Sweet Elizabeth … now lies rolling on the floor, has kicked off her stockings and is licking your photo. The way she crowed when I gave it her – I do believe she thought it had some connection with her pa.

What a delightful vignette! I’m certain that it made Angus smile.

This:

but it is the multiplicity of household drudgery which only belongs to servants

is rather less so. Don’t the servants deserve the same opportunity for intellectual expansion? Didn’t she realize how many of those servants are usually poor women trying to keep their families fed? She sounds like a very spoiled upper-middle class wife.

Martha corresponded with Barbara Replogh, a friend from medschool. In one letter from SLC, dated May 1, 1885 she indicated how she is under $200 bond to appear at the trial of Samual B. Smith as lead witness against him for delivering his baby. She says she will “skin out” and doubts that they will “oath her” again. Then she goes on to say:

When are you going to wed? After all, this to my mind, is the true state of womanhood neither, if properly managed should it interfere with her true advancement, in whatever sphere she might cast her talents. Tis not the bringing of noble spirits into the world – to me, a mother is woman’s brightest glory – that dwarfs talent, and retards her intellectual advancement but it is the multiplicity of household drudgery which only belongs to servants – and the conformity to the vile customs of modern society.

Barbara, even if we have to be poor let us not waste our talents in the cauldron of modern nothingness – but strive to become women of intellect, and endeavor to do some little good, while we live this protracted gleam called life.