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.
[Illustration: Susan B. Anthony at her desk]
* * * * *
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.
[Illustration: Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton]
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 Honoré 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.
[Illustration: Elizabeth Smith Miller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and
Susan B. Anthony]
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.