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There came the George Eliot incident, whereby the spotlight of publicity was turned upon this liberal teacher. She was teaching English, and some girl asked if it was true that George Eliot had lived with a man to whom she was not married. What was Henrietta to do? Should she tell the girl to hush, that was a naughty question? Or should she lie? She explained that George Henry Lewes had had an insane wife, and under the English law could not get a divorce; so he and George Eliot had lived as husband and wife, and had been so accepted by all their friends for the rest of their lifetime. One of the children took this home to her father, and the father took it to the priest, and the priest took it to the pulpit, and the New York “Times” took it to the whole city. There was a terrible uproar—it is so that reputations are made in the radical movement. We have to do something queer or unusual, something supposed to be shocking; and we must manage to be right while we are doing it!

Next came the uproar over married teachers. The board passed a rule that women teachers who got married should automatically lose their jobs; so the women took to concealing their marriages. But now and then one could no longer be concealed, and there would be a case of what Henrietta called “mother-baiting.” The board of education caught one woman about to become a mother, and Henrietta wrote a satirical letter to the newspapers. For this she was suspended for eight months without pay. As she said: “They fined me eighteen hundred dollars, and then they adopted my idea. They have always adopted my ideas, and have always fined me for making them adopt them.”