Free Uprising by Margaret Peterson Haddix

friends had looked the quotation up in the Bible and said it was actually the
want
of money that was evil, which wasn’t exactly the same thing. Jane was still thinking about that one.) And then there were all those women’s rights lectures. Would the United States be a better place if women could vote?
    Jane favored her father with what she hoped was her most innocent-looking smile.
    â€œAnd really,” she said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I’m coming home much earlier than if I’d been to a dance.”
    Father scowled at her anyway, his thick black eyebrows beetling together. Jane had seen pictures of her father when he was young and handsome—she could understand why her mother stared at him so dreamily in their wedding pictures. They’d been a lovely couple, Jane’s parents, back before Mother had taken sick and faded away. Now Father was potbellied and balding and fierce, and Jane was more than a little afraid of him.
    â€œYou were with Eleanor Kensington?” he muttered. “Of the shipping-interest Kensingtons?”
    â€œI suppose,” Jane said. “She’s Pearl Kensington’s cousin.”
    â€œAh,” Father said, and Jane understood that he had just begun a calculation in his head, judging the Kensington family’s financial and social status relative to his own.
    â€œThey live near the Vanderbilts,” Jane said.
    â€œI see,” Father said. Eleanor had been judged acceptable. “Does she perhaps have a brother?”
    Jane blushed. This was new, Father asking about eligible males, instead of simply counting on Miss Milhouse to shepherd Jane through the complexities of courtship. Jane felt a sudden pang of missing her mother. Surely, even as an invalid, Jane’s mother would have cared enough to ask, “Was that boy kind enough when he asked you to dance? Did his eyes sparkle when you said yes,’ or was he just playing his role?” and even, “Do you think you could love him?”—rather than treating the whole marriage campaign like a militarymaneuver, a series of battles to be won or lost based on flounced dresses, tasteful décolletage and discreet flirting (but not too much! Oh, no, not too much!).
    â€œEh? Is there a brother?” Father repeated awkwardly. Maybe he was blushing too.
    â€œEleanor’s brothers are older, and already married,” Jane said, trying to keep her voice steady.
    â€œAh,” Father said again.
    Jane wondered what would happen if she told him what the lecturer had said tonight about marriage.
    â€œWomen are not chattel, to be traded off like cattle or hogs!” she’d thundered out. “We’re not trophies, to be placed in glass cases! We’re human beings, and we deserve to be treated as such. We, like our husbands, should be allowed to own property. We, like our husbands, should have a say over the money we earn. We, like our husbands, should have a determining voice in the guardianship of our children. And we, like our husbands, should have the right to vote!”
    Afterward, in the ice cream parlor, Jane had spooned butterscotch sundae into her mouth and listened to the debate swirling around her. Eleanor said the speaker had been particularly brave to take on the issue of marriage, since Mrs. Belmont, who’d just donated a new headquarters for the suffrage movement, had forced her own daughter to marry against her will.
    â€œJust because
she
wanted a royal title in the family, she made Consuelo marry that horrid duke, who just wanted her money,” Eleanor had said. “Even though Consuelo was in love with someone else, and sobbed all the way to the wedding. That’s the worst fad, rich Americans marrying off theirdaughters to dusty old counts and such. It’s barbaric, I say!”
    Jane hadn’t heard of anyone objecting before. Her old friends thought royalty was romantic.
    â€œWouldn’t you want to be a duchess?”