The Quality - Richard Beck - Bog

In 1867 Jennifer Harris buries her husband, becomes the mistress of the president of a major New York City bank, and begins work as a reporter for Elizabeth Cady Stanton's newspaper. In this capacity she gets involved with the major issues of the day for women - the movement for equality and voting rights - and with some major players - Susan B. Anthony, Victoria Woodhull, Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, Frederick Douglass, P.T. Barnum and George Francis Train. The novel is a cross between fiction - the young woman and her personal problems with life and love - and real characters and events that impact her, the women's movement and the country. While working for "The Revolution" she meets with a woman accused of infanticide, a woman who witnesses the trial of her husband accused of murdering her lover, and a woman who will become the first female candidate for President of the United States. On a personal basis she marries the bank president, and after becoming pregnant gets a lesson in child-bearing from Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in the country. When she gives birth to twins, she finds herself in double trouble as she is engaged in a legal battle to keep them. Working now as a reporter for "The Woodhull and Claflin Weekly," she finds herself in the middle of a religious riot in New York City between Irish Protestants and Catholics. When Woodhull is arrested on Federal obscenity charges she witnesses the trial in which Woodhull makes public charges against Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. Jennifer writes of one last trial, that of Susan B. Anthony on charges of illegally voting in an upstate New York election. At the trial's conclusion Jennifer decides to catch a secret glimpse of her young son in the upstate home of her mother-in-law. Proceeding inside the forbidden place, she accidently kills the elder woman and kidnaps her own son. The entire novel is written as a journal and the conclusion will be a surprise to readers.