Читать книгу Belva Lockwood - Jill Norgren - Страница 7

I ask no favors for my sex.…All I ask our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us stand upright on that ground which God designed for us to occupy.

Sarah Grimké, women’s rights advocate, 1837

Belva’s mother, Hannah, was a Greene. Family histories describe the Greenes as descended from Magna Carta barons. An early forefather, John, is said to have sailed from England in the 1630s to the British West Indies, found it “Godless,” and shipped out for the Massachusetts Bay colony.¹ He and others from whom Hannah was descended were also said to be followers of the religious dissidents Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson.

Sometime after the War of Independence, Belva’s branch of the Greene family began a journey westward. A son of this clan, William, took his wife and children as far as Washington County, New York. Hannah, the youngest of six children, was born there in 1812. In 1814, wanting better farmland, William joined family members in another trek to the far western corner of New York State, where several of the men had purchased property from the Holland Land Company.

Hannah’s family settled in a frontier region some twenty-odd miles east of Niagara Falls. This had long been the land of the Iroquois Nation (Seneca), but in 1669 the French explorer, Robert Cavelier de La Salle, had established a post on what was then called the Niagara Frontier, and was followed by French traders and missionaries. In 1759 English forces expanded into the area following their capture of Fort Niagara. Later yet, warfare and politics placed the region in the hands of the United States, which sold much of it to financier Robert Morris. Seeking quick profits, he arranged the sale of a million and a half acres of western New York to Dutch bankers who capitalized the Holland Land Company, one of the many speculative investment groups that carved up the late-eighteenth-century frontier. Using newspaper ads, handbills, and tavern talk, company agents put out the word that good land was available on liberal terms of credit. Special incentives were established to encourage extended families, or networks of friends, to make the move together.² Buoyed by dreams, Hannah Greene’s family became a client of the Holland Land Company, and after that, farmers and manufacturers of potash.³

Belva’s father, Lewis J. Bennett, was also born in Washington County, New York. His people were Scots. Late in life Belva proudly wrote to a niece that Lewis’s ancestor Nathan High fought in the Revolution, “so we have a part in the foundation of the Govt.”⁴ Lewis was five years older than Hannah. It is possible that the Greenes and Bennetts moved west to Niagara County at the same time, but Bennett lore was scarce; Belva always knew more about her mother’s people.

The Greenes claimed their lands from the Holland Company and started the hard work of clearing acreage. They sowed wheat, corn, and barley. Dairy farms were started, and then fruit orchards. Next came the gristmills and sawmills, powered by the plentiful local stream water. Rising from this industry were clusters of small farming communities. Royalton, in the southeastern corner of Niagara County, was one such village. The first town meeting was called within a few years of the Greenes’—now spelled “Green” by some—arrival. Hannah’s father, a respected Baptist elder, was elected to the post of inspector while Solomon Richardson, husband of Hannah’s older sister, Ruth, took up duties as constable.⁵ Royalton looked to its civic organization none too soon. A rural community needed law and order, roads and schools, and a sensible plan for dealing with the blessings, and problems, of the Erie Canal.

In 1814, when the Greens emigrated west, it took weeks to cross New York State. To obtain goods from the port city of New York, or to sell farm produce, or timber, from the center of the state required long, arduous, and expensive journeys across bad roads, and then ship passage on the Hudson River. Market expansion and westward movement cried out for a quick and inexpensive means of connecting the Atlantic Coast to the Great Lakes. Spurred on by future governor DeWitt Clinton, the New York State legislature agreed to support the building of an “artificial river.”⁶

Begun in 1817, and completed in 1825, the Erie Canal transformed the landscape and economy of northern New York. Hundreds of laborers and artisans flooded the route of the planned waterway, and remained after the canal was completed. They brought new cultures and a stronger cash economy. Water-powered manufacturing spread from the path of the canal, as did villages and towns servicing the needs of merchants and travelers. At Lockport a series of locks had been built to breach the Niagara escarpment, permitting the canal to continue west to Buffalo. When the canal opened in 1825, Lockport’s population equaled that of Rochester and Buffalo. It was a bustling hub whose cosmopolitan resources nourished the residents of surrounding villages like Royalton.

Hannah Green married Lewis Bennett at Royalton on December 11, 1827. She was fifteen; the groom, twenty. It appears that the newlyweds lived with a maternal aunt and her husband, the John Layton family. Belva and her older sister, Rachel, were born at the Laytons’, and it is probable that Lewis Bennett labored for Layton and neighboring farmers.⁷ Lewis never succeeded as a farmer. He moved his family around the county for twenty years, owning property briefly but never prospering.⁸

The five Bennett children, Rachel, Belva, Warren, Cyrene, and Inverno, born between 1828 and 1841, shared a close relationship with one another and the numerous members of Hannah’s extended family who lived nearby. Belva had mixed feelings about a childhood in which her accomplishments and ambitions were not particularly valued. She complained that she did the work of a boy caring for the farm animals but did not get proper credit.⁹ She chafed when her father did not encourage her schoolwork because of her sex. But she had a strong ego and later remembered personal feats of running, rowing, jumping, and horseback riding that she immodestly described as “proverbial.”¹⁰

The Bennett children attended country schools near Royalton when they were not needed for farm work. Belva was a good student and at fourteen was offered an instructor’s position by the local school board. With the family in need of money, she ended her formal education and took up the life of a rural schoolteacher. She boarded with the parents of her students and had her first taste of independence—and sex prejudice. As a female instructor, she received less than half the salary paid to her male counterparts. She called this treatment “odious, an indignity not to be tamely borne,” complaining to the wife of a local minister who counseled her that such was the way of the world.¹¹ As the daughter of a poor family she had little choice but to accept the pay that was offered.

While teaching Belva began to imagine a life different from that of her mother and aunts—the life of a great man. She asked her father’s permission to go back to school, but Lewis refused her request. He was a man of limited means and did not believe that women needed a higher education.¹² Defeated, his daughter did what was expected of her: on November 8, 1848, at the home of her parents, Belva Bennett, eighteen years old, married Uriah McNall.¹³

In her fifties Belva recalled the decision to marry: “The daughter of a poor farmer, I followed the well-trodden road, and was united in marriage to a promising young farmer of my neighborhood.”¹⁴ Uriah was twenty-two. His father, John, had come to Royalton from Canada and was one of the most respected men in Niagara County. The senior Mc-Nall farmed, ran the red brick tavern at McNall’s Corners, and shouldered his share of civic responsibilities, serving for many years as justice of the peace and town supervisor.¹⁵ His son was a sober young man. Belva had married well. By the new year, she and Uriah were settled on land a few miles north of their families, near the village of Gasport, where they farmed and operated a sawmill.¹⁶

Uriah and Belva married four months after the revolutionary stirrings of women, in July 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York. Here, ninety miles from the home of the newlyweds, sixty-eight women led by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and thirty-two men, including Frederick Douglass and James Mott, signed a “Declaration of Sentiments.” The short document, echoing the natural-law language of the Declaration of Independence, proclaimed the patient suffering of women denied an equal station in life by the government under which they lived. The facts submitted “to a candid world” included the denial of their right to vote, submission to laws in whose making they had no voice, a double standard in matters of morality, and limited access to education and well-paying employment. The declaration took particular care to spell out the abuse of women in marriage, condemning a system of law that gave husbands the power to deprive their wives of liberty, property, and wages.

Upstate New York newspapers reported on the extraordinary gathering, and it is likely that Belva, who loved to read newspapers, had seen the document. She thought about these provocative issues and later wrote that Uriah had joined with an unconventional wife who found contemporary marital customs loathsome. She believed that the marriage of an ordinary woman, clearly not including herself in that category, “is the end of her personality, or her individuality of thought and action.” A woman, she said, “is known by her husband’s name, takes his standing in society, receives only his friends, is represented by him, and becomes a sort of domestic nonentity, reflecting, if anything, her husband’s religious, moral, and political views, and rising or falling in the world as his star shall go up or down.”¹⁷ She resisted this “ordinary” life by reading widely and producing articles for literary magazines and local newspapers. She proudly described her interest in books and writing as “unwomanly habits.”¹⁸

As Mrs. McNall, Belva had little time to find the permanent direction of her domestic star. Not long into their marriage, Uriah was injured in a mill accident that weakened his health. By the spring of 1853, four and a half years after their wedding, the young husband was dead. He left behind his 22-year-old bride and a three-year-old daughter, Lura, born July 31, 1849. He owned real estate, most probably mortgaged, valued at slightly less than three thousand dollars.¹⁹

Had Uriah not died, Belva’s life might have followed a course similar to that of Harriet Beecher Stowe, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who, as mothers of small children, stormed the world using household writing tables. Tragedy, however, freed Belva McNall from these constraints, stealing from her the comforts of a settled arrangement and challenging her to act on long-buried ambitions. Initially, her husband’s death and the responsibility of caring for Lura made her indecisive. She contemplated the conventional possibilities: retreat to the home of her parents or her in-laws, engage in farm work, and undergo an appropriate period of mourning, perhaps followed by remarriage, even though she later revealed that after Uriah’s death she wanted to become independent, to throw off “a woman’s shackles,” but was ridiculed by friends.²⁰ For a short while she “submitted,” made no decisions, found life “aimless and monotonous,” then, finally, determined to “take destiny into [her] own hands.”²¹ Her first step was to return to school, believing that education would be the road to independence.

Drawing on the limited capital left in Uriah’s estate, she enrolled at neighboring Gasport Academy. Her purpose was “to fit myself for some active employment whereby I could earn a livelihood for myself and child.”²² She was twenty-three and thought her plan reasonable but encountered “impudent” criticism from neighbors who commented that her behavior was “unheard of and unusual,” snidely questioning what the young widow expected to make of herself.²³ Her father joined this chorus of nay-sayers: quoting St. Paul, he insisted that her desire for education was improper and unwomanly.²⁴

Belva had yielded at eighteen but now she persisted. She finished the academic term and asked the school trustees for a job teaching the winter session, when boys typically enrolled and men taught. The trustees replied that a male instructor had been engaged. Then, fate stepped in. The teacher was fired and the trustees asked the young widow if she would take over his class, which she did, bringing Lura to school each day.²⁵ She taught several short terms, saving enough money to move forward with a truly subversive scheme: Lura would be given over to the care of her parents, who were about to move to Illinois, while she pursued a ladies’ seminary degree. Years later Belva admitted that all of her friends and advisers objected to this idea, and that she “was compelled to use a good deal of strategy to prevent an open rupture.”²⁶ But she prevailed. In September 1854 she packed her modest and much-mended wardrobe and in the company of two young women companions undertook the sixty-mile trip east to Genesee Wesleyan Seminary in Lima, New York. This was her first journey, and it was, she wrote, “a matter of a good deal of moment.”²⁷

Belva arrived at Lima and enrolled at the Methodist seminary in a program that offered a “ladylike” curriculum for young women, as well as preparatory work for young men hoping to matriculate at Genesee College, which shared its campus. When she learned that the college was engaged in the radical experiment of coeducation, she applied to transfer after presenting herself to an examining board.²⁸ She believed that the more demanding curriculum as well as the prestige of a college degree was an opportunity she could not afford to lose, one that would “gratify” the ambitions of her youth.²⁹ She gave up a lady’s “finishing” in music and the arts and, without consulting her family, began Gene-see’s “Scientific Course,” a program in politics and science. Her transfer earned a “half remonstrance” from the preceptress of the seminary, who told her she could expect to be a more highly cultured person if she stayed with the ladies’ program.³⁰ The president of the college welcomed her, but did not hide his concern that she, a poor single mother, would not finish the longer course of study.

The Genesee program imposed a strict code of behavior, one that emphasized long hours of study and rote classroom recitation. The cloistered students were not allowed newspapers, and were encouraged not to mix with the citizens of Lima. Belva said that as a result of these policies she and her classmates were a “blank” with respect to contemporary politics.³¹ On campus, informal social conversation between the sexes was also discouraged. At meals, men and women sat on opposite sides of long tables without speaking. Belva had no callers at the dormitory parlor, something of a trial for a gregarious person.

Genesee had a “decidedly religious cast,” with male students and teachers dominating the school: “The only thing that the young ladies pretended to run themselves,” Belva wrote, “was a literary society, which gave opportunity for the display of such genius as had not been exhausted by the rigorous study of the week.”³² Although the college nourished her in many ways, she occasionally slipped away in order to widen her perspective. She attended law lectures conducted by a local attorney. She said this was frowned upon by the Genesee faculty, who considered it an intrusion upon their rights, but her fascination with the law was already strong, and she went as often as possible.³³ On at least one occasion she also left campus in order to hear Susan B. Anthony lecture on women’s rights. Anthony made the radical argument that society must permit women to work in stores and offices, a proposal Belva described as “startling heresy” to the public of the time.³⁴

Belva graduated with honors on June 27, 1857. Forty years later, she confided that the discipline and thought “awakened” by the Genesee faculty was as important as the knowledge imparted by these teachers; and that the education “has been…like a cash capital in bank, giving reputation and standing in the community, and a constant desire for greater knowledge.”³⁵ She had risked the love of her family for a degree that did, in fact, change her life.

While she may have dreamed about finding an attorney bold enough to apprentice her, immediately after graduation Belva headed home to take up work at the Lockport Union School. In 1857 teaching was virtually the only profession open to women. Schools were enrolling an increasing number of female students, and women instructors were being sought to teach them.³⁶ After the quiet of her life with Uriah, and the isolation of Genesee, she would be living in the county seat, a prosperous transportation and manufacturing town with a population of several thousand. Again, however, she faced the problem of wage discrimination. Although the school board knew she was a widow with a child to support, she was offered a salary lower than the one paid to her male colleagues. She complained, unsuccessfully, and then began the work of educating some of the school’s six hundred students, anxious to earn enough salary to be reunited with her daughter.³⁷ In the late autumn she collected her pay and made the journey to her parents’ home in Onargo, Illinois. She saw Hannah and Lewis for the first time since leaving for college in 1854 and was reunited with Lura, to whom she was a stranger. After a visit of some weeks, she gathered up her six-year-old daughter and her teenaged sister, Inverno, and traveled back to New York. She set up housekeeping at Esther Comstock’s boarding house, grateful for the presence of her sister, who was close to Lura. Both girls were enrolled at the Lockport Union School, Lura in the lower division and her aunt, already a high school student, in the Senior Department.

Historians describe the decades before the Civil War as an “age of great movements.” Men joined in organized campaigns, at first religious but later secular, to bring the “good news” that society could be reformed. Women’s activism labored under the general belief that women belonged in the home, that they were intellectually inferior to men and should defer to them. But there was something sufficiently permissive in the culture of western New York where Belva grew up and had returned to teach that women could, and did, claim a place in changing society. With men, they became a voice against slavery and drink and, at Seneca Falls, they publicized the peaceful suffrage revolution that was taking shape in a number of communities through talk and petitioning.³⁸

Cloistered college life had been confining for Belva, an enthusiast, but the move to Lockport freed her to join the highly charged world of upstate New York reform, to read newspapers, and to catch up on the politics of the day. Her religion drew her to benevolent-society activity, while her experience with sexual discrimination and the tragedy of widowhood gave her a natural sympathy for women’s rights.

The social ferment in western New York was the product of many influences, including “fires of the spirit” that had burnt with particular intensity twenty years earlier during a period of religious revivals, giving the region the nickname, “the Burned-Over District.”³⁹ By the time Belva returned to Lockport in 1857, this religious excitement had matured into a culture of spiritual and secular optimism that embraced the hoped-for second coming of Christ and the practice of benevolence.

The year before moving to Lockport, Belva had been converted to Methodism by the preaching of her college president, Joseph Cumming, and had been baptized by him. She had read the Bible as a child and undoubtedly attended the revival meetings that broke the tedium and isolation of farm work, but before 1856 she never spoke about membership in a church. The Methodists’ belief in individual responsibility, divine love freely bestowed upon humankind, and faith confirmed by good works nurtured Belva’s inherent sense of her own worth and encouraged her desire to improve the world. Through her conversion she gained focus. She became, she wrote, “an earnest, zealous laborer in the cause of Education, Sabbath School and Missionary work and an indefatigable advocate of the Temperance Cause.”⁴⁰ It was a public role encouraged by a church that, since the early days of John Wesley’s preaching in England, had been progressive on the question of women. In western New York Methodist women had been known to preach at meeting, publicly affirming Wesley’s particular message of salvation and charging others to share the good news of the Gospels.⁴¹ By 1857 this part of the state, once a storm center of personal religious fervor, had turned outward with citizens now stoking the fires of social and political reform in matters of temperance, abolition, and women’s rights.

Western New York was a good place for Belva, who was empowered by her religion and by a thousand changes, large and small, that were working their way into the secular culture that also defined women’s lives. An increase in commerce, transportation, urbanization, and female literacy reshaped mid-nineteenth-century America, introducing new ideas about what was right and proper. Belva also benefited from the slow but dramatic transformation in women’s civic life that had begun in the 1830s. Once welcomed and celebrated in politics only for their role as mothers of the Republic, ordinary women had seized a greater role and stepped out into the community, as Belva had, performing benevolent and missionary work. In this coming out, they saw their communities and governments in a new light and concluded that the perfection of society required their participation in politics.⁴² Although they could not vote, women sized up parties and candidates, concerned themselves with the business of school boards, and began lobbying state educational appropriations, married women’s property rights, and observance of the sabbath.

This activism was aided by a handful of courageous women who proved to be exceptionally able theoreticians, agitators, and organizers. In Belva’s civic genealogy, they are the mothers: African-American Maria Stewart; Quaker minister Lucretia Mott; southern abolitionists Angelina and Sarah Grimké. Each asserted the right of respectable women to talk in public even when what they had to say was controversial. They argued that all women, not only preaching women who spoke from an “Inner Light,” had the right and duty, as equals to men, to speak on matters of public importance. The Grimkés wrote essays on women’s unequal status. Their work anticipated the writing of Margaret Fuller, one of America’s great intellectual figures, who made the radical argument that men “could never reach [their] true proportions while [woman] remained in any wise shorn of hers.”⁴³ In her too-short life, Fuller championed women’s intellectual (rather than domestic) development, insisting that women must be taught rigorous critical thinking. She offered private classes, “Conversations for a circle of women in Boston,” that were eagerly attended and later became a model for women’s clubs and organizations.⁴⁴ At a time when advice books told women to be domestic, pious, and submissive, to “avoid a controversial spirit, to repress a harsh answer,” these women challenged orthodoxy and were objects of curiosity and occasional violence.⁴⁵ Newcomers did not make lightly the decision to join their ranks.

Like these women, Belva did not shy from controversy. Once established in Lockport, she did not hesitate to collaborate with New York women reformers, who radiated “controversial spirit,” most significantly with Susan B. Anthony, who was ten years older than Belva and had already earned a reputation as a peripatetic activist who would not brook sex discrimination. In 1852 she bolted from a Sons of Temperance meeting in Rochester when the chairman, saying women delegates were only present to listen, refused to let her speak. With her new friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anthony organized the Women’s State Temperance Society, an association run by women. Five hundred delegates attended its first meeting in April 1852 where they heard Stanton argue that male drunkenness as well as adultery should be grounds for divorce under state law.⁴⁶ Stanton and Anthony also linked temperance to woman suffrage, insisting that men could not be relied upon, as proxies for women, to vote against alcohol. In public Anthony urged the wives of drunks not to allow their husbands “to add another child to the family.” This message from “a maiden lady” was taken as effrontery and Anthony, who faced the public more in these years than the often-pregnant Stanton, found herself viciously attacked by newspaper editors protective of liquor interests and male prerogatives. In one editorial she was demeaned as “personally repulsive,” a woman who labored “under feelings of strong hatred toward male men, the effect we assume of jealousy and neglect.”⁴⁷

Anthony, like Belva, had begun teaching while in her teens. She left the profession to work as a paid organizer for the Anti-Slavery Association but continued to use educators’ forums for her advocacy. Belva encountered her most often at teachers’ conventions held in Lockport. In a message warmly received by Belva, Anthony repeatedly encouraged women teachers to agitate for equal professional status and pay. The message provoked contention. At an August 1858 New York State Teachers Association meeting, a cranky male delegate admonished Anthony for practicing “every dodge,” constantly bringing in this question of woman’s rights. He pronounced the topic now “a stench in the nostrils of many prominent educational men.”⁴⁸ Anthony refused to back down and Belva watched with admiration as she insisted upon the appointment of women to association committees.

Anthony also opposed many elements of the traditional “girls’” curriculum. During one convention, at Anthony’s suggestion, she and Belva were placed on a committee charged with determining whether it would be appropriate and beneficial for young ladies to be taught public speaking. The two women were given the length of a school term to submit a report. Belva worked quickly, anxious to demonstrate, “with my usual practicality,” that the curriculum for girls, which emphasized domestic arts, underestimated their mental abilities.⁴⁹ In an experiment, she assigned a weekly public talk to her students and found, over the course of a quarter, that they greatly improved with practice, so much so that “declamation for the girls became the standing order for the school forever after.”⁵⁰ Flush with success, she urged the school association to recommend a similar change in curriculum throughout the state. When she became an attorney, she praised this liberalization and said such training would have benefited her in the courtroom.⁵¹

While they would later quarrel over policy and strategy, in the 1850s Belva and Anthony had a warm relationship, nurtured by their shared profession, work on curriculum reform, and mutual interest in the expansion of coeducational schooling.⁵² Belva described “this” Susan as a young and handsome woman, whose “spirit of aggressiveness” made her a marked figure, always far ahead of her competitors.⁵³ Profession, family, and finances kept Belva in Lockport, but without Lura and Inverno to care for she might well have emulated Anthony and left teaching to become a field organizer and public speaker for temperance and woman suffrage. She had left Lura once, however, and now felt she had no choice but to remain where she was and to teach, particularly after 1859 when Inverno graduated and returned to Illinois, where she became a teacher and later married.⁵⁴

When the Civil War started in April 1861 Belva, an abolitionist but also a pacifist, experienced a struggle of the spirit. She was not yet formally affiliated with the American peace movement but, like many northern pacifists, she found it necessary to choose between principle and politics. Reluctantly, she gave Lincoln her support and became president of the Aid Society, organizing the girls in her school, along with the older women of the community, into groups that made clothing and lint bandages for several companies of local volunteers. Like many people, however, she never made peace with the cruelties and cost of this war. Years after the bloodshed ended, she wrote that she had been opposed to slavery “from the first moment that I was able to lisp my school reader” but would have preferred peaceful arbitration “to the sad carnage.”⁵⁵

Belva resigned her position in Lockport in the summer of 1861 and moved the small McNall household southeast to Wyoming County, New York, where she took up a teaching position at the Gainesville Female Seminary. Aged thirty-one and restless, Belva hoped shortly to buy a small ladies’ seminary where she could experiment further with education whose transforming powers she appreciated as a democrat, a Methodist, and an advocate of equal opportunity for both sexes. Like influential women educators before her, including New Yorker Emma Willard, she thought that a rigorous education could alter women’s lives and make them financially independent.⁵⁶ She had read about Mary Lyon’s Mount Holyoke Seminary, founded to prepare rural women to work as teachers and missionaries, and was devoted to the exercise regimens advocated by Catharine Beecher of the Hartford Female Seminary.⁵⁷ Respectable but radical, these mentors sought to open a wider sphere of public influence to their students, claiming for women teachers a share of the life-shaping authority that traditionally had rested with family and church. Belva had accepted this role when she went to Lockport, making a number of changes in the curriculum for girls, including the introduction of a program of calisthenics devised by Beecher. She hoped that the move to Gainesville would afford her even more independence and the chance to mold a new generation of women students.

Initially the move produced little more than frustration and failure. Although Belva was looking for a school of her own, for two years she had to settle for being an employee and endure the opposition of a principal who rejected her suggestions for reform. They clashed over the introduction of Beecher’s calisthenics. When ponds near the seminary froze over, Belva recommended that the girls be encouraged to skate, but her employer forbade it, saying that the innovation would be immodest and irreligious.⁵⁸ The two were spared further argument when the seminary building burned down, forcing Belva to take Lura and move on. They went to nearby Steuben County, where, in the town of Hornell, Belva obtained a new teaching position at a private academy.

In 1863 the nomadic pair set off again, to the south-central New York State town of Owego, where Belva used her savings to buy the small Owego Female Institute, located on Front Street near the Susquehanna River. Owego was the county seat and the commercial center of a prosperous agricultural and lumbering district. Various teachers had operated a woman’s seminary in the vicinity since 1828, typically not staying more than a few years. Princeton graduate George H. Burroughs and his wife preceded Belva. In 1863 they sold the building to her. Announcement of the change was made in the Owego Times, where an advertisement commended Belva McNall to the citizens of the village as “an earnest and efficient teacher.”⁵⁹ She and three women assistants operated the institute as a day and boarding school. She made no record of her professional work and after three years, again restless, made the decision to risk an uncertain future in order to explore unspoken ambitions.⁶⁰ She sold the school property for double her original investment and enrolled Lura, sixteen, at the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary.⁶¹ And then, because of her fascination with national politics, she decided to visit Washington, D.C.