To her horror, Maud spotted Teddy Swain, the corner of his lip bent up in a smirk, and she watched as if in slow motion as he began to slowly clap, until soon all the boys in the class were clapping, and hoots and whistles soon filled the air.
Maud saw Josie surreptitiously lean over and pick up the errant textbook and tuck it in her lap, and Maud ducked her head and aimed toward her seat like an eagle streaking down toward its prey, muttering to herself, “Potted plant, potted plant.” But then she caught the eye of Teddy Swain, whose fingers were tucked in the sides of his mouth as he wolf-whistled, and she felt rage bubbling up inside her. Didn’t the men often come in late, in twos and threes, laughing and talking as they did? Had anyone ever whistled or applauded or jeered at them? And yet the coeds were always bent on getting to all their classes early so that they could take their seats up front and avoid the spectacle of walking down the aisle with a hundred young men’s eyes trained upon them.
Maud stopped dead in her tracks. She threw her shoulders back and rose to her full height. She stopped directly in front of Teddy Swain.
“Have you got something stuck in your teeth?” she asked him. “As I see you have your fingers in your mouth.”
Teddy Swain appeared startled at the unexpected confrontation. He pulled his fingers from the corners of his lips and dropped his hands into his lap.
“And as for the rest of you…” Maud’s voice rang out across the length and breadth of the hall, and the room suddenly went silent.
Maud never had a chance to decide what it was that she was going to threaten, as into the silence, the botany professor, a shrunken man with wisps of white hair that clung to his collar, injected a small cough, then a slightly bigger one, before he said, “I believe that we are turning to the phylum of the fern species today.”
Maud took this chance to skid across the front of the room and plop into the seat Josie had saved for her.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “That was dreadful. Why can I not learn to arrive at class on time?”
“Boys are horrid,” Josie said. “Or most, anyway, or whenever they’re in a group.”
Maud pulled out her pencil and notebook and tried to concentrate on the professor’s dry voice as he discussed the species of fern native to the Cayuga region, but all she could hear were the jeers and whistles and applause that had greeted her entrance. She did not want to learn about ferns; she wanted to be a fern, with no purpose greater than waving a bit in the wind. Was this truly the equality that Mother had searched for so dearly?
From that day on, Teddy Swain would fall silent and look away whenever she happened to pass him on campus, and when he dined at Sage College, he appeared to take great care to sit on the far side of the room. One evening, not long after the incident in the classroom, she caught sight of him across the crowded dining room, engaged in animated conversation with Clara Richards, a raven-haired sophomore who was as pretty as she was reserved. Her head was tipped up, and she was listening intently to whatever Teddy was saying to her, as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world. Maud felt a slight twinge—not quite regret, but almost. Would things have worked out differently if she could have learned the manner the other girls seemed to master so effortlessly? Would she be seated with Teddy Swain, raptly looking into his handsome face as he lectured her about weighty matters? Maud sat up straighter and resolutely shifted her gaze away from him. In truth, though she longed to fit in, she felt more compelled to be true to herself. If she were to have any hope at love, she’d have to find a man who could love her as she was, even though there seemed little likelihood that such a man existed.
* * *
—
ONE FRIDAY EVENING NEAR the midterm, Maud’s sleep was interrupted by the sound of pebbles rattling against their third-floor window. Josie didn’t stir, so Maud crept out of bed and across the room. She shoved the sash until the heavy window pushed open, and a handful of pebbles flew in and skittered across the floor. Maud leaned her head outside, hoping to see who was below.
Confused, she beheld a group of women gathered below her window. Who were these people, and what did they want? But a second later, she heard the rich tenor of Teddy Swain, slurred with drink, soon joined by his compatriots. This was no group of women—it was eight boys dressed up in women’s clothing, and they were dead drunk and singing at the top of their lungs.
“There is a gay maiden at Sage,
Who flies into a terrible rage
If one says in a crowd,
In a tone a bit loud,
‘Matilda, may I ask your age?’?”
“Oh!” Maud exclaimed, loud enough to wake Josie, who now joined her at the window.
“Close the window!” Josie whispered frantically. “You should never have opened it.”
“They were throwing stones,” Maud said.
“You never open when they throw stones,” Josie said, grabbing the window and slamming it shut. “It just encourages them.”
But Maud could still hear their loud, drunken voices through the closed window, and she knew that all the other girls were likely awake and could hear it, too. And she had not missed the point: they had used her mother’s Christian name instead of hers. If Maud had thought that she was striking out on her own here, she had been foolish—the colossus of Matilda had come along with her. She had never really stood a chance at all.
It wasn’t enough to push open the doors. You had to change minds. How could girls truly make their mark if their role models were houseplants, if their fashions scarcely allowed them to breathe? If any expression of opinion on any subject was considered by young men to be a threat? And even more so, how could they escape the basic fact that no matter how horrid the boys were, the young women still wanted to please them—because what choice had they, really? Where could they go besides back to their own homes, where they would rest under the heavy thumbs of their own mothers, or into the home of a man—with the hopes that this man would be indulgent, like Papa, and not oppressive or cruel, like so many others?
Maud was beginning to understand that she would never be like the other girls. Here at Cornell, she would always fight with her own nature just to fit in, and she would always be seen not just as herself, but also as her mother’s daughter. Matilda Gage, the controversial advocate for the rights of women. In some ways, living here was more constraining than life at home, where, she had come to realize, she had been indulged in her eccentricities. The heady sense of newfound freedom she had felt on first arriving here had started to ebb away. The beautiful campus of Cornell, which had seemed so open, so vast, started to close in on her, and Maud began to understand that finding her own way here would be more elusive than she ever would have guessed.
CHAPTER
5
ITHACA, NEW YORK
1880
The weather turned suddenly sharp as the trees around campus faded from brilliant red and orange to a wan straw color. The young men’s voices grew loud with talk of upcoming revelries as their secret fraternities geared up for Hallowe’en, a night of drunken rituals that were never talked about in front of the young ladies. But it was widely known that the women of Cornell would do best to stay indoors and learn of the men’s exploits only through the dormitory windows.
For their part, the girls could not help but think about magic prognostications—apple peelings, egg yolks, and lighted candles held in front of mirrors—for All Hallows’ Eve was the night on which, according to common superstition, their future husbands’ names might be revealed.
Now that the girls were settled into their routines and felt fully comfortable around one another, they had begun to go about Sage in loose tea gowns, without their corsets. The same girls who maintained a strict air of composure while conducting their scholarly life on campus could be lively and gay inside the confines of the henhouse.
The day before Hallowe’en, several girls gathered in Maud and Josie’s room, and the talk soon turned to boys. Everyone, of course, was talking about their future husbands, but no one wanted to be the first to suggest that they try any of the rituals for themselves.
“I think I would simply faint if I looked into a mirror with a candle and saw an image appear over my shoulder. I would collapse so quickly from fright that I wouldn’t ever be sensible enough to know what I saw.” This from Josie Baum. Everyone knew she was sweet on her beau, Charlie Thorp.
“It would be dreadfully wicked to do such a thing,” Jessie Mary said. She was a strict Presbyterian.
“I can promise you,” Maud said, “that if I looked in the mirror, I know exactly what I would see.”