Susan B. Anthony Part 30

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, Ma.s.sachusetts, 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 sc.r.a.pbooks 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 a.s.sociation 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, Va.s.sar 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 munic.i.p.al 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 pa.s.ses 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 G.o.d 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 a.s.sociation. 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 att.i.tude 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 grat.i.tude 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 endors.e.m.e.nt 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 enfranchis.e.m.e.nt, 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 a.s.sociation, 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 a.s.sociation 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 a.s.sociation 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 a.s.sociation, 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 a.s.sociation 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 a.s.sociation and she welcomed its transfer to Washington.[362]

Women from all parts of the world a.s.sembled 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.