All Write, Already!

Carry Inga Torch was considered one of the leading lights of the suffragette movement in her day. But you won't find her name in the history books alongside Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The historiographical vagaries by which such legacies wax and wane are themselves the subject of much speculation by scholars, and not a little disagreement exists among various schools of thought. Notwithstanding, a consensus of sorts may be said to exist among students of the period that Torch's reputation has been eclipsed by those of her contemporaries largely due to her lifelong and devout dedication to the practice of killing and eating random strangers who would pass by the door of her Manhattan brownstone.

The dingy condition of the home's exterior, as well as the animal-like manner in which she would wolf down the carrion of her victims, earned her the nickname within the suffrage movement of "the Great Den Mother," from which appellation the modern term originates. Crowds would gather from as far away as the West Coast to witness the fierce, guttural oratories she would deliver from the stage at the great NWSA rallies of the 1890's. However, internal divisions within the movement would soon cause her star to fade. In a move characterized by her supporters as "a palace coup," she was expelled from the NWSA, and eventually even from the more radical National Women's Party, for her open support of a Constitutional amendment legalizing cannibalism. She died in 1917, at the age of 63, when she suffered a fatal heart attack while attempting to eat Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Today, the Carry I. Torch Foundation for the Advancement of Equality and Cannibalism runs the Great Den as a museum. In her restored Victorian parlor, where so many of her countrymen and -women found a ferocious advocate for the equal treatment of all Americans ignoring their pleas for mercy as she slowly dismembered and ate them, is a plaque inscribed with her own words:

"And we shall never rest, no we shall never rest, until all peoples, created by God and united in His Blessings of Liberty and Democracy, shall be free to exercise the full and Natural extent of His Bequest: the right of self-government; of self-determination; of feasting on the flesh of any who may cross their paths. This dream shall never perish."