Some Last Words
bob
HEADLINE: Public Interests;
Some Last Words
BYLINE: By GAIL COLLINS; Gail Collins becomes editorial page editor of The
Times in August.
BODY:
This is my last Op-Ed column for The New York Times, and although I was
strongly tempted to spend it reviewing the accomplishments of the New York
State Legislature, I'm going to resist. Instead, I want to put in a plug for
seizing the moment.
We spend a great deal of time worrying about the damage a single wrongheaded
individual can do on a whim. But it's nice to remember how many important
watersheds in our history came when unheralded heroines responded to sudden
impulses of a higher sort.
On July 16, 1854, Elizabeth Jennings, a 24-year-old black schoolteacher, was
rushing to play the organ for a religious service in Manhattan when the
trolley conductor demanded that she wait for a car that was designated for
colored people. Jennings responded that he was "a good for nothing impudent
fellow for insulting decent persons while on their way to church." She
stayed in her seat, hanging onto the window sash, until they dragged her
away. She sued, and won the first legal decision affirming that all New
Yorkers had an equal right to public transportation. A hundred years before
Rosa Parks, Jennings knew what to do when somebody told her to go to the
back of the bus.
The case helped make a name for her lawyer, Chester A. Arthur, who later as
president would be sorely in need of heroic anecdotes. But Jennings was
almost entirely forgotten. She became one of thousands of Americans who
changed history by following their best instincts, never insisting that
immortality be part of the package.
My favorite low-profile but strong-minded woman was dragged out of a cellar
by the British at the start of the Revolutionary War. The rebel forces were
on the run, and the war might have ended almost as soon as it had begun. But
the British were distracted by a fire that burned down most of Lower
Manhattan and gave the Americans time to get away. What we remember about
the moment now is mainly Nathan Hale regretting he had but one life to lose
for his country. But Hale, who was picked up as a spy, didn't set the fire.
In London, Edmund Burke told Parliament that the deed had been done by a
woman, who was found hiding in the ruins, her face bearing "every mark of
rage, despair, resolution and the most exalted heroism."
The woman, he added, "knowing that she would be condemned to die," boldly
admitted what she'd been up to. Burke seems to be the only one who told this
story. But if the woman existed, she saw her moment and jumped right in. She
had her eye on something larger than herself, so perhaps she wouldn't have
been put out that Hale won immortality with a terrific exit line while her
name vanished.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn't fade away over time. But I like to think about
her before she was famous, struggling to make sense of her life. She started
her marriage in Boston, surrounded by a community of like-minded friends,
living in a charming house and assisted by two hard-working servants. She
couldn't understand why anybody hated housework. She gave the man who
delivered the firewood a tip to pile the logs with the smooth ends outward.
Then her husband got a job in Seneca Falls, a distinctly unromantic mill
town in upstate New York. The neighbors weren't congenial, her husband was
away a lot and the kids kept getting sick. The house was isolated, and
Stanton began to have trouble working up any enthusiasm for cleaning it.
"Now I understood, as I never had before, how women could sit down and rest
in the middle of general disorder," she wrote.
As a 19th-century matron, she always had the option of taking to her bed
with the vapors. But Stanton gathered up her accumulated grievances and
dumped them in the lap of Lucretia Mott, who was summering in Waterloo,
N.Y., and probably bored out of her considerable mind as well. They worked
up a newspaper announcement inviting people to a women's rights convention
five days later. Just like that, the women's movement was born.
My farewell wish is that everybody have a summer as eventful as Stanton's
and Mott's, preferably in a setting more cheerful than Seneca Falls circa
1848. And that we all listen to our better instincts and take the occasional
leap on their behalf. It is, of course, advisable not to burn down cities in
the process.
LOAD-DATE: June 26, 2001