woman's rights" exhibiting themselves in "short petticoats and
long-legged boots."[46] Nevertheless, the convention aroused such
genuine interest that evening meetings were continued for two weeks,
featuring as speakers Ernestine Rose, Antoinette Brown, Samuel J. May,
and William Henry Channing, the young Unitarian minister from
Rochester; and when the men appeared on the platform, the audience
called for the women.
Susan could not have asked for anything better than Elizabeth
Stanton's moving plea for property rights for married women and the
attention it received from the large audience in the Senate Chamber.
Her heart swelled with pride as she listened to her friend, and so
important did she think the speech that she had 50,000 copies printed
for distribution.
To back up Mrs. Stanton's words with concrete evidence of a demand for
a change in the law, Susan presented petitions with 10,000 signatures,
6,000 asking that married women be granted the right to their wages
and 4,000 venturing to be recorded for woman suffrage.
Enthusiastic over her Albany success, she impetuously wrote Lucy
Stone, "Is this not a wonderful time, an era long to be
remembered?"[47]
Although the legislature failed to act on the petitions, she knew that
her cause had made progress, for never before had women been listened
to with such respect and never had newspapers been so friendly. She
cherished these words of praise from Lucy, "God bless you, Susan dear,
for the brave heart that will work on even in the midst of
discouragement and lack of helpers. Everywhere I am telling people
what your state is doing, and it is worth a great deal to the cause.
The example of positive action is what we need."[48]
* * * * *
Susan continued her "example of positive action," this time against
the Kansas-Nebraska bill, pending in Congress, which threatened repeal
of the Missouri Compromise by admitting Kansas and Nebraska as
territories with the right to choose for themselves whether they
would be slave or free. "I feel that woman should in the very capitol
of the nation lift her voice against that abominable measure," she
wrote Lucy Stone, with whom she was corresponding more and more
frequently. "It is not enough that H. B. Stowe should write."[49]
Harriet Beecher Stowe's _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ had been published in 1852
and during that year 300,000 copies were sold.
[Illustration: Ernestine Rose]
With Ernestine Rose, Susan now headed for Washington. These two women
had been drawn together by common interests ever since they had met in
Syracuse in 1852. Susan was not frightened, as many were, by
Ernestine's reputed atheism. She appreciated Ernestine's intelligence,
her devotion to woman's rights, and her easy eloquence. Conscious of
her own limitations as an orator, she recognized her need of Ernestine
for the many meetings she planned for the future.
As they traveled to Washington together, she learned more about this
beautiful, impressive, black-haired Jewess from Poland, who was ten
years her senior. The daughter of a rabbi, Ernestine had found the
limitations of orthodox religion unbearable for a woman and had left
her home to see and learn more of the world in Prussia, Holland,
France, Scotland, and England. She had married an Englishman
sympathetic to her liberal views, and together they had come to New
York where she began her career as a lecturer in 1836 when speaking in
public branded women immoral. She spoke easily and well on education,
woman's rights, and the evils of slavery. Her slight foreign accent
added charm to her rich musical voice, and before long she was in
demand as far west as Ohio and Michigan. With a colleague as
experienced as Ernestine, Susan dared arrange for meetings even in the
capital of the nation.
Washington was tense over the slavery issue when they arrived, and
Ernestine's friends warned her not to mention the subject in her
lectures. Unheeding she commented on the Kansas-Nebraska bill, but the
press took no notice and her audiences showed no signs of
dissatisfaction. In fact, two comparatively unknown women, billed to
lecture on the "Educational and Social Rights of Women" and the
"Political and Legal Rights of Women," attracted little attention in a
city accustomed to a blaze of Congressional oratory. Hoping to draw
larger audiences and to lend dignity to their meetings, Susan asked
for the use of the Capitol on Sunday, but was refused because
Ernestine was not a member of a religious society. Making an attempt
for Smithsonian Hall, Ernestine was told it could not risk its
reputation by presenting a woman speaker.[50]
A failure financially, their Washington venture was rich in
experience. Susan took time out for sightseeing, visiting the
"President's house" and Mt. Vernon, which to her surprise she found in
a state of "delapidation and decay." "The mark of slavery o'ershadows
the whole," she wrote in her diary. "Oh the thought that it was here
that he whose name is the pride of this Nation, was the _Slave
Master_."[51]
Again and again in the Capitol, she listened to heated debates on the
Kansas-Nebraska bill, astonished at the eloquence and fervor with
which the "institution of slavery" could be defended. Seeing slavery
first-hand, she abhorred it more than ever and observed with dismay
its degenerating influence on master as well as slave. She began to
feel that even she herself might be undermined by it almost
unwittingly and confessed to her diary, "This noon, I ate my dinner
without once asking myself are these human beings who minister to my
wants, Slaves to be bought and sold and hired out at the will of a
master?... Even I am getting _accustomed_ to _Slavery_ ... so much so
that I have ceased continually to be made to feel its blighting,
cursing influence."[52]
* * * * *
A few months later, Susan and Ernestine were in Philadelphia at a
national woman's rights convention, and when Ernestine was proposed
for president, Susan had her first opportunity to champion her new
friend. A foreigner and a free-thinker, Ernestine encountered a great
deal of prejudice even among liberal reformers, and Susan was
surprised at the strength of feeling against her. Impressed during
their trip to Washington by Ernestine's essentially fine qualities and
her value to the cause, Susan fought for her behind the scenes,
insisting that freedom of religion or the freedom to have no religion
be observed in woman's rights conventions, and she had the
satisfaction of seeing Ernestine elected to the office she so richly
deserved.
Freedom of religion or freedom to have no religion had become for
Susan a principle to hold on to, as she listened at these early
woman's rights meetings to the lengthy fruitless discussions regarding
the lack of Scriptural sanction for women's new freedom. Usually a
clergyman appeared on the scene, volubly quoting the Bible to prove
that any widening of woman's sphere was contrary to the will of God.
But always ready to refute him were Antoinette Brown, now an ordained
minister, William Lloyd Garrison, and occasionally Susan herself. To
the young Quaker broadened by her Unitarian contacts and unhampered by
creed or theological dogma, such debates were worse than useless; they
deepened theological differences, stirred up needless antagonisms,
solved no problems, and wasted valuable time.
During this convention, she was one of the twenty-four guests in
Lucretia Mott's comfortable home at 238 Arch Street. Every meal, with
its stimulating discussions, was a convention in itself. Susan's great
hero, William Lloyd Garrison, sat at Lucretia's right at the long
table in the dining room, Susan on her left, and at the end of each
meal, when the little cedar tub filled with hot soapy water was
brought in and set before Lucretia so that she could wash the silver,
glass, and fine china at the table, Susan dried them on a snowy-white
towel while the interesting conversation continued. There was talk of
woman's rights, of temperance, and of spiritualism, which was
attracting many new converts. There were thrilling stories of the
opening of the West and the building of transcontinental railways; but
most often and most earnestly the discussion turned to the progress of
the antislavery movement, to the infamous Kansas-Nebraska bill, to the
New England Emigrant Aid Company,[53] which was sending free-state
settlers to Kansas, to the weakness of the government in playing again
and again into the hands of the proslavery faction. Most of them saw
the country headed toward a vast slave empire which would embrace
Cuba, Mexico, and finally Brazil; and William Lloyd Garrison fervently
reiterated his doctrine, "No Union with Slaveholders."
Before leaving home Susan had heard first-hand reports of the bitter
bloody antislavery contest in Kansas from her brother Daniel, who had
just returned from a trip to that frontier territory with settlers
sent out by the New England Emigrant Aid Company. Now talking with
William Lloyd Garrison, she found herself torn between these two great
causes for human freedom, abolition and woman's rights, and it was
hard for her to decide which cause needed her more.
* * * * *
She had not, however, forgotten her unfinished business in New York
State. The refusal of the legislature to amend the property laws had
doubled her determination to continue circulating petitions until
married women's civil rights were finally recognized. It took courage
to go alone to towns where she was unknown to arrange for meetings on
the unpopular subject of woman's rights. Not knowing how she would be
received, she found it almost as difficult to return to such towns as
Canajoharie where she had been highly respected as a teacher six years
before. In Canajoharie, however, she was greeted affectionately by her
uncle Joshua Read. He and his friends let her use the Methodist church
for her lecture, and when the trustees of the academy urged her to
return there to teach, Uncle Joshua interrupted with a vehement "No!"
protesting that others could teach but it was Susan's work "to go
around and set people thinking about the laws."[54]
Returning to the scene of her girlhood in Battenville and Easton,
visiting her sisters Guelma and Hannah, and meeting many of her old
friends, Susan realized as never before how completely she had
outgrown her old environment. In her enthusiasm for her new work, she
exposed "many of her heresies," and when her friends labeled William
Lloyd Garrison an agnostic and rabble rouser, she protested that he
was the most Christlike man she had ever known. "Thus it is belief,
not Christian benevolence," she confided to her diary in 1854, "that
is made the modern test of Christianity."[55]
After eight strenuous months away from home, she was welcomed warmly
by a family who believed in her work. She found abolition uppermost in
everyone's mind. Her brother Merritt, fired by Daniel's tales of the
West and the antislavery struggle in Kansas, was impatient to join the
settlers there and could talk of nothing else. While he poured out the
latest news about Kansas, he and a cousin Mary Luther helped Susan
fold handbills for future woman's rights meetings. Susan listened
eagerly and approvingly as he told of the 750 free-state settlers who
during the past summer had gone out to Kansas, traveling up the
Missouri on steamboats and over lonely trails in wagons marked
"Kansas." Most of them were not abolitionists but men who wanted
Kansas a free-labor state which they could develop with their own hard
work. She heard of the ruthless treatment these "Yankee" settlers
faced from the proslavery Missourians who wanted Kansas in the slavery
bloc. There was bloodshed and there would be more. John Brown's sons
had written from Kansas, "Send us guns. We need them more than
bread."[56] Merritt was ready and eager to join John Brown.
The Anthony farm was virtually a hotbed of insurrection with Merritt
planning resistance in Kansas and Susan reform in New York. Susan
mapped out an ambitious itinerary, hoping to canvass with her
petitions every county in the state. With her father as security, she
borrowed money to print her handbills and notices, and then wrote
Wendell Phillips asking if any money for a woman's rights campaign had
been raised by the last national convention. He replied with his own
personal check for fifty dollars. His generosity and confidence
touched her deeply, for already he had become a hero to her second
only to William Lloyd Garrison. This tall handsome intellectual, a
graduate of Harvard and an unsurpassed orator, had forfeited friends,
social position, and a promising career as a lawyer to plead for the
slave. He was also one of the very few men who sympathized with and
aided the woman's rights cause.
Horace Greeley too proved at this time to be a good friend, writing,
"I have your letter and your programme, friend Susan. I will publish
the latter in all our editions, but return your dollars."[57]
Her earnestness and ability made a great appeal to these men. They
marveled at her industry. Thirty-four years old now, not handsome but
wholesome, simply and neatly dressed, her brown hair smoothly parted
and brought down over her ears, she had nothing of the scatterbrained
impulsive reformer about her, and no coquetry. She was practical and
intelligent, and men liked to discuss their work with her. William
Henry Channing, admiring her executive ability and her plucky reaction
to defeat, dubbed her the Napoleon of the woman's rights movement.
Parker Pillsbury, the fiery abolitionist from New Hampshire,
broad-shouldered, dark-bearded, with blazing eyes and almost fanatical
zeal, had become her devoted friend. He liked nothing better than to
tease her about her idleness and pretend to be in search of more work
for her to do.
* * * * *
So impatient was Susan to begin her New York State campaign that she
left home on Christmas Day to hold her first meeting on December 26,
1854, at Mayville in Chatauqua County. The weather was cold and damp,
but the four pounds of candles which she had bought to light the court
house flickered cheerily while the small curious audience, gathered
from several nearby towns, listened to the first woman most of them
had ever heard speak in public. She would be, they reckoned, worth
hearing at least once.
Traveling from town to town, she held meetings every other night.
Usually the postmasters or sheriffs posted her notices in the town
square and gave them to the newspapers and to the ministers to
announce in their churches. Even in a hostile community she almost
always found a gallant fair-minded man to come to her aid, such as the
hotel proprietor who offered his dining room for her meetings when
the court house, schoolhouse, and churches were closed to her, or the
group of men who, when the ministers refused to announce her meetings,
struck off handbills which they distributed at the church doors at the
close of the services. The newspapers too were generally friendly.
As men were the voters with power to change the laws, she aimed to
attract them to her evening meetings, and usually they came, seeking
diversion, and listened respectfully. Some of them scoffed, others
condemned her for undermining the home, but many found her reasoning
logical and by their questions put life into the meetings. A few even
encouraged their wives to enlist in the cause.
The women, on the other hand, were timid or indifferent, although she
pointed out to them the way to win the legal right to their earnings
and their children. It was difficult to find among them a rebellious
spirit brave enough to head a woman's rights society.
"Susan B. Anthony is in town," wrote young Caroline Cowles, a
Canandaigua school girl, in her diary at this time. "She made a
special request that all seminary girls should come to hear her as
well as all the women and girls in town. She had a large audience and
she talked very plainly about our rights and how we ought to stand up
for them and said the world would never go right until the women had
just as much right to vote and rule as the men.... When I told
Grandmother about it, she said she guessed Susan B. Anthony had
forgotten that St. Paul said women should keep silence. I told her,
no, she didn't, for she spoke particularly about St. Paul and said if
he had lived in these times ... he would have been as anxious to have
women at the head of the government as she was. I could not make
Grandmother agree with her at all."[58]
Many of the towns Susan visited were not on a railroad. Often after a
long cold sleigh ride she slept in a hotel room without a fire; in the
morning she might have to break the ice in the pitcher to take the
cold sponge bath which nothing could induce her to omit since she had
begun to follow the water cure, a new therapeutic method then in
vogue.
For a time Ernestine Rose came to her aid and it was a relief to turn
over the meetings to such an accomplished speaker. But for the most
part Susan braved it alone. Steadily adding names to her petitions
and leaving behind the leaflets which Elizabeth Stanton had written,
she aroused a glimmer of interest in a new valuation of women.
[Illustration: Parker Pillsbury]
On the stagecoach leaving Lake George on a particularly cold day, she
found to her surprise a wealthy Quaker, whom she had met at the Albany
convention, so solicitous of her comfort that he placed heated planks
under her feet, making the long ride much more bearable. He turned up
again, this time with his own sleigh, at the close of one of her
meetings in northern New York, and wrapped in fur robes, she drove
with him behind spirited gray horses to his sisters' home to stay over
Sunday, and then to all her meetings in the neighborhood. It was
pleasant to be looked after and to travel in comfort and she enjoyed
his company, but when he urged her to give up the hard life of a
reformer to become his wife, there was no hesitation on her part. She
had dedicated her life to freeing women and Negroes and there could be
no turning aside. If she ever married, it must be to a man who would
encourage her work for humanity, a great man like Wendell Phillips, or
a reformer like Parker Pillsbury.
Returning home in May 1855, she took stock of her accomplishments. She
had canvassed fifty-four counties and sold 20,000 tracts. Her expenses
had been $2,291 and she had paid her way by selling tracts and by a
small admission charge for her meetings. She even had seventy dollars
over and above all expenses. She promptly repaid the fifty dollars
which Wendell Phillips had advanced, but he returned it for her next
campaign.
However, her heart quailed at the prospect of another such winter, as
she recalled the long, bitter-cold days of travel and the indifference
of the women she was trying to help. Even the unfailing praise of her
family and of Elizabeth Stanton, even the kindness and interest of the
new friends she made paled into insignificance before the thought of
another lone crusade. She was exhausted and suffering with rheumatic
pains, and yet she would not rest, but prepared for an ambitious
convention at Saratoga Springs, then the fashionable summer resort of
the East.
She had braved this center of fashion and frivolity the year before
with her message of woman's rights, and to her great surprise, crowds
seeking entertainment had come to her meetings, their admission fees
and their purchase of tracts making the venture a financial success.
Here was fertile ground. Susan was counting on Lucy Stone and
Antoinette Brown to help her, for Elizabeth Stanton, then expecting
her sixth baby, was out of the picture. Now, to her dismay, Lucy and
Antoinette married the Blackwell brothers, Henry and Samuel.
Fearing that they too like Elizabeth Stanton would be tied down with
babies and household cares, Susan saw a bleak lonely road ahead for
the woman's rights movement. She did so want her best speakers and
most valuable workers to remain single until the spade work for
woman's rights was done. Almost in a panic at the prospect of being
left to carry on the Saratoga convention alone, Susan wrote Lucy
irritable letters instead of praising her for drawing up a marriage
contract and keeping her own name. Later, however, she realized what
it had meant for Lucy to keep her own name, and then she wrote her, "I
am more and more rejoiced that you have declared by actual doing that
a woman has a name and may retain it all through her life."[59]
So persistently did she now pursue Lucy and Antoinette that they both
kept their promise to speak at the Saratoga convention, Lucy traveling
all the way from Cincinnati where she was visiting in the Blackwell
home. Lucy was loudly cheered by a large audience, eager to see this
young woman whose marriage had attracted so much notice in the press.
In fact Lucy Stone, who had kept her own name and who with her husband
had signed a marriage protest against the legal disabilities of a
married woman, was as much of a novelty in this fashionable circle as
one of Barnum's high-priced curiosities.
Pleased at Lucy's reception, Susan surveyed the audience
hopefully--handsome men in nankeen trousers, red waistcoats, white
neckcloths, and gray swallowtail coats, sitting beside beautiful young
women wearing gowns of bombazine and watered silk with wide hoop
skirts and elaborately trimmed bonnets which set off their curls. To
her delight, they also applauded Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the first
woman minister they had ever seen, and Ernestine Rose with her
appealing foreign accent. They clapped loudly when she herself asked
them to buy tracts and contribute to the work.
Complimentary as this was, she did not flatter herself that they had
endorsed woman's rights. That they had come to her meetings in large
numbers while vacationing in Saratoga Springs, this was important. In
some a spark of understanding glowed, and this spark would light
others. They came from the South, from the West, and from the large
cities of the East. There were railroad magnates among them, rich
merchants, manufacturers, and politicians. Charles F. Hovey, the
wealthy Boston dry-goods merchant, listened attentively to every word,
and in the years that followed became a generous contributor to the
cause.
* * * * *
Realizing how very tired she was and that she must feel more
physically fit before continuing her work, Susan decided to take the
water cure at her cousin Seth Rogers' Hydropathic Institute in
Worcester, Massachusetts. This well-known sanitorium prescribed water
internally and externally as a remedy for all kinds of ailments, and
in an age when meals were overhearty, baths infrequent, and clothing
tight and confining, the drinking of water, tub baths, showers, and
wet packs had enthusiastic advocates. The soothing baths relaxed
Susan and the leisure to read refreshed and strengthened her. She
read, one after another, Carlyle's _Sartor Resartus_, George Sand's
_Consuelo_, Madame de Stael's _Corinne_, then Frances Wright's _A Few
Days in Athens_ and Mrs. Gaskell's _Life of Charlotte Brontë_, making
notes in her diary (1855) of passages she particularly liked. She
discussed current events with her cousin Seth on long drives in the
country, finding him a delightful companion, well-read, understanding,
and interested in people and causes. He took her to her first
political meeting, where she was the only woman present and had a seat
on the platform. It was one of the first rallies of the new Republican
party which had developed among rebellious northern Whigs,
Free-Soilers, and anti-Nebraska Democrats who opposed the extension of
slavery. After listening to the speakers, among them Charles Sumner,
she drew these conclusions: "Had the accident of birth given me place
among the aristocracy of sex, I doubt not I should be an active,
zealous advocate of Republicanism; unless perchance, I had received
that higher, holier light which would have lifted me to the sublime
height where now stand Garrison, Phillips, and all that small band
whose motto is 'No Union with Slaveholders.'"[60]