The five Bennett children, Rachel, Belva, Warren, Cyrene, and Inverno, born between 1828 and 1841, shared a close relationship with one another and the numerous members of Hannah’s extended family who lived nearby. Belva had mixed feelings about a childhood in which her accomplishments and ambitions were not particularly valued. She complained that she did the work of a boy caring for the farm animals but did not get proper credit.9 She chafed when her father did not encourage her schoolwork because of her sex. But she had a strong ego and later remembered personal feats of running, rowing, jumping, and horseback riding that she immodestly described as “proverbial.”10
The Bennett children attended country schools near Royalton when they were not needed for farm work. Belva was a good student and at fourteen was offered an instructor’s position by the local school board. With the family in need of money, she ended her formal education and took up the life of a rural schoolteacher. She boarded with the parents of her students and had her first taste of independence—and sex prejudice. As a female instructor, she received less than half the salary paid to her male counterparts. She called this treatment “odious, an indignity not to be tamely borne,” complaining to the wife of a local minister who counseled her that such was the way of the world.11 As the daughter of a poor family she had little choice but to accept the pay that was offered.
While teaching Belva began to imagine a life different from that of her mother and aunts—the life of a great man. She asked her father’s permission to go back to school, but Lewis refused her request. He was a man of limited means and did not believe that women needed a higher education.12 Defeated, his daughter did what was expected of her: on November 8, 1848, at the home of her parents, Belva Bennett, eighteen years old, married Uriah McNall.13
In her fifties Belva recalled the decision to marry: “The daughter of a poor farmer, I followed the well-trodden road, and was united in marriage to a promising young farmer of my neighborhood.”14 Uriah was twenty-two. His father, John, had come to Royalton from Canada and was one of the most respected men in Niagara County. The senior Mc-Nall farmed, ran the red brick tavern at McNall’s Corners, and shouldered his share of civic responsibilities, serving for many years as justice of the peace and town supervisor.15 His son was a sober young man. Belva had married well. By the new year, she and Uriah were settled on land a few miles north of their families, near the village of Gasport, where they farmed and operated a sawmill.16
Uriah and Belva married four months after the revolutionary stirrings of women, in July 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York. Here, ninety miles from the home of the newlyweds, sixty-eight women led by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and thirty-two men, including Frederick Douglass and James Mott, signed a “Declaration of Sentiments.” The short document, echoing the natural-law language of the Declaration of Independence, proclaimed the patient suffering of women denied an equal station in life by the government under which they lived. The facts submitted “to a candid world” included the denial of their right to vote, submission to laws in whose making they had no voice, a double standard in matters of morality, and limited access to education and well-paying employment. The declaration took particular care to spell out the abuse of women in marriage, condemning a system of law that gave husbands the power to deprive their wives of liberty, property, and wages.
Upstate New York newspapers reported on the extraordinary gathering, and it is likely that Belva, who loved to read newspapers, had seen the document. She thought about these provocative issues and later wrote that Uriah had joined with an unconventional wife who found contemporary marital customs loathsome. She believed that the marriage of an ordinary woman, clearly not including herself in that category, “is the end of her personality, or her individuality of thought and action.” A woman, she said, “is known by her husband’s name, takes his standing in society, receives only his friends, is represented by him, and becomes a sort of domestic nonentity, reflecting, if anything, her husband’s religious, moral, and political views, and rising or falling in the world as his star shall go up or down.”17 She resisted this “ordinary” life by reading widely and producing articles for literary magazines and local newspapers. She proudly described her interest in books and writing as “unwomanly habits.”18
As Mrs. McNall, Belva had little time to find the permanent direction of her domestic star. Not long into their marriage, Uriah was injured in a mill accident that weakened his health. By the spring of 1853, four and a half years after their wedding, the young husband was dead. He left behind his 22-year-old bride and a three-year-old daughter, Lura, born July 31, 1849. He owned real estate, most probably mortgaged, valued at slightly less than three thousand dollars.19
Had Uriah not died, Belva’s life might have followed a course similar to that of Harriet Beecher Stowe, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who, as mothers of small children, stormed the world using household writing tables. Tragedy, however, freed Belva McNall from these constraints, stealing from her the comforts of a settled arrangement and challenging her to act on long-buried ambitions. Initially, her husband’s death and the responsibility of caring for Lura made her indecisive. She contemplated the conventional possibilities: retreat to the home of her parents or her in-laws, engage in farm work, and undergo an appropriate period of mourning, perhaps followed by remarriage, even though she later revealed that after Uriah’s death she wanted to become independent, to throw off “a woman’s shackles,” but was ridiculed by friends.20 For a short while she “submitted,” made no decisions, found life “aimless and monotonous,” then, finally, determined to “take destiny into [her] own hands.”21 Her first step was to return to school, believing that education would be the road to independence.
Drawing on the limited capital left in Uriah’s estate, she enrolled at neighboring Gasport Academy. Her purpose was “to fit myself for some active employment whereby I could earn a livelihood for myself and child.”22 She was twenty-three and thought her plan reasonable but encountered “impudent” criticism from neighbors who commented that her behavior was “unheard of and unusual,” snidely questioning what the young widow expected to make of herself.23 Her father joined this chorus of nay-sayers: quoting St. Paul, he insisted that her desire for education was improper and unwomanly.24
Belva had yielded at eighteen but now she persisted. She finished the academic term and asked the school trustees for a job teaching the winter session, when boys typically enrolled and men taught. The trustees replied that a male instructor had been engaged. Then, fate stepped in. The teacher was fired and the trustees asked the young widow if she would take over his class, which she did, bringing Lura to school each day.25 She taught several short terms, saving enough money to move forward with a truly subversive scheme: Lura would be given over to the care of her parents, who were about to move to Illinois, while she pursued a ladies’ seminary degree. Years later Belva admitted that all of her friends and advisers objected to this idea, and that she “was compelled to use a good deal of strategy to prevent an open rupture.”26 But she prevailed. In September 1854 she packed her modest and much-mended wardrobe and in the company of two young women companions undertook the sixty-mile trip east to Genesee Wesleyan Seminary in Lima, New York. This was her first journey, and it was, she wrote, “a matter of a good deal of moment.”27
Belva arrived at Lima and enrolled at the Methodist seminary in a program that offered a “ladylike” curriculum for young women, as well as preparatory work for young men hoping to matriculate at Genesee College, which shared its campus. When she learned that the college was engaged in the radical experiment of coeducation, she applied to transfer after presenting herself to an examining board.28 She believed that the more demanding curriculum as well as the prestige of a college degree was an opportunity she could not afford to lose, one that would “gratify” the ambitions of her youth.29 She gave up a lady’s “finishing” in music and the arts and, without consulting her family, began