Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 May 1895 — She Wanted Her Share. [ARTICLE]

She Wanted Her Share.

She was a tall, spare woman, sallow of coloring, lusterless of eye, with stooping shoulders and hard gnarled hands. For forty years she had been the wife of the man who sat beside her in the lawyer’s office, and those forty years had been spent in the hard manual labor, the perennial baking and brewing, the almost ceaseless round of toil that belongs to the lot of farmer’s wives. Their joint home had been a small acreage of land in Western Pennsylvania, which had been hardly reclaimed from the wilderness, but which now, in the light of some recent coal findings, had become a valuable and salable property. It was to execute such a deed of sale that the two had come to the attorney’s office, and they waited passively and quietly while the lawyer’s clerk prepared it. Presently it was ready, and true to the custom of their married life it was “father” who first took the pen, and, with much labor and pains, Droduced his signature. Then “mother” was asked to put her name on the proper line, and a place was made for her at the office desk. But she did not move. Her hands fumbled nervously and she cleared her throat of some choking emotion.

“Before I sign that paper,” she said, and her voice grew steady and firm, “I want to know what my share’s to be. I’ve worked as hard as father all these years on the farm, and I’ve pinched and managed and earned wliatever’s to be paid for it, as much as he, and I want a set sum that’s all mine, and that I can hold in my own hands and have belong to me alone.” Husband and lawyer were both amazed at this outburst, but her manner indicated so much resolution behind it that the legal man proposed at once not to combat her, but to accede to her request. In a conciliatory speech he acknowledged the reasonableness of her demand and wished to know what she would consider a fair estimate of her share, her husband sitting by dazed and speechless at this most unexpected turn of alfairs. The woman did not hesitate. “I thought of that, too,” she said. “It’s been forty years, a good forty years, for we took the farm in the fall, and this is spring, and it seems to me”—her voice broke a little at this critical moment —“it seems to me,” she repeated, “as if I’d ought to have $40.” Which is a true story of a recent happening.