystery palled. But it did. Stars, wide, dark, moonless lawn, empty street, all these blurred and merged in a single impression. This was one of chilliness. Even calling through the night at intervals, and at the imminent risk of being heard, lost its charm, because after a little while there was nothing left to call. “How still it is!” and “Nobody but us is up in town,” and “Won’t Delia be mad?” lose their edge when repeated for about the third time each. Moreover, I was obliged to face a new foe: I was getting sleepy.

Without undue disturbance of the cord, I managed to consult the clock once more. It was five minutes of four. There remained more than an hour to wait! It was I who capitulated.

“Mary Elizabeth,” I said waveringly, “would you care very much if I was to lay down just a little to rest my eyes?”

“No, I wouldn’t care,” came with significant alacrity. “I will, too.”

I lay down on the covers and pulled a comforter about me. As I drifted off I remember wondering how the dark ever kept awake all night. For it was awake. To know that one had only to listen.

We all had a signal which we called a “trill,” made by tongue and teeth, with almost the force of a boy and a blade of grass. This, produced furiously beneath my window, was what wakened me. Delia stood between the two houses, engaged with such absorption in manufacturing this sound that she failed to see me at the window. A moment after I had hailed her, Mary Elizabeth appeared at her window, looking distinctly distraught.

Seeing us fully dressed, Delia’s indignation increased.

“Why didn’t you leave me know you were up?” she demanded shrilly. “It’s a quarter past five. I been out here fifteen minutes.”

We were assuring her guiltily that we would be right down when there came an interruption.

“Delia!”

Delia’s father, in a gray bath-robe, stood at an upper window of their house across the street.

“What do you mean by waking up the whole neighbourhood?” he inquired, not without reason. “Now I want you to come home.”

“We were going walking,” Delia reminded him.

“You are coming home at once after this proceeding,” Delia’s father assured her. “No more words please, Delia.”

He disappeared from the window. Delia moved reluctantly across the street. As she went, she threw a resentful glance at Mary Elizabeth and me, each.

“I’m sorry, Delia!” we called softly in chorus. She made no reply. Mary Elizabeth and I were left staring at each other down our bell-rope, no longer taut, but limp, as we had left it earlier.... Even in that stress, the unearthly sweetness of the morning smote me—the early sun, the early shadows. It all looked so exactly as if it had expected you not to be looking. This is the look of outdoors that, now, will most quickly take me back.

“It wouldn’t be fair to go walking without Delia,” said Mary Elizabeth, abruptly and positively.

“No,” I agreed, with equal decision. Then, “We might as well go back to bed,” I pursued the subject further.

“Let’s,” said Mary Elizabeth.

Our third story is from Nina Evans Allendar.

Nina Evans Allender, born 1872 died 1957 was an American artist, cartoonist, and a pivotal figure in the women's suffrage movement. As the official cartoonist for the National Woman's Party (NWP), she became a leading force in using art as a form of political activism. Her iconic "Allender girl" illustrations depicted the suffragist as a young, energetic, and modern woman, challenging the prevailing stereotype of suffragettes as humorless spinsters. Her work was featured on the cover of the NWP's weekly publication, The Suffragist, and her cartoons brilliantly documented the movement’s most significant moments, including protests and political efforts. Allender's art was not only influential in its time but also played a crucial role in shaping public opinion and mobilizing support for the cause of women's rights.

This article about bargain hunting was the only thing other than cartoons that I’ve so far found from Nina Allendar. 

Women and Bargains

Show me the woman who in her heart of hearts does not delight in a bargain, and I will tell you that she is a dead woman.

I who write this, after having triumphantly passed bargain counters of every description, untempted by ribbons worth twenty-five cents but selling for nineteen, insensible to dimities that had sold for nineteen cents but were offered at six and a fourth cents a yard, and—though I have a weakness for good cooking utensils—blind to the attractions of a copper tea-kettle whose former price was now cut in two, at last fell a victim to a green-and-white wicker chair.

This is how it happened. I asked the price. Eight dollars, replied the shop-keeper. No. It was a ten-dollar chair. But he had said eight. It was a mistake. Nevertheless he would keep his word. I could have it for eight. What heart of woman could resist a bargain like this? Besides, I thought such honesty ought to be encouraged. It is but too uncommon in this wicked world. And—well, I really wanted the chair. How could a woman help wanting it when she found that the salesman had made an error of two dollars? It was a ten-dollar chair, the shop-keeper repeated. I saw the tag marked "Lax, Jxxx Mxx." There could be no doubt of it.

I gazed and gazed, but finally went on, like the seamen of Ulysses, deafening myself to the siren-voice. And though I had hesitated, I might not have been lost; but returning by the same route, I saw a neighboring druggist rush into that store bareheaded, as I now suppose to change a bill. Need I say that I then thought he had come for my chair? Need I say that I then and there bought that chair?

Thus have I brought shame on a judicious parent—not my mother—who has conscientiously labored to teach me that the way of the bargain-hunter is hard.

As well might man attempt to deprive the cat of its mew or the dog of its bark as to eliminate from the female breast the love of bargains. It has been burned in with the centuries. Eve, poor soul, doubtless never knew the happiness of swarming with other women round a big table piled with remnants of rumpled table-linen, mis-mated towels and soiled dresser-scarfs, or the pleasure of carrying off the bolt of last fall's ribbon on which another woman had her eye; nor had she the proud satisfaction of bringing home to her unfortunate partner a shirt with a bosom like a checker-board, that had been marked down to sixty-three cents. But history, since her day, is not lacking in bargains of various kinds, of which woman has had her share, though no doubt Anniversary Sales, Sensational Mill End Sales, and Railroad Wreck Sales are comparatively modern.

A woman's pleasure in a good bargain is akin to the rapture engendered in the feminine bosom by successful smuggling. It is perhaps a purer joy. The satisfaction of acquiring something one does not need, or of buying an article which one may have some use for in the future, simply because it is cheap or because Mrs. X. paid seventeen cents more for the same thing at a bargain-sale, can not be understood by a mere man.

Once in a while some stupid masculine creature endeavors to show his wife that she is losing the use of her money by tying it up in embroideries for decorating cotton which is still in the fields of the South, or laying it out in summer dress-goods when snow-storms can not be far distant. The use of her money forsooth! What is money for except to spend? And if she didn't buy embroideries and dimities, she would purchase something else with it.

So she goes on hunting bargains, or rather profiting by those that come in her way, for generally it is not necessary to search for them. These little snares of the merchant are only too common in this age, when everything from cruisers to clothes-pins and pianos to prunes may often be had at a stupendous sacrifice.

A man usually goes to a shop where he believes that he will run little or no risk of being deceived in the quality of the goods, even though prices are higher there than at some other places. A woman thinks she knows a bargain when she sees it.

She is aware that the store-keeper has craftily spread his web of bargains, hoping that when lured into his shop she will buy other things not bargains. But she determines beforehand that she will not be cajoled into purchasing anything but the particular bargain of her desire,—unless—unless she sees something else which she really wants. And generally, she sees something else which she really wants.

Most women are tolerably good judges of a bargain, and therefore have some ground for their confidence in themselves. I have seen a Christmas bargain-table containing china and small ornaments of various wares, completely honeycombed of its actual bargains by veteran bargain-hunters, who left unpurchased as if by instinct goods from the regular stock, offered at usual prices.

Bargains are a boon to the woman of moderate means. The deepest joys of bargain-hunting are not known to the rich, though they by no means disdain a bargain. To them is not given the delight of saving long, and waiting for a bargain sale, and at last possessing the thin white china or net curtains ardently desired and still out of reach at regular prices. But they have some compensation. They have the advantage not only of ready money, which makes a bargain available at any time, but also that of leisure.

While my lady of the slender purse is still getting the children ready for school, or exhorting Bridget not to burn the steak that will be entrusted to her tender mercies, they can swoop down upon a bargain and bear it away victoriously.

A fondness for bargains is not without its dangers, for with some people the appetite grows with what it feeds on, to the detriment of their purses as well as of their outlook on life. To them, all the world becomes a bargain-counter.

A few years ago in a city which shall be nameless, two women looked into the windows of a piano-store. In one, was an ancient instrument marked "1796"; in the other, a beautiful modern piano labeled "1896." "Why," said one of the gazers to her companion, indicating the latter, "I'd a good deal rather pay the difference for this one, wouldn't you?"

This is no wild invention of fiction, but a bald fact. So strong had the ruling passion become in that feminine heart.

Upon a friend of mine, the bargain habit has taken so powerful a hold that almost any sort of a bargain appeals to her. She is the owner of a fine parrot, yet not long ago she bought another, which had cost fifteen dollars, but was offered to her for ten. Its feathers were bedraggled and grimy, for it had followed its mistress about like a dog; it proved to be so cross that at first it had to be fed from the end of a stick; and though represented as a brilliant talker, its discourse was found to be limited to "Wow!" and "Rah! Rah!"—but it was a bargain.

To be sure, she didn't really need two parrots, but had she not saved five dollars on this one?

The most elusive kind of bargain is that set forth in alluring advertisements as a small lot, perhaps three, four, or two dozen articles of a kind, offered at a price unprecedentedly low.

When you reach the store, you are generally told that they—whatever they may be—are all gone. The other woman so often arrives earlier than you, apparently, that finally you come to doubt their existence.

Once in a while, if you are eminent among your fellows by some gift of nature, as is an acquaintance of mine, you may chase down one of these will-o'-the-wisps.

He—yes, it is he, for what woman would own to a number ten foot even for the sake of a bargain?—saw a fire sale advertised, with men's shoes offered at a dollar a pair. He went to the store. Sure enough, a fire had occurred somewhere, but not there. It was sufficiently near, however, for a fire sale.

A solitary box was brought out, whose edges were scorched, as by a match passed over them; within was a pair of number ten shoes. Number tens alone, whether one pair or more, I wot not, represented their gigantic fire sale. And I can not say how many men had come only to be confronted with tens, before this masculine Cinderella triumphantly filled their capacious maws with his number ten feet, and gleefully carried off what may have been the only bargain in the shop.

In spite of the suspicions of some doubting Thomases who regard all bargains as snares and delusions, it is certain that many real bargains are offered among the numerous things advertised as such; but to profit by them, I may add, one must have an aptitude, either natural or acquired, for bargains.

P.S.—I have just learned that my wicker chair would not have been very cheap at six dollars.

I really enjoyed those lighthearted windows into everyday ordinary life of the past.  I hope you got a kick out of them too.

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The public domain is a massive library, and I need your help to find the next great tale. What should we read next? Send in your requests to sbnarration@sallybarronvoiceovers.com, that’s sbnarration@sallybarronvoiceovers.com. I'm always on the lookout for your favorites. I can’t wait to share another story with you next week. 

Thanks for listening!