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All the Days of My Life: An Autobiography / The Red Leaves of a Human Heart

Chapter 49: FOOTNOTES
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About This Book

The memoir recounts a woman's life from childhood in northern England through emigration to America, tracing family roots, early domestic years, widowhood and wartime hardship, and eventual renewal through writing and teaching. It moves chronologically across homes in Yorkshire, Norfolk, the Isle of Man, and the United States, describing personal losses, the strains of civil conflict, efforts to support a family, creative beginnings, and reflections on work, faith, and feminine resilience. Interspersed are poems, letters, and appendices on family genealogy and published works, yielding a candid and practical account of daily life, moral growth, and the practical labor that sustained artistic ambition.

[1]

Kendal wig, a very fine tea cake raised with yeast. It is baked and allowed to cool, then cut apart, toasted and buttered.

[2]

Judging Chartists by their own words we should not now think they merited exile, hard labor, and life imprisonment. I do not suppose I ever understood their claims, but I have looked up their record and I find they were fighting for five not very wicked points: first, universal suffrage, excluding women, which was the great mistake of Chartism; second, the division of England into equal electoral districts; third, votes by ballot; fourth, annual Parliaments and no property qualifications for members; fifth, payments to every member for his legislative services. For advocating these demands, I saw in 1843, at Liverpool Railway Station, a long row of these Chartists chained together on their way to a convict ship which was to carry them to Botany Bay, or Norfolk Island.

[3]

A Serape Saltillero, is an exceedingly fine blanket in which is interwoven gold or silver threads. It is so soft and fine that it can be carried in the coat pocket. It has an aperture in the centre which goes over the head. Made only in Saltillero, Mexico.

[4]

An English gentleman who lost his reason on spiritual matters. He lived alone, no one knew just how; but he always came to us for Christmas breakfast.

[5]

Blue Williams, Confederate paper money.

[6]

Beowulf, A.D. 600.

[7]

Mr. Cochran’s opinion has been overwhelmingly refuted by the vast number of Women’s Clubs scattered all over the civilized and semi-civilized world; and more especially so by the suffragist movement of the present day. In this effort for their enfranchisement, the cultured woman and the ignorant woman, the nobly born, and the lowly born, the wealthy woman, clothed in purple, and the poor girl in her clean cotton waist, stand shoulder to shoulder, and plan and work together. Neither are they indifferent to their weak sisters, or afraid of their strong ones. The very clubs for helping the weak, the sick, the poor, and the ignorant, are numberless. Tired mothers are succored by them, deficient and neglected children are their care. The strong ones are demanding clean cities, and healthy food, and are looking after defiled waterways, and the savagely abused forests of the country. Indeed if Mr. Cochran could revisit earth at this day the thing that would amaze him more than all other changes would be the condition of women—their work, their aims, their already vast success, embodying as it does the sure fulfilment of the promise that she should “bruise the serpent’s head” which will be done when woman has put down drunkenness, and cleansed the Augean stables of civil government of its vile methods of bribery, graft, and injustice.

[8]

It is worth noting that the Manx, a very primitive religious people, restore to a wife as soon as she dies her maiden name. Death instantly absolves her from her thraldom to her husband. She regains her individuality, and with it her birth name, which is put both upon her coffin and her tombstone. It is likely that this custom has its source in the words of Christ—Luke, 20:27, Mark, 12:13, and Matthew, 22:23.

[9]

To William Libbey, Senior, My First Friend in New York. Mr. Libbey, Senior, was then dead, but he knew.