Willing women shall be alloud to shed as much sweat as men. Hire them, and for no partial wages, but for full ones.
Over two months, the renovations of the Meetinghouse progressed without incident. On the first day after her demand, only one woman attended the task, and the men ferried her about with pointed fingers like some flitting servant. This, Gloria interrupted with a touch to the woman's elbow. "Can you swing a hammer," she asked, and the woman — Kora Emmerich, unmarried, club-footed — drove a nail with one strike into a discarded bit of lumber. Two days later, men held the ladder for Kora, and called her "Yes, Sera Emmerich," and "No, Sera Emmerich."
In the following week, Gloria noted four women in the Bazaar whose skirts hadn't yet been shaken free of their sawdust. And when one of their accompanying fellows tried to pluck a sliver of wood from one woman's brow, she gave his hand an affectionate strike and said, "Leave it," with a surge of pride that fell from her like a ripple.
By the time the renovations were half-completed, as many able-bodied women as men worked the Meetinghouse renovations, and even one who occasionally took leave to feed a yellow-skinned infant that she let lay in the shade beneath a wiry tree. And on some days, Gloria took part, though the labor of moving this object to that location was far more worth her eager sweat than tools or saws. So she hoisted, tied her skirts up, dripped black sweat, and learned names: Gussie Millard, Dalian Hedgefirth, Articula Meers, Olida Farrier-Smith, so on and so on, candlemaker daughters and butcher daughters and fish daughters, all daughters or restless wives or single women who wore their brows like armor.
After a day of grueling work, the women and men mingled with chatter and laughter, sharing wine and whiskey, giving one another soft jabs in the forearms and telling lewd stories.
After sundown, Gloria took her lantern into the unlit skeleton of the half-built Meetinghouse. Her shadow stretched like a black animal across the floorboards, held hostage beneath the heels of her boots. The place reeked of wet wood and rope and perspiration and flax. Footprints of mud and sawdust trailed various patterns across the floor.
She settled her lantern on a sawhorse and a shaved length of wood. It was as good a place as any; it was a quiet place, and a promising place.
She scrawled the words by candlelight.
Written this Firstday of the Second Week of the Last Month of Summer, 219.
A future is not difficult to predict: there shall come a time when my integrity is brought into question, and as such, the following words serve to vouch for the passion of my honesty, even if they perform damage to my name in their commission. Therefore—