1. "Was he looking for a mother, or a wife?"
Posted by redfern on Dec-9th-02 at 3:58 PM

Andrew Borden Married Abby, although he did not have much time outside of taking care of his buisness dealings and such. Was he looking for a mother or a wife? They had a maid to do the cooking and such. Is there a possibility that the love in their relationship was not much in the way of love of today. They had no real time for romance, and she was a spinster until he married her at age 36. She wasn't appealing to the eye, so said. How did he find time to meet, love, marry a woman with the way he would keep up with his buisness affairs? Lizzie was around two or so, and that would not have given him much time in search of a wife either. So was it a wife or a mother he was in search of? I find it kind of hard to think it would be both. If so, did he talk to his girls, (I guess that would have been just Emma at the time), or did he just proceed to marry Abby and throw her into the family mix?
     RedFern

Is this a question that tells more about the responder than the subject? Did Andy (and the girls) have a maid then? Not yet rich enough?
I could answer he wanted a replacement for Lauranna (his first wife). A young girl needed mothering, a housemaker, and a wife. All for the low, low price of an "old maid". If he wanted a son and heir, he would have tried for someone in her 20s (agree?).
Didn't Uncle John mention that Abby was more "faithful and frugal" than his first wife? That's quite an admission from a brother-in-law!!

At the time that Andrew married Abby, Lizzie was around 5 and Emma was 14.  He was still living in his father, Abraham's home on Ferry street with his stepmother, Bebe Wilmarth, Hiram Harrington, Lurana (Andrew's sister), their child, George, and possibly a servant couple.  So, there was Andrew's stepmother, Lurana, and possibly a female servant to look after the girls while Andrew was at work or courting Abby.

I would imagine there was social pressure on Andrew to re-marry.  I would think that Andrew was looking for all of the above when he married Abby, someone to raise the girls to be ladies and prepare them for the sphere of women at the time, wives and homemakers.  Plus a wife, I'm sure Andrew got lonely and needed someone to warm his tootsies on a cold winter's night.  And I would like to think that there was some sort of affection towards Abby, she may have reminded Andrew of his first wife, Sarah.  If you look at the older photographs of Sarah and Abby, they look remarkably alike.

I think that Andrew may have just thrown Abby into the mix, Emma being female and a young girl at the time, to me, meant that her opinion may not have amounted to much.  And look at how much Emma resented poor Abby when she had done nothing but marry Andrew.  Emma may have felt like Abby was trying to usurp Sarah's place in her family.  After my mother had divorced and started dating, I can remember how my brothers and sister and I overinspected every guy my poor mom went on a date with.  We resented these guys and saw them as interlopers, I would imagine that Emma went through much of the same thing with Abby. 

I wonder if Emma's "hatred" of Abby says that Andrew
did indeed think of her as a real "wife" not as a
servant? Would she have been jealous if she didn't
see love there? Maybe her resentment wasn't so much
because of "Baby Lizzie" but the fact she saw herself
as being Andrew's spouse? They maybe had a co-parenting thing
of Lizzie & she didn't want another woman in his life
because she wasn't the spoiled baby & she might have felt lost?
She was a teenager, I'm sure even back then it was a
rough time, and I guess it would have been easy to get lost
in the shuffle. And to feel that you were being replaced &
that you were not loved or needed anymore? She did spend the
majority of her life "caring" for Lizzie, maybe she never felt
wanted anywhere else in life?

(Message last edited Dec-10th-02  12:33 AM.)