Leigh_, called by Ruskin the greatest poem in the English language,
but criticized by others as an indecent romance revolting to the
purity of many women. Susan had bought a copy of the first American
edition and she carried it with her wherever she went. After a hard
active day, she found inspiration and refreshment in its pages. No
matter how dreary the hotel room or how unfriendly the town, she no
longer felt lonely or discouraged, for Aurora Leigh was a companion
ever at hand, giving her confidence in herself, strengthening her
ambition, and helping her build a satisfying, constructive philosophy
of life. On the flyleaf of her worn copy, which in later years she
presented to the Library of Congress, she wrote, "This book was
carried in my satchel for years and read and reread. The noble words
of Elizabeth Barrett, as Wendell Phillips always called her, sunk deep
into my heart. I have always cherished it above all other books. I now
present it to the Congressional Library with the hope that women may
more and more be like Aurora Leigh."
The beauty of its poetry enchanted her, and Elizabeth Barrett
Browning's feminism found an echo in her own. She pencil-marked the
passages she wanted to reread. When her "common work" of hiring halls
and engaging speakers seemed unimportant and even futile, she found
comfort in these lines:
"Be sure no earnest work
Of any honest creature, howbeit weak
Imperfect, ill-adapted, fails so much,
It is not gathered as a grain of sand
To enlarge the sum of human action used
For carrying out God's end....
... let us be content in work,
To do the thing we can, and not presume
To fret because it's little."[106]
Glorying in work, she read with satisfaction:
"The honest earnest man must stand and work:
The woman also, otherwise she drops
At once below the dignity of man,
Accepting serfdom. Free men freely work;
Who ever fears God, fears to sit at ease."
Could she have written poetry, these words, spoken by Aurora, might
well have been her own:
"You misconceive the question like a man,
Who sees a woman as the complement
Of his sex merely. You forget too much
That every creature, female as the male,
Stands single in responsible act and thought,
As also in birth and death. Whoever says
To a loyal woman, 'Love and work with me,'
Will get fair answers, if the work and love
Being good of themselves, are good for her--the best
She was born for."
Inspired by _Aurora Leigh_, Susan planned a new lecture, "The True
Woman," and as she wrote it out word for word, her thoughts and
theories about women, which had been developing through the years,
crystallized. In her opinion, the "true woman" could no more than
Aurora Leigh follow the traditional course and sacrifice all for the
love of one man, adjusting her life to his whims. She must, instead,
develop her own personality and talents, advancing in learning, in the
arts, in science, and in business, cherishing at the same time her
noble womanly qualities. Susan hoped that some day the full
development of woman's individuality would be compatible with
marriage, and she held up as an ideal the words which Elizabeth
Barrett Browning put into the mouth of Aurora Leigh:
"The world waits
For help. Beloved, let us work so well,
Our work shall still be better for our love
And still our love be sweeter for our work
And both, commended, for the sake of each,
By all true workers and true lovers born."
She expressed this hope in her own practical words to Lydia Mott:
"Institutions, among them marriage, are justly chargeable with many
social and individual ills, but after all, the whole man or woman will
rise above them. I am sure my 'true woman' will never be crushed or
dwarfed by them. Woman must take to her soul a purpose and then make
circumstances conform to this purpose, instead of forever singing the
refrain, 'if and if and if.'"[107]
* * * * *
Late in 1858, Susan received a letter from Wendell Phillips which put
new life into all her efforts for women. He wrote her that an
anonymous donor had given him $5,000 for the woman's rights cause and
that he, Lucy Stone, and Susan had been named trustees to spend it
wisely and effectively.
The man who felt that the woman's rights cause was important enough to
rate a gift of that size proved to be wealthy Francis Jackson of
Boston, in whose home Susan had visited a few years before with Lucy
and Antoinette. Jubilant over the prospects, she at once began to make
plans. She wanted to use all of the fund for lectures, conventions,
tracts, and newspaper articles; Lucy thought part of the money should
be spent to prove unconstitutional the law which taxed women without
representation and Antoinette was eager for a share to establish a
church in which she could preach woman's rights with the Gospel.
Both Wendell Phillips and Lucy Stone agreed that Susan should have
$1,500 for the intensive campaign she had planned for New York, and
for once in her life she started off without a financial worry, with
money in hand to pay her speakers. She held meetings in all of the
principal towns of the state, making them at least partially pay for
themselves. Her lecturers each received $12 a week and she kept a
like amount for herself, for planning the tour, organizing the
meetings, and delivering her new lecture, "The True Woman."
"I am having fine audiences of thinking men and women," she wrote Mary
Hallowell. "Oh, if we could but make our meetings ring like those of
the antislavery people, wouldn't the world hear us? But to do that we
must have souls baptized into the work and consecrated to it."[108]
Some souls were deeply stirred by the woman's rights gospel. One of
these was the wealthy Boston merchant, Charles F. Hovey, who in his
will left $50,000 in trust to Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd
Garrison, Parker Pillsbury, Abby Kelley Foster, and others, to be
spent for the "promotion of the antislavery cause and other reforms,"
among them woman's rights, and not less than $8,000 a year to be spent
to promote these reforms. With all this financial help available,
Susan expected great things to happen.
* * * * *
During the winter of 1860 while the legislature was in session, Susan
spent six weeks in Albany with Lydia Mott, and day after day she
climbed the long hill to the capitol to interview legislators on
amendments to the married women's property laws. When these amendments
were passed by the Senate, Assemblyman Anson Bingham urged her to
bring their mutual friend, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to Albany to speak
before his committee to assure passage by the Assembly.
Once again Susan hurried to Seneca Falls, and unpacking her little
portmanteau stuffed with papers and statistics, discussed the subject
with Mrs. Stanton in front of the open fire late into the night. Then
the next morning while Mrs. Stanton shut herself up in the quietest
room in the house to write her speech, Susan gave the children their
breakfast, sent the older ones off to school, watched over the babies,
prepared the desserts, and made herself generally useful. By this time
the children regarded her affectionately as "Aunt Thusan," and they
knew they must obey her, for she was a stern disciplinarian whom even
the mischievous Stanton boys dared not defy.
These visits of Susan's were happy, satisfying times for both these
young women. A few days' respite from travel in a well-run home with
a friend she admired did wonders for Susan, giving her perspective on
the work she had already done and courage to tackle new problems,
while for Mrs. Stanton this short period of stimulating companionship
and freedom from household cares was a godsend. "Miss Anthony" had
long ago become Susan to Elizabeth, but Susan all through her life
called her very best friend "Mrs. Stanton," playfully to be sure, but
with a remnant of that formality which it was hard for her to cast
off.
The speech was soon finished. Mrs. Stanton's imagination, fired by her
sympathetic understanding of women's problems, had turned Susan's cold
hard facts into moving prose, while Susan, the best of critics,
detected every weak argument or faltering phrase. They both felt they
had achieved a masterpiece.
Mrs. Stanton delivered this address before a joint session of the New
York legislature in March 1860. Susan beamed with pride as she watched
the large audience crowd even the galleries and heard the long loud
applause for the speech which she was convinced could not have been
surpassed by any man in the United States.
The next day the Assembly passed the Married Women's Property Bill,
and when shortly it was signed by the governor, Susan and Mrs. Stanton
scored their first big victory, winning a legal revolution for the
women of New York State. This new law was a challenge to women
everywhere. Under it a married woman had the right to hold property,
real and personal, without the interference of her husband, the right
to carry on any trade or perform any service on her own account and to
collect and use her own earnings; a married woman might now buy, sell,
and make contracts, and if her husband had abandoned her or was
insane, a convict, or a habitual drunkard, his consent was
unnecessary; a married woman might sue and be sued, she was the joint
guardian with her husband of her children, and on the decease of her
husband the wife had the same rights that her husband would have at
her death.
Susan did not then realize the full significance of what she had
accomplished--that she had unleashed a new movement for freedom which
would be the means of strengthening the democratic government of her
country.
FOOTNOTES:
[90] Harper, _Anthony_, I, pp. 173-174, 198.
[91] _Ibid._, p. 160.
[92] May 26, 1856, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Vassar College
Library.
[93] _Ibid._, June 5, 1856. Antoinette Brown Blackwell was often
called Nette.
[94] Ms., Susan B. Anthony Papers, Library of Congress.
[95] 1856, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of Congress.
[96] Ms., Susan B. Anthony Papers, Library of Congress. A notation on
this ms. reads, "Written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton--Delivered by Susan
B. Anthony."
[97] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 143.
[98] Stanton and Blatch, _Stanton_, II, p. 71.
[99] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 162.
[100] June 10, 1856, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of
Congress.
[101] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 171.
[102] Sept. 27, 1857, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of
Congress.
[103] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 175.
[104] Ms., Diary, 1855.
[105] Sept. 27, 1857, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of
Congress.
[106] Elizabeth Barrett Browning, _Aurora Leigh_ (New York, 1857), p.
316; quotations following, pp. 53-54, pp. 364-365.
[107] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 170.
[108] _Ibid._, p. 177. Mary Hallowell, a liberal Rochester Quaker,
always interested in Susan B. Anthony and her work.
THE ZEALOT
With a spirit of confidence inspired by her victory in New York State,
Susan looked forward to the tenth national woman's rights convention
in New York City in May 1860. At this convention she reported progress
everywhere. Four thousand dollars from the Jackson and Hovey funds had
been spent in the successful New York campaign, and similar work was
scheduled for Ohio. In Kansas, women had won from the constitutional
convention equal rights and privileges in state-controlled schools and
in the management of the public schools, including the right to vote
for members of school boards; mothers had been granted equal rights
with fathers in the control and custody of their children, and married
women had been given property rights. In Indiana, Maine, Missouri, and
Ohio, married women could now control their own earnings.
"Each year we hail with pleasure," she continued, "new accessions to
our faith. Brave men and true from the higher walks of literature and
art, from the bar, the bench, the pulpit, and legislative halls are
now ready to help woman wherever she claims to stand." She was
thinking of the aid given her by Andrew J. Colvin and Anson Bingham of
the New York legislature, of the young journalist, George William
Curtis, just recently speaking for women, of Samuel Longfellow at his
first woman's rights convention, and of the popular Henry Ward Beecher
who, just a few months before, had delivered his great woman's rights
speech, thereby identifying himself irrevocably with the cause. She
announced with great satisfaction the news, which the papers had
carried a few days before, that Matthew Vassar of Poughkeepsie had set
aside $400,000 to found a college for women equal in all respects to
Harvard and Yale.[109]
Progress and good feeling were in the air, and the speakers were not
heckled as in past years by the rowdies who had made it a practice to
follow abolitionists into woman's rights meetings to bait them. Into
this atmosphere of good will and rejoicing, Susan and Elizabeth
Stanton now injected a more serious note, bringing before the
convention the controversial question of marriage and divorce which
heretofore had been handled with kid gloves at all woman's rights
meetings, but which they sincerely believed demanded solution.
* * * * *
Divorce had been much in the news because several leading families in
America and in England were involved in lawsuits complicated by
stringent divorce laws. Invariably the wife bore the burden of censure
and hardship, for no matter how unprincipled her husband might be, he
was entitled to her children and her earnings under the property laws
of most states.
In New York efforts were now being made to gain support for a liberal
divorce bill, patterned after the Indiana law, and a variety of
proposals were before the legislature, making drunkenness, insanity,
desertion, and cruel and abusive treatment grounds for divorce. Horace
Greeley in his _Tribune_ had been vigorously opposing a more liberal
law for New York, while Robert Dale Owen of Indiana wrote in its
defense. Everywhere people were reading the Greeley-Owen debates in
the _Tribune_. Through his widely circulated paper, Horace Greeley had
in a sense become an oracle for the people who felt he was safe and
good; while Robert Dale Owen, because of his youthful association with
the New Harmony community and Frances Wright, was branded with
radicalism which even his valuable service in the Indiana legislature
and his two terms in Congress could not blot out.
Susan and Mrs. Stanton had no patience with Horace Greeley's smug
old-fashioned opinions on marriage and divorce. In fact these
Greeley-Owen debates in the _Tribune_ were the direct cause of their
decision to bring this subject before the convention, where they hoped
for support from their liberal friends. They counted especially on
Lucy Stone, who seemed to give her approval when she wrote, "I am glad
you will speak on the divorce question, provided you yourself are
clear on the subject. It is a great grave topic that one shudders to
grapple, but its hour is coming.... God touch your lips if you speak
on it."[110]
Neither Susan nor Mrs. Stanton shuddered to grapple with any subject
which they believed needed attention. In fact, the discussion of
marriage and divorce in woman's rights conventions had been on their
minds for some time. Three years before Susan had written Lucy, "I
have thought with you until of late that the Social Question must be
kept separate from Woman's Rights, but we have always claimed that our
movement was _Human Rights_, not Woman's specially.... It seems to me
we have played on the surface of things quite long enough. Getting the
right to hold property, to vote, to wear what dress we please, etc.,
are all to the good, but _Social Freedom_, after all, lies at the
bottom of all, and unless woman gets that she must continue the slave
of man in all other things."[111]
* * * * *
Consternation spread through the genial ranks of the convention as
Mrs. Stanton now offered resolutions calling for more liberal divorce
laws. Quick to sense the temper of an audience, Susan felt its
resistance to being jolted out of the pleasant contemplation of past
successes to the unpleasant recognition that there were still
difficult ugly problems ahead. She was conscious at once of a stir of
astonishment and disapproval when Mrs. Stanton in her clear compelling
voice read, "Resolved, That an unfortunate or ill-assorted marriage is
ever a calamity, but not ever, perhaps never a crime--and when society
or government, by its laws or customs, compels its continuance, always
to the grief of one of the parties, and the actual loss and damage of
both, it usurps an authority never delegated to man, nor exercised by
God, Himself...."[112]
Listening to Mrs. Stanton's speech in defense of her ten bold
resolutions on marriage and divorce, Susan felt that her brave
colleague was speaking for women everywhere, for wives of the present
and the future. As the hearty applause rang out, she concluded that
even the disapproving admired her courage; but before the applause
ceased, she saw Antoinette Blackwell on her feet, waiting to be heard.
She knew that Antoinette, like Horace Greeley, preferred to think of
all marriages as made in heaven, and true to form Antoinette contended
that the marriage relation "must be lifelong" and "as permanent and
indissoluble as the relation of parent and child."[113] At once
Ernestine Rose came to the rescue in support of Mrs. Stanton.
Then Wendell Phillips showed his displeasure by moving that Mrs.
Stanton's resolutions be laid on the table and expunged from the
record because they had no more to do with this convention than
slavery in Kansas or temperance. "This convention," he asserted, "as I
understand it, assembles to discuss the laws that rest unequally upon
men and women, not those that rest equally on men and women."[114]
Aghast at this statement, Susan was totally unprepared to have his
views supported by that other champion of liberty, William Lloyd
Garrison, who, however, did not favor expunging the resolutions from
the record.
It was incomprehensible to Susan that neither Garrison nor Phillips
recognized woman's subservient status in marriage under prevailing
laws and traditions, and she now stated her own views with firmness:
"As to the point that this question does not belong to this
platform--from that I totally dissent. Marriage has ever been a
one-sided matter, resting most unequally upon the sexes. By it, man
gains all--woman loses all; tyrant law and lust reign supreme with
him--meek submission and ready obedience alone befit her."[115]
Warming to the subject, she continued, "By law, public sentiment, and
religion from the time of Moses down to the present day, woman has
never been thought of other than as a piece of property, to be
disposed of at the will and pleasure of man. And this very hour, by
our statute books, by our so-called enlightened Christian
civilization, she has no voice in saying what shall be the basis of
the relation. She must accept marriage as man proffers it or not at
all...."
When finally the vote was taken, Mrs. Stanton's resolutions were laid
on the table, but not expunged from the record, and the convention
adjourned with much to talk about and think about for some time to
come.
The newspapers, of course, could not overlook such a piece of news as
this heated argument on divorce in a woman's rights convention, and
fanned the flames pro and con, most of them holding up Miss Anthony
and Mrs. Stanton as dangerous examples of freedom for women. The Rev.
A. D. Mayo, Unitarian clergyman of Albany, heretofore Susan's loyal
champion, now made a point of reproving her. "You are not married," he
declared with withering scorn. "You have no business to be discussing
marriage." To this she retorted, "Well, Mr. Mayo, you are not a
slave. Suppose you quit lecturing on slavery."[116]
Both Susan and Mrs. Stanton, amazed at the opposition and the
disapproval they had aroused, were grateful for Samuel Longfellow's
comforting words of commendation[117] and for the letters of approval
which came from women from all parts of the state. Most satisfying of
all was this reassurance from Lucretia Mott, whose judgment they so
highly valued: "I was rejoiced to have such a defense of the
resolutions as yours. I have the fullest confidence in the united
judgment of Elizabeth Stanton and Susan Anthony and I am glad they are
so vigorous in the work."[118]
Hardest to bear was the disapproval of Wendell Phillips whom they both
admired so much. Difficult to understand and most disappointing was
Lucy Stone's failure to attend the convention or come to their
defense. Thinking over this first unfortunate difference of opinion
among the faithful crusaders for freedom to whom she had always felt
so close in spirit, Susan was sadly disillusioned, but she had no
regrets that the matter had been brought up, and she defied her
critics by speaking before a committee of the New York legislature in
support of a liberal divorce bill. Nor was she surprised when a group
of Boston women, headed by Caroline H. Dall, called a convention which
they hoped would counteract this radical outbreak in the woman's
rights movement by keeping to the safe subjects of education,
vocation, and civil position.
Having learned by this time through the hard school of experience that
the bona-fide reformer could not play safe and go forward, Susan
thoughtfully commented, "Cautious, careful people, always casting
about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can
bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing
to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and
privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and
persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences."[119]
* * * * *
The repercussions of the divorce debates were soon drowned out by the
noise and excitement of the presidential campaign of 1860. With four
candidates in the field, Breckenridge, Bell, Douglas, and Lincoln,
each offering his party's solution for the nation's critical problems,
there was much to think about and discuss, and Susan found woman's
rights pushed into the background. At the same time antagonism toward
abolitionists was steadily mounting for they were being blamed for the
tensions between the North and the South.
Dedicated to the immediate and unconditional emancipation of slavery,
Susan saw no hope in the promises of any political party. Even the
Republicans' opposition to the extension of slavery in the
territories, which had won over many abolitionists, including Henry
and Elizabeth Stanton, seemed to her a mild and ineffectual answer to
the burning questions of the hour. For her to further the election of
Abraham Lincoln was unthinkable, since he favored the enforcement of
the Fugitive Slave Law and had stated he was not in favor of Negro
citizenship.
At heart she was a nonvoting Garrisonian abolitionist and would not
support a political party which in any way sanctioned slavery. Had she
been eligible as a voter she undoubtedly would have refused to cast
her ballot until a righteous antislavery government had been
established. As she expressed it in a letter to Mrs. Stanton, she
could not, if she were a man, vote for "the least of two evils, one of
which the Nation must surely have in the presidential chair."[120]