The newspapers welcomed her home. "Susan B. Anthony is back from Europe," announced the Cleveland Leader, "and is here for a winter's fight on behalf of woman suffrage. She seems remarkably well, and has gained fifteen pounds since she left last spring. She is sixty-three, but looks just the same as twenty years ago. There is perhaps an extra wrinkle in her face, a little more silver in her hair, but her blue eyes are just as bright, her mouth as serious and her step as active as when she was forty. She would attract attention in any crowd."[354]

Susan came back to an indifferent Congress. "All would fall flat and dead if someone were not here to keep them in mind of their duty to us," she wrote a friend at this time, and to her diary she confided, "It is perfectly disheartening that no member feels any especial interest or earnest determination in pushing this question of woman suffrage, to all men only a side issue."[355]

FOOTNOTES:

[339] The only such history available was the History of the National Woman's Rights Movement for Twenty Years (New York, 1871), written by Paulina Wright Davis to commemorate the first national woman's rights convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850. This brief record, ending with Victoria Woodhull's Memorial to Congress, was inadequate and placed too much emphasis on Victoria Woodhull who had flashed through the movement like a meteor, leaving behind her a trail of discord and little that was constructive.

[340] Aaron McLean, Eugene Mosher, his daughter Louise, Merritt's daughter, Lucy E. Anthony from Fort Scott, Kansas, and later Lucy's sister "Anna O."

[341] Mrs. Stanton moved to the new home she had built in Tenafly, New Jersey, in 1868.

[342] Fowler & Wells furnished the paper, press work, and advertising and paid the authors 12-1/2% commission on sales. They did not look askance at such a controversial subject, having published the Fowler family's phrenological books. In addition the women of the family were suffragists.

[343] In 1855, at the instigation of her father. Miss Anthony began to preserve her press clippings. She now found them a valuable record, and she hired a young girl to paste them in six large account books. Thirty-two of her scrapbooks are now in the Library of Congress.

[344] Aug. 30, 1876, Ida Husted Harper Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library. The history of the American Woman Suffrage Association was compiled for Volume II from the Woman's Journal and Mary Livermore's The Agitator by Harriot Stanton.

[345] Nov. 30, 1880, Amelia Bloomer Papers, Seneca Falls Historical Society, Seneca Falls, N. Y.

[346] Harper, Anthony, II, p. 531. The History received friendly and complimentary reviews, the New York Tribune and Sun giving it two columns.

[347] June 28, 1881, Amelia Bloomer Papers, Seneca Falls Historical Society, Seneca Falls, N. Y. The cost of a cloth copy of the History was $3.

[348] Dec. 19, 1880, Susan B. Anthony Papers, Library of Congress. Rachel Foster's mother was a life-long friend of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and sympathetic to her work for women. The widow of a wealthy Pittsburgh newspaperman, she was now active in Pennsylvania suffrage organizations. Her daughters, Rachel and Julia, early became interested in the cause.

[349] E. C. Stanton to Laura Collier, Jan. 21, 1886, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Vassar College Library. Mary Livermore criticized the History as poorly edited.

[350] After her marriage in 1882, to William Henry Blatch of Basingstoke, Harriot made her home in England for the next 20 years.

[351] Harper, Anthony, II, p. 549.

[352] Ibid., pp. 553, 558, 562. Miss Anthony spent a week with her old friends, Ellen and Aaron Sargent in Berlin where Aaron was serving as American Minister to Germany. In Paris she visited Theodore Stanton and his French wife.

[353] Lydia Becker, Mrs. Jacob Bright, Helen Taylor, Priscilla Bright McLaren, Margaret Bright Lucas, Alice Scatcherd, and Elizabeth Pease Nichol. A bill to enfranchise widows and spinsters was pending in Parliament. Only a few women were courageous enough to demand votes for married women as well.

[354] Harper, Anthony, II, p. 582.

[355] Ibid., pp. 591, 583.



IMPETUS FROM THE WEST

"My heart almost stands still. I hope against hope, but still I hope," Susan wrote in her diary in 1885, as she waited for news from Oregon Territory regarding the vote of the people on a woman suffrage amendment.[356] Woman suffrage was defeated in Oregon; and in Washington Territory, where in 1883 it had carried, a contest was being waged in the courts to invalidate it. In Nebraska it had also been defeated in 1882. Since the victories in Wyoming and Utah in 1869 and 1870, not another state or territory had written woman suffrage into law.

In spite of these setbacks, Susan still saw great promise in the West and resumed her lecturing there. She knew the rapidly growing young western states and territories as few easterners did, and she understood their people. Here women were making themselves indispensable as teachers, and state universities, now open to them, graduated over two thousand women a year. The Farmers' Alliance, the Grange, and the Prohibition party, all distinctly western in origin, admitted women to membership and were friendly to woman suffrage. School suffrage had been won in twelve western states as against five in the East, and Kansas women were now voting in municipal elections. In a sense, woman suffrage was becoming respectable in the West, and a woman was no longer ostracized by her friends for working with Susan B. Anthony.

Still critical of her own speaking, Susan was often discouraged over her lectures, but her vitality, her naturalness, and her flashes of wit seldom failed to win over her audiences. Her nephew, Daniel Jr., a student at the University of Michigan, hearing her speak, wrote his parents, "At the beginning of her lecture, Aunt Susan does not do so well; but when she is in the midst of her argument and all her energies brought into play, I think she is a very powerful speaker."[357]

On these trips through the West, she kept in close touch with her brothers Daniel and Merritt in Kansas, frequently visiting in their homes and taking her numerous nieces to Rochester. She valued Daniel's judgment highly, and he, well-to-do and influential, was a great help to her in many ways, investing her savings and furnishing her with railroad passes which greatly reduced her ever-increasing traveling expenses.

Everywhere she met active zealous members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Since the Civil War, temperance had become a vigorous movement in the Middle West, doing its utmost to counteract the influence of the many large new breweries and saloons. Through the Prohibition party, organized on a national basis in 1872, temperance was now a political issue in Kansas, Iowa, and the Territory of Dakota, and through the W.C.T.U. women waged an effective total-abstinence campaign. Brought into the suffrage movement by Frances Willard under the slogan, "For God and Home and Country," these women quickly sensed the value of their votes to the temperance cause. Nor was Susan slow to recognize their importance to her and her work, for they represented an entirely new group, churchwomen, who heretofore had been suspicious of and hostile toward woman's rights. Through them, she anticipated a powerful impetus for her cause.

With admiration she had watched Frances Willard's career.[358] This vivid consecrated young woman was a born leader, quick to understand woman's need of the vote and eager to lead women forward. It was a disappointment, however, when she joined the American rather than the National Woman Suffrage Association. The reasons for this, Susan readily understood, were Frances Willard's warm friendship with Mary Livermore and her own preference for the American's state-by-state method, similar to that she had so successfully followed in her W.C.T.U. Yet Frances Willard, whenever she could, cooperated with Susan whom she admired and loved; and through the years these two great leaders valued and respected each other, even though they frequently differed over policy and method.

Susan, for example, was often troubled because women suffrage and temperance were more and more linked together in the public mind, thus confusing the issues and arousing the hostility of those who might have been friendly toward woman suffrage had they not feared that women's votes would bring in prohibition. She did her best to make it clear to her audiences that she did not ask for the ballot in order that women might vote against saloons and for prohibition. She demanded only that women have the same right as men to express their opinions at the polls. Such an attitude was hard for many temperance women to understand and to forgive.

Over women's support of specific political parties, Susan and Frances Willard were never able to agree. Susan had never been willing to ally herself with a minority party. Therefore, to Frances Willard's disappointment, she withheld her support from the Prohibition party in 1880, although their platform acknowledged woman's need of the ballot and directed them to use it to settle the liquor question, and in 1884 when they recommended state suffrage for women. Finding women eager to support the Prohibitionists in gratitude for these inadequate planks, Susan even issued a statement urging them to support the Republicans, who held out the most hope to them even if woman suffrage had not been mentioned in their platform. Her experience in Washington had proved to her the friendliness and loyalty of individual Republicans, and she was unwilling to jeopardize their support.

Her judgment was confirmed during the next few years when friendly Republicans spoke for woman suffrage in the Senate, and when in 1887 the woman suffrage amendment was debated and voted on in the Senate. In the Senate gallery eagerly listening, Susan took notice that the sixteen votes cast for the amendment were those of Republicans.[359]

Still hoping to win Susan's endorsement of the Prohibition party in 1888, Frances Willard asked her to outline what kind of plank would satisfy her.

"Do you mean so satisfy me," Susan replied, "that I would work, and recommend to all women to work ... for the success of the third party ticket?... Not until a third party gets into power ... which promises a larger per cent of representatives, on the floor of Congress, and in the several State legislatures, who will speak and vote for women's enfranchisement, than does the Republican, shall I work for it. You see, as yet there is not a single Prohibitionist in Congress while there are at least twenty Republicans on the floor of the United States Senate, besides fully one-half of the members of the House of Representatives who are in favor of woman suffrage.... I do not propose to work for the defeat of the party which thus far has furnished nearly every vote in that direction."[360]

Nor was she lured away when, in 1888, the Prohibition party endorsed woman suffrage and granted Frances Willard the honor of addressing its convention and serving on the resolutions committee.

* * * * *

The temperance issue also cropped up in the annual Washington conventions of the National Woman Suffrage Association, preparations for which Susan now left to Rachel Foster, May Wright Sewall, a capable young recruit from Indiana, and Jane Spofford. However, she still supervised these conventions, prodding and interfering, in what she called her most Andrew Jackson-like manner. She always returned to Washington with excitement and pleasure, and with the hope of some outstanding victory, and the suite at the Riggs House, given her by generous Jane Spofford, was a delight after months of hard travel in the West. "I shall come both ragged and dirty," she wrote Mrs. Spofford in 1887. "Though the apparel will be tattered and torn, the mind, the essence of me, is sound to the core. Please tell the little milliner to have a bonnet picked out for me, and get a dressmaker who will patch me together so that I shall be presentable."[361]

Open to all women irrespective of race or creed, the National Woman Suffrage Association attracted fearless independent devoted members. They welcomed Mormon women into the fold, and when the bill to disfranchise Mormon women as a punishment for polygamy was before Congress in 1887, they did their utmost to help Mormon women retain the vote, but were defeated.

They welcomed as well many temperance advocates. A few delegates, however, among them Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Gage, and Mrs. Colby, scorned what they called the "singing and praying" temperance group and protested that temperance and religion were getting too strong a hold on the organization. Abigail Duniway from Oregon contended that suffragists should not join forces with temperance groups and blamed the defeat of woman suffrage in Oregon, Idaho, and Washington, in 1887, on men's fear that women would vote for prohibition.

Often Susan was obliged to act as arbiter between the temperance and nontemperance groups. She did not underestimate the momentum which the well-organized W.C.T.U. had already given the suffrage cause, particularly in states where the National Association had only a few and scattered workers. She needed and wanted the help of these temperance women and of Frances Willard's forceful and winning personality. She also saw the importance of breaking down with Frances Willard's aid the slow-yielding opposition of the church.

Occasionally enthusiastic workers undertook projects which to her seemed unwise. She told them frankly how she felt and left it at that, but most of them had to learn by experience. When Belva Lockwood, one of her most able colleagues in Washington, accepted the nomination for President of the United States, offered her by the women of California in 1884 and by the women of Iowa in 1888 through their Equal Rights party, she did not lend her support or that of the National Association, but followed her consistent policy of no alignment with a minority party. Nevertheless, she heartily believed in women's right and ability to hold the highest office in the land.

* * * * *

Ever since her trip to Europe in 1883, Susan had been planning for an international gathering of women. Interest in this project was kept alive among European women by Mrs. Stanton during her frequent visits with her daughter Harriot in England and her son Theodore in France. It was Susan, however, who put the machinery in motion through the National Woman Suffrage Association and issued a call for an international conference in Washington, in March 1888, to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the first woman's rights convention. Ten thousand invitations were sent out to organizations of women in all parts of the world, to professional, business, and reform groups as well as to those advocating political and civil rights for women, and an ambitious program was prepared. Most of the work for the conference and the raising of $13,000 to finance it fell upon the shoulders of Susan, Rachel Foster, and May Wright Sewall, but they also had the enthusiastic cooperation of Frances Willard, who, with her nation-wide contacts, was of inestimable value in arousing interest among the many and varied women's organizations and the labor groups. Another happy development was Clara Colby's decision to publish her Woman's Tribune in Washington during the conference. Mrs. Colby's Tribune, established in Beatrice, Nebraska, in 1883, had since then met in a measure Susan's need for a paper for the National Association and she welcomed its transfer to Washington.[362]

Women from all parts of the world assembled in Albaugh's Opera House in Washington for the epoch-making international conference which opened on Sunday, March 25, 1888, with religious services conducted entirely by women, as if to prove to the world that women in the pulpit were appropriate and adequate. Fifty-three national organizations sent representatives, and delegates came from England, France, Norway, Denmark, Finland, India, and Canada.

Presiding over all sixteen sessions, Susan rejoiced over a record attendance. Her thoughts went back to the winter of 1854 when she and Ernestine Rose had held their first woman's rights meetings in Washington, finding only a handful ready to listen. The intervening thirty-four years had worked wonders. Now women were willing to travel not only across the continent but from Europe and Asia to discuss and demand equal educational advantages, equal opportunities for training in the professions and in business, equal pay for equal work, equal suffrage, and the same standard of morals for all. Aware of their responsibility to their countries, they asked for the tools, education and the franchise, to help solve the world's problems. They were listened to with interest and respect, and were received at the White House by President and Mrs. Cleveland.

Through it all, a dynamic, gray-haired woman in a black silk dress with a red shawl about her shoulders was without question the heroine of the occasion. "This lady," observed the Baltimore Sun, "daily grows upon all present; the woman suffragists love her for her good works, the audience for her brightness and wit, and the multitude of press representatives for her frank, plain, open, business-like way of doing everything connected with the council.... Her word is the parliamentary law of the meeting. Whatever she says is done without murmur or dissent."[363]

A permanent International Council of Women to meet once every five years was organized with Millicent Garrett Fawcett of England as president, and a National Council to meet every three years was formed as an affiliate with Frances Willard as president and Susan as vice-president at large. Emphasizing education and social and moral reform, the International Council did not rank suffrage first as Susan had hoped. Nevertheless, she was happy that an international movement of enterprising women was well on its way. They would learn by experience.

Of all the favorable results of the International Council of Women, two were of special importance to Susan, meeting Anna Howard Shaw and overtures from Lucy Stone for a union of the National and American Woman Suffrage Associations.

Prejudiced against Anna Howard Shaw, who had aligned herself with Mary Livermore and Lucy Stone, and who she assumed, was a narrow Methodist minister, Susan was unprepared to find that the pleasing young woman in the pulpit on the first day of the conference, holding her audience spellbound with her oratory, was Anna Howard Shaw. Here was a warm personality, a crusader eager to right human wrongs, and above all a matchless public speaker. Anna too had heard much criticism of Susan and had formed a distorted opinion of her which was quickly dispelled as she watched her preside. They liked each other the moment they met.

Anna Howard Shaw had grown up on the Michigan frontier, her indomitable spirit and her eagerness for learning conquering the hardships and the limitations of her surroundings. Encouraged by Mary Livermore, who by chance lectured in her little town, she worked her way through Albion College and Boston University Theological School, from which she graduated in 1878. She then served as the pastor of two Cape Cod churches, but was refused ordination by the Methodist Episcopal church because of her sex. Eventually she was ordained by the Methodist Protestant church. During her pastorate, she studied medicine at Boston University, and because of her ability as a speaker was in demand as a lecturer for temperance and woman suffrage groups. Through the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, she met an inspiring group of reformers, and their influence and that of Frances Willard, in whose work she was intensely interested, led her to leave the ministry for active work in the temperance and woman suffrage movements. After several years as a lecturer and organizer for the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, she was placed at the head of the franchise department of the W.C.T.U. This was her work when she met Susan B. Anthony.



The more Susan talked with Anna, the better she liked her, and the feeling was mutual. This wholesome woman of forty-one, with abundant vitality, unmarried and without pressing family ties to divert her, seemed particularly well fitted to assist Susan in the arduous campaigns which lay ahead. A natural orator, she could in a measure take the place of Mrs. Stanton, who could no longer undertake western tours. Before the International Council adjourned, Susan had Anna's promise that she would lecture for the National Association.

One of Susan's nieces, Lucy E. Anthony, also felt drawn to Anna after meeting her at the International Council. A warm friendship quickly developed and continued throughout their lives. Within a few years they were living together, Lucy serving as Anna's secretary and planning her lecture tours and campaign trips. Educated in Rochester through the help of her aunts, Susan and Mary, living in their home and loving them both, Lucy readily made their interests her own and devoted her life to the suffrage movement. Neither a public speaker nor a campaigner, she put her executive ability to work, and her tasks, though less spectacular, were important and freed both Susan and Anna from many details.

Just as the International Council of Women had broken down Anna Howard Shaw's prejudice regarding Susan B. Anthony and her National Woman Suffrage Association, just so it clarified the opinions of other young women, now aligning themselves with the cause. Admiring the leaders of both factions, these young women saw no reason why the two groups should not work together in one large strong organization, and this seemed increasingly important as they welcomed women from other countries to this first international conference. Unfamiliar with the personal antagonisms and the sincere differences in policy which had caused the separation after the Civil War, they did not understand the difficulties still in the way of union. So strongly, however, did they press for a united front that the leaders of both groups felt themselves swept along toward that goal. Susan herself had long looked forward to the time when all suffragists would again work together, but since the unsuccessful overtures of her group in 1870, she had made no further efforts in that direction. She was completely taken by surprise when in the fall of 1887 the American Association proposed that she and Lucy Stone confer regarding union.

* * * * *

The negotiations revived old arguments in the minds of zealous partisans, and in the Woman's Journal, the Woman's Tribune, and elsewhere, attempts were made to fasten the blame for the twenty-year-old rift upon this one and that one; but so strong ran the tide for union among the younger women that this excursion into the past aroused little interest.

The election of the president of the merged organizations was the most difficult hurdle. Lucy Stone suggested that neither she, Mrs. Stanton, nor Susan allow their names to be proposed, since they had been blamed for the division, but this was easier said than done. The clamor for Susan and Mrs. Stanton was so strong and continuous among the younger members that it soon became apparent that unless one or the other were chosen, there would be no hope of union. The odds were in Susan's favor. Her popularity in the National Association was tremendous. Although Mrs. Stanton was revered as the mother of woman suffrage and admired for her brilliant mind and her poise as presiding officer, she now spent so much time in Europe with her daughter Harriot that many who might otherwise have voted for her felt that the office should go to Susan, who was always on the job.



Most of the American Association regarded Susan as safer and less radical than Mrs. Stanton, less likely to stray from the straight path of woman suffrage, and Henry Blackwell recommended her election.

Susan did not want the presidency. She wanted it for Mrs. Stanton, who had headed the National Association so ably for so many years. She pleaded earnestly with the delegates of the National Association: "I will say to every woman who is a National and who has any love for the old Association, or for Susan B. Anthony, that I hope you will not vote for her for president.... Don't you vote for any human being but Mrs. Stanton.... When the division was made 22 years ago it was because our platform was too broad, because Mrs. Stanton was too radical.... And now ... if Mrs. Stanton shall be deposed ... you virtually degrade her.... I want our platform to be kept broad enough for the infidel, the atheist, the Mohammedan, or the Christian.... These are the broad principles I want you to stand upon."[364]

When the two organizations met in February 1890 to effect formal union as the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was elected president by a majority of 41 votes, while Susan was the almost unanimous choice for vice-president at large. With Lucy Stone chosen chairman of the executive committee, Jane Spofford treasurer, and Rachel Foster and Alice Stone Blackwell secretaries,[365] the new organization was well equipped with able leaders for the work ahead. It was dedicated to work for both state and federal woman suffrage amendments and its official organ would be the Woman's Journal.

Susan now faced the future with gratitude that a strong unified organization could be handed down to the younger women who would gradually take over the work she had started, and her confidence in these young women grew day by day. Working closely with Rachel Foster and May Wright Sewall, she knew their caliber. Anna Howard Shaw and Alice Stone Blackwell showed great promise, and Harriot Stanton Blatch was living up to her expectations. In England where Harriot had made her home since her marriage in 1882, she was active in the cause, and on her visits to her mother in New York, she kept in touch with the suffrage movement in the United States. She took part in the union meeting, and in her diary, Susan recorded these words of commendation, "Harriot said but a few words, yet showed herself worthy of her mother and her mother's lifelong friend and co-worker. It was a proud moment for me."[366]

To such she could entrust her beloved cause.

FOOTNOTES:

[356] Harper, Anthony, II, p. 592.

[357] Ibid., p. 658.

[358] Miss Anthony first met Frances Willard in 1875 when she lectured in Rochester. Invited to sit on the platform, by her side, she thoughtfully refused, adding "You have a heavy enough load to carry without me." Harper, Anthony, I, p. 472. When Frances Willard took her stand for woman suffrage in the W.C.T.U. in 1876, Miss Anthony wrote her, "Now you are to go forward. I wish I could see you and make you feel my gladness." Mary Earhart, Frances Willard (Chicago, 1944), p. 153.

[359] During the debate, Frances Willard rendered valuable aid with a petition for woman suffrage, signed by 200,000 women. This counteracted in a measure the protests against woman suffrage by President Eliot of Harvard and 200 New England clergymen.

[360] Harper, Anthony, II, pp. 622-623.

[361] Ibid., p. 612.

[362] So successful was Mrs. Colby's Washington venture that she continued to publish her Woman's Tribune there for the next 16 years

[363] Harper, Anthony, II, p. 637.

[364] Woman's Tribune, Feb. 22, 1890.

[365] The credit for achieving union after two years of patient negotiation goes to Rachel Foster Avery, secretary of the National Association, and to Lucy Stone's daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, secretary of the American Association.

[366] Harper, Anthony, II, p. 675.



VICTORIES IN THE WEST

New western states were coming into the Union, North and South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming, and in Susan's opinion it was highly important that they be admitted as woman suffrage states, for she had not forgotten that disturbing line of the Supreme Court decision in the Virginia Minor case which read, "No new State has ever been admitted to the Union which has conferred the right of suffrage on women, and this has never been considered a valid objection to her admission."[367] Susan wanted to start a new trend.

Opposition to Wyoming's woman suffrage provision was strong in Congress in spite of the fact that it had the unanimous approval of Wyoming's constitutional convention. To Susan in the gallery of the House of Representatives, listening anxiously to the debate on the admission of Wyoming, defeat was unthinkable after women had voted in the Territory of Wyoming for twenty years; but Democrats, wishing to block the admission of a preponderantly Republican state, used woman suffrage as an excuse. With a sinking heart, she heard an amendment offered, limiting suffrage in Wyoming to males. At the crucial moment, however, the tide was turned by a telegram from the Wyoming legislature, the words of which rejoiced Susan, "We will remain out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without woman suffrage."[368] After this, the House voted to admit Wyoming, 139 to 127, but the Senate delayed, renewing the attack on the woman suffrage provision. Not until July 1890, while she was speaking to a large audience in the opera house at Madison, South Dakota, did the good news of the admission of Wyoming reach her. Jubilant as she commented on this great victory, she spoke as one inspired, for she saw this as the turning point in her forty long years of uphill work.

Neither North Dakota nor South Dakota had wanted to risk their chances of statehood by incorporating woman suffrage in their constitutions.[369] Yet public opinion in both states was friendly, South Dakota directing its first legislature to submit the question to the voters. It was this that brought Susan to South Dakota in 1890. Sentiment for woman suffrage in South Dakota had previously been created almost entirely by the W.C.T.U., and this had linked woman suffrage and prohibition together. Now, the liquor interests made prohibition an issue in this woman suffrage campaign, as they rallied their forces for the repeal of prohibition which had been adopted when South Dakota was admitted to statehood. Through the propaganda of the liquor interests the 30,000 foreign-born voters became formidable opponents, and newly naturalized Russians, Scandinavians, and Poles, given the vote before American women, wore badges carrying the slogan, "Against Woman Suffrage and Susan B. Anthony."[370] Both Republicans and Democrats cultivated these foreign-born voters, turning a cold shoulder to the woman suffrage amendment and refusing to endorse it in their state conventions. Even the Farmers' Alliance and the Knights of Labor, previously friendly to woman suffrage, now joined with the Prohibitionists to form a third political party which also failed to endorse the woman suffrage amendment. On top of all this, anti-suffragists from Massachusetts, calling themselves Remonstrants, flooded South Dakota with their leaflets.

It now seemed to Susan as if every clever politician had lined up against women. During these trying days, Anna Howard Shaw joined her, and together they covered the state, hoping by the truth and sincerity of their statements to quash the propaganda against woman suffrage. Often they traveled in freight cars, as transportation was limited, or drove long distances in wagons over the sun-baked prairie. The heat was intense and the hot winds, blowing incessantly, seared everything they touched. After two years of drouth, the farmers were desperately poor, and Susan, concerned over their plight, wondered why Congress could not have appropriated the money for artesian wells to help these honest earnest people, instead of voting $40,000 for an investigating commission.[371]

Occasionally Susan and Anna spent the night in isolated sod houses where ingenious pioneer women cooked their scant meals over burning chips of buffalo bones gathered on the prairie. Glorying in the valiant spirit of these women, who in loneliness and hardship played an important but unheralded role in the conquest of this new country, Susan was generous with her praise. To them her words of commendation were like a benediction, and few of them ever forgot a visit from Susan B. Anthony.

By this time life on the frontier was an old story to her, for she had campaigned under similar conditions in Kansas and in the far West. Nonetheless, the hardships were trying. Yet this plucky woman of seventy wrote friends in the East, "Tell everybody that I am perfectly well in body and in mind, never better, and never doing more work.... O, the lack of modern comforts and conveniences! But I can put up with it better than any of the young folks.... I shall push ahead and do my level best to carry this State, come weal or woe to me personally.... I never felt so buoyed up with the love and sympathy and confidence of the good people everywhere...."[372]

Young vigorous Anna Howard Shaw proved to be a campaigner after Susan's own heart, tireless, uncomplaining, and good-tempered, an exceptional speaker, witty and quick to say the right word at the right time. It was a joy to find in Anna the same devotion to the cause that she herself felt, the same crusading fervor and reliability. During the long drives over the prairie, she talked to Anna of the work that must be done, of what it would mean to the women of the future, and she fired Anna's soul "with the flame that burned in her own."[373]

Another young western woman, Carrie Chapman Catt, also attracted Susan's attention at this time. She had volunteered for the South Dakota campaign, after attending her first national woman suffrage convention; and Susan, meeting her in Huron, South Dakota, to map out a speaking tour for her, found a tall handsome confident young woman ready to attack the work and see it through, in spite of the hardships which confronted her.

Carrie Lane, a graduate of Iowa State College, had briefly studied law and taught school before her marriage to Lee Chapman. Now, four years after his death, she had married George W. Catt of Seattle, a promising young engineer and a former fellow-student at Iowa State College. What particularly impressed Susan was that Carrie, in spite of her marriage in June, had kept her pledge to come to South Dakota. She was pleased with the way Carrie not only heroically filled every difficult engagement, but sized up the campaign for herself and planned for the future. In Carrie's report of her work there was a ruthless practicality which was rare and which instantly won Susan's approval. Here was a young woman to watch and to keep in the work.



The visible result of six months of campaigning was defeat, with the vote 22,972 for woman suffrage and 45,632 opposed, and as Susan remembered the maneuvers of the politicians, the trading of votes for the location of the state capital, and the scheming of the liquor interests, she felt she was championing a lonely cause.

* * * * *

From now on Susan hoped to turn over to the younger women much of the lecturing and organizing in the West, and she needed an anchorage, a home of her own from which she could direct the work. Her mother had willed 17 Madison Street to Mary, who had rented the first floor and was living on the second where there was a room for Susan. Now that Susan planned to spend more time at home and Mary had retired from teaching, they decided to take over the whole house, modernize and redecorate it, and enjoy it the rest of their lives. Mary as usual took charge, but Susan had definite ideas about what should be done. Mary, who had learned to be cautious and frugal, was more willing than Susan to make old furnishings do, but their friends came to the rescue, showering them with gifts.

Freshly painted and papered, with new rugs on the floor, lace curtains at the windows, easy chairs and new furniture here and there, the house was all Susan had wished for, and everywhere were familiar touches, such as her mother's spinning wheel by the fireplace in the back parlor.

She spent most of her time in her study on the second floor. Here she hung her pictures of the reformers she admired and loved; and right over her desk, looking down at her, was the comforting picture of her dearest friend, Mrs. Stanton. Hour after hour, she sat at this desk, writing letters, hurriedly dashing off one after another, writing just as the thoughts came, as if she were talking, bothering little with punctuation, using dashes instead, and vigorously underlining words and phrases for emphasis. Instructions to workers in all parts of the country, letters of friendship and sympathy, answers to the many questions which came in every mail, these were signed and sealed one after another, and slipped into the mail box when she took a brisk walk before going to bed.

She started each day with the morning newspaper, stepping out on the front veranda to pick it up, taking a deep breath of fresh air, and enjoying the green grass and the tall graceful chestnut trees in front of the house. Then sitting down in the back parlor beside the big table covered with magazines and mail, she carefully read her paper before beginning the work at her desk, for she must keep up-to-date on the news.

Rochester was important to her. It was her city, and she was on hand with her colleagues whenever there was an opportunity for women to express interest in its government, progress, or welfare. Not only did she encourage women to make use of their newly won right to vote in school elections, she also urged municipal suffrage for women. Appealing to the governor to appoint a woman to fill a vacancy on the board of trustees of Rochester's State Industrial School, she herself received the appointment which the Democrat and Chronicle called "a fitting recognition of one of the ablest and best women in the commonwealth."[374]

One of her first acts as trustee was a practical one for the girls. "Spent entire day at State Industrial School," she wrote in her diary, "getting the laundry girls—who had always washed for the entire institution by hand and ironed that old way—transferred to the boys' laundry room to use its machinery—am sure it will work well—girls 12 of them delighted."[375] She also taught the boys to patch and darn, and later asked for coeducation.



* * * * *

Susan looked forward to welcoming Mrs. Stanton at 17 Madison Street when she returned to this country in 1891, particularly because she had sold her home in Tenafly after her husband's death, in 1887, and now had no home to go to. Susan hoped that as they again worked together she could persuade Mrs. Stanton to concentrate on more serious writing than the chatty reminiscences she had just published and which Susan felt were "not the greatest" of herself.[376] When she heard that Mrs. Stanton seriously contemplated living in New York with two of her children, she begged her to reconsider, writing, "This is the first time since 1850 that I have anchored myself to any particular spot, and in doing it my constant thought was that you would come here ... and stay for as long, at least, as we must be together to put your writings into systematic shape to go down to posterity. I have no writings to go down, so my ambition is not for myself, but is for the one by the side of whom I have wrought these forty years, and to get whose speeches before audiences ... has been the delight of my life."[377]

Mrs. Stanton decided to make her home in New York, but first she visited Susan who found her as stimulating as ever and brimful of ideas. They plotted and planned as of old and managed to stir up public opinion on the question of admitting women to the University of Rochester. With women enrolled at the University of Michigan since 1870, and at Cornell since 1872, and with Columbia University yielding at last to women's entreaties by establishing Barnard College in 1889, they felt it their duty to awaken Rochester, and although their agitation produced no immediate results, it did start other women thinking and made news for the press. The cartoons on the subject delighted them both.[378]

Susan soon realized that the writing she had planned for Mrs. Stanton would never be done, for Mrs. Stanton had already made up her mind to write for magazines and newspapers on new and controversial subjects, feeling this was the best contribution she could make to the cause. Susan also found it increasingly difficult to hold her old friend to the straight path of woman suffrage, Mrs. Stanton insisting that too much concentration on this one subject was narrowing and left women unprepared for the intelligent use of the ballot. Women, Mrs. Stanton argued, needed to be stirred up to think, and this they would not do as long as their minds were dominated by the church, which, she believed, had for generations hampered their development by emphasizing their inferiority and subordination. She was determined to analyze and rebel, and Susan could in no way divert her. Completely absorbed in trying to prove that the Bible, accurately translated and interpreted, did not teach the inferiority or the subordination of women, she was writing a book which she called The Woman's Bible, chapters of which were already appearing in the Woman's Tribune.

Susan was not unsympathetic to Mrs. Stanton's ideas, but she opposed this excursion into religious controversy because she was sure it would stir up futile wrangles among the suffragists and keep Mrs. Stanton from giving her best to the cause. Her lack of interest then and her frank disapproval as The Woman's Bible progressed were a great disappointment to Mrs. Stanton, and these two old friends began to grow somewhat apart as they took different roads to reach their goal, the one intent on freeing women's minds, the other determined to establish their citizenship. Yet their friendship endured.



In 1892 Susan reluctantly consented to Mrs. Stanton's retirement as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Mrs. Stanton's request that she be followed by Susan won unanimous approval, and Anna Howard Shaw was moved up to second place, vice-president at large. For forty years, Susan had watched Mrs. Stanton preside with a poise, warmth, and skill which few could equal. She knew she would miss her dynamic reassuring presence at the conventions. Yet she was obliged to admit to herself that it was more than fitting that she should at last head the ever-growing organization which she had built up. This was the last convention which Mrs. Stanton attended, and it was the last for Lucy Stone who died the next year. Susan appreciated the eager young women who now took their places, but she did not yet feel completely at home with them. "Only think," she wrote an old-time colleague, "I shall not have a white-haired woman on the platform with me, and I shall be alone there of all the pioneer workers. Always with the 'old guard' I had perfect confidence that the wise and right thing would be said. What a platform ours then was of self-reliant strong women! I felt sure of you all.... I can not feel quite certain that our younger sisters will be equal to the emergency, yet they are each and all valiant, earnest, and talented, and will soon be left to manage the ship without even me."[379]

In 1892, the year of the presidential election, Susan hopefully attended the national political conventions. Again the Republicans made their proverbial excuses, explaining that they not only faced a formidable opponent in Grover Cleveland but also the threat of a new People's party. The familiar ring of their alibis, which they had repeated since Reconstruction days, made Susan wonder when and if ever the Republicans would feel able to bear the strain of woman suffrage. Their platform remembered the poor, the foreign-born, and male Negroes, but it still ignored women. Yet hope for the future stirred in her heart as she saw at the convention two women serving as delegates from Wyoming. Here was the entering wedge.

The Democrats as usual were silent on woman suffrage, but undismayed by them or by the Prohibitionists, who this year failed to endorse votes for women, Susan moved on to Omaha with Anna Howard Shaw for the first national convention of the new People's party. Here she met representatives of the Farmers' Alliance and the Knights of Labor, both friendly to woman suffrage, and men from other groups, critical of the two major political parties for their failure to solve the pressing economic problems confronting the nation. Susan was sympathetic with many of the aims of the People's party, having seen with her own eyes the plight of debt-burdened, hard-working farmers and having crusaded in her own paper, The Revolution, for the rights of labor and for the control of industrial monopoly. However, she still viewed minor, reform parties with a highly critical eye. The People's party gave her no woman suffrage plank and she found them "quite as oblivious to the underlying principle of justice to women as either of the old parties...."[380]

With the election of Grover Cleveland, whose opposition to woman suffrage was well known, and with the Democrats in the saddle for another four years, Congressional action on the woman suffrage amendment was blocked. Nevertheless, the cause moved ahead in the states; Colorado was to vote on the question in 1893 and Kansas in 1894, and New York was revising its constitution. In addition, the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 offered endless opportunities to bring the subject before the people.

* * * * *

As soon as plans for the World's Fair were under way, Susan began to work indirectly through prominent women in Washington and Chicago for the appointment of women to the board of management. "Lady Managers" were appointed, 115 strong, who proved to be very much alive under the leadership of Mrs. Bertha Honore Palmer. Susan found Mrs. Palmer almost as determined as she to secure equality of rights for women at the World's Fair, and nothing that she herself might have planned could have been more effective than the series of world congresses in which both men and women took part, or than the World's Congress of Representative Women.



Two of Susan's "girls," as she liked to call them, Rachel Foster Avery[381] and May Wright Sewall, were appointed by Mrs. Palmer to take charge of the World's Congress of Representative Women, and they arranged a meeting of the International Council of Women as a part of this Congress.

Convening soon after the opening of the World's Fair, the Congress of Representative Women drew record crowds at its eighty-one sessions. Twenty-seven countries and 126 organizations were represented. Here Susan, to her joy, heard Negroes, American Indians, and Mormons tell of their progress and their problems, and saw them treated with as much respect as American millionaires, English nobility, or the most virtuous, conservative housewife. Watching these women assemble, talking with them, and listening to their well-delivered speeches, she felt richly rewarded for the lonely work she had undertaken forty years before, when scarcely a woman could be coaxed to a meeting or be persuaded to express her opinions in public. Although only one session of the congress was devoted to the civil and political rights of women, it was gratifying to her that women's need of the ballot was spontaneously brought up in meeting after meeting, showing that women, whatever their cause or whatever their organization, were recognizing that only by means of the vote could their reforms be achieved.

Speaking on the subject to which she had dedicated her life, Susan gave credit to the pioneering suffragists for the change which had taken place in public opinion regarding the position of women. She urged women's organizations to give suffrage their wholehearted support and pointed out the great power of some of the newer organizations, such as the W.C.T.U. with its membership of half a million and the young General Federation of Women's Clubs of 40,000 members. Confessing that her own National American Woman Suffrage Association in comparison was poor in numbers and limited in funds, she added, "I would philosophize on the reason why. It is because women have been taught always to work for something else than their own personal freedom; and the hardest thing in the world is to organize women for the one purpose of securing their political liberty and political equality."[382] Even so, the vital woman's rights organizations, she concluded, drew the whole world to them in spirit if not in person.

Her very presence among them without her words, in fact her very presence on the fair grounds, advertised her cause, for in the mind of the public she personified woman suffrage. This tall dignified woman with smooth gray hair, abundant in energy and spontaneous friendliness, was the center of attraction at the World's Congress of Representative Women. In her new black dress of Chinese silk, brightened with blue, and her small black bonnet, trimmed with lace and blue forget-me-nots, she was the perfect picture of everyone's grandmother, and the people took her to their hearts.[383] She was the one woman all wanted to see. Curious crowds jammed the hall and corridors when she was scheduled to speak, and often a policeman had to clear the way for her. At whatever meeting she appeared, the audience at once burst into applause and started calling for her, interrupting the speakers, and were not satisfied until she had mounted the platform so that all could see her and she had said a few words. Then they cheered her. After years of ridicule and unpopularity, she hardly knew what to make of all this, but she accepted it with happiness as a tribute to her beloved cause. Many who had been critical and wary of her newfangled notions began to reverse their opinions after they saw her and heard her words of good common sense. Even those who still opposed woman suffrage left the World's Fair with a new respect for Susan B. Anthony.

She stayed on in Chicago for much of the summer and fall, for she was in demand as a speaker at several of the world congresses and had five speeches to read for Mrs. Stanton, who felt unable to brave the heat and the crowds. She felt at home in this bustling, rapidly growing city which for so many years had been the halfway station on her lecture and campaign trips through the West. Here she had always found a warm welcome, first from her cousins, the Dickinsons, then from the ever-widening circle of friends she won for her cause. Now she was literally swamped with hospitality.[384] She rejoiced that such great numbers of everyday people were able to enjoy the beauty of the fair grounds and the many interesting exhibits, and when a group of clergymen urged Sunday closing, she took issue with them, declaring that Sunday was the only day on which many were free to attend. Asked by a disapproving clergyman if she would like to have a son of hers attend Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show on Sunday, she promptly and bluntly replied, "Of course I would, and I think he would learn far more there than from the sermons in some churches!"[385]

Hearing of this, Buffalo Bill offered her a box at his popular Wild West Show, and she appeared the next day with twelve of her "girls." Dashing into the arena on his spirited horse while the band played and the spotlight flashed on him, Buffalo Bill rode directly up to Susan's box, reined his horse, and swept off his big western hat to salute her. Quick to respond, she rose and bowed, and beaming with pleasure, waved her handkerchief at him while the immense audience applauded and cheered.

She returned home early in November 1893, with happy memories of the World's Fair and to good news from Colorado. "Telegram ... from Denver—said woman suffrage carried by 5000 majority," she recorded in her diary.[386] This laconic comment in no way expressed the joy in her heart.

Her diaries, written hurriedly in small fine script, year after year, in black-covered notebooks about three inches by six, were a brief terse record of her work and her travels. Only occasionally a line of philosophizing shone out from the mass of routine detail, or an illuminating comment on a friend or a difficult situation, but she never failed to record a family anniversary, a birthday, or a death.

The Colorado victory, referred to so casually in her diary, was actually of great importance to her and her cause, for it carried forward the trend initiated by the admission of Wyoming as a woman suffrage state in 1890. Colorado also proved to her that her "girls" could take over her work. So busy had she been winning good will for the cause at the World's Fair that she had left Colorado in the capable hands of the women of the state and of young efficient Carrie Chapman Catt, to whom she now turned over the supervision of all state campaigns.

Encouragement also came from another part of the world, from New Zealand, where the vote was extended to women. This confirmed her growing conviction that equal citizenship was best understood on the frontier and that in her own country victory would come from the West.

FOOTNOTES:

[367] Minor vs. Happersett, History of Woman Suffrage, II, pp. 741-742. North and South Dakota, Washington and Montana were admitted in 1889, Wyoming and Idaho in 1890.

[368] Ibid., IV, pp. 999-1000.

[369] North Dakota's constitution provided that the legislature might in the future enfranchise women.

[370] History of Woman Suffrage, IV, p. 556.

[371] Harper, Anthony, II, p. 690.

[372] Ibid., p. 688.

[373] Anna Howard Shaw, The Story of a Pioneer (New York, 1915), p. 202.

[374] Harper, Anthony, II, p. 731.

[375] Ms., Diary, Feb. 28, April 18, 1893.

[376] Published first in the Woman's Tribune, then as a book in 1898 under the title, Eighty Years and More.

[377] Harper, Anthony, II, p. 712.

[378] During this visit the young sculptor, Adelaide Johnson, modeled busts of Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton which later were chiseled in marble and were exhibited with the bust of Lucretia Mott at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893. They are now in the Capitol in Washington.

[379] To Clarina Nichols. Harper, Anthony, II, p. 544. Miss Anthony wrote in her diary, Oct. 18, 1893, "Lucy Stone died this evening at her home—Dorchester, Mass. aged 75—I can but wonder if the spirit now sees things as it did 25 years ago!" The wound inflicted by Lucy's misunderstanding of her motives had never healed.

[380] Ibid., p. 727.

[381] Rachel Foster was married in 1888 to Cyrus Miller Avery.

[382] May Wright Sewall, Editor, The World's Congress of Representative Women (Chicago, 1894), p. 464.

[383] Statement by Lucy E. Anthony, Una R. Winter Collection.

[384] Miss Anthony's diary, 1893, mentions visiting "dear Mrs. Coonley" (Lydia Avery Coonley) in her beautiful, friendly home. May Wright Sewall, and devoted Emily Gross. Her sister Mary, Daniel, Merritt, and their families joined her at the Fair for a few weeks.

[385] Shaw, The Story of a Pioneer, pp. 205-207.

[386] Ms., Diary, Nov. 8, 1893.



LIQUOR INTERESTS ALERT FOREIGN-BORN VOTERS AGAINST WOMAN SUFFRAGE

"I am in the midst of as severe a treadmill as I ever experienced, traveling from fifty to one hundred miles every day and speaking five or six nights a week,"[387] Susan wrote a friend in 1894, during the campaign to wrest woman suffrage from the New York constitutional convention. She was now seventy-four years old. Political machines and financial interests were deeply intrenched in New York, and although two governors had recommended that women be represented in the constitutional convention and a bill had been passed making women eligible as delegates, neither Republicans nor Democrats had the slightest intention of allowing women to slip into men's stronghold. It was obvious to Susan that without representation at the convention and without power to enforce their demands, women's only hope was an intensive educational campaign which she now directed with vigor. Whenever she could, she conferred with Mrs. Stanton, whose judgment she valued, and there was zest in working together as they had during the previous constitutional convention in 1867.

The women of New York were aroused as never before. Young able speakers went through the state, piling up signatures on their petitions, but they had few influential friends among the delegates. Anti-suffragists were active, encouraged by Bishop Doane of the Protestant Episcopal church and Mrs. Lyman Abbott, whose name carried the prestige and influence of her husband's popular magazine, The Outlook.

With the election of Joseph Choate of New York as president of the convention, Susan knew that woman suffrage was doomed, for Choate had political aspirations and was not likely to let his sympathies for an unpopular cause jeopardize his chances of becoming governor. While he gave women every opportunity to be heard, at the same time he arranged for the defeat of woman suffrage by appointing men to consider the subject who were definitely opposed, and they submitted an adverse report. Here was a situation similar to that in 1867, when her one-time friend, Horace Greeley, had deserted women for political expediency.

"I am used to defeat every time and know how to pick up and push on for another attack," she wrote as she now turned her attention to Kansas.[388]

* * * * *

The Republicans in Kansas had sponsored school and municipal suffrage for women and had passed a woman suffrage amendment to be referred to the people in 1894. Yet they proved to be as great a disappointment to Susan as they were in 1867, when as a last resort she had been obliged to campaign with the Democrats and George Francis Train.

The population of Kansas had changed with the years, as immigrants from Europe had come into the state, and Susan was again confronted with the powerful opposition of foreign-born voters for whose support the political parties bargained. The liquor interests were also active, and the Republicans, who had brought prohibition to Kansas, now left the question discreetly alone, even making a deal with German Democrats for their votes by promising to ignore in their platform both prohibition and woman suffrage. Prohibition and woman suffrage were synonymous in the minds of voters, because women had generally voted for enforcement in municipal elections, and no matter how hard Susan tried, she found it impossible to have woman suffrage considered on its own merits.

Watching the straws in the wind, she saw Republican supremacy seriously threatened by the new Populist party. Convinced that she could no longer count on help from Kansas Republicans, she turned to the Populist party, ignoring the pleas of Republican women who warned her she would hurt the cause by association with such a radical group. The Populists were generally regarded as the party of social unrest, of a regulated economy, and unsound money, and they were looked upon with suspicion. To many they represented a threat to the American free-enterprise system, and they were blamed for the labor troubles which had flared up in the bloody Homestead strike in the steel mills of Pennsylvania and in the Pullman strike, defying the powerful railroads. Susan was never afraid to side with the underdog, and she could well understand why western farmers, in the hope of relief, were eagerly flocking into the Populist party when their corn sold for ten cents a bushel and the products they bought were high-priced and their mortgage interest was never lower than 10 per cent.

To the Populist convention, she declared, "I have labored for women's enfranchisement for forty years and I have always said that for the party that endorsed it, whether Republican, Democratic, or Populist, I would wave my handkerchief."[389]

"We want more than the waving of your handkerchief, Miss Anthony," interrupted a delegate, who then asked her, "If the People's party put a woman suffrage plank in its platform, will you go before the voters of this state and tell them that because the People's party has espoused the cause of woman suffrage, it deserves the vote of every one who is a supporter of that cause?"

"I most certainly will," she replied, adding as the audience cheered her wildly, "for I would surely choose to ask votes for the party which stood for the principle of justice to women, though wrong on financial theories, rather than for the party which was sound on questions of money and tariff, and silent on the pending amendment to secure political equality to half of the people."

"I most certainly will" was the phrase which was remembered and was flashed through the country, and as a result, the Republican press and Susan's Republican friends harshly criticized her for taking her stand with the radicals.

Like all political parties, the Populists found it hard to comprehend justice for women, but after a four-hour debate, the convention endorsed the woman suffrage amendment, absolving, however, members who refused to support it. The rank and file rejoiced as if each and every one of them were heart and soul for the cause. They cheered, they waved their canes, they threw their hats high in the air, and then swarmed around Susan and Anna Shaw to shake their hands and welcome them into the Populist party.

With woman suffrage at last a political issue in Kansas, Susan left the field to her "girls." Her homecoming brought reporters to 17 Madison Street for the details about her alignment with the Populist party. "I didn't go over to the Populists," she told them. "I have been like a drowning man for a long time, waiting for someone to throw a plank in my direction. I didn't step on the whole platform, but just on the woman suffrage plank.... Here is a party in power which is likely to remain in power, and if it will give its endorsement to our movement, we want it."[390]

This explanation, however, did not satisfy her critics, and as the Republican press circulated false stories about her enthusiasm for the Populist party, letters of protest poured in, among them one from Henry Blackwell. To him, she replied, "I shall not praise the Republicans of Kansas, or wish or work for their success, when I know by their own confessions to me that the rights of the women of their state have been traded by them in cold blood for the votes of the lager beer foreigners and whisky Democrats.... I never, in my whole forty years work, so utterly repudiated any set of politicians as I do those Republicans of Kansas.... I never was surer of my position that no self-respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party that ignores her political rights."[391]

The contest in Kansas was close and bitter. Kansas women carried on an able campaign with the help of Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt. When Susan returned to the state in October, she not only found that the Democrats had entered the fight with an anti-suffrage plank but the Populists had noticeably lost ground since the Pullman strike riots, the court injunction against the strikers, and the arrest of Eugene V. Debs. Again this prairie state, from which she had hoped so much, refused to extend suffrage to women. Impulsively she recommended a little "Patrick Henryism" to the women of Kansas, suggesting that they fold their hands and refuse to help men run the churches, the charities, and the reform movements.[392]

* * * * *

California was the next state to demand Susan's attention. A Republican legislature had submitted a woman suffrage amendment to be voted on by the people in 1896, and the women of California asked for her help. She toured the state in the spring of 1895 with Anna Howard Shaw, and everywhere she won friends. The continuous travel and speaking, however, taxed her far more than she realized, and soon after her return to the East, she collapsed. As this news flashed over the wires, letters poured in from her friends, begging her to spare herself. Two of these letters were especially precious. One in bold vigorous script was from her good comrade, Parker Pillsbury, now eighty-six, who had been an unfailing help during the most difficult years of her career and whom she probably trusted more completely than any other man. The other from her dearest friend, Elizabeth Stanton, read, "I never realized how desolate the world would be to me without you until I heard of your sudden illness. Let me urge you with all the strength I have, and all the love I bear you, to stay at home and rest and save your precious self."[393]

She now realized that rest was imperative for a time, but it troubled her that people thought of her as old and ill, and she wrote Clara Colby never to mention anyone's illness in her Woman's Tribune, adding, "It is so dreadful to get public thought centered on one as ill—as I have had it the last two months."[394]

She had no intention of retiring from the field. She knew her own strength and that her life must be one of action. "I am able to endure the strain of daily traveling and lecturing at over three-score and ten," she observed, "mainly because I have always worked and loved work.... As machinery in motion lasts longer than when lying idle, so a body and soul in active exercise escapes the corroding rust of physical and mental laziness, which prematurely cuts off the life of so many women."[395]

Yet she did slow up a little, refusing an offer from the Slayton Lecture Bureau for a series of lectures at $100 a night, and she engaged a capable secretary, Emma B. Sweet, to help her with her tremendous correspondence. "Dear Rachel" had given her a typewriter, and now instead of dashing off letters at her desk late at night, she learned to dictate them to Mrs. Sweet at regular hours. As requests came in from newspapers and magazines for her comments on a wide variety of subjects, she answered those that made possible a word on the advancement of women.

Bicycling had come into vogue and women as well as men were taking it up, some women even riding their bicycles in short skirts or bloomers. What did she think of this? "If women ride the bicycle or climb mountains," she replied, "they should don a costume which will permit them the use of their legs." Of bicycling she said, "I think it has done more to emancipate woman than any one thing in the world. I rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives her a feeling of self-reliance and independence the moment she takes her seat; and away she goes, the picture of untrammeled womanhood."[396]



* * * * *

Susan returned to California in February 1896. Through the generosity and interest of two young Rochester friends, her Unitarian minister, William C. Gannett, and his wife, Mary Gannett, she was able to take her secretary with her. Making her home in San Francisco with her devoted friend, Ellen Sargent, she at once began to plan speaking tours for herself and her "girls," many of whom, including her niece Lucy, had come West to help her. She appealed successfully to Frances Willard to transfer the national W.C.T.U. convention to another state, for she was determined to keep the issue of prohibition out of the California campaign.

With the press more than friendly and several San Francisco dailies running woman suffrage departments, she realized the importance of keeping newspapers fed with readable factual material and enlisted the aid of a young journalist, Ida Husted Harper, whom she had met in 1878 while lecturing in Terre Haute, Indiana, and who was in California that winter. When the San Francisco Examiner, William Randolph Hearst's powerful Democratic paper, offered Susan a column on the editorial page if she would write it and sign it, she dictated her thoughts to Mrs. Harper, who smoothed them out for the column, helping her as Mrs. Stanton had in the past, for writing was still a great hardship. Grateful to Mrs. Harper, she sang her praises: "The moment I give the idea—the point—she formulates it into a good sentence—while I should have to haggle over it half an hour."[397]

California women had won suffrage planks from Republicans, Populists, and Prohibitionists, and the prospects looked bright. Rich women came to their aid, Mrs. Leland Stanford, with her railroad fortune, furnishing passes for all the speakers and organizers, and Mrs. Phoebe Hearst contributing $1,000 to their campaign. What warmed Susan's heart, however, was the spirit of the rank and file, the seamstresses and washerwomen, paying their two-dollar pledges in twenty-five-cent installments, the poorly clad women bringing in fifty cents or a dollar which they had saved by going without tea, and the women who had worked all day at their jobs, stopping at headquarters for a package of circulars to fold and address at night. The working women of California made it plain that they wanted to vote.

Susan insisted upon carrying out what she called her "wild goose chase" over the state.[398] People crowded to hear her at farmers' picnics in the mountains, in schoolhouses in small towns, and in poolrooms where chalked up on the blackboard she often found "Welcome Susan B. Anthony." She was at home everywhere and ready for anything. The men liked her short matter-of-fact speeches and her flashes of wit. Her hopes were high that the friendly people she met would not fail to vote justice to women.

She grew apprehensive, however, when the newspapers, pressured by their advertisers, one by one began to ignore woman suffrage. The Liquor Dealers' League had been sending letters to hotel owners, grocers, and druggists, as well as to saloons, warning that votes for women would mean prohibition and would threaten their livelihood. Word was spread that if women voted not one glass of beer would be sold in San Francisco. As in Kansas, liquor interests had persuaded naturalized Irish, Germans, and Swedes to oppose woman suffrage, so now in California, they appealed to the Chinese.

On election day Susan was in San Francisco with Anna Howard Shaw and Ellen Sargent, watching and anxiously waiting for the returns. Telling the story of those last tense hours when women's fate hung in the balance, Anna Howard Shaw reported, "I shall always remember the picture of Miss Anthony and the wife of Senator Sargent wandering around the polls arm in arm at eleven o'clock at night, their tired faces taking on lines of deeper depression with every minute, for the count was against us.... When the final counts came in, we found that we had won the state from the north down to Oakland and from the south up to San Francisco; but there was not sufficient majority to overcome the adverse votes of San Francisco and Oakland. In San Francisco the saloon element and the most aristocratic section ... made an equal showing against us.... Every Chinese vote was against us."[399]

In spite of defeat in California, Susan had the joy of marking up two more states for woman suffrage in 1896. Utah was granted statehood with a woman suffrage provision in its constitution and Idaho's favorable vote, though contested in the courts, was upheld by the State Supreme Court. Now women in Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah were voters.

FOOTNOTES:

[387] Harper, Anthony, II, p. 763.

[388] To Elizabeth Smith Miller, July 25, 1894, Elizabeth Smith Miller Papers, New York Public Library.

[389] Harper, Anthony, II, p. 788.

[390] Ibid., p. 791.

[391] Ibid., p. 794.

[392] To Clara Colby, July 22, 1895, Anthony Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library.

[393] Harper, Anthony, II, p. 842.

[394] N.d., Anthony Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library.

[395] Harper, Anthony, II, p. 843.

[396] Ibid., pp. 844, 859.

[397] Ms., Diary, July 10, 1896.

[398] Sept. 8, 1896, Anthony Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library.

[399] Shaw, The Story of a Pioneer, pp. 274-275.



AUNT SUSAN AND HER GIRLS

The future of the National American Woman Suffrage Association was much on Susan's mind. This organization which she had conceived and nursed through its struggling infancy had grown in numbers and prestige, and she understood, as no one else could, the importance of leaving it in the right hands so that it could function successfully without her.

The young women now in the work, many of them just out of college, were intelligent, efficient, and confident, and yet as she compared them with the vivid consecrated women active in the early days of the movement, she observed in her diary, "[Clarina] Nichols—Paulina Davis—Lucy Stone—Frances D. Gage—Lucretia Mott & E. C. Stanton—each without peer among any of our college graduates—young women of today."[400]

Even so, she appreciated the "young women of today" whom she affectionately called her girls or her adopted nieces, but she still held the reins tightly, although they often champed at the bit. Recognizing, however, that she must choose between personal power and progress for her cause, she characteristically chose progress. Quick to appreciate ability and zeal when she saw it, she seldom failed to make use of it. When Carrie Chapman Catt presented a detailed plan for a thorough overhauling of the mechanics of the organization, she gave her approval, remarking drily, "There never yet was a young woman who did not feel that if she had had the management of the work from the beginning, the cause would have been carried long ago. I felt just that way when I was young."[401]

On four of her adopted nieces, Rachel Foster Avery, Anna Howard Shaw, Harriet Taylor Upton, and Carrie Chapman Catt, Susan felt that the greater part of her work would fall and be "worthily done."[402] Yet she feared that in their enthusiasm for efficient organization they might lose the higher concepts of freedom and justice which had been the driving force behind her work. Not having learned the lessons of leadership when the cause was unpopular, they lacked the discipline of adversity, which bred in the consecrated reformer the wisdom, tolerance, and vision so necessary for the success of her task. What they did understand far better than the highly individualistic pioneers was the value of teamwork, which grew in importance as the National American Association expanded far beyond the ability of one person to cope with it.



Probably first in her affections was Rachel Foster Avery, who had been like a daughter to her since their trip to Europe together in 1883. The confidence she felt in their friendship was always a comfort. Rachel's intelligent approach to problems made her an asset at every meeting, and Susan relied much on her judgment.

In Anna Howard Shaw, ten years older than Rachel, Susan had found the hardy campaigner and orator for whom she had longed. Anna expressed a warmth and understanding that most of the younger women lacked, and best of all she loved the cause as Susan herself loved it. Because of her close friendship with Susan's niece Lucy, she was regarded as one of the family, and whenever possible between lectures she stopped over in Rochester for a good talk with "Aunt Susan."

Harriet Taylor Upton of Warren, Ohio, had enlisted in the ranks in the 1880s when her father was a member of Congress. Because of her influence in Washington and Ohio, Harriet was invaluable, and Susan speedily brought her into the official circle of the National American Association as treasurer, even thinking of her as a possible president.[403] Harriet's jovial irrepressible personality readily won friends, and Susan found her a refreshing and comfortable companion, able to see a bit of humor in almost every situation. When differences of opinion at meetings threatened to get out of hand, Harriet could always be relied on to break the tension with a few witty remarks.



Carrie Chapman Catt gave every indication of developing into an outstanding executive. Not another one of Susan's "girls" could so quickly or so intelligently size up a situation as Carrie, nor could they so effectively put into action well-thought-out plans. Not as popular a speaker as the more emotional Anna Howard Shaw, she held her audiences by her appeal to their intelligence. Tall, handsome, and well dressed, she never failed to leave a favorable impression. Only her name irked Susan, and as Susan wrote Clara Colby, "If Catt it must be then I insist, she should keep her own father's name—Lane—and not her first husband's name—Chapman,"[404] but the three Cs intrigued Carrie and she continued to be known as Carrie Chapman Catt. Now living in the East because her husband's expanding business had brought him to New York, she was easily accessible, and from her beautiful new home at Bensonhurst, a suburb of Brooklyn, she carried on the rapidly growing work of the organization committee until a New York City office became imperative. In Carrie, Susan recognized qualities demanded of a leader at this stage of the campaign when suffragists must learn to be as keen as politicians and as well organized.

* * * * *

"Spring is not heralded in Washington by the arrival of the robin," commented a Washington newspaper, "but by the appearance of Miss Anthony's red shawl." Susan was still the dominating figure at the annual woman suffrage conventions. Everyone looked eagerly for the tall lithe gray-haired woman with a red shawl on her arm or around her shoulders. Once when Susan appeared on the platform with a new white crepe shawl, the reporters immediately registered their displeasure by putting down their pencils. This did not escape her, and always on good terms with the newsmen and informal with her audiences, she called out, "Boys, what is the matter?"[405]

"Where is the red shawl?" one of them asked. "No red shawl, no report."

Enjoying this little by-play, she sent her niece Lucy back to the hotel for the red shawl, and when Lucy brought it up to the platform and put it about her shoulders, the audience burst into applause, for the red shawl, like Susan herself, had become the well-loved symbol of woman suffrage.

Susan was convinced that the annual national convention should always be held in Washington, where Congress could see and feel the growing strength and influence of the movement. Her "girls," on the other hand, wanted to take their conventions to different parts of the country to widen their influence. Not as certain as Susan that work for a federal amendment must come first, many of them contended that a few more states won for woman suffrage would best help the cause at this time. The southern women, now active, were firm believers in states' rights and supported state work.[406] Susan's experience had taught her the impracticability of direct appeal to the voters in the states, now that foreign-born men in increasing numbers were arrayed against votes for women. In spite of her arguments and her pleas, the National American Association voted in 1894 to hold conventions in different parts of the country in alternate years. Disappointed, but trying her best graciously to follow the will of the majority, she traveled to Atlanta and to Des Moines for the conventions of 1895 and 1897.

Nor did the younger women welcome the messages which Mrs. Stanton, at Susan's insistence, sent to every convention. Susan herself often wished her good friend would stick more closely to woman suffrage instead of introducing extraneous subjects, such as "Educated Suffrage," "The Matriarchate," or "Women and the Church," but nevertheless she proudly read her papers to successive conventions. Insisting that the conventions were too academic, Mrs. Stanton urged Susan to inject more vitality into them by broadening their platform. Susan, however, had come to the conclusion that concentration on woman suffrage was imperative in order to unite all women under one banner and build up numbers which Congressmen were bound to respect. With this her "girls" agreed 100 per cent. While all of them were convinced suffragists, they were divided on other issues, and few of them were wholehearted feminists, as were Susan and Mrs. Stanton.

* * * * *

With the publication of The Woman's Bible in 1895, Mrs. Stanton almost upset the applecart, stirring up heated controversy in the National American Woman Suffrage Association. The Woman's Bible was a keen and sometimes biting commentary on passages in the Bible relating to women. It questioned the traditional interpretation which for centuries has fastened the stigma of inferiority upon women, and pointed out that the female as well as the male was created in the image of God. To those who regarded every word of the Bible as inspired by God, The Woman's Bible was heresy, and both the clergy and the press stirred up a storm of protest against it. Suffragists were condemned for compiling a new Bible and were obliged to explain again and again that The Woman's Bible expressed Mrs. Stanton's personal views and not those of the movement.

Susan regarded The Woman's Bible as a futile, questionable digression from the straight path of woman suffrage. To Clara Colby, who praised it in her Woman's Tribune, she wrote, "Of all her great speeches, I am always proud—but of her Bible commentaries, I am not proud—either of their spirit or letter.... I could cry a heap—every time I read or think—if it would undo them—or do anybody or myself or the cause or Mrs. Stanton any good—they are so entirely unlike her former self—so flippant and superficial. But she thinks I have gone over to the enemy—so counts my judgment worth nothing more than that of any other narrow-souled body.... But I shall love and honor her to the end—whether her Bible please me or not. So I hope she will do for me."[407]

She was, however, wholly unprepared for the rebellion staged by her "girls" at the Washington convention of 1896, when, led by Rachel Foster Avery, they repudiated The Woman's Bible and proposed a resolution declaring that their organization had no connection with it. This was clear proof to Susan that her "girls" lacked tolerance and wisdom. Listening to the debate, she was heartsick. Anna Howard Shaw and Mrs. Catt as well as Alice Stone Blackwell spoke for the resolution. Only a few raised their voices against it, among them her sister Mary, Clara Colby, Mrs. Blake, and a young woman new to the ranks, Charlotte Perkins Stetson.

Susan was presiding, and leaving the chair to express her opinions, she firmly declared, "To pass such a resolution is to set back the hands on the dial of reform.... We have all sorts of people in the Association and ... a Christian has no more right on our platform than an atheist. When this platform is too narrow for all to stand on, I shall not be on it.... Who is to set up a line? Neither you nor I can tell but Mrs. Stanton will come out triumphant and that this will be the great thing done in woman's cause. Lucretia Mott at first thought Mrs. Stanton had injured the cause of woman's rights by insisting on the demand for woman suffrage, but she had sense enough not to pass a resolution about it....[408]

"Are you going to cater to the whims and prejudices of people?" she asked them. "We draw out from other people our own thought. If, when you go out to organize, you go with a broad spirit, you will create and call out breadth and toleration. You had better organize one woman on a broad platform than 10,000 on a narrow platform of intolerance and bigotry."

Her voice tense with emotion, she concluded, "This resolution adopted will be a vote of censure upon a woman who is without a peer in intellectual and statesmanlike ability; one who has stood for half a century the acknowledged leader of progressive thought and demand in regard to all matters pertaining to the absolute freedom of women."[409]

When the resolution was adopted 53 to 40, she was so disappointed in her "girls" and so hurt by their defiance that she was tempted to resign. Hurrying to New York after the convention to talk with Mrs. Stanton, she found her highly indignant and insistent that they both resign from the ungrateful organization which had repudiated the women to whom it owed its existence. The longer Susan considered taking this step, the less she felt able to make the break. She severely reprimanded Mrs. Catt, Rachel, Harriet Upton, and Anna, telling them they were setting up an inquisition.

Finally she wrote Mrs. Stanton, "No, my dear, instead of my resigning and leaving those half-fledged chickens without any mother, I think it my duty and the duty of yourself and all the liberals to be at the next convention and try to reverse this miserable narrow action."[410]

To a reporter who wanted her views on The Woman's Bible, she made it plain that she had no part in writing the book, but added, "I think women have just as good a right to interpret and twist the Bible to their own advantage as men have always twisted it and turned it to theirs. It was written by men, and therefore its reference to women reflects the light in which they were regarded in those days. In the same way the history of our Revolutionary War was written, in which very little is said of the noble deeds of women, though we know how they stood by and helped the great work; it is so with history all through."[411]

* * * * *

For some years, Susan's girls had been urging her to write her reminiscences, spurred on by the fact that Mrs. Stanton, Mary Livermore, and Julia Ward Howe were writing theirs. There were also other good reasons for putting her to work at this task. Writing would keep her safely at home and away from the strenuous work in the field which they feared was sapping her strength. It would keep her well occupied so that they could develop the work and the conventions in their own way.

Susan put off this task from month to month and from year to year, torn between her desire to leave a true record of her work and her longing to be always in the thick of the suffrage fight. Finally she began looking about for a collaborator, convinced that she herself could never write an interesting line. Ida Husted Harper, with her newspaper experience and her interest in the cause, seemed the logical choice, and in the spring of 1897, she came to 17 Madison Street to work on the biography.[412]

The attic had been remodeled for workrooms and here Susan now spent her days with Mrs. Harper, trying to reconstruct the past. She had definite ideas about how the book should be written, holding up as a model the biography of William Lloyd Garrison recently written by his children. Mrs. Harper also had high standards, and influenced by the formalities of the day, edited Susan's vivid brusque letters—hurriedly written and punctuated with dashes—so that they conformed with her own easy but more formal style. To this Susan readily consented, for she always depreciated her own writing ability. On one point, however, she was adamant, that her story be told without dwelling upon the disagreements among the old workers.

The household was geared to the "bog," as they called the biography. Mary, supervising as usual, watched over their meals and the housework with the aid of a young rosy-cheeked Canadian girl, Anna Dann, who had recently come to work for them and whom they at once took to their hearts, making her one of the family. Soon another young girl, Genevieve Hawley from Fort Scott, Kansas, was employed to help with the endless copying, sorting of letters, and pasting of scrapbooks, and with the current correspondence which piled up and diverted Susan from the book.[413] Through 1897 and 1898, they worked at top speed.

The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, A Story of the Evolution of the Status of Women, in two volumes, by Ida Husted Harper, was published by the Bowen Merrill Company of Indianapolis just before Christmas 1898. Happy as a young girl out of school, Susan inscribed copies for her many friends and eagerly watched for reviews, pleased with the favorable comments in newspapers and magazines throughout this country and Europe.[414]

* * * * *

By this time the Cuban rebellion was crowding all other news out of the papers, and Susan followed it closely, for this struggle for freedom instantly won her sympathy. She hoped that Spain under pressure from the United States might be persuaded to give Cuba her independence, but the blowing up of the battleship Maine and the war cries of the press and of a faction in Congress led to armed intervention in April 1898. Always opposed to war as a means of settling disputes, she wrote Rachel, "To think of the mothers of this nation sitting back in silence without even the power of a legal protest—while their sons are taken without a by-your-leave! Well all through—it is barbarous ... and I hope you and all our young women will rouse to work as never before—and get the women of the Republic clothed with the power of control of conditions in peace—or when it shall come again—which Heaven forbid—in war."[415]

Not only did she express these sentiments in letters to her friends, but in a public meeting, where only patriotic fervor and flag-waving were welcome, she dared criticize the unsanitary army camps and the greed and graft which deprived soldiers of wholesome food. "There isn't a mother in the land," she declared, "who wouldn't know that a shipload of typhoid stricken soldiers would need cots to lie on and fuel to cook with, and that a swamp was not a desirable place in which to pitch a camp.... What the government needs at such a time is not alone bacteriologists and army officers but also women who know how to take care of sick boys and have the common sense to surround them with sanitary conditions."[416] At this her audience, at first hostile, burst into applause.

More and more disturbed by the inefficient care of the wounded and the feeding of enlisted men, she wrote Rachel, "Every day's reports and comments about the war only show the need of women at the front—not as employees permitted to be there because they begged to be—but there by right—as managers and dictators in all departments in which women have been trained—those of feeding and caring for in health and nursing the sick."[417]