To my surprise and delight Dr. Vincent sent word to me that I had caught his idea, and that he had advised Dr. Flood to ask me to prepare similar notes each month.
“Will you do it?” asked Dr. Flood.
I jumped at the chance, calculating that it would take not over two weeks of my month, give me pin money, and leave time for the microscope—that my future was in it, I did not dream.
But my task required better equipped libraries than Titusville offered; Meadville, only thirty miles away, headquarters for _The Chautauquan_, had them, and so I arranged to do my work there, remaining until I had read the proofs—an exacting job which never ceased to worry me. What if the accent was in the wrong place? What if I brought somebody into the world in the wrong year? Something of the kind happened occasionally, and when it did I quickly discovered that, while there might be many Chautauqua readers who did not have books of reference, there were more that did and knew how to use them.
Once in touch with the office of _The Chautauquan_ I began to see things to do. Dr. Flood had little interest in detail. The magazine was made up in a casual, and to my mind a disorderly, fashion. I could not keep my fingers off. A woman is a natural executive: that has been her business through the ages. Intuitively she picks up, sets to rights, establishes order. I began at once to exercise my inheritance, proved useful, was offered a full-time job, and threw myself heartily into an attempt to learn how to make up a magazine in the way I suspected a magazine should be made up.
When the long-suffering foreman of the printing office discovered I was in earnest he undertook my education, taught me the vocabulary—the only galley I had heard of up to that time was a war vessel of the Middle Ages—suggested dummies, and offered a model. He installed a proper respect for the dates on which copy was to be in, and forms closed: showed me the importance of clean copy by compelling me to see with my own eyes the time it took to make a correction, trained me until I could stand over the closing of the last form and direct the necessary changes to be made in order to make room for a three-line advertisement which had just arrived, and which, such was the need of _The Chautauquan_ for advertising, must under no consideration be thrown out. When I could do that nonchalantly I felt as if I had arrived. And this training I owed to as fine a craftsman as there was in the trade at the time; as well, he was a courteous and patient gentleman—Adrian McCoy, long the head of the pressroom where _The Chautauquan_ was printed.
My willingness to take on loose ends soon brought to my desk much of the routine office correspondence—letters to be answered by a more or less set form, signed with Dr. Flood’s name and mailed without troubling him to read them.
In this grist were many letters from readers, women chiefly, who laid their troubles and hopes on our shoulders, confident of understanding and counsel. Dr. Flood’s answers to such communications were courteous but formal. Probably he appreciated as I did not that there lay safety. I felt strongly that such an appeal or confidence should have a personal, sympathetic letter, and I began producing them, pouring out counsel and pity. I shudder now to think of the ignorant sentiment I probably spilled. But my career as a professional counselor was checked suddenly by the unexpected result of a series of letters to a contributor. This gentleman, a foreign lecturer and teacher, had been chilled by the lack of understanding by Americans of his ideals. And all of this he was expressing in letters to the office after our acceptance of one or two of his articles. I was deeply touched by his outpourings and answered in kind—of course signing my editor’s name. Then one day Dr. Flood received a letter saying that on such a day the gentleman would be in Meadville. He must see the one who so understood him. And come he did. Poor Dr. Flood did not know what it was all about.
“But these letters,” the visitor exclaimed. “Oh,” Dr. Flood said, “Miss Tarbell wrote those. We’ll speak to her.”
And so he was presented—letters in hand—Dr. Flood looking sternly at me and leaving me to my fate.
“Did you write these letters?” the bewildered and disappointed stranger asked.
All I could say was, “Yes, I wrote them.”
“And Dr. Flood never saw them?”
“No,” I said, “he never does.”
“I might have known it was a woman,” he groaned, and fled. And that was the last we ever saw or heard of him. But it made a vast difference in my editorial correspondence.
I was not satisfied, however, with setting things to rights and counseling the unhappy. Having convinced my editor-in-chief that I could keep his house in better order than he had been interested in doing, I became ambitious to contribute to its furnishing, to extend its field beyond matters purely Chautauquan. I began by offering contributions to what was called the Editor’s Table—the Editor’s Note Book. I began to write articles, even went off on trips to gather information on subjects which seemed to me to be fitting.
The first and most ambitious of these undertakings was an investigation made in the Patent Office in Washington of the amount of inventing the records showed women to have done. I had been disturbed for some time by what seemed to me the calculated belittling of the past achievements of women by many active in the campaign for suffrage. They agreed with their opponents that women had shown little or no creative power. That, they argued, was because man had purposely and jealously excluded her from his field of action. The argument was intended, of course, to arouse women’s indignation, stir them to action. It seemed to me rather to throw doubt on her creative capacity. Power to create breaks all barriers. Women had demonstrated this, I believed, again and again while carrying on what I as an observer of society was coming to regard as the most delicate, complex, and essential of all creative tasks—the making of a home. There was the field of invention. At the moment it was being said in print and on the platform that, in all the history of the Patent Office, women had taken out only some three hundred patents.
I had seen so much of woman’s ingenuity on the farm and in the kitchen that I questioned the figures; and so I went to see, feeling very important if scared at my rashness in daring to penetrate a Government department and interview its head. I was able to put my finger at once on over two thousand patents, enough to convince me that, man-made world or not, if a woman had a good idea and the gumption to seek a patent she had the same chance as a man to get one. This was confirmed by correspondence with two or three women who at the time were taking out patents regularly.
These dashes into journalism, timid and factual as were the results, gave my position more and more body, began slowly to arouse my rudimentary capacity for self-expression. At the same time my position was enriched by a novel feature of our undertaking, one that any editor of a monthly journal can appreciate. We published but ten issues, suspending in July and August in order to get out on the grounds at Chautauqua an eight-page newspaper—the Chautauqua Assembly _Daily Herald_. This meant moving our Meadville staff bodily to the Lake late in June.
I was soon contributing two columns of editorials a day to the _Herald_, comments on the daily doings of the Assembly, and making many stimulating acquaintances in doing it. Among them I valued particularly Dr. Herbert B. Adams and Dr. Richard T. Ely of Johns Hopkins University, men who were stirring youth and shocking the elders by liberal interpretations of history and economics. We felt rather proud of ourselves at Chautauqua that we were liberal enough to engage Dr. Adams and Dr. Ely as regular lecturers and teachers, and that our constituency accepted them, if with occasional misgivings.
It was not only the faculty of Johns Hopkins which was adding to my friends. One who remains today among those I most value came from its student body—Dr. John H. Finley. Dr. Finley gave several summers to the Assembly _Herald_, reading its copy and its proofs among other things. It was he who read my two columns and, no doubt, kept me out of much trouble; but once there did slip by him a misquotation over which he still chuckles when we talk of Chautauqua days. I made it a practice to head my first column with a digest of the day’s happenings—a line to an event and, as a starter for the paragraph, a quotation. I had been rather pleased one day to select a line from James Thomson:
[Illustration:
_Office staff of The Chautauquan, 1888: Miss Tarbell at left, sitting_ ]
The meek-eyed Morn appears, mother of dews.
A copy of the paper was always thrown on the verandah of my upstairs room around five o’clock in the morning, and I hopped out of bed to see what had happened to my column. That morning something dire had happened, for my quotation ran: