A Restless Wind Read Free Page A

“I learned a great deal,”  she said as she came back to the table with the plate and a cup and saucer.  “For one thing, that I wish my life to have meaning beyond simply wondering what the latest fashions are or what color dress I will wear or how I will arrange my hair each morning.  Or what my husband would like for dinner.”
         And that was new for Hetty ?  Zebadiah thought to himself.  Though he did find himself wondering what she had planned for dinner that night.  Two years of his own cooking was about a year and eleven and a half months too long.
         “I don’t want to spend my life thinking how best to please a husband,”  Hetty went on as she slid two eggs onto the plate before him.  “The notion that a woman exists for the sole purpose of being some man’s wife is fast becoming outdated.  As well it should.”  She went to the stove and poured flapjack batter on a hot iron griddle.
         “Women are doing a great many things these days,”  she said with her back to him as she waited and then turned the flapjacks.  “They are thinking beyond the old accepted , but very limiting, roles of wife and mother and awakening to the fact that life can offer more than simply bearing children and seeing to a man’s needs, his comforts, his pleasures-  ”
         “By God, Hetty!”
         “Don’t swear at the table,”  she remonstrated him gently.  “I am merely expressing the truth.”
         “You’re not intending to marry then?”  he questioned, hesitating with his fork halfway between his mouth and the plate.
         She looked thoughtful as she set a plate of steaming flapjacks before him.  “I don’t mean that there is anything wrong with being a wife and mother.  And you know as well as I do that most women work as hard as men do.  In some cases they work harder.”
         Zebadiah grumbled his agreement as he reached for the syrup.  He wasn’t going to argue with her there.  Caring for a husband and children, in addition to cooking, washing clothes, gardening and putting up food was a rough job.  Taking care of a home and family required endless, heavy labor.  And too often it was thankless labor.
        He glanced at Hetty who had taken a seat opposite him.  Urged to the decision by his sisters in Boston, Zebadiah had thought that sending Hetty back East to get an education was the right thing to do.  He had been told it was the logical step in teaching her how to be a proper young woman.  To his dismay, however, she had come back with even more radical views and newfangled ideas about things like reforms and women’s rights.
         “You might find the cause of women’s rights out of place out here, Hetty.”
         She shrugged one blue-clad shoulder as she sipped at her tea.  “Speaking out about it might be.  But not the cause.”  She looked directly at him.  “Women’s rights conventions, Uncle Zebadiah, are regularly attended by some of the most socially prominent women of Boston.  I attended one of those conventions myself,”  she informed him, obviously proud of the fact. 
         Zebadiah drew a deep breath and groaned audibly before devoting his attention to the stack of flapjacks.  Talking about suffrage and women’s rights made him uncomfortable.  And temperance.  He didn’t even want to think about that one.  But she went right on while he ate.
         “Why, what would you think if I told you that there are men who support the cause of women’s emancipation?  That some of those men have even organized and financed several of the campaigns?”
         “H’m,”  was his muttered comment between bites.
         “It’s all well and good to be a partner in life with a man.  Equally ,”  she was saying.  “But the old-fashioned idea that a man owns his wife and children as he does his horses or his cattle and that she is to be at his beck and call without any rights whatsoever