The year is 1892. The setting is New York City.

Cassandra Bray had never gotten on with her eldest brother. It was a case of conflicting interests as children, which translated to an entirely unresolvable gap as they grew into adulthood. Carson Bray was to firmly rooted in their family's properties and businesses, happy both with his standing and power, content to while away the rest of his life in solitary opulence, The Bray of New York City.

Cassandra had never learned to sit still. As a girl, her governess had endured countless afternoons of chasing her young charge around the grounds of the family's home, shouting up into the giant oak in which Cassandra would ensconce herself, until finally relenting, and resigning herself to conducting the lesson a good twenty feet below.

Perhaps that was the root of their troubles. Cassandra was always looking to leave; Carson wanted nothing more than to stay.

"Cassandra, this is folly. Worse, it is a folly you shall not bear alone. Think of what Father will say when he hears! He'll have to tell his associates the reason for his daughter's sudden absence; he'll have to tell the world he has reared a half-mad woman who insists on shoving herself into a man's world!"

The conversation had been ongoing, an argument for days, and weeks, approaching on months. Ever since Cassandra's friend Etti had mentioned, in a hushed whisper, that Harvard Collage was establishing a woman's branch: Radcliff Collage. Carson could argue that the no-name collages in the middle of Missouri or what not, were bound to be no better than daycare, but Harvard? Not even Cassandra's older brother could turn his nose up at that.

"Carson," Cassandra leaned forward from her father's plush office chair, where she had been happily reading the daily paper before her brother had barged in, "to begin, I have told father, and he has posed no objections. In fact, I think he's rather pleased. As for his associates, one of Father's associates is, in fact, Mr. Sterling, whose own daughter is to be attending. If anything, I should think Mr. Sterling should be rather pleased with father, wouldn't you?"

"And what about Mr. Hatly, Mr. Dawson, Mr. Parson, and all the others who have good, respectable daughters at home, quietly fulfilling their duty as mothers to the nation. Daughters who will become wives, who will become mothers, who will become respectable matrons who spend their time volunteering in their community. Daughters who wouldn't dream of something as precocious as collage! How do you think they will take it?"

Cassandra shrugged, laying down her paper as she realized she wouldn't be allowed to return to it for some time yet. Her brother's dark hair was slicked back, as usual, but there were a few strands straying from their threads, flying away in testament to a hurried departure and a quick cab ride. His green-brown eyes flickered with annoyance, and anger, and something else. Apprehension? Cassandra sighed, standing up and coming around from behind the desk, sweeping past Carson without a word, ignoring his continued rant as she made her way down the hall, and to the outer door.

"Hello, brother!" she called out, stepping into the noon sun, squinting slightly and raising a hand to shade her eyes.

"Sister dear!" came a joking voice, followed by the crunch of gravel as a tall, lanky figure clad in a well-worn tailcoat and lopsided hat detached itself from the motorcar that idled in the driveway, hugging his sister briefly before drawing back, and smiling fondly, "Carson informed me, quite emphatically, that you were out. Was he trying to change your mind before I got here?"

Cassandra grinned. Warren Bray was everything his brother was not, from light hair to his brother's dark to an acceptance of Cassandra's ambitions where his brother scorned them. He himself had attended Harvard collage (the proper men's section, of course) and now ran a successful newspaper in Connecticut. Unlike Carson, he understood Cassandra's desire to get away, to make something of himself.

"Of course," Cassandra replied, shooting a dark look at Carson, who was pointedly ignoring them both.

"He failed, I hope?'

"It hurts me that you doubt me so, Warren," Cassandra pouted, "If this was no more than idle fantasies, would I go so far as to tell father?"

"So you talked to him? What did he say?" Warren asked, raising an eyebrow fractionally.

Cassandra rolled her eyes, "Yes, of course. But Mother was there as well. She just sniffed and said she'd be calling someone around this afternoon to talk to me. I hope its not another priest," she added, thinking of the stuffy old man who had tried to convince her that not only would collage be damaging to her spiritual well-being, but that her place as a woman was most defiantly in the house, not making her way in the world. Needless to say, Cassandra disagreed.

Warren laughed, mounting the steps and swinging lightly into the house's entrance hall, Cassandra and Carson following in his wake.

"Don't encourage her, please, Warren," Carson cut in, "you know as well as I no good can come of it."

"On the contrary, brother," Warren called over his shoulder, marching through the halls, "I observed many quite extraordinary women in my time in collage. Even the best of them emerged miles more advanced mentally and a thousand times more worldly than they went in. Think what Cassandra could do with a bit of formal instruction."

"All very well for a girl from the grocer's family across the way, or the hat maker’s sister looking for something to do, but why in God's name does Cassandra want or need such training?"

They reached the kitchen in a moment, and as Carson ranted, Warren busied himself in the cabinets, emerging with bread and butter, the second of which he proceeded to liberally apply to the first, before applying his mouth eagerly to both. A pause, as he chewed and all three glared, and Warren said:

"Why don't you ask her about it. She's not some pretty little bride to be bought or sold, Carson, nor is she stupid. If you want to know why, ask her."

Carson strained up, offended, before he saw the senses of Warren's words, and his own mistake. His shoulders slumped marginally, and he turned to Cassandra, asking dully,

"Cassandra. Would you please enlighten me as to why you wish to go to collage when we can provide you a perfectly acceptable tutor here."

Cassandra crossed her arms, glad of the chance to finally explain herself,

"Why not?" she retorted first, just to see her brothers' faces. Warren smirked. Carson looked livid, but she continued before he could bite out a cutting response, "and besides, you know I don't wish to become an accessory to this house. I want to do something with my life. Perhaps become a doctor, a proper doctor, not a nurse. Or maybe a scientist, a chemist. Or scholar. I do like the idea of study.”

“Women don’t study, Cassandra!” Carson burst out, slamming his hand down on the counter to highlight his point.

“Quite right, Carson.”

All three siblings whirled.

Genevieve Bray was a formidable woman, with dark hair she wore piled on her head like a crown and a long, thin frame that exuded the sort of sedentary, distinctly old-world female persona Cassandra detested so much. At her side was another man, this one a good deal plumper than she, and shorter, dressed in a rather expensive waistcoat and a collared greycoat that only served to accentuate his paunch.

“Warren, Carson. Cassandra,” Mrs. Bray shot her youngest child a look, “I’d like you to meet Mr. Farris, a qualified brain surgeon, and a graduate of Harvard himself. I called him here today to speak with you.”

“A pleasure,” Carson held out a hand to shake the doctors, who took it in his meaty hand, shaking it vigorously. Warren opened his mouth, looking outraged, but finding words seemingly impossible to get past his lips, just shook his head and marched out of the room. Mrs. Bray watched him go with a shake of her head, before turning to Cassandra again.

“Cassandra,” she prompted, motioning to Mr. Farris. Cassandra groaned inwardly, curtsying slightly and mumbling something that might have been a greeting. Mrs. Bray sighed again.

“Mrs. Bray,” Mr. Farris addressed the lady of the house, “I am sorry, but my time is limited. I believe you wished my advice on an applicant to collage?”

“Yes, of course,” Mrs. Bray smiled, leading the way out of the kitchen and into the salon, pouring Carson, Cassandra, and the doctor all a cup of tea from the service left there for them, “we wouldn’t dare keep you from your practice,” she continued, “My daughter here, Ms. Cassandra, had simply taken it into her mind to go to university. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the matter, being a respected doctor.”

Her tone was warm, flattering, but her eyes, when she glanced over at Cassandra, spoke volumes. Cassandra met her in kind, frowning and letting her eyes go cold.

Mr. Farris, blissfully oblivious of the tension, pushed his rounded glasses up further on his nose, clearing his throat importantly and doing his best to assume a formidable countenance as he turned towards Cassandra. Cassandra had to stifle a laugh.

“Well, Miss, I must advise you most emphatically against such a decision,” he began, puffing out his chest and all but wagging his finger at her, “to begin with, there are many quite respectable options for a woman of your status and wealth that do not require such drastic measures, and second, most important, studies have shown that university has a severely detrimental effect on young women’s minds.”

“Detrimental?” Cassandra asked incredulously. The doctor just nodded,

“Yes, extremely detrimental. Women are not made for the brainwork of men; the constant stretching, the over-use of their brains, the environment of university, the social implications, these are all things best handled by the male populations and only by the highest and most evolved of them at that. I mean, do you see many of those coolies hunting around libraries? Or the Negros? The real universities, the good universities, respect social Darwinism, and know better than to endanger young girls by subjecting themselves to these activities proved to be of severe disservice to their physical health. Am I clear enough, Ms. Bray?”

Cassandra felt as though she was about to be sick. A doctor and a social Darwinist? Did Mother want her to hate her even more?

“Mr. Farris,” she managed to choke out, keeping up a reasonable semblance of that calm, unworried visage that is a lady’s mainstay, “thank you for your opinion, but I think I shall form my own ideas on the matter.”

“Oh, but you can’t!” Mr. Farris cried, his distress almost comical, “good girls are absolutely wasted in those places, thrown away, their health ruined, any ounce of standing destroyed, and for what? A degree that will lead them to some back-end profession better served by men to begin with? Would you risk all that?”

“I think I-“ Cassandra began, quite prepared to argue with this infuriating man until the sun set. Her mother, however, had different plans.

“Cassandra,” she snapped, before slipping her smile back on her face, rising from the settee, and taking Mr. Farris’s arm, “Mr. Farris, I think that is quite enough. My daughter’s mind has been enlightened, and we have hopes she will abandon this venture entirely. Now, if you would be so kind as to…” Her voice faded away as she led the somewhat ruffled doctor to the door, waving him out of the driveway with all the usual pleasantries. Cassandra, suddenly disgusted with the world, got up and followed her brother Warren out of the room.

She found him exactly where she knew he would be, out behind the house in the crisp New York air, lying languidly on his back, tossing a little rubber ball between his hands. She crossed their yard to join him, striking up a game of toss.

“He talked about education’s impacts on your brain, didn’t he?” Warren finally asked. Cassandra nodded,

“Yes. Is that why you left?”

“Of course. They have those fools up in Connecticut as well. Damned idiots, the lot of them. All their ‘data,’ was gleaned through tests designed more to test how stupid a girl was than how smart. Of course a woman who has gone through education is less likely to say the best way to get on in life is to submit to whomever and whatever comes her way. The ass.”

“Language, Warren.”

“Damn my language,” he swore fondly, flicking the little rubber ball up over his sister’s head so she had to run and get it, returning with her impeccable hair sliding from its pins.

“What’s it like,” she asked suddenly, fingering the toy in her hand, eyes far away, “Connecticut I mean. With the progressive intellectuals. The realists. The naturalists. The feminists. Is it nice? I imagine it makes more sense than here.”

Warren laughed,

“No, little sister, it makes decidedly less sense,” Cassandra frowned. Warren motioned for her to sit on the bench beside him, explaining, “just think about it for a moment. Naturalists demand that we do away with romantic notions, with classics, with all that entirely. That we see things simply as they are. Then the Feminists come barging in, saying the entire world is wrong, that it needs to be changed, that nothing is as it is, and that women are the axis upon which all else turns. Then, of course, the naturalists just go hide up in their cabins like Walden and come back down years later, claiming they’ve seen the meaning of life away from all the realist’s realism and the feminist’s voting rights, and everyone ends up in an uproar.”

He grinned at the image, and Cassandra laughed outright.

“Still,” she pointed out, “I’m sure it makes more sense than this. How they think a woman’s brain will turn to mush under pressure. How they’re convinced collages like Harvard expanding into women’s schools is the end of the world. It’s all so silly, isn’t it? It’s like they’re determined to keep us out, no matter the cost.”

Warren considered this statement for a moment or two, staring at his sister critically before coming to a decision. He fished a scrap of paper from his breast pocket, holding it out to Cassandra. She took it curiously, finding it to be a business card with an address for somewhere in Connecticut.

“It’s the address of my newspaper’s editing office,” he explained, “I was just thinking…if you do end up going to Radcliff, my paper would love a woman’s view of the situation, to publish. If you feel up to it.”

Cassandra just stared for a moment, dumbstruck, then threw her arms around her brother’s neck enthusiastically, practically squealing,

“Oh, Warren, wouldn’t that be just amazing? I’d love to! And I will be going. Just let mother try to stop me. I already got father on my side, and he’d be the one paying, in any case. And Carson’ll go slink off to his room after he’s finished sulking anyways.”

She beamed up at him proudly, grasping the business card in one hand. Warren smiled broadly, standing up and tipping his hat to Cassandra in a mock-farewell:

“Goodbye, Miss, I hope to hear from you soon.”

Cassandra grinned,

“Expect my correspondence within the next few months.”

“With pleasure. Oh, and Cassandra?”

“Yes?”

“Just remember, you weren’t wrong. They are determined to keep you out. We men can be infuriatingly superior when it comes to our own prowess. It scares us to think that you women, you devious, diminutive, proper little things could accomplish feats to equal our own.”


“I’ll remember that.”

“Good girl. See that you do. I for one am looking forward to seeing you surpass me someday. Good day! And good luck.”

And with that, Warren Bray strode from the garden, back to Connecticut and his paper full of realists and feminists and naturalists who all seemed to agree that something needed to change, even if none of them could agree what.




The year is 1892. Three months have passed since Cassandra Bray brought up the topic of collage. She now attends Radcliff Collage, Massachusetts.


The men’s collage was closer than Cassandra had thought, no more than a quick walk’s distance from Radcliff. Then again, it might as well have been on another planet, for all the respect given to the few female students.

“Whore,” a boy with glasses and dirty-blond hair called out across the quadrangle on her first day. Cassandra had been so stunned she had stopped walking, staring around with flashing eyes for the culprit. She had stayed that way, amid fits of giggling from the other boys, until a girl name Alice Sterling, a year above her, had grabbed her hand, leading her onward as she whispered,

“Pay them no mind. If you ignore them long enough, they stop trying. Now come on, we have mathematics next block.”

And so her years at collage had begun. The taunts did not die out, partially because Cassandra herself had never been one to let an insult rest, and the boys were insatiable in their appetite for mischief. One boy had deliberately knocked a burner over on her work during a science class, while a blown-away paper in the quadrangle would never be recovered, except, occasionally, as a rolled-up ball at her doorstep, sodden, de-formed, and three days past the due-date.

Her only consolation was the school itself. Cassandra hadn’t realized how much her mind had been starved of such attention, such a chance to spread her wings and fly. Math was wonderful, as was History, and English delighted her heart. And, as for her fellow female students, well, she had never met anyone like them.

“Cassandra! Study for History after lunch?”

“Cassandra, did you hear about Mr. Felton’s new wife?”

“Cassandra, there’s a meeting of feminists in town this afternoon, will you come?”

“Cassandra, Jeremy Grath got a C on his last report. That’ll be the last time he teases us about female’s mental abilities.”

And so on. It was a bustling world of thoughts, of information, of people who were not vapid and self-satisfied, as Cassandra had learned to expect. It was the most alive place Cassandra had ever dared imagine.

“Cassandra, what do you have against women’s voting rights?” this was Alice again, staring at Cassandra from across the library’s expansive desk, Cassandra flipping idly through a book on the history of women’s collages for a report, Alice making her way through one of the dime novels she was forever devouring.

“What?” Cassandra asked, looking up as she realized she was actually expected to respond to the last statement.

“I said, what do you have against advocating for women’s suffrage?” Alice repeated patiently. Cassandra sighed,

“I told you, I have nothing against it, but I’m a realist, Alice. I’ve seen the way the men look at us, like we’re freaks of nature just because we want to learn something besides needlework. They think we should be in one of those damned finishing schools, learning how to polish silver wear and mend skirts. Even those poor souls who lend themselves to teaching they turn their noses up at, and god knows they go through enough.”

“Agreed,” Alice nodded heartily, “Low pay, unable to marry, no formal training, and shut in a classroom with little entitled brats all day. I must say, I am glad I didn’t go down that road. But still,” Alice reached over, tipping down Cassandra’s book so she couldn’t keep disappearing inside it, “They granted votes to the Negros, why not us? They even have collages for Negro women, you read about Spelman.”

“Yes, but the Africans they cannot deny, for their civil status was assured. Us? We women have been kept oppressed and under-educated for far too long for that to change now. Think about it, Alice, if we had been born fifty years before this, we would have had no chance at all of this,” Cassandra waved her hand around to encompass the library, the collage, all of it, “the first woman weren’t accepted to a collage – any collage – until 1833, in Oberlin. And the first all-women’s collages weren’t chartered until, what, 1837? It’s a lost cause, Alice. Maybe in another century. Maybe in another lifetime. Not in our generation,” She smiled sadly and pulled her book back from Alice’s grasping fingers.

“Cassandra,” Alice pouted, crossing her arms, a sure sign of her settling in for a long argument, “Don’t be an idiot. They gave the blacks votes, why not us? Women were at the head of the abolition movement, don’t you remember? Why do you think your precious Holyoke and Mills were started? Because women realized that they deserved better. We should have gotten our rights at the same time as the Negros.”

It was an old argument, a well-used one and a sad one. Had the fifteenth amendment been written just a touch differently, had the world decided to give in to equality, just once, people like Cassandra and Alice and the rest of those clever women would not have to fight for some form of expression. They would be a part of society, instead of simply pretty toys for society to admire. But the truth was the truth, and Cassandra knew it. Women’s suffrage would have to wait on the sidelines for the moment, nursing its wounds and gathering strength until the world was ready to accept it.

“Alice,” Cassandra began, cutting off whatever Alice had planned next, “please. All I want is to enjoy what I have now enjoy the opportunity you learn and grow and become something. Yes, if the world were fair, you and I would be casting ballots, and there would be schools for women across the country, but the civil right movement, the suffrage movement, it hasn’t been enough. And we’d best accept that, and do our best to show society that women are not all insipid lay-abouts fit only to smile and sew. We can do that, at least.” The discussion was closed, and Alice knew it. She petered off, returning to her dime novel with considerably less enthusiasm than before, and Cassandra returned to her book.

She had not forgotten Alice’s words though. She was not adamant on the topic of women’s suffrage, as some were, but she did see their reasoning. Women were smart. Alice was smart. Helen and Elizabeth and Sarah and Philipa, they were cleverer than any men Cassandra had ever met. Yet their voices counted for absolutely nothing. As she paced about her little room, Cassandra fingered the card her brother had given her before he left New York. The card and the promise. Women had no voice, yes, but perhaps Cassandra could change that, at least a bit.

She kept her little stationary set in the small desk granted her on her enrollment, a bottle of royal blue ink, her favorite, a medium-nib pen, a few dozen good sheets of paper embossed with her initial, and envelopes. A little luxury. But then, even luxuries have their uses now and again.

She checked the tip of her pen, then, satisfied, unscrewed the top of her ink well and dipped it in, testing it out on the blotting paper to assure herself of its functionality. It was a bit antiquated, she knew, having an ink well instead of a re-fillable fountain pen, but she liked the control it gave her, and the smell of ink was something of a comfort.

Dear Warren: she wrote at the top of a page, chewing on the end of the pen – an atrocious habit, as her mother had informed her – before continuing:

I hope this finds you well and in good spirits, and the Connecticut winter has not been too unkind. It was atrocious here in Cambridge; the drifts were almost to my head.

Collage has been a blessing, truly Warren; I don’t know that I’ve ever been happier. The boys over in Harvard proper are, of course, menaces, but one can deal with the monsters for the sake of heaven. The library alone was enough to make me swoon. And the people here are clever, and funny, and driven, and I can’t believe such women exist in such numbers.

It is partially on that note that I write you, as I have no doubt my dull reminiscings are most tedious, but you mentioned when we last met that you would be interested in publishing women’s experiences of Collage in your newspaper, and I wondered if the offer still stood.

It seems a capitol shame that these brilliant minds will never be heard simply because of the housing they bear, housings valued aesthetically, but never intellectually. If I were to ask my fellows to write to you their experiences, their troubles, their opinions, would you be interested in hearing them?

I do not wish to impose, and if I overstep what you yourself either can or want to achieve, please feel no shame in saying. It may be the world is not ready for the quiet wisdom women bring to the world, and if that is the case for you, I have made my peace with it.

My best wishes in the approaching holidays,

Your loving sister,


-Cassandra Bray


The year is 1893, by no more than a month. Cassandra resides at Radcliff once again, in her second term.


A telegram arrived for Cassandra in late January. Her brother had been away fro the Christmas season, so it was not a surprise that he had not responded. The telegram, when she opened the flimsy little envelope, looking at the message, was typically Warren-esqu: short, to the point, almost illegible in its simplicity:
OFFER GLADLY ACCEPTED STOP PAPER AGREES STOP PERHAPS OTHER STUDENTS QUESTION HOPE ALL WELL STOP BROTHER WARREN.
It was supposed to be a small thing. A few people, a few little stories for her brother to publish, a few voices to cut above the din.

Instead, she had gotten the entire din, in all its glory.

She had underestimated just how many clever, under-represented women there were in Radcliff, and, perhaps most surprisingly of all, how many clever, overridden men there were at Harvard who agreed with her.

She had gotten no less than seven letters from Harvard since she had first circulated her request, each of them detailing precisely why women were to be allowed education. She had gotten over sixty letters from Radcliff students.

It was a trifle overwhelming.


“Alice!” Cassandra pulled Alice to the side as they left Chemistry, bundling her books against her chest to keep them steady, calling out again as the next wave of women exited the large, circular lecture hall, “Oh, Sarah! Etti!” two other girls detached themselves from the pack, “Are you free to work a bit tonight?”

“On what?” Sarah demanded, though they all already knew.

“The letters. I have to sort through, decide which ones to send to my brother, as most are probably complete nonsense.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Alice said lazily, “do you know, my roommate, Gwen, spent three days writing hers. Said it might actually be a chance for her to tell her mother what she felt. She’s told her family to be sure to read the Herald when it comes out.”

Cassandra felt faint. That many letters? How would she decide?

“Well, in any case,” she continued, “I still need to sort through. Can you spare some time to help?”

“I’d be happy to.”

“Nothing better to do with my night.”

“Sure.”

“Thank you,” Cassandra’s relief was palpable.

The little group broke up again, each going to their respective blocks to re-unite later that night. Cassandra didn’t even hear her Eastern history professor’s words that day, chewing on her pencil end as she worked on her own letter. She hadn’t really known what to say, what with the torrent of other people’s words drowning her. And she would hate to let Warren down. But what to write?

…. You say that women are not to be taught, that women have no mind worth developing. And I say, who has led each and every reform movement for equality in past years? Who has shown themselves within the public sphere to be titans of intellect in navigating the murky waters of social equality? You speak of social Darwinism, you speak of evolution and how women are evolutionarily unable to keep up, they have smaller hands, smaller muscles, so must they not have smaller minds? And to that I say, spend one day inside my shoes, learning alongside women with minds quicker than running trains and a thirst for knowledge your walls have simply exaggerated. We will break through. Women’s collages are springing up across the country, as are co-education collages, and the women who emerge from both are more worldly for their experience, smarter for their tutelage, and able to serve their community as profitable members of society, a role you have previously barred from….

She frowned, looking at the passage with distaste. It was all true, but it was so hard to make people see, to understand.

She closed her notebook, sighing lightly and letting the professor’s words fill her ears again, listing as he described Russia’s rise and the Mongol Empire and China’s isolation. She would ask Alice later, after they sorted through all those dammed letters…


“What about this one?”

“What’s it about?” Cassandra asked without even turning around. She was reading through one girl’s heartfelt account of her family’s distrust of education for women and how they believed it would ruin her forever as a prospective bride. It was an all too common a story.

“Hm, it’s from Ms. Halish, the math teacher,” Etti said. Cassandra looked up, interested. Etti scanned the note, summarizing briefly, “she’s talking about the students she’s had and how some of them went on to become researchers and a few doctors, and some who even tried to get into government.”
“Save that one,” Cassandra instructed, and Etti tossed it into the ever-mounting pile of letters to send to Warren. Cassandra looked dispiritedly at the total two letters they had deemed unfit to publish, as opposed to the thirty or so to be saved. Who knew Radcliff had so much to say?
“This one’s Alice’s!” Sara called out, almost cackling as she read aloud in an overly dramatic voice: “we are women! We are not to be trodden beneath the boots of –“
“Give it here!” Alice demanded, laughing as she leaped over to jerk the paper from Sarah’s hands, “do you even need to look?” she joked, tossing it onto the ‘to be sent’ pile. Cassandra rolled her eyes, picking up another letter and splitting it open.
“What are we going to do with all the letters we don’t use?” Alice asked. Cassandra shrugged,
“Toss them. If we can’t use them, what are we to do?”
“Some of the bad ones have good little lines in them, though,” Etti pointed out, waving a scrap of paper in the air and directing Cassandra’s eyes to one line in particular:
…. The teachers may not marry, the housewives may not speak their minds, the maids may not have a mind to speak, and you consider this any less than slavery? Collage gives women some sense of self, some worth to clutch to, and yet even here, a woman who attends collage may not vote.
“Too much of a suffrage movement’s plea,” Cassandra dismissed it. Etti looked shocked. Cassandra rolled her eyes,
“We’re trying to get people to listen to us, Etti, not hate us because we’re challenging the system. Leave that for later.”
Another letter. Another story of a family who, as Cassandra’s had, had called in a mental doctor to warn the girl of the effects of collage on her health. Cassandra snorted, tossing it in the throw away pile. She could say the same herself.
“Do you ever wonder if we’re all mad for doing this?” she asked to the room in general, glad her voice didn’t crack as it threatened to. Alice smiled slightly. Sarah laughed. Etti just shook her head.
“Cassandra, I’m here because I want to help others learn, not as a teacher, but as someone who can actually do something,” Alice put in fervently.
“And I’m here because I’m tired of arguing with men who tell me I don’t have the qualifications to re-form anything, because I haven’t gone to a collage they banned me from attending to begin with,” Etti piped up.

“And here I am, all because I love this world, I love how t works, and I want to take it apart with data and experiments, and I damn well can’t do that if I don’t know how. Is that mad?” Sarah’s soft voice asked.

Cassandra’s three friends looked up at her amid the stacks of letters crying out their cause, and Cassandra couldn’t help but grin in return. She lay down her letter, staring around at Alice, then Etti, then Sarah.

“Damn it all,” she muttered, standing up and scooping up the pile of complains, of stories, of prayers, of wishes, of dreams, of pleas for equality, and threw them all onto the ‘to be sent’ pile, “We’re all worth hearing. All of us. Grab that hatbox, will you Etti? We need to pack these up. Let Warren hear them all.”



Later that night, Cassandra placed the hatbox by the door, addressed and stamped to be sent, staring at it. Sixty-nine letters. Sixty-nine voices.

“Let’s make it seventy, shall we?” she whispered to herself, retrieving her ink well and pen from her drawer, fishing out a few pieces of writing paper and one of her books to write on, collapsing on her narrow bed with a little sigh, staring off into space.

She had looked through all the letters that had been sent in. She had seen the complaints, herd the stories, heard the girls who had finally found their voices and delighted in using them. What was there left for her to say?



Alice could see Cassandra’s window from her own, down the row and over two. She saw the light flicker on at midnight, bright and gleaming against the darkness of the collage grounds, which lay deserted under their blanket of snow. Every once in a while, she would see a shadow cross the little yellow square, when her friend stretched from her seat, or adjusted positions. It was one o’clock when she finally saw Cassandra rise and go to cover the light, dampening the glow as she prepared for bed, before smothering the flame entirely.
Yes, they met opposition, yes, the road for a woman of intellect was not an easy one, but for Alice and Cassandra and Etti and Sarah, perhaps it might be a bit easier. The road a bit less treacherous. The sky a bit less stormy. The drifts a bit less high. Cassandra was right. They were all worth hearing; why else would they be there, amid women of opinion, community activists, people determined to change their world? There were some things in life Alice would accept without worrying about the cost; some things were worth whatever she could give.


The Herald published its one hundred and seventy-third edition that month. It was the first of a series, a series on the trials of women, and, later, the trials of blacks, minorities, immigrants. It was a testament to America, and it was a criticism: a gauntlet thrown. A challenge: Is this the best you can do? And, in the beginning of each section, printed precisely as it was written, was a short paragraph, authored by the editor’s sister.



America promises us freedom. America promises us life. There are people, sitting beside fireplaces here, or in Europe, in Asia, in South America, speaking in hushed voices of the possibility you represent. The possibility of a place that will accept them. The possibility of freedom, at whatever cost. You have promised them this. You promise a world where no man need hide, where no man need fear. Of course, this is as you wish. We know nothing of freedom. We know nothing of equality, of acceptance. We are the poor cousins who no one will speak of, or perhaps we are the gems you put about our necks, to be admired, but never useful. Never with a voice, never with a mind, for you believe we cannot think. We are good only for feeling. But then, is the butcher good only for cutting meat? Is the politician good only for telling lies? Is the coroner of no worth to the living? Are woman good only to sit back and watch the world pass them by? You promise us freedom. Each and every day. “Land of the free and home of the brave,” you tell us, do you not? And we are brave. We will always be brave, until you allow us to collect on the second half of that promise, until you give us the freedom we desire. Until you let our minds out to wander the isles of power, of discovery. Do not forget us. And please, please, do not underestimate us again.


Epilogue:

IN LOVING MEMORY OF CASSANDRA DAWSON
HISTORIAN, PROFESSOR OF EASTERN GEOGRAPHY, ADVOCATE FOR EDUCATION
MAY THE AGES REMEMBER
HER AS KINDLY AS SHE DID THEM
1874-1978