In fact, in people’s minds, it made sense that men would lead a workers’ revolution, because they were the ones who worked in the factories. They were the ones who woke up in the morning and went to their jobs and earned a living. Women stayed home with the children. They took care of the housework. This was necessary business, but they couldn’t understand what it was to wake up in the morning and earn money. Their husbands did that.
On a Monday a few months after the revolution in the Squalid Mile, an older woman walked down the street with a large staff. She banged on everyone’s door telling them in was time to go off to their jobs. Remarkably soon afterward the people began to emerge from their doors. It was like the old woman was a child shoving a stick into an anthill.
The women woke up and splashed water on their faces. They pulled on their black stockings. When their big toes popped out of them, they sewed the hole closed with black thread.
Women who had their babies attached to their backs or were holding their little ones’ hands hurried out their doors to head to the factories. Young girls, their coats missing buttons and fastened with diaper pins hurried out, their heads full of all sorts of romance, and ran down the streets to get to their stations on time. Older women with kerchiefs tied to their heads walked their arthritic limbs toward the factories.
There was a girl who was staring down a cat on the sidewalk. The cat had no intention of going anywhere. But neither did she. There was a girl who took a mouthful of water, tilted her face upward into the air and spit the water up as though she were a whale that had just emerged from the deep. There was a girl who was sewing at a sweatshop. She wrote the words “I HATE YOU” onto a piece of cloth and tucked it into the hem of a dress she was sewing.
There would be further uprisings in the city. To be alive is to be in a constant state of revolution. These girls would all grow up and come for the vote.
Acknowledgments
This book was edited by two very brilliant women, Jennifer Lambert and Alison Fairbrother.
About the Author
Heather O'Neill is a novelist, poet, short-story writer, screenwriter, and essayist. Her internationally-acclaimed books include The Lonely Hearts Hotel and The Girl Who Was Saturday Night. Her debut novel Lullabies for Little Criminals was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. O'Neill lives in Montreal with her daughter.