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In the spring of 1856, in the coastal region of South Carolina, a young woman named Clara Hawthorne faced a fate that her society had already decreed. At twenty-two, she had been deemed by high society as “unfit for marriage.” The reason was not her character or intelligence, but the fact that, since the age of eight, her legs had been unresponsive due to a fall from a horse that fractured her spine.
Twelve rejections and a social sentence
Over the course of four years, twelve suitors had visited the Hawthorne home. Twelve men had first looked at the polished mahogany wheelchair that her father, Colonel Edmund Hawthorne, had commissioned, and then invented excuses to withdraw. The polite words masked cruel prejudices: that she would not be able to walk down the aisle, that she would not be able to chase a child around the garden, that she would probably not be able to bear children.
The rumor about her supposed infertility had taken on a life of its own after a doctor’s indiscretion at a dinner party. High-society women whispered about her body as if it were a broken clock. Clara learned to smile, to hold her head high, and to pretend that the contempt didn’t burn her skin.