the Stanton home in Tenafly, New Jersey.[341] As they planned their
book, it soon became obvious that the one volume which they had hoped
to finish in a few months would extend to two or three volumes and
take many years to write. They called in Matilda Joslyn Gage to help
them, and the three of them signed a contract to share the work and
the profits.
The history presented a publishing problem as well as a writing
ordeal, and Susan, interviewing New York publishers, found the subject
had little appeal. Finally, however, she signed a contract with Fowler
& Wells under which the authors agreed to pay the cost of composition,
stereotyping, and engravings; and as usual she raised the necessary
funds.[342]
[Illustration: Matilda Joslyn Gage]
Returning to Tenafly as to a second home, Susan usually found Mrs.
Stanton beaming a welcome from the piazza and Margaret and Harriot
running to the gate to meet her. The Stanton children were fond of
Susan. It was a comfortable happy household, and Susan, thoroughly
enjoying Mrs. Stanton's companionship, attacked the history with
vigor. Sitting opposite each other at a big table in the sunny tower
room, they spent long hours at work. Susan, thin and wiry, her graying
hair neatly smoothed back over her ears, sat up very straight as she
rapidly sorted old clippings and letters and outlined chapters, while
Mrs. Stanton, stout and placid, her white curls beautifully arranged,
wrote steadily and happily, transforming masses of notes into readable
easy prose.[343]
Having sent appeals for information to colleagues in all parts of the
country, Susan, as the contributions began to come in, struggled to
decipher the often almost illegible, handwritten manuscripts, many of
them careless and inexact about dates and facts. To their request for
data about her, Lucy Stone curtly replied, "I have never kept a diary
or any record of my work, and so am unable to furnish you the required
dates.... You say 'I' must be referred to in the history you are
writing.... I cannot furnish a biographical sketch and trust you will
not try to make one. Yours with ceaseless regret that any 'wing' of
suffragists should attempt to write the history of the other."[344]
The greater part of the writing fell upon Mrs. Stanton, but Matilda
Joslyn Gage contributed the chapters, "Preceding Causes," "Women in
Newspapers," and "Women, Church, and State." Susan carefully selected
the material and checked the facts. She helped with the copying of the
handwritten manuscript and with the proofreading. Believing that
pictures of the early workers were almost as important for the
_History_ as the subject matter itself, she tried to provide them, but
they presented a financial problem with which it was hard to cope, for
each engraving cost $100.[345]
When the first volume of the _History of Woman Suffrage_ came off the
press in May 1881, she proudly and lovingly scanned its 878 pages
which told the story of women's progress in the United States up to
the Civil War.
She was well aware that the _History_ was not a literary achievement,
but the facts were there, as accurate as humanly possible; all the
eloquent, stirring speeches were there, a proof of the caliber and
high intelligence of the pioneers; and out of the otherwise dull
record of meetings, conventions, and petitions, a spirit of
independence and zeal for freedom shone forth, highlighted
occasionally by dramatic episodes. As Mrs. Stanton so aptly expressed
it, "We have furnished the bricks and mortar for some future architect
to rear a beautiful edifice."[346]
The distribution of the book was very much on Susan's mind, for she
realized that it would not be in great demand because of its cost,
bulk, and subject matter. Nor could she at this time present it to
libraries, as she wished, for she had already spent her savings on the
illustrations. "It ought to be in every school library," she wrote
Amelia Bloomer, "where every boy and girl of the nation could see and
read and learn what women have done to secure equality of rights and
chances for girls and women...."[347]
So much material had been collected while Volume I was in preparation
that both Susan and Mrs. Stanton felt they should immediately
undertake Volume II. After a summer of lecturing to help finance its
publication, Susan returned to Tenafly to the monotonous work of
compilation. "I am just sick to death of it," she wrote her young
friend Rachel Foster. "I had rather wash or whitewash or do any
possible hard work than sit here and go there digging into the dusty
records of the past--that is, rather _make_ history than write
it."[348]
Yet she never entirely gave up making history, for she was always
planning for the future and Rachel Foster was now her able lieutenant,
relieving her of details, doing the spade work for the annual
Washington conventions, and arranging for an occasional lecture
engagement. Susan would not leave Tenafly for a lecture fee of less
than $50.
She took this intelligent young girl to her heart as she had Anna E.
Dickinson in the past. Rachel, however, had none of Anna's dramatic
temperament or love of the limelight, but in her orderly businesslike
way was eager to serve Susan, whom she had admired ever since as a
child she had heard her speak for woman suffrage in her mother's
drawing room.
While Susan was pondering the ways and means of financing another
volume of the _History_, the light broke through in a letter from
Wendell Phillips, announcing the astonishing news that she and Lucy
Stone had inherited approximately $25,000 each for "the woman's cause"
under the will of Eliza Eddy, the daughter of their former benefactor,
Francis Jackson. Although the legacy was not paid until 1885 because
of litigation, its promise lightened considerably Susan's financial
burden and she knew that Volumes II and III were assured. Her
gratitude to Eliza Eddy was unbounded, and better still, she read
between the lines the good will of Wendell Phillips who had been Eliza
Eddy's legal advisor. That he, whom she admired above all men, should
after their many differences still regard her as worthy of this trust,
meant as much to her as the legacy itself.
In May 1882 she had the satisfaction of seeing the second volume of
the _History of Woman Suffrage_ in print, carrying women's record
through 1875. Volume III was not completed until 1885.
Women's response to their own history was a disappointment. Only a few
realized its value for the future, among them Mary L. Booth, editor of
_Harper's Bazaar_. The majority were indifferent and some even
critical. When Mrs. Stanton offered the three volumes to the Vassar
College library, they were refused.[349] Nevertheless, every time
Susan looked at the three large volumes on her shelves, she was happy,
for now she was assured that women's struggle for citizenship and
freedom would live in print through the years. To libraries in the
United States and Europe, she presented well over a thousand copies,
grateful that the Eliza Eddy legacy now made this possible.
* * * * *
In 1883, Susan surprised everyone by taking a vacation in Europe. Soon
after Volume II of the _History_ had been completed, Mrs. Stanton had
left for Europe with her daughter Harriot.[350] Her letters to Susan
reported not only Harriot's marriage to an Englishman, William Henry
Blatch, but also encouraging talks with the forward-looking women of
England and France whom she hoped to interest in an international
organization. Repeatedly she urged Susan to join her, to meet these
women, and to rest for a while from her strenuous labors. The
possibility of forming an international organization of women was a
greater attraction to Susan than Europe itself, and when Rachel Foster
suggested that she make the journey with her, she readily consented.
"She goes abroad a republican Queen," observed the Kansas City
_Journal_, "uncrowned to be sure, but none the less of the blood
royal, and we have faith that the noblest men and women of Europe will
at once recognize and welcome her as their equal."[351]
In London, Susan met Mrs. Stanton, "her face beaming and her white
curls as lovely as ever." Then after talking with English suffragists
and her two old friends, William Henry Channing and Ernestine Rose,
now living in England, Susan traveled with Rachel through Italy,
Switzerland, Germany, and France, where a whole new world opened
before her. She thoroughly enjoyed its beauty; yet there was much that
distressed her and she found herself far more interested in the
people, their customs and living conditions than in the treasures of
art. "It is good for our young civilization," she wrote Daniel, "to
see and study that of the old world and observe the hopelessness of
lifting the masses into freedom and freedom's industry, honesty and
integrity. How any American, any lover of our free institutions, based
on equality of rights for all, can settle down and live here is more
than I can comprehend. It will only be by overturning the powers that
education and equal chances ever can come to the rank and file. The
hope of the world is indeed our republic...." To a friend she
reported, "Amidst it all my head and heart turn to our battle for
women at home. Here in the old world, with ... its utter blotting out
of women as an equal, there is no hope, no possibility of changing her
condition; so I look to our own land of equality for men, and partial
equality for women, as the only one for hope or work."[352]
Back in London again, she allowed herself a few luxuries, such as an
expensive India shawl and more social life than she had had in many a
year, and she longed to have Mary enjoy it all with her. She visited
suffragists in Scotland and Ireland as well as in England and
occasionally spoke at their meetings.[353] Here as in America
suffragists differed over the best way to win the vote, and even the
most radical among them were more conservative and cautious than
American women, but she admired them all and tried to understand the
very different problems they faced. Gradually she interested a few of
them in an international conference of women, and before she sailed
back to America with Mrs. Stanton in November 1883, she had their
promise of cooperation.
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.