She Owned Her Own Bedding: A Hoquiam Wife's Public Reckoning
When W. E. Ulmer filed notice that he would no longer pay his wife's bills, Ida V. Ulmer went straight to the paper — to point out that he had never paid them in the first place.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Mrs. Ida V. Ulmer, an independent woman of Hoquiam, able to make her own way in the world without the assistance of a man, makes this self-explanatory statement in the Washingtonian: "I acknowledge publicly that W. E. Ulmer and myself, man and wife, have mutually agreed to live separate and apart, and that the said W. E. Ulmer formed, or caused to have formed, an instrument of writing to that effect; that he, in company with an officer, brought it to me for my signature and acknowledgment; that upon these grounds he has given notice that he would settle no bills contracted by me hereafter — something he has never had to do. I always had to pay my own bills and the most of his, or else they went unpaid. As to leaving his 'bed and board,' it is something he did not have. I own my own bedding and supported the family mostly by my own labor, and was compelled to leave home to do so."
A very small hole would seem to be sufficient to accommodate Mr. Ulmer at this time.
“I own my own bedding and supported the family mostly by my own labor, and was compelled to leave home to do so.”
Washington gave married women control of their own property and earnings earlier and more firmly than most states, and Ida Ulmer used that ground to answer her husband in print. Her plain accounting — I paid my bills and most of his, I own my own bedding — is the 1891 version of an argument still being had about who carries a household's debt and how a separation gets negotiated in public.
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