The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: An Awful Hush, 1895 to 1906 9780813553450
The “hush” of the title comes suddenly, when first Elizabeth Cady Stanton dies on October 26, 1902, and three years late
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The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
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k••••••••w•••••••••'
The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
S volume vi S
An Awful Hush 1895 to 1906
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Ann D. Gordon, editor
Michael David Cohen, assistant editor Sara Rzeszutek Haviland, assistant editor Andy Bowers, editorial assistant Katharine Lee, editorial assistant
rutgers university press new brunswick, new jersey
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 1815–1902. [Selections. 1997] The selected papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony / Ann D. Gordon, editor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: v. 6. An awful hush, 1895 to 1906 isbn 0-8135-2320-6 (alk. paper) 1. Feminists—United States—Archives. 2. Suffragists—United States— Archives. 3. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 1815–1902—Archives. 4. Anthony, Susan B. (Susan Brownell), 1820–1906—Archives. 5. Feminism—United States—History—19th century—Sources. 6. Women—Suffrage—United States—History—19th century—Sources. i. Anthony, Susan B. (Susan Brownell), 1820–1906. ii. Gordon, Ann D. (Ann Dexter) iii. Miller, Tamara Gaskell. iv. Title. hq1410.a25 1997 016.30542—dc21 97-5666 cip British Cataloging-in-Publication information is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2013 by Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. text design: Judith Martin Waterman of Martin-Waterman Associates, Ltd. Manufactured in the United States of America
• Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. • Upper left, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, c. 1900 Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Coline Jenkins/Elizabeth Cady Stanton Trust. Lower right, Susan B. Anthony, February 1905. Photograph by Grace A. Woodworth, Rochester, New York. Negative 1394b. Archives of the Seneca Falls Historical Society, N.Y.
To the memory of Sally Ride 1951–2012 She embodied woman’s rights and inspired us all.
“Methinks I hear some say, surely you will not contend for equality here. Yes, we must not give an inch lest you claim an ell, . . .” Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1848
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1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Contents Illustrations xvii Preface xix Acknowledgments xxi Introduction xxv Editorial Practice xxxiii Abbreviations xxxix • 19–20 December 1895 • 21 December 1895 • 21–22 December 1895 • 14 January 1896 • 18 January 1896 • 24 January 1896 • 28 January 1896 • 28 January 1896
9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.
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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.
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c. 31 January 1896 5 February 1896 10 February 1896 10 February 1896 29 February 1896 4 March 1896 11–12 March 1896 13 March 1896 13–14 March 1896 c. 17 March 1896 20 March 1896 April? 1896 9 April 1896 1–2 May 1896
Diary of SBA 1 ECS to Pilgrim Mothers’ Dinner 3 Diary of SBA 5 SBA to Frances E. Willard 7 Frances E. Willard to SBA 9 ECS to Clara Bewick Colby 10 ECS to Clara Bewick Colby 13 Remarks of SBA to National-American Woman Suffrage Association 14 Interview with SBA by Nellie Bly 24 ECS to Clara Bewick Colby 41 SBA to Clara Bewick Colby 44 SBA to ECS 47 ECS to Editors, Critic 48 Grace Channing-Stetson to ECS 51 Diary of SBA 54 Remarks by SBA to Meeting in Los Angeles 55 Diary of SBA 57 Interview of SBA 59 SBA to Mary McHenry Keith 60 SBA to ECS 61 SBA to Lillie Devereux Blake 63 Diary of SBA 66
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co n t e n t s
23.
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3 May 1896
24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.
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3–4 May 1896 14 June 1896 24 June 1896 3 July 1896 24 July 1896 26 July 1896 1 August 1896
31. 32. 33.
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1 August 1896 4 August 1896
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11 August 1896 15 August 1896 20 August 1896 26 August 1896
52.
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53.
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13 February 1897 21 February 1897
34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.
Lecture by SBA at A.M.E. Zion Church 68 Diary of SBA 70 Theodore W. Stanton to ECS 71 Harriot Stanton Blatch to ECS 74 SBA to Harriot Stanton Blatch 75 ECS to Theodore W. Stanton 76 SBA to Clara Bewick Colby 78 Article by SBA: Woman Suffrage Must Be Non-Partisan 81 SBA to Jessie Anthony 83 SBA to Jenkin Lloyd Jones 84
SBA to Clara Bewick Colby 85 • ECS to Charles P. Somerby 89 • ECS to Clara Bewick Colby 90 • Article by ECS: Specially Inspired Men 92 • 29 August 1896 SBA to Jessie Anthony 94 • 8 September 1896 SBA to ECS 95 • 8 September 1896 ECS to William McKinley 98 • 19 September 1896 SBA to ECS 101 • before 20 September 1896 ECS to Editor, New York Journal 103 • 22 September 1896 Mary S. Anthony to ECS 104 • 30 September 1896 SBA to Mary S. Anthony 105 • 16 October 1896 Interview of SBA 107 • 1–3 December 1896 Diary of SBA 109 • 4 December 1896 Remarks by SBA to National Council of Women 111 • 5 December 1896 Article by ECS: The Woman’s Bible 113 • 24 December 1896 SBA to Lillie Devereux Blake 115 • 4 January 1897 SBA to Caroline Bartlett Crane 117 • c. 8 January 1897 SBA to ECS 118 • 29 January 1897 Meeting of National-American Woman Suffrage Association 119 ECS to SBA 124 Remarks by SBA to Cuban Hospital Relief Association 127
co n t e n t s 54. 55. 56.
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57. 58.
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59. 60. 61.
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62. 63.
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64.
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65. 66. 67.
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68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.
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28 September 1897 5 October 1897 10 October 1897 20 October 1897 29 October 1897 November 1897 16 November 1897 26 November 1897 1 December 1897 27 December 1897 29 December 1897 1 January 1898 18 January 1898 26 January 1898 26 January 1898 14 February 1898
84.
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14 February 1898
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26 February 1897 12 March 1897
SBA to Rachel Foster Avery 128 SBA to Elizabeth Smith Miller 132
27 March 1897 8 April 1897 2 May 1897
Theodore Tilton to ECS 134 SBA to Frances E. Willard 135 Article by ECS: Recalled by the Grant Pageant 137 SBA to Lydia Coonley Ward 140 SBA to Daniel R. Anthony 141 Article by ECS: Reading the Bible in the Public Schools 143 ECS to Margaret Bryan Shelby 150 Speech by SBA to Berkshire County Historical Society 151
9 May 1897 26 May 1897 June 1897 30 June 1897 29 July 1897 23 August 1897 7 September 1897 8 September 1897 c. 21 September 1897
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SBA to Elizabeth Smith Miller 158 SBA to ECS 160 SBA to Anna H. Shaw 161 ECS to Clara Bewick Colby, with enclosures 168 Isabel Howland to SBA 168 SBA to Isabel Howland 170 Isabel Howland to SBA 172 Verse by ECS for daughter’s birthday 173 ECS to Harriot Stanton Blatch 174 Article by ECS: Two Valuable Gifts 174 Mary S. Anthony to SBA 176 ECS to Elizabeth Root 177 SBA to ECS 179 ECS to Lucinda Hinsdale Stone 181 John Swinton to ECS 182 ECS to SBA 183 SBA to Rachel Foster Avery 184 ECS to Theodore W. Stanton 185 Frances E. Willard to SBA 186 Remarks by SBA to National-American Woman Suffrage Association 188 Address by ECS: Our Defeats and Our Triumphs 190
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co n t e n t s
85. 86. 87.
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17? February 1898 28 February 1898
Helen Appo Cook to SBA 203 ECS to Editors, Woman’s Journal
88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.
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8 March 1898 25 April 1898 9 May 1898 11 May 1898 17 May 1898 21 May 1898 24 May 1898 27 May 1898 30 May 1898 14 June 1898
ECS to Olivia Bigelow Hall 209 SBA to Jane Lathrop Stanford 210 ECS to Marietta Holley 213 SBA to Business Committee 213 ECS to Wendell P. Garrison 216 Article by ECS: War or Peace 218 Florence Kelley to ECS 222 SBA to Business Committee 224 SBA to Elizabeth Smith Miller 235 Robert K. Beach to SBA 238
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9 July 1898
98. 99.
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30 July 1898 10 September 1898
100. 101.
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102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111.
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Article by ECS: Bible as a Moral Guide 239 ECS to Clara Bewick Colby 241 Article by ECS: Woman’s Position in the Bible 243 ECS to Victoria Woodhull Martin 244 Remarks by SBA to meeting on coeducation 246 Marietta Holley to ECS 247 Robert G. Ingersoll to ECS 248 SBA to Emmeline Woodward Wells 249 SBA to ECS 250 ECS to SBA 253 SBA to Ida Husted Harper 253 SBA to Clara Bewick Colby 256 SBA to Anna H. Shaw 257 Diary of SBA 259 SBA et al. to House Committee on Elections 259 Diary of SBA 261 SBA to Robert R. Hitt 263 Diary of SBA 264 ECS and SBA: Open Letter to Thomas B. Reed 268
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112. 113. 114. 115.
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116.
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117.
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4 October 1898 7 October 1898 14 October 1898 14 October 1898 30 October 1898 2 December 1898 c. 4 December 1898 7 December 1898 17 December 1898 c. 23 December 1898 1 January 1899 2 January 1899 2–6 January 1899 7 January 1899 7–13 January 1899 14 January 1899 14 January 1899 15 January 1899
206
Diary of SBA 269 Appeal: Petition for Women of Hawaii
270
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co n t e n t s 118. 119. 120.
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121. 122. 123. 124. 125.
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15 January 1899 before 13 February 1899
Diary of SBA 271 ECS to Editor, New York Sun
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c. 4 March 1899 6 March 1899 9 March 1899 15 March 1899 17 March 1899 27 April 1899
Interview with ECS 273 Henry B. Blackwell to SBA 275 William F. Channing to ECS 276 SBA to Mary Hutcheson Page 279 SBA to Clara Bewick Colby 280 Speech by SBA to National-American Woman Suffrage Association 281
126.
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3 May 1899
127. 128.
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3 May 1899
Resolution by ECS for National-American Woman Suffrage Association 288 Interview with ECS 289
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129.
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12 May 1899 13 May 1899
130. 131. 132.
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133. 134.
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135. 136. 137. 138.
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139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144.
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14 June 1899 14–22 June 1899 24 June 1899 21 July 1899 22 July 1899 26 July 1899 23 October 1899 31 October 1899 10 November 1899
272
SBA to Rachel Foster Avery 291 SBA to Herbert S. Stone and Company 295 ECS to Lillie Devereux Blake 296 Diary of SBA 298 Article by ECS: A Trailing Dress and No Pocket 300 ECS to William Lloyd Garrison, Jr. 302 Article by ECS: The Woman’s Suffrage Association 303 William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., to ECS 306 SBA to Clara Bewick Colby 307 Samuel Gompers to SBA 310 Remarks by SBA to New York State Federation of Women’s Clubs 312 Emily Parmely Collins to ECS 314 Statement by ECS 314 SBA to Samuel Gompers 315 SBA to John F. Shafroth 317 John F. Shafroth to SBA 318 Interview with ECS 318
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12 November 1899 c. 20 November 1899 29 November 1899 2 February 1900 4 February 1900 7 February 1900
145.
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12 February 1900
Report and Remarks by SBA to NationalAmerican Woman Suffrage Association 319
146.
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13 February 1900
Testimony by ECS to House Committee on Judiciary 321
147.
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15 February 1900
Verse by ECS for SBA’s birthday
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325
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148.
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March 1900
149. 150.
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151. 152. 153. 154.
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12 March 1900 between 12 & 24 March 1900 14 March 1900 31 March 1900 15 April 1900 3 May 1900
155.
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28 May 1900
156.
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3 June 1900
157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167.
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168. 169. 170. 171. 172.
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173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178.
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Article by ECS: Are Homogeneous Divorce Laws in All the States Desirable? 327 SBA to George F. Hoar 333 ECS to Lillie Devereux Blake 335 George F. Hoar to SBA 336 SBA to Priscilla Bright McLaren 338 SBA to Laura Clay 340 Remarks by SBA to Political Equality Club 344 Remarks by SBA to New England Woman Suffrage Association 345
Article by ECS: M’Kinley and the Women 346 5 June 1900 Ida Husted Harper to ECS 348 7 June 1900 SBA to Anna O. Anthony 351 11 June 1900 SBA to ECS 352 25 July 1900 SBA to Mary McHenry Keith 354 3 September 1900 ECS to Editor, New York Tribune 355 8–11 September 1900 Diary of SBA 357 6 October 1900 Josephine Shatz to SBA 362 10 November 1900 Diary of SBA 362 11 November 1900 SBA to ECS 363 22 November 1900 SBA to Fannie Rosenberg Bigelow 364 before 28 November 1900 ECS to Editor, New York Evening Post 365 29 November 1900 ECS to Editor, New York Sun 367 28 December 1900 SBA to Carrie Chapman Catt 370 1 January 1901 Interview with SBA 374 2 January 1901 SBA to L. Burt Anthony 378 19 January 1901 Book Review by ECS: Life and Letters of Thomas Huxley 380 2 February 1901 ECS to Editor, New York Sun 381 15 February 1901 ECS to Booker T. Washington 383 19 February 1901 ECS to Lillie Devereux Blake 384 27 February 1901 SBA to Alice Alt Pickler 386 4 March 1901 SBA to William Van Benthuysen 387 8 March 1901 SBA to Fannie Rosenberg Bigelow 389
co n t e n t s 179. 180. 181.
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182. 183. 184.
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185. 186. 187.
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188. 189. 190. 191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197.
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198. 199.
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200. 201.
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18 February 1902 19 February 1902
202.
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27 February 1902
203. 204. 205.
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1 April 1902 8 April 1902 20 April 1902
206. 207. 208. 209.
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before 9 March 1901 2 April 1901
ECS to Editors, Woman’s Journal 390 ECS to Harriot Stanton Blatch 392
11 April 1901 14 April 1901 May 1901 18 May 1901
Ida Husted Harper to ECS 393 SBA to Clara Bewick Colby 396 Article by ECS: Rich and Poor 398 Speech by SBA to Rochester Council of Women 400 SBA to Catharine Waugh McCulloch 401 ECS to Elizabeth Boynton Harbert 403
3 July 1901 25 July 1901 4 August 1901 16 August 1901 27 August 1901 August 1901 6 November 1901 13 November 1901 27 November 1901 5 December 1901 15 December 1901 20 January 1902 22 January 1902 26 January 1902 12 February 1902
23 June 1902 15 September 1902 25 September 1902 30 September 1902
SBA to Anna E. Dann 405 SBA to Anna E. Dann 407 SBA to Anna E. Dann 408 John C. Norton to ECS 410 SBA to Henry A. Baker 411 ECS to Theodore W. Stanton 412 SBA to William C. Gannett 413 Article by ECS: Education Will Do It 413 SBA to Emily Howland 416 M. Carey Thomas to SBA 418 ECS to Editor, New York Evening Post 420 ECS to Ida Husted Harper 421 Remarks by SBA to International Woman Suffrage Conference 422 Remarks by SBA to Senate Committee 423 Remarks by SBA to National Council of Women 425 Remarks by SBA to National Congress of Mothers 426 SBA to Elizabeth Lowe Watson 427 ECS to Clara Bewick Colby 429 Article by ECS: A Defence of Woman’s Tears 430 SBA to Anna H. Shaw 432 ECS to SBA 433 Harriot Stanton Blatch to SBA 434 ECS to Ida Husted Harper 435
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co n t e n t s
210. 211.
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September 1902 10 October 1902
212.
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13 October 1902
213. 214. 215. 216.
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15 October 1902 21 October 1902 22 October 1902 25 October 1902
217. 218.
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before 26 October 1902 26 October 1902
219.
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27 October 1902
220. 221. 222. 223. 224. 225.
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28 October 1902 28 October 1902 28 October 1902 31 October 1902 28 November 1902 22 December 1902
226. 227. 228. 229. 230.
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231. 232.
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233. 234.
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235. 236.
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237. 238.
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26 January 1903 4 February 1903 before 19 February 1903 11 March 1903 18 March 1903 18 March 1903 29 March 1903 Spring 1903 28 April 1903 29 April 1903 25 May 1903 9 June 1903 12 June 1903
International Declaration of Principles 437 ECS to Editor, New York Evening Post 440 Article by ECS: How Shall We Solve the Divorce Problem? 441 Florence Beeton Everett to ECS 446 ECS to William R. Hearst 447 ECS to Theodore Roosevelt 448 ECS to Edith Carow Roosevelt, with enclosure 449 SBA to ECS 451 Telegrams from Harriot Stanton Blatch to SBA 452 Article by ECS: An Answer to Bishop Stevens 452 SBA to Friend 454 SBA to Ida Husted Harper 455 Lavina A. Hatch to SBA 456 SBA to Clara Bewick Colby 457 SBA to Mary McHenry Keith 459 Margaret Richardson Sievwright and Christina K. Henderson to SBA 461 Interview with SBA 462 SBA to Elizabeth Smith Miller 465 SBA to meeting on disfranchisement 467 Carrie Chapman Catt to SBA 468 Business Committee to Editor, TimesDemocrat 469 Robert J. Burdette to SBA 473 SBA and Mary S. Anthony to Anna Dann Mason 474 Harriot Stanton Blatch to SBA 476 Remarks by SBA to meeting on disfranchisement 477 SBA to Elizabeth Smith Miller 478 Inscriptions by SBA to Adella Hunt Logan 479 Theodore W. Stanton to SBA 480 William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., to SBA 481
co n t e n t s 239. 240. 241.
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242. 243. 244. 245. 246. 247. 248. 249. 250. 251.
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252. 253. 254. 255. 256.
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SBA to Margaret A. Haley 482 SBA to Herbert Putnam 483
22 July 1903 24 July 1903 30 July 1903 17 November 1903 12 December 1903 15 December 1903 4 January 1904 19 January 1904 15 April 1904 before 28 May 1904
Ainsworth R. Spofford to SBA 486 SBA to Ainsworth R. Spofford 487 SBA to Helen Leslie Gage 488 Speech by SBA to Judean Club 493 SBA to Elizabeth Browne Chatfield 494 SBA to Elizabeth Smith Miller 496 Last Will and Testament of SBA 500 SBA to Clara Spalding Ellis 501 SBA to Robert L. Stanton 502 SBA to Anna Dann Mason 504
17 June 1904 c. 26 July 1904 6 September 1904 4–8 October 1904 12 October 1904 14 October– 8 November 1904 before 12 November 1904
SBA to Mary Lewis Gannett 506 Interview with SBA 508 SBA to Jane Cobden Unwin 511 Diary of SBA 514 SBA to Catharine Waugh McCulloch
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258. 259. 260. 261.
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262. 263. 264. 265. 266. 267. 268. 269. 270.
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17 December 1904 22 December 1904 3 January 1905 28 January 1905 28 January 1905 11 February 1905 20 February 1905 24 February 1905 24 February 1905
271.
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24 April 1905
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before 6 July 1903 18 July 1903
257.
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12–19 November 1904 c. 2 December 1904 after 3 December 1904 12 December 1904
516
Diary of SBA 518 SBA to Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association 519 Diary of SBA 521 SBA to Anna Osborne Anthony 524 Albert J. Beveridge to SBA 527 Remarks by SBA to Rochester Council of Women 528 SBA to Aletta H. Jacobs 531 SBA to Elizabeth Smith Miller 532 Thomas C. Platt to SBA 534 SBA to Mary McHenry Keith 534 SBA to George W. Martin 538 SBA to Julia Dodson Sheppard 539 SBA to Lucy Browne Johnston 541 SBA to Fannie Rosenberg Bigelow 543 SBA to Political Equality Club of Rochester 544 SBA to Ida Husted Harper 545
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272. 273. 274.
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275. 276. 277. 278.
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co n t e n t s
25 April 1905 3 May 1905
Interview with SBA 549 SBA to Charles K. Gallup 550
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25 May 1905 c. 12 June 1905 22 June 1905 3 July 1905 28 July 1905
279.
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30 July 1905
280. 281. 282.
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20 October 1905 6 November 1905
SBA to Ida Husted Harper 552 SBA to Ellen Clark Sargent 553 SBA to Anna Dann Mason 554 Interview with SBA 555 Remarks by SBA at Woman’s Clubhouse 558 Conversation between SBA and Celia Coyle 559 Henry A. Baker to SBA 562 SBA to Booker T. Washington 562
283. 284. 285. 286. 287.
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2 December 1905 8 December 1905 3 January 1906 8 January 1906 20 January 1906 8 February 1906
288.
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15 February 1906
289.
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28 February 1906
290.
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2 March 1906
291. 292.
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6 March 1906 13 March 1906 Index 583
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Samuel Gompers to SBA 564 SBA to Elizabeth Smith Miller 565 SBA to Rush Rhees 566 SBA to Grace A. Woodworth 568 Jenkin Lloyd Jones to SBA 569 College Evening of National-American Woman Suffrage Association 570 Remarks by SBA at birthday celebration 577 Lucy E. Anthony to Ida Husted Harper 579 Lucy E. Anthony to Elizabeth Smith Miller 580 Statement to press about SBA’s health 581 Mabel Nichols to Maude Nichols 581
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Illustrations “In Memoriam Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” Pearson’s Magazine Fannie Rosenberg Bigelow Hester C. Jeffrey Mary S. Anthony “What Shall We Do with Our Ex-Presidents?—Susan B. Anthony Knows” Students at Tuskegee Institute Susan B. Anthony in Portland, Oregon Elizabeth Smith Miller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, Geneva, New York Business Committee, National-American Woman Suffrage Association, Warren, Ohio Elizabeth Cady Stanton Margaret McLean Baker, Guelma L. Baker, and Susan B. Anthony, San Diego, California Nora S. Blatch, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriot Stanton Blatch Susan B. Anthony, Ukiah, California Ellen Wright Garrison and William Lloyd Garrison, Jr. Women in class of 1903, University of Rochester Susan B. Anthony at her desk, Rochester, New York Elizabeth Cady Stanton at her desk, New York City Funeral of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, New York City
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Preface
T
his is the sixth and final volume publishing selected papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) and Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906). Like the earlier volumes, this one builds upon the work of Patricia G. Holland, Ann D. Gordon, Gail Malmgreen, and Kathleen McDonough in preparing the microfilm edition, Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (1991). The underlying search for the papers of Stanton and Anthony is described in detail in the Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: Guide and Index to the Microfilm Edition (1992). This series brings the most important documents of that comprehensive collection to print. The Selected Papers focuses on the public careers of two co-workers in the cause of woman suffrage, beginning with the start of their activism in the 1840s and pursuing the story of their ideas, tactics, reputations, and impact until the end of their lives in the twentieth century. Volume six draws on the papers dating from late 1895 to March 1906. It documents the last accomplishments of women whose leadership stretched back more than half a century; it follows the search for their successors, the telling of their stories, their gifts to libraries, and their deaths. It shows them pressing for woman suffrage while the nation went to war, constructed an overseas empire, and disfranchised voters at home.
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Acknowledgments
W
ith this volume, the series is complete. The stream of students who made this series possible has come to an end. Loyal donors can direct their gifts elsewhere. Our own flood of puzzling and curious queries directed to librarians, genealogists, fellow editors, and archivists dries up. We thank them all for carrying this project along sometimes difficult roads to its conclusion. The title page credits the people whose work is most evident in the pages of this volume. Many more people contributed time and talents to specific tasks. Current and former graduate students at Rutgers who helped at different times on this volume are Mekala Audain, Danielle Bradley, Lesley Doig, Vanessa Holden, Travis Jeffres, Kathleen Manning, Rebecca Tuuri, Dara Walker, Shannen Dee Williams, and Jasmin A. Young. Megha Vyas, an undergraduate intern who returned later for employment, could be counted on for attention to detail. We acknowledge in the notes the archivists, librarians, and local historians across the country who answered queries about people, places, and sources. Pardon the favoritism if we salute Mary M. Huth, who retired from the University of Rochester Libraries while this volume was in preparation. Our collaboration with—indeed, dependency upon—Mary Huth dates back to 1982. In addition, we thank Sam Blanchard for reading newspapers in Columbia, Missouri; Colin Woodward for reading the Humanitarian at the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College; Elizabeth Churchich for reading in the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris; and Cornelia Ruedin for research in Rochester. The Pacific Northwest provided us two, skilled volunteers with long associations with this editorial project, Barbara C. Manning and Allison L. Sneider. And thank you to Karen Holmes, of the Grace Hudson Museum and Sun House in Ukiah, California, who understands that the ties that bound Clarina Nichols to Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton should not be broken by time. We extend our gratitude to the owners of manuscripts who allowed us to publish items from their collections: Special Collections and Archives, Auburn University Libraries; the California Historical Society; the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; the Huntington Library; ^
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Stanford University Archives; Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto Libraries; Western History and Genealogy Department, Denver Public Library; Meadville Lombard Theological School; Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library; the Newberry Library; Frances E. Willard Memorial Library; Kansas Historical Society; Special Collections, University of Kentucky Libraries; Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University; Massachusetts Historical Society; Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College; University Archives and Regional History Collection, Western Michigan University; Local History Room, Kalamazoo Public Library; Minnesota Historical Society; Missouri History Museum Archives; Aletta, Institute for Women’s History, Amsterdam; Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library; Manuscript and Archives Division, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations; Local History and Genealogy Department, Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County; Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, University of Rochester Library; Susan B. Anthony House, Rochester; Seneca Falls Historical Society; Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries; Jefferson County Historical Society; Special Collections, Bryn Mawr College Library; Archives, South Dakota State Historical Society; Archives Division, Wisconsin Historical Society; West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, England; Lisa Unger Baskin; and Coline Jenkins. This volume was produced with major financial support from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the National Historical Publications and Records Commission; Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey; and Patricia G. Holland. We have also received generous gifts from the following: Paul E. Barnes, Lisa Unger Baskin, Irene Bowers, Catherine Conheady, Vijaylaxmi Dargan, Carol DeBoer-Langworthy, Ellen C. DuBois, Faye E. Dudden, Nancy S. Green, Honora Horan, Mary M. Huth, Susan G. Lane, John E. Little, Carol Nadell, Wendy D. Rieger, Carol A. Roper, Stacy Kinlock Sewell, Fredrick E. Sherman, Sarah L. O. Smith, Claire M. Stern, and Judith Wellman. Many people working at Rutgers should be named for the ways they have kept the details of daily life manageable—handling basic things like parking, interlibrary loan, care and feeding of an ancient boiler, grant accounting’s hurdles, and cranky computers. For frequency of encounters and senses of humor that survive the ridiculous, I single out for special
ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s
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thanks Sebastiano Balliro, Mary DeMeo, Barry Lipinski, Donna Piazza, and Jeanne Schaab. Without you, no edition. My son, Daniel E. Marketti, deserves special mention. Once upon a time, a long time ago, he, at roughly three years of age, shouted in a fit of pique, “There is too much Susan B. Anthony around here!” Oh, if he had only known. His thirty years have been spent in the company of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton by proxy. He gave up resisting, helped out along the way, and has been heard to compete for the title of most senior staff member of the Stanton and Anthony Papers. Thanks. Finally, a bow to our hidden staff member, the designer of the edition and typesetter of all six volumes, Judith Martin Waterman. Thank you.
U A. D. G.
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Introduction
T
he American people learned about plans for governing the newly annexed islands of Hawaii when President William McKinley delivered to Congress the recommendations of the Hawaiian Commission on 6 December 1898. 1 Susan B. Anthony read and saved the summary published the next day in Rochester’s Democrat and Chronicle, underlining its most startling propositions about race and sex. 2 Perhaps she anticipated the proposal that only male citizens of the United States would be eligible to vote for members of a new bicameral legislature, though with that recommendation, the Hawaiian Commission disregarded the achievement of full suffrage for women in four of the United States. But she could not have predicted that the commissioners would take the extra precaution to protect male-only government by adding that only male citizens could serve in that legislature. The commission’s plan was, Anthony would soon point out, more exclusive than any state’s constitution in the country. It was as if the history of her life’s work never happened, as if the contemporary agitation for equal rights did not exist. Over the next several weeks, the report to Congress became the keystone of Anthony’s fears that her younger co-workers lacked the political perspective to lead. Their failure to respond to the Hawaiian Commission revealed their blindness to a current wave of reaction against woman’s rights. In a letter to Anna Shaw, she described “the tendency shown all round of a reactionary sentiment—action—” 3 Hawaii was but the first of many islands suddenly under American control for which governments would be required. Moreover, political rights in Hawaii or any island were 1 Hawaiian Commission. Message from the President of the United States, 55th Cong., 3d sess., Senate Doc. 16. 2 Susan B. Anthony scrapbook 28, Rare Books Division, Library of Congress. Anthony underlined these remarkable words about race, quoted in the article from the commission’s report: “All white persons, including Portuguese and persons of African descent, and all persons descended from the Hawaiian race, . . . are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.” 3 Document number 109 within.
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not the only contest. The news in December 1898 brought weekly evidence of assaults on women’s economic gains in the private and public sectors. Even their relatively secure claim as teachers in the nation’s public schools was the target of a respected, “progressive” commission headed by University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper. 4 “Our souls ought all to be on fire—& yet no one seems awake to the threatening signs of the times,” Anthony told Shaw. Those “signs” pointed to multiple assaults on the gains made in woman’s rights. 5 For woman suffragists, it had been a year of festivities—launched inauspiciously on the day in February the battleship Maine blew up in Havana’s harbor. Five decades of work since the woman’s rights convention at Seneca Falls were celebrated in 1898 against the background of war with Spain. At the first event, on 15 February 1898, delegates to the NationalAmerican Woman Suffrage Association’s annual meeting in Washington listened to an address titled “Our Defeats and Our Triumphs,” sent from New York by their honorary president, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. For the younger activists in attendance she counseled, “the pioneers have brought you through the wilderness in sight of the promised land; now, with active, aggressive warfare, take possession.” But along with her calls to “agitate the whole community,” Stanton reiterated her progressive faith, her conviction that the ground women gained, they would hold. Pointing to the four states where women already voted, the two dozen states where women enjoyed partial suffrage, and the many women across the country holding elected office, Stanton opined, “[t]he suffrage question is practically conceded. . . . The opposition with their flimsy protests and platitudes are wandering in fields where long ago the harvests were gathered and garnered.” 6 4 On Harper’s attempt to deploy more men into the classrooms of public
schools while cutting the salaries of women already teaching, see Chicago Educational Commission, Report of the Educational Commission of the City of Chicago, Appointed by the Mayor, Hon. Carter H. Harrison, January 19th, 1898 (Chicago, 1899), and Kate Rousmaniere, Citizen Teacher: The Life and Leadership of Margaret Haley (Albany, N.Y., 2005). 5 The events of the month of December 1898 are also linked in “Women Should Wake Up, Says Susan B. Anthony. Here’s a Bugle Blast from the Famous Champion of Her Sex’s Rights,” New York Herald, 15 January 1899, in Patricia G. Holland and Ann D. Gordon, eds., Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (Wilmington, Del., 1991, microfilm), reel 39, frame 467. Cited hereafter as Film. 6 The speech is document number 84 herein.
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Notwithstanding Stanton’s worldview, at year’s end, with the war won, island territories conquered, and peace commissioners at work on a treaty, American politicians pushed back against women’s gains, proposed to surround male-only government with new protection, and openly aspired to undo gains made in the history of woman’s rights. All this was happening at a moment of transition in leadership in the woman suffrage movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) (ecs) stepped down from the presidency of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association in 1892. Her successor, Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) (sba), had just decided to step down at the start of 1900. The jolt from the Hawaiian Commission heightened sba’s anxieties about that decision. “I wonder if when I am under the sod—or cremated & floating in the air,” she fumed in a letter to Clara Colby, “I shall have [to] stir you & others up— How can you not be on fire.” What kind of reform movement could not see danger in the commission’s proposal, its bad precedent for how to govern an empire, and simultaneous threats to take back economic rights? The Hawaiian Commission inadvertently provided a test of her successors’ ability to spot danger, and they were failing. “I really believe I shall explode if some of you young women dont wake up,” she continued, “and raise your voices in protest against the impending crime of this nation upon the new Islands it has clutched from other folks.” 7 From this despair of December 1898, sba turned to the woman she knew shared her indignation and outrage: she began her last collaboration with ecs. There are three texts about governing the new empire of islands that date from January 1899 in New York City and bear the names of ecs and sba. 8 The first of these texts calls upon the Speaker of the House of Representatives to oppose the legislation based on the Hawaiian Commission’s report. The open letter sounds the historical high note that ecs played to sum up fifty years since Seneca Falls. “The marked feature in the legislation of the present century has been the growing liberality of our laws for women,” they wrote, “until in four States they have been crowned with all the rights of American citizens.” Then it swoops down to the new depths 7 Document number 108 within. 8 In addition to documents number 115 and 117 herein, see “The Women of
Hawaii. Woman Suffrage in Our New Possessions,” Woman’s Journal, 28 January 1899, Film, 39:500. There is reason to doubt that sba had a part in writing it. Dates and topics necessitate placing its composition after her departure from New York City. A schedule of their earlier collaboration is in documents number 112 and 114.
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under consideration in Congress. That bill, they added, “proposes more restrictive legislation for woman than any yet tried in the United States.” Their second text consisted of a petition to Congress and an appeal to women to sign it. Again, they stressed the need to protect women’s accomplishments and history. To pass the Hawaiian bill “would be to ignore all the steps of progress made during the last fifty years,” they warned. Historians have difficulties with this moment in women’s history. To be insulted and impelled to protest the creation of male-only governments in the new empire is, twenty-first-century scholars suggest, to collaborate in the imperial project. 9 From a similar premise, Samuel Gompers called out sba on this choice in 1899. Long able to count on Gompers and the American Federation of Labor for suffrage petitions to Congress, this year sba sent along as well her petition to open government to women in the island empire. In reply, Gompers scolded that to make the request “is to recognize that the government of the United States has the right to foist itself upon the people of those islands, . . . You will not make friends for the cause of woman’s suffrage by following the course to which I refer, I imagine.” 10 For all she respected Gompers, sba did not accept him as a craftsman of women’s political strategy. She pointed out that the position of women, disfranchised, therefore helpless and powerless in regard to the policy of the government, either as to war, or its ownership of the Islands, is quite unlike that of men who do have power, . . . All that we women can do in the matter, is to beg of Congress, that in whatever it does or recommends to be done relative to the government of those Islands, the basis shall be one of justice and perfect equality of rights and opportunities to all the inhabitants, women included. 11 9 The idea is pervasive. See one example in the fine book, Allison L. Sneider,
Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 (New York, 2008), 91. “Primarily concerned with preventing U.S. imperialism from extending the boundaries of what she called ‘male oligarchy’ overseas, rather than the antidemocratic nature of empire itself, Anthony . . . substituted a critique of patriarchy for a critique of empire and in the process lent the NAWSA’s tacit approval to the U.S. imperial project.” 10 Document number 137 within. 11 Sba to S. Gompers, 14 November 1899, American Federation of Labor Papers, Additions of 2012, Archives Division, Wisconsin Historical Society, not in Film.
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Sba’s view of her citizenship here is both international and national. She bears a responsibility, despite her disfranchisement, for what her government does in the world and for actions her government takes that work against the equality of women. Gompers questions the precedence she assigns to woman’s equal rights, in a classic and familiar attack. Sba no doubt detected in Gompers, as modern readers might in the academic literature, a whiff of Wendell Phillips in 1865 fulminating that women’s claims must give position to a more pressing correction in the body politic. Once again, this was a metaphorical “negro’s hour,” as Phillips put it. 12 Most of the stories in An Awful Hush are tied to this intense moment in December 1898 and January 1899. War and empire complicated the whole nation’s understanding of what it meant to talk about the consent of the governed. What starts as a flash of realization that women could not hold the ground they gained without vigilance and struggle settles into a steady beam of experience in the last years of the two leaders. Fifty years of work made a dent in the laws and customs of a society “based upon the invidious distinctions of sex,” 13 but sba and ecs faced the unprecedented challenge of handing off leadership without breaking the ties between their long march through the nineteenth century and a rising twentieth-century agitation. Even the woes of old age, evident throughout the volume, played a part in this last collaboration. In her diary, after four days of writing together, sba wrote of ecs, “Well it is very sad to see her so nearly blind—that she cannot even read over what she writes.” That too becomes a sad story in this volume. Everybody dies here. The words “an awful hush” describe how sba found life after ecs died in 1902. That death surprised the world: ecs had lived so long indoors, out of sight of her followers, and, at the same time, published so much so regularly, that few anticipated the end, least of all sba. In fact, sba expected to die first. Though younger, she was living by a grim rhythm that carried her through travels from California to Berlin and Maine to New Orleans on the upbeats and knocked her out with strokes and shingles and arrhythmias on the downbeats. That she still lived was 12 On this conflict at the start of Reconstruction, see Ann D. Gordon, ed., In
the School of Anti-Slavery, 1840 to 1866, vol. 1 of The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (New Brunswick, N.J., 1997) 549n, 564–65. Cited hereafter as Papers. 13 Document number 117 herein.
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the news, and her final days were tracked daily in newspapers across the country. In the second “awful hush” of sba’s death, the makers of myths were heard before the body cooled. Readers of this volume will not find one of sba’s most famous phrases, “Failure is impossible,” said to be her parting public words. There is a reason: the editors have not found that phrase in reports of her last public appearances in Baltimore and Washington. The sentiment is there, but not the words. The phrase seems to originate in the eulogy delivered by the Reverend Anna Howard Shaw at sba’s funeral on 15 March 1906. On that occasion, Shaw claims to quote “a follower” who urges that sba’s “talismanic words, the last words she ever uttered before a public audience ‘Failure is impossible’ should be inscribed on our banners and engraved on our hearts.” 14 Further along in her remarks, Shaw uses the phrase in her own voice as a call to action. 15 Other memorialists in the United States and England picked up the phrase from Shaw. 16 Most modern readers discover the phrase in Ida Husted Harper’s biography of sba, but it is worth noting that Harper did not put the phrase into sba’s mouth immediately. 17 A journalist and close friend for a decade, Harper was a skilled publicist and unabashed author of mythology, who surely appreciated the power of the phrase. Yet she hesitated, waiting until she published her third volume of the Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony in 1908. That two-year pause is another indication of the phrase’s cloudy origins. 14 A. H. Shaw, Eulogy, typescript, Series X, Mary Earhart Dillon Collection,
Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. For her research on “Failure is impossible,” we are especially indebted to Lesley Doig. 15 See also Shaw’s message to the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, meeting in Copenhagen in June 1906, that closes, “What wonder that the last words of inspiration to her followers uttered by this unconquered and unconquerable woman were ‘Failure is impossible.’” (Series X, Mary Earhart Dillon Collection, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.) 16 See, for example, Harriet Taylor Upton to New York State Woman Suffrage Association, n.d., in New York Suffrage Newsletter 7 (April 1906): 55; and Ignota [Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy], “Susan B. Anthony. An Appreciation and an Appeal,” Westminster Review 165 (May 1906): 547. 17 The phrase is not used in Ida Husted Harper, “Susan B. Anthony,” Independent 60 (22 March 1906) 676-82, or in Harper, “Susan B. Anthony: The Woman and Her Work,” North American Review 182 (April 1906): 604–616. Two years later, the phrase appeared in Ida Husted Harper, Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (1908; reprint, New York, 1969) 3:1408–9.
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U Six of the seven children of ecs were alive at the time this story begins, two of whom lived abroad. They had recently gathered together in New York for the celebration of their mother’s eightieth birthday at the Metropolitan Opera House. 18 In this volume they surface in the documents as players in a small number of particular stories that reveal very little about how this family fared. When the book opens, ecs, widow, lives in an apartment on West Sixty-first Street, New York City, with a daughter and a son, Margaret Livingston Stanton Lawrence (1852–1930), a widow and teacher at Teachers’ College, and Robert Livingston Stanton (1859–1920), a bachelor, lawyer, and publisher of his mother’s books. The trio later relocates to West Ninety-fourth Street. They are joined for several years by granddaughter Nora Blatch, who moved to New York City to attend the Horace Mann School. Nora’s mother, Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch (1856–1940), visits often from her home in Basingstoke, England, not only on family business but also on a journey of investigation about conditions in American factories. She moves to the United States in 1902, just before her mother’s death. Theodore Weld Stanton (1851–1925) is a less frequent visitor from his homes in Paris and southern France. Glimpses of his role as an overseas extension of the Stanton family in Paris come from news of his hosting such friends of his parents as Theodore Tilton and Frederick Douglass and adding a friendship with Booker T. Washington. Notably, on one of Theodore’s American visits, he delivers his younger daughter to Rochester so that she may get to know sba. Closer to home, Henry Brewster Stanton, Jr., (1844–1903) lived with his young wife in the city, while Gerrit Smith Stanton (1845–1927) and his wife lived on Long Island. All the children reached their mother’s side before her death in October 1902.
18 Ann D. Gordon, ed., Their Place Inside the Body-Politic, 1887 to 1895, vol. 5
of The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (New Brunswick, N.J., 2009), 719–31. Harriot Stanton Blatch was unable to make the trip from England.
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Editorial Practice Principles of selection
This volume selects less than ten percent of the documents available for the period of time from December 1895 to March 1906. Documents are printed in their entirety with two exceptions: entries from diaries are selected from the larger document; ecs’s and sba’s contributions to meetings are occasionally excerpted from the fullest coverage available. The high cost of producing and publishing historical editions creates an editorial imperative to bulldoze most of the trees while leaving an attractive and useful forest in place. The selection of documents to include in each volume often boils down to arbitrary choices between equally valuable items. There are, however, guidelines. Selection is governed first by the mission to document the careers of the two co-workers. Drawn from the papers of two people, the selections must next represent differences in the documentation of each one. Although writings by ecs and sba have priority, incoming mail is included if it documents the other voice in longstanding friendships with ecs or sba or supplies unusual evidence about their lives. The dominant stories evident in the documents of any year or era are also retained. The inclusion of discussions in which people other than ecs and sba participate reflects the editors’ conviction that in the battle of ideas waged by these women, exchanges with opponents and allies give critical evidence about political style, intellectual influences, and differences of opinion that the principals might otherwise have failed to mention. A considerable “selection” of documents for the years of this volume occurred long before the editors began their work. Even before her death in 1902, letters written by ecs are in very short supply. Ecs is heard primarily in her public voice as a writer. The papers of sba are much fuller, but diaries are again missing. None for 1902 and 1905 are known.
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Arrangement Documents are presented in chronological order according to the date of authorship, oral delivery, or publication of the original text. Documents dated only by month appear at the start of the month unless the context in surrounding documents dictates later placement. Documents that cover a period of time, such as diaries, are placed at the date of the earliest entry, and the longer text is interrupted for the placement of other documents that fall within the same period of time. If a diary entry appears on the same date as another document, it is assumed that the entry was written at day’s end. When two or more documents possess the same date, ecs and sba authorship takes precedence over incoming mail, and sba’s papers appear before those of ecs unless the context dictates otherwise. Selection of text Most documents in this edition survive in a single version. When choices were required, original manuscripts took precedence over later copies, and the recipient’s copy of correspondence was used. The newspaper to which sba or ecs submitted a text took precedence over newspapers that reprinted it. When letters survive only in transcripts made by editors and biographers, the earliest transcript was used as the source text. Typescripts by Harriot Stanton Blatch and Theodore Stanton took precedence over their published texts; considerable rewriting occurred between the two. For the text of meetings and other oral events, the official report, or in its absence, the most comprehensive coverage, is the primary source text. If reports differ widely, composite reports were created. Additions to or substitutions from a second source are set off by angle brackets. The sources are separated by a semicolon in the endnote. Format Some features of the documents have been standardized when set into print. The indentation of existing paragraphs was consistently set. The dateline of each letter appears as the first line of text, flush to the right mar-
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gin, regardless of its placement in the original. The salutation of letters was printed on one line, flush left. Extra space in the dateline or salutation indicates the author’s line break. The complimentary close of letters was run into the text itself, regardless of how the author laid it out, and signatures were placed at the right margin beneath the text. The dash is uniformly rendered even though the lengths vary in the originals. Each document is introduced by an editorial heading or title that connects the document to ecs or sba. Following the text, an unnumbered endnote describes the physical character of the document and the source or owner of the original. The endnote also explicates unusual physical properties of the document and explains the uses made of square brackets in the transcription. In the case of diary entries, this note appears at the end of the series. Numbered notes follow the endnote, except that numbered notes for diary entries follow each entry. Transcription The editors strive to prepare for print the most accurate transcription that reproduces the format of the original as nearly as possible. However, the greater the remove from the author, the less literal is the representation. Letters and diaries. The editors retained the author’s punctuation, including the absence of customary symbols; emphasis by underlining, although not occasional use of double or triple underlines; spelling and capitalization; mistakes; abbreviations; superscripts; and paragraphing, or its absence. The author’s form of dating was retained. Opening or closing quotation marks have been supplied in square brackets when the author neglected to enter them. Emendations in the original text are marked by symbols to show cancelled text, interlineations, and other corrections and additions. A minimum number of exceptions were allowed when the interlineation obviously resulted from slip of the pen or thought, as when an infinitive was clearly intended but the “to” was added above the line. Strike outs and other erasures are indicated with a line through the text. Interlineations, above or below the line, are framed in up and down arrows. Text from the margin is moved into place with an editorial notation about the original location. Sba’s dashes can usually be distinguished as pauses or full stops, and the
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distinction is represented by spacing. The em-dash is flush to the words on either side in a pause; extra space is added after the dash at a full stop. Sba made no visible distinction when capitalizing letters “a,” “m,” and “w,” and in haste, often lost the distinction for other letters. When her customary practice could not be found, the editors resorted to standard usage. Haste also affected sba’s ending syllables. Her rendition of “evening” became “evenng” and then something resembling “eveng.” A similar evolution occurred with the “ly” ending. These compressions and contractions were ignored and the invisible letters supplied. When sba kept her diary in commercial appointment books, the printed date is set in capitals and small capitals to distinguish it from her entry. Ecs’s letters contain a form of implied punctuation; if a comma or period were required and she had reached the right margin of her paper, she omitted the punctuation. Rather than supplying what she left out, extra space was introduced into the text, larger for a full stop. The Typewriter. With money from the National-American, sba hired secretarial help off and on after 1890 and dictated some letters to be typed. She did not easily cede control of her correspondence, and most of her typed letters show her intervention with a pen, as she checked the typist’s punctuation, revised her own sentences, and scribbled postscripts. To preserve this collaboration between sba and her clerks, new procedures were required. For typewritten incoming letters, handwritten corrections are silently incorporated into the typed text. Sba’s typed letters are published as emended texts, without indication of the collaboration between author and typist. Substantial additions she made, usually positioned like postscripts, are marked as in her hand. Her revisions are reserved for textual notes: alterations are listed by paragraph and line numbers, referenced to paragraph numbers printed beside the text. The textual notes detail significant changes in wording that sba made, either to improve a phrase or to alter meaning; the notes do not indicate every comma or underline that she added. Printed texts. In printed texts, obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. When new words were substituted, the original wording was recorded in a numbered note. The original titles of articles and appeals were retained as part of the text. The practice of typesetters to use small capitals for emphasis and for highlighting the names of speakers has been ignored. To preserve the emphasis, italics have been substituted.
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Annotation In numbered notes, the editors provide the information they think necessary for readers to understand the document. Editorial notes placed either beneath a document’s heading or interjected in the transcription provide context for texts excerpted from reports of a meeting. To incomplete place and datelines, the editors have added, in italic type within square brackets, the best information available to complete the line. The basis for supplying a date is explained in a note. The numbered notes principally identify references in the text, explain textual complexities, and summarize documents omitted from the edition. People are identified at the first occurrence of their names in the documents. The editors have tried to identify every person and reference, but they have not added notes simply to say “unidentified” or “not located.” Biographical notes about people identified in previous volumes of this series do not recapitulate earlier information; if previous volumes contain useful references to the individual, readers are directed to them. Research on the World Wide Web has become an important part of the editors’ work on annotation, especially for constructing biographies. Rather than citing sources by the Uniform Resource Locator (url) or address in annotation, the editors recorded the name of the database and the host institution. Addresses changed too often. More ephemeral information with no institutional connection was described and copied for retention in the project’s files. Unless otherwise indicated, documents published in this volume may be found at their date in the microfilm edition of the Papers of Stanton and Anthony. A citation to the film (as Film, reel number:frame numbers) appears in the endnote only if the document was filmed at a different date. Film citations are included for documents mentioned within the numbered notes. An indication that a text is “not in Film” signifies that it has been acquired since publication of the microfilm edition. Textual Devices [roman text] [roman text?]
Text within square brackets in roman type is identified in the unnumbered endnote. The question mark indicates that the editors are uncertain about the text within the square brackets.
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[roman date] [italic text] [italic date] ntextp text illegible
e d i to r i a l p r ac t i c e Date when a speech was delivered or an article published. Editorial insertion or addition. Date supplied by editors. In most cases, the basis is explained in a numbered note. Authorial interlineation or substitution. Text cancelled by the author. Text cancelled by author that cannot be recovered. Addition to the source text from a second source.
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Abbreviations
Throughout the volume Elizabeth Cady Stanton is referred to as ecs and Susan B. Anthony as sba. In notes only the National-American Woman Suffrage Association is abbreviated as NAWSA. Abbreviations Used to Describe Documents ALS
U
Autograph Letter Signed
ANS
U
Autograph Note Signed
LS
U
Letter Signed
Ms
U
Manuscript
TL
U
Typed Letter
TLS
U
Typed Letter Signed
Standard References, Newspapers, and Journals Allen
U
Charles Allen, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, 14 vols. (Boston, 1863–1883)
Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie U Historische Commission bei der Königl. Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed., Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, 56 vols. (Leipzig, Germany, 1875-1912) Allibone Supplement U John Foster Kirk, A Supplement to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1891) American Women U Frances E. Willard, American Women: Fifteen Hundred Biographies with over 1,400 Portraits, 2 vols. (New York, 1897) American Women: Standard Biographical Dictionary U Durward Howes, ed., American Women: The Standard Biographical Dictionary of Notable Women, 1939–40 (1939; reprint, Teaneck, N.J., 1974)
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a b b r ev i at i o n s
U
John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 24 vols. (New York, 1999)
Anthony
U
Ida Husted Harper, Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, 3 vols. (1898–1908; reprint, New York, 1969)
Banks, Biographical Dictionary of British Feminists, 1800–1930 U Olive Banks, The Biographical Dictionary of British Feminists, vol. 1, 1800–1930 (Brighton, England, 1985) BDAC
U
Biographical Dictionary of the American Congress, 1774–1971 (Washington, D.C., 1971)
BDAmerEd U John F. Ohles, ed., Biographical Dictionary of American Educators, 3 vols. (Westport, Conn., 1978) BDGov
U Robert Sobel and John Raimo, eds., Biographical Dictionary of the Governors of the United States, 1789–1978, 4 vols. (Westport, Conn., 1978)
BDTerrGov U Thomas A. McMullin and David Walker, Biographical Directory of American Territorial Governors (Westport, Conn., 1984) Booker T. Washington, Papers U Booker T. Washington, The Booker T. Washington Papers, ed. Louis R. Harlan et al., 14 vols. (Urbana, Ill., 1972-1989) DAB
U
Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 20 vols. (New York, 1928–1936)
DAB, Supplement 1 U Harris E. Starr, ed., Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement One, To 1935 (New York, 1944) DANB DNB
U
Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston, eds., Dictionary of American Negro Biography (New York, 1982)
U
Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, eds., The Dictionary of National Biography, 22 vols. (1885–1901; reprint, London, 1973)
Douglass, Papers U Frederick Douglass, The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, ed. John W. Blassingame et al., 5 vols. (New Haven, 1979–1992) 1894. Constitutional-Amendment Campaign Year U New York State Woman Suffrage Association, 1894. Constitutional-Amendment Campaign Year. Report of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association (Rochester, N.Y., 1895)
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Eighty Years U Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815–1897 (1898; reprint, Boston, 1993) Encyclopedia of Mormonism U Daniel H. Ludlow, ed., Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 5 vols. (New York, 1992) Federal Reporter U The Federal Reporter. Cases Argued and Determined in the Circuit Court of Appeals and Circuit and District Courts of the United States, 141 vols. (St. Paul, Minn., 1892–1911) Film
U
Patricia G. Holland and Ann D. Gordon, eds., Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (Wilmington, Del., 1991, microfilm)
Garrison, Letters U William Lloyd Garrison, The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, ed. Walter M. Merrill and Louis Ruchames, 6 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1971–1981) Garrison and Garrison, Life U Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison: The Story of His Life Told By His Children, 4 vols. (New York, 1885–1889) Gompers, Papers U Samuel Gompers, The Samuel Gompers Papers, ed. Stuart B. Kaufman et al., 12 vols. (Urbana, Ill., 1986-2010) History
Hun
U
U Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, et al., History of Woman Suffrage, 6 vols. (vols. 1–2, New York, 1881, 1882; vols. 3–4, Rochester, 1886, 1902; vols. 5–6, New York, 1922)
Marcus T. Hun, Reports of Cases Heard and Determined in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, 92 vols. (New York, 1874–1896)
Kansas Reports U Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of the State of Kansas (Topeka, Kan., 1862–) McPherson, Hand-Book of Politics U Edward McPherson, A Hand-Book of Politics for 1884, 1892 (Washington, D.C., 1884–1892) Mill, Collected Works U John Stuart Mill, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson, 33 vols. (Toronto, Canada, 1963–1991) Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records U on-line images, Mount Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records, Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, NRU National Party Platforms U Kirk H. Porter and Donald Bruce Johnson, eds., National Party Platforms, 1840–1968 (Urbana, Ill., 1970)
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U
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Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer, eds., Notable American Women, 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1971)
NAW Modern Period U Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green, eds., Notable American Women, The Modern Period: A Biographical Dictionary (Cambridge, Mass., 1980) NCAB
U
National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 63 vols. (New York, 1891–1984)
Nebraska Reports U Reports of Cases in the Supreme Court of Nebraska, 143 vols. (Lincoln, Neb., 1860–1943) New York Reports U Reports of Cases Decided in the Court of Appeals of the State of New York, 264 vols. (Albany, 1872–1956) Oxford DNB U H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, on-line edition (Oxford, England, 2004) Papers
U
Ann D. Gordon, ed., Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1, In the School of Anti-Slavery, 1840 to 1866 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1997); vol. 2, Against an Aristocracy of Sex, 1866 to 1873 (New Brunswick, N.J., 2000); vol. 3, National Protection for National Citizens, 1873 to 1880 (New Brunswick, N.J., 2003); vol. 4, When Clowns Make Laws for Queens, 1880 to 1887 (New Brunswick, N.J., 2006); vol. 5, Their Place Inside the Body-Politic, 1887 to 1895 (New Brunswick, N.J., 2009)
Quaker Genealogy U William Wade Hinshaw, Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy, 3 vols. (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1936–1940) Register of Federal Officers U Register of Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval, in the Service of the United States . . . (Washington, D.C., 1901) Report of the International Conference, 1902 U Report First International Woman Suffrage Conference, Held at Washington, U.S.A. February 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 1902 in Connection with and by Invitation of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (New York, n.d.) Report of the International Council of Women, 1888 U Report of the International Council of Women, Assembled by the National Woman Suffrage Association, Washington, D.C., U.S. of America, March 25 to April 1, 1888 (Washington, D.C., 1888)
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Report of the Sixteenth Annual Washington Convention, 1884 U Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, eds. National Woman Suffrage Association. Report of the Sixteenth Annual Washington Convention, March 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th, 1884, With Reports of the Forty-Eighth Congress (Rochester, N.Y., 1884) Proceedings of the Report of the Twenty-fifth Annual Convention, 1893 U Twenty-fifth Annual Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Held in Washington, D.C., January 16, 17, 18, 19, 1893, ed. Harriet Taylor Upton (Washington, D.C., 1893) Report of the Twenty-sixth Annual Convention, 1894 U Proceedings of the Twenty-sixth Annual Convention of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association, Held in Washington, D.C., February 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20, 1894, ed. Harriet Taylor Upton (Warren, Ohio, n.d.) Report of the Twenty-seventh Annual Convention, 1895 U Proceedings of the Twenty-seventh Annual Convention of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association, Held in Atlanta, Ga., January 31st to February 5th, 1895, ed. Harriet Taylor Upton (Warren, Ohio, n.d.) Report of the Twenty-eighth Annual Convention, 1896 U Proceedings of the Twenty-eighth Annual Convention of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association, Held in Washington, D.C., January 23d to 28th, 1896, ed. Rachel Foster Avery (Philadelphia, n.d.) Report of the Twenty-ninth Annual Convention, 1897 U Proceedings of the Twenty-ninth Annual Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association at the Central Christian Church, Corner Ninth and Pleasant Streets, Des Moines, Iowa, January 26th, 27th, 28th, and 29th, 1897, ed. Rachel Foster Avery (Philadelphia, n.d.) Report of the Thirtieth Annual Convention, 1898 U Proceedings of the Thirtieth Annual Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the Celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the First Woman’s Rights Convention at the Columbia Theatre, Twelfth and F Streets, Washington, D.C., February 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 1898, ed. Rachel Foster Avery (Philadelphia, n.d.) Report of the Thirty-first Annual Convention, 1899 U Proceedings of the Thirty-first Annual Convention of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association at the St. Cecilia House, Grand Rapids, Mich., April 27, 28, 29, 30, and May 1, 2, 3, 1899, ed. Rachel Foster Avery (Warren, Ohio, n.d.)
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Report of the Thirty-second Annual Convention, 1900 U Proceedings of the Thirty-second Annual Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Held at the Church of Our Father, Cor. Thirteenth and L Sts, N.W., Washington, D.C., February 8, 9, 10, 12, 13 and 14, 1900, ed. Rachel Foster Avery (Philadelphia, n.d.) Proceedings of the Report of the Thirty-third Annual Convention, 1901 U Thirty-third Annual Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Held at First Baptist Church, Corner 10th Street and Harmon Place, Minneapolis, Minn., May 30 and 31, June 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, 1901, ed. Alice Stone Blackwell (Warren, Ohio, n.d.) Report of the Thirty-fourth Annual Convention, 1902 U Proceedings of the Thirty-fourth Annual Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association held at Washington, D.C., February 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 1902, eds. Alice Stone Blackwell and Harriet Taylor Upton (Warren, Ohio, n.d.) Report of the Thirty-fifth Annual Convention, 1903 U Proceedings of the Thirty-fifth Annual Convention of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association, Held at New Orleans, La., March 19th to 25th, inclusive, 1903, ed. Harriet Taylor Upton (Warren, Ohio, n.d.) Report of the Thirty-sixth Annual Convention, 1904 U Proceedings of the Thirty-sixth Annual Convention of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association, Held at Washington, D.C., February 11th to 17th, inclusive, 1904, eds. Harriet Taylor Upton and Elizabeth J. Hauser (Warren, Ohio, n.d.) Report of the Thirty-seventh Annual Convention, 1905 U Proceedings of the Thirty-seventh Annual Convention of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association, Held at Portland, Ore., June 28th to July 5th, inclusive, 1905 (Warren, Ohio, n.d.) Report of the Thirty-eighth Annual Convention, 1906 U Proceedings of the Thirty-eighth Annual Convention of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association held at Baltimore, Md., February 7th to 13th inclusive, 1906 (Warren, Ohio, n.d.) Rev. SEAP
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Revolution (New York)
U
Ernest H. Cherrington, ed., Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, 6 vols. (Westerville, Ohio, 1925–1930)
South Eastern Reporter
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The Southeastern Reporter, Containing All
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the Decisions of the Supreme Courts of Appeals of Virginia and West Virginia, and Supreme Courts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, 1st ser., 200 vols. (St. Paul, Minn., 1887–1939) Stanton
U Theodore Stanton and Harriot Stanton Blatch, eds., Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences, 2 vols. (1922; reprint, New York, 1969)
Sumner, Works U Charles Sumner, The Works of Charles Sumner, 15 vols. (Boston, 1870–1883) Temperance and Prohibition Papers U The Temperance and Prohibition Papers, Microfilm Edition, eds. Randall C. Jimerson and Francis X. Blouin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1977) United States Reports U United States Reports: Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court, 438 vols. (New York, 1884–) Wallace
WhNAA
U John William Wallace, Cases Argued and Adjudged in the Supreme Court of the United States, 23 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1866–1876) U
Who Was Who among North American Authors, 1921-1939, 2 vols. (Detroit, Mich., 1976)
Who’s Who of British Members of Parliament U Michael Stenton and Stephen Lees, eds., Who’s Who of British Members of Parliament: A Biographical Dictionary of the House of Commons, 4 vols. (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1976–1981) Woman’s Bible U The Woman’s Bible, Parts I & II (1895, 1898; reprint, Boston, 1993) Woman’s Who’s Who 1914 U John William Leonard, ed., Woman’s Who’s Who of America, 1914–1915 (1914; reprint, Detroit, Mich., 1976) Women Building Chicago U Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast, eds., Women Building Chicago, 1790–1990: A Biographical Dictionary (Bloomington, Ind., 2001) WWW1
U
Who Was Who in America, vol. 1, 1897–1942 (Chicago, 1942)
WWW2
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Who Was Who in America, vol. 2, 1943–1950 (Chicago, 1950)
WWW3
U
Who Was Who in America, vol. 3, 1951–1960 (Chicago, 1966)
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Who Was Who in America, vol. 4, 1961–1968 (Chicago, 1968)
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Wyoming Reports U Wyoming Reports; Cases Decided in the Supreme Court of Wyoming, 80 vols. (Casper, Wyo., 1879–1959)
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a b b r ev i at i o n s Collections U
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The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
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From the Diary of SBA [19–20 December 1895]
Thur. Dec. 19, 1895. Politcal PE. Club Sociable Yellow Tea at Mrs Anges T. Probsts 24— Elm street—1 Mrs Mary Jane Holmes2 of Brockport—came to attend sociable— Spent the night with—seemed pleased— Had a large & nice company at Mrs Probsts— Mrs C. C. Catts3 Woman Suffrage Calendars not arrive— but Mrs Sweet4 took orders for 35— 1. Political Equality Clubs were the basic organizational unit of New York State’s woman suffragists. The clubs in Monroe County and Rochester, where SBA’s sister Mary Anthony worked for many years, were deemed among the most effective. At this social with musical entertainment, where money was raised for the state suffrage association, the decorations were yellow, the color that indicated one’s commitment to the cause. For reports of the event, see Film, 34:813–14. Anges Thayer Probst (1851–?) was a daughter of SBA’s old friend John M. Thayer and, like her sister Mary Thayer Sanford, an activist in local, state, and national suffrage societies. Her Swiss husband, John Godfrey Probst, was a locksmith with the firm of Sargent and Greenleaf, where Anges Probst sometimes worked as a bookkeeper. (Federal Census, Buckland, Mass., 1860, and Rochester, 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910, 1920; city directories, 1890, 1895, 1910.) 2. Mary Jane Hawes Holmes (1825–1907) wrote popular, sentimental novels. In Brockport, she was active in women’s temperance and charitable work and in the Episcopal church. She entertained the Monroe County Political Equality Club when SBA was the guest speaker in Brockport in September 1895. (NAW; ANB; Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 1 October 1895, not in Film.) 3. Carrie Clinton Lane Chapman Catt (1859–1947) entered the national suffrage movement in 1890, and by 1895, had amassed unrivaled power in the NationalAmerican Woman Suffrage Association, chiefly as chair of its Organization Committee. To help finance its ambitious plans, the committee issued a suffrage calendar for 1896. (NAW; ANB. See also Papers 5.) 4. Emma Biddlecome Sweet (1862–1951) became SBA’s stenographer and typist in October 1895. The two were related through SBA’s grandmother Hannah Lapham Anthony, the sister of Emma Sweet’s great-grandfather. Sweet moved from Macedon, New York, to Rochester to study stenography and typing and find work more congenial than teaching, and she met and married Fred Gilbert Sweet. SBA employed her off and on over many years. (E. B. Sweet to SBA, 7 September
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1895, and SBA diary, 30 December and account pages for October, 1895, 19 May 1899, Film, 33:80ff, 34:333, 39:13ff; “Emma B. Sweet,” Rochester Regional Library Council website, Western New York Suffragists: Winning the Vote; Emma C. Donk, Life of Emma B. Sweet, typescript, supplied by author.)
Fri. Dec. 20, 1895. At Home Mrs Holmes went to Mr Kents1 to Lunch— & thence with Mrs K. to a reception given by Mrs Thayer2 & Mrs Tom. Raines!!3 Mrs H. opened talk on Mrs Stanton’s Bible—but we soon saw she couldn’t be talked with—she could think it awful to tear down the Christian religion— This was but another proof of my word to Mrs S.—that her Bible talk couldn’t do the bigoted any good—because they shut their eyes & ears against her personally—& it wont do the liberals good—because to them she is simply threshing old straw— It seems simply rouse hatred against Woman Suffrage through her—but it will not harm that in the end— 1. John Howe Kent (1827–1910) was a well-known portrait photographer, a collaborator with George Eastman on development of the Kodak camera, and a director of the Eastman Kodak Company. He lived at 57 South Washington Street with Julia Ainsworth Kent (c. 1840–1916), his wife. (Charles Elliott Fitch, Encyclopedia of Biography of New York [New York, 1916], 2:266–68; Joan Pedzich, “John Howe Kent,” Image 27 [March 1984]: 1–5.) 2. Adeliza Severance Thayer (1823–?) lived at 30 James Street with her husband, John M. Thayer (1827–?), a manager at Sargent and Greenleaf. They moved to Rochester from New England after the Civil War, bringing most of their children with them. Reformers in their own right and good friends of SBA, the Thayers were also the parents of two local suffragists. (Federal Census, Franklin County, Mass., 1860, and Rochester, 1870, 1880; Bezaleel Thayer, Memorial of the Thayer Name, from the Massachusetts Colony of Weymouth and Braintree [Oswego, N.Y., 1874], 58–59.) 3. Agnes Butler Raines (1852–?) was the second wife of Thomas Raines (1842– 1924), a man SBA regarded as one of the city’s most distinguished citizens. Former state treasurer and former county judge, Raines practiced law in Rochester. (Federal Census, 1900; James Clark Fifield, ed., The American Bar: Contemporary Lawyers of the United States and Canada [Minneapolis, Minn., 1918], 470; New York Times, 12 August 1924; Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 12 August 1924; Papers, 5:569.) 4. The European Publishing Company, a business of ECS’s youngest son, published the Woman’s Bible, Part I, early in November 1895. Part I consisted of passages from the Pentateuch that spoke of women, followed by commentaries written by a small band of women selected by ECS for the purpose. In ECS’s scheme for the project, this partial publication was a step in perfecting the commentaries. “Divide the whole into six parts & publish in cheap form, paper cover, as fast as we can get each one ready,” she wrote to one contributor, “then place all in the hands of each member of the Revising Committee say two or three weeks or
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months before we meet for the final revision.” (ECS to Augusta J. Chapin, 6 June 1895, Papers, 5:695–97; Kathi Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible [Ithaca, N.Y., 2001].) 5. After a conversation about the Woman’s Bible on December 9, SBA wrote that Anne and Elizabeth Miller “feel as badly as do I—that the work is not natp all worthy of Mrs S.—& letting down.” (SBA diary, 9 December 1895, Film, 33:80ff.) Y Excelsior Diary 1895, n.p., SBA Papers, DLC.
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ECS to the Pilgrim Mothers’ Dinner1 [before 21 December 1895]
I deeply regret that absence from the city deprives me of the contemplated pleasure of being present on this occasion, realizing, as it does each year, so many long-cherished memories of the birthday of the Republic. Among the many progressive movements inaugurated by Mrs. Devereux Blake2 to enkindle the virtue of patriotism in the hearts of her countrywomen, not one surpasses in tender sentiment the foremothers’ dinner in annually realizing all the heroic struggles of our ancestors. The forefathers have never been neglected. Their great deeds have been celebrated by their sons on many festive occasions, but the mothers were left to slumber on Plymouth Rock, unhonored and unknown, until the President of the Suffrage League seized Gabriel’s horn Dec. 21, 1892, and sounded the clarion note for their resurrection. Having tasted the bitterness of days of persecution, the Pilgrims hoped to secure for their descendants, in the New World, a government and religion of equality and freedom. They desired to plant the tree of liberty in the virgin soil of this vast continent, with room to spread its branches far and wide, so that coming generations under its shelter might learn a lesson of individual rights; but no sooner did they secure peace and prosperity for themselves, than they began to persecute Baptists, Quakers, and the supposed victims of witchcraft. While we linger over a history of these events with deep regret and wonder that the Pilgrims forgot the terms of liberty so dearly bought, let us take heed that, while we glorify their virtues, we do not in religious persecution imitate their vices. The strongest argument made by our most liberal classes of men against
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extending the right of suffrage to women is the dangerous influence against the secular nature of our Government. That there is ground for such fears, I would mention two facts for the serious consideration of those present. Report says that at the time of the Chicago Exposition 100,000 women petitioned Congress to make no appropriation unless the managers pledged themselves to close it on Sunday, the only day the majority of the people could enjoy that magnificent exhibition. Fortunately the petition was unheeded, but the religious bigotry then manifested will not read well on a page of nineteenth-century history.3 Another, though less important blunder, may serve to point a moral in favor of individual freedom. A convention of women, held this morning in Richmond, Va., passed a resolution denouncing the “Woman’s Bible,” and sent it to every newspaper in the country, although they had never sent [for] or read the book.4 A committee of able, educated women saw fit to comment in plain English on those points of the Pentateuch regarding women and the invidious distinction of sex, but the Richmond contingent thought it a desecration of the Bible to comment even on those parts concerning themselves, thus manifesting the same spirit of religious bigotry that burned, drowned, and tortured witches in the seventeenth century. Having enjoyed so many liberties secured by the hardships and sacrifices of our foremothers, we should so act that those who come after us may have higher ideas of individual conscience and judgment than those they bequeathed to us. Above all things, to that end let us abjure religious bigotry, fatal alike to individual and national life. Y New York Times, 22 December 1895. Word in square bracket added by editors. 1. The New York City Suffrage League, the city’s principal suffrage organization, launched the Pilgrim Mothers’ Dinners in December 1892 to rival the New England Society’s annual dinners for male descendants of those who arrived on the Mayflower. Although suffragists organized the event and dominated the entertainment, the luncheons attracted women from all kinds of groups, especially patriotic societies. The tradition lasted until 1906. ECS was invited to speak on “Freedom in Thought,” but she sent this letter instead. It is dated with reference to the dinner on 21 December 1895. (Katherine Devereux Blake and Margaret Louise Wallace, Champion of Women: The Life of Lillie Devereux Blake [New York, 1843], 180–81.) 2. Lillie Devereux Blake (1833–1913), a former president of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association, presided over the New York City Suffrage League and its entertainment. (NAW; ANB. See also Papers 2–5.)
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3. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union made it a special project to petition Congress to close the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 on Sunday, joining the National Reform Association, the Young Men’s Christian Association, and other proponents of state enforcement of a religious sabbath. At the time, ECS had hoped that the National-American Woman Suffrage Association would defend secularism. She is incorrect in stating that Congress ignored the petitions; an appropriation bill in August 1892 required Sunday closing of the fairgrounds. The fair’s directors ignored the provision and were sustained in their action by the Circuit Court of Appeals. (Gaines M. Foster, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865–1920 [Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002], 101–7; Papers, 5:436–42, 495–96, 507–9; U.S. v. World’s Columbian Exposition, 56 Federal Reporter 630 [C.C.N.D. Ill. 1893]; World’s Columbian Exposition v. U.S., 56 Federal Reporter 654 [7th Cir. 1893].) 4. At a quarterly meeting of the Richmond District of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union on 4 December 1895, delegates unanimously passed a resolution condemning the Woman’s Bible. Introduced by Martha Henry Garland Whitehead, wife of Virginia’s Democratic commissioner of agriculture and former congressman, the resolution stated, “That we deplore the issuing by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lillie Devereux Blake, and others of what is known as the Woman’s Bible; that we accept the place given us in God’s Book with joy; that we believe the attempt to mar the perfectness of the Holy Scriptures for personal reasons or self-aggrandizement is a sin. Therefore, that for this movement we have no sympathy—only sincere and sorrowful condemnation.” Reports of the vote appeared in dozens of papers around the country on December 5 and 6. (Richmond Dispatch, 5 December 1895; Lyon Gardiner Tyler, ed., Encyclopedia of Virginia Biography [New York, 1915], 4:44–46.) •••••••••
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From the Diary of SBA [21–22 December 1895]
Sat. Dec. 21, 1895. At home— Writing the last of 40 letters to state Presidents1—begging them not to fail to send on their aux. dues to national treasurer Mrs Upton2—only 9n8p states—up to date had sent on their dues— Sister Mary & self took at Mrs Thayers—her daughter Mrs [blank] Perry3 lives with them had a good talk with Mr T. he had read Mrs. S. Bible—& remarked he thought its purpose was more to destroy belief in its infalibility—than to prove it on the side of equal rights to women— 1. See Film, 34:830, for one of these letters.
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2. Harriet Taylor Upton (1853–1945), daughter of an Ohio congressman, attended the National-American’s convention in 1891 as a delegate and was named to the new Congressional Committee. A year later she chaired the association’s Press Committee, and in 1893, she took over as treasurer when Jane Spofford stepped down. (NAW; ANB. See also Papers 4 & 5.) 3. Emma E. Thayer Perry (1849–?), the oldest child of Adeliza and John Thayer, married in 1866, before her family moved to Rochester. By one account, she lived for a time with her husband in Woodstock, Vermont, though two Perry families seem to be confused. In the 1890s she was described as a widow. When she moved into her parents’ home, she brought her son Edward with her. In 1920, Emma Perry was still in Rochester and still living with members of her family. (Rochester house directories, 1892, 1895; Federal Census, 1920; Thayer, Memorial of the Thayer Name, 58–59.)
Sun. Dec. 22, 1895. At Home— Went to Church—Sister Mary1 stayed at home— Mr Gannett2 preached on the “War Spirit” shown over the Presidents Venezuelan message to Congress3—& seemed to me to ignore the fact that peace—without justice—is no peace—but it stirred all up—some one way & some another— At p.m. went over to Mrs Hallowells4—there came Mrs Piatt5—Wm & Mrs Stout6 & Sister Mary & Sarah Willis—had a good call—came home at 8—took bread & milk & baked sweet apples & went to bed— 1. Mary Stafford Anthony (1827–1907), youngest of the Anthony sisters, retired from the Rochester public schools in 1883. She owned the house on Madison Street where SBA boarded. (Charles L. Anthony, comp., Genealogy of the Anthony Family from 1495–1904 [Sterling, Ill., 1904], 173; Anthony, 3:1489; Rochester Post Express, 6 February 1907.) 2. William Channing Gannett (1840–1923) moved to Rochester in 1889 to take charge of the Unitarian Church, and he and his wife became firm friends of SBA. (William H. Pease, “The Gannetts of Rochester: Highlights in a Liberal Career, 1889–1923,” Rochester History 17 [October 1955]: 1–24.) 3. Grover Cleveland (1837–1908), the twenty-second president of the United States from 1885 to 1889, became the nation’s twenty-fourth president in 1893. Gannett talked about Cleveland’s special message to Congress, 17 December 1895, in which the administration insisted that national interests were at stake in a boundary dispute between Venezuela and British Guyana. Cleveland declared that the United States would settle the dispute itself and prepare to resist any aggression on the part of Great Britain. Much of his message answered British claims that the Monroe Doctrine had no standing in international law and no relevance to the particular case; on the contrary, Cleveland declared, European intervention against the interests of a neighboring republic still threatened American safety. (A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents [New York, 1897], 12:6087–90; Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American
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Expansion, 1860–1898 [Ithaca, N.Y., 1963], 242–83; Charles S. Campbell, The Transformation of American Foreign Relations, 1865–1900 [New York, 1976], 194–221.) 4. Mary H. Post Hallowell (1823–1913) was one of SBA’s close friends and an activist for woman’s rights since the convention at Seneca Falls in 1848. Sarah L. Kirby Hallowell Willis (1818–1914), mentioned below, was a member of the same extended family of reformers in Rochester and also attended the convention at Seneca Falls. (Quaker Genealogy, 3:434, 483, 489, 507; William F. Peck, History of Rochester and Monroe County, New York, from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of 1907 [New York, 1908], 2:1242–44; Nancy A. Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822–1872 [Ithaca, N.Y., 1984], passim; Hewitt, “Amy Kirby Post,” University of Rochester Library Bulletin 37 [1984]: 4–21. See also Papers 1–5.) 5. SBA probably refers to Isabella Hart Pyott (1841–1917), the wife of Henry Harrison Pyott, a nephew of the late William R. Hallowell from Pennsylvania. Harry Pyott, as he was known, had moved to Rochester to work in his uncle’s wool business. (Henry C. Conrad, 1683–1891. Thones Kunders and His Children [Wilmington, Del., 1891], 61, 98; city directory, 1895; gravestones, Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester.) 6. William Hallowell Stout (1858–1931), another nephew of the late William Hallowell, was raised near Philadelphia but moved to Rochester to live with his aunt and uncle before 1880. After his marriage in 1894, he continued to board at the Hallowell house on Plymouth Avenue with his wife, Edith Greenslage Stout (c. 1874–1958). (Thaddeus Stevens Kenderdine, The Kenderdines of America; Being a Genealogical and Historical Account of the Descendants of Thomas Kenderdine, of Montgomery Shire, Wales [Doylestown, Pa., 1901], 167–68; Federal Census, 1880; city directory, 1895; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records.) Y Excelsior Diary 1895, n.p., SBA Papers, DLC.
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SBA to Frances E. Willard1 [Rochester] Tuesday a.m. Jan. 14/[96]—2
My Dear Frances Last evening my sister attended our City W.C.T.U’s annual meeting— and one of its members made a most earnest speech for nthep Bible in our public schools—3 Of course if you persist in taking your National W.C.T.U. to California next October—this sort of talk will be had—& thus the Catholics will be repelled from woman suffrage—4 If you only
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Expansion, 1860–1898 [Ithaca, N.Y., 1963], 242–83; Charles S. Campbell, The Transformation of American Foreign Relations, 1865–1900 [New York, 1976], 194–221.) 4. Mary H. Post Hallowell (1823–1913) was one of SBA’s close friends and an activist for woman’s rights since the convention at Seneca Falls in 1848. Sarah L. Kirby Hallowell Willis (1818–1914), mentioned below, was a member of the same extended family of reformers in Rochester and also attended the convention at Seneca Falls. (Quaker Genealogy, 3:434, 483, 489, 507; William F. Peck, History of Rochester and Monroe County, New York, from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of 1907 [New York, 1908], 2:1242–44; Nancy A. Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822–1872 [Ithaca, N.Y., 1984], passim; Hewitt, “Amy Kirby Post,” University of Rochester Library Bulletin 37 [1984]: 4–21. See also Papers 1–5.) 5. SBA probably refers to Isabella Hart Pyott (1841–1917), the wife of Henry Harrison Pyott, a nephew of the late William R. Hallowell from Pennsylvania. Harry Pyott, as he was known, had moved to Rochester to work in his uncle’s wool business. (Henry C. Conrad, 1683–1891. Thones Kunders and His Children [Wilmington, Del., 1891], 61, 98; city directory, 1895; gravestones, Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester.) 6. William Hallowell Stout (1858–1931), another nephew of the late William Hallowell, was raised near Philadelphia but moved to Rochester to live with his aunt and uncle before 1880. After his marriage in 1894, he continued to board at the Hallowell house on Plymouth Avenue with his wife, Edith Greenslage Stout (c. 1874–1958). (Thaddeus Stevens Kenderdine, The Kenderdines of America; Being a Genealogical and Historical Account of the Descendants of Thomas Kenderdine, of Montgomery Shire, Wales [Doylestown, Pa., 1901], 167–68; Federal Census, 1880; city directory, 1895; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records.) Y Excelsior Diary 1895, n.p., SBA Papers, DLC.
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SBA to Frances E. Willard1 [Rochester] Tuesday a.m. Jan. 14/[96]—2
My Dear Frances Last evening my sister attended our City W.C.T.U’s annual meeting— and one of its members made a most earnest speech for nthep Bible in our public schools—3 Of course if you persist in taking your National W.C.T.U. to California next October—this sort of talk will be had—& thus the Catholics will be repelled from woman suffrage—4 If you only
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opposed the amendment—& resolved & prayed & argued that to carry it would defeat every end you most desired—then your Convention over there might help to draw votes to the amendment!!— Of all the states— there is not one in which your Con. would so militate against carrying a suffrage amendment—as in California— The thought of your having a thought of thrusting W.C.T.U.ism into our California Suffrage Campaign had never crossed my mind—until I met your letter in the San Francisco Papers—5 I am simply appalled— distressed—faint at the very heart—because of your I am sure thoughtless placing of your Con— I cannot believe it possible that you willing knowingly—thinkingly—wish to block the way for the California women’s getting the ballot— Well—it makes me heart sick—that at the close of my fifty years hard work—just when we seem to be reaching the goal—that my—our best friends—the woman—the women—who claim to want the ballot should now so ruthlessly dash the cup from our lips!— Now do—I pray you—as you love justice to woman—change the state—don’t thrust men’s pet vices to the fore—when we are trying to persuade them to vote to give us the political power to make, shape & control all governmental & social conditions— U S. B. A. Y ALS draft, on NAWSA letterhead, Emma B. Sweet Papers, NRU. 1. Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard (1839–1898) presided over the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union from 1879 until her death. She and SBA enjoyed a strong friendship despite the fact that the temperance union’s members often worked at cross purposes to SBA’s ideal of campaigning for the ballot without regard to its uses. (NAW; ANB. See also Papers 3–5.) 2. SBA’s use of “/95” in her date is corrected based on the date of Frances Willard’s reply in 1896. 3. The only meeting of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union on January 13 mentioned in the Rochester press was not a citywide event but a meeting of the Eleventh Ward Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. (Rochester Herald, 14 January 1896; Rochester Union and Advertiser, 14 January 1896.) 4. A campaign was underway in California to organize voters to approve a constitutional amendment to remove the word ‘male’ from the state’s requirements for voting submitted at the election in November 1896. SBA spent the early summer of 1895 in the state carrying out a decision of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association to recognize only one suffrage association in a state with a history of divisions in the movement. In May an Amendment Campaign Association was formed distinct from the state suffrage association, and in July a Joint Campaign
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Committee added a structure for collaboration between those groups. National organizers and lecturers worked in California for the second half of 1895. SBA intended to return to the state in March 1896. (Report of the Twenty-seventh Annual Convention, 1895, pp. 50, 54, and Report of the Twenty-ninth Annual Convention, 1897, pp. 65–70, and SBA to Carrie C. Catt, dictated 17 December 1895, shorthand, transcribed by M. D. Cohen, Film, 33:552ff, 34:637–39, 36:744ff; Susan Scheiber Edelman, “ ‘A Red Hot Suffrage Campaign’: The Woman Suffrage Cause in California, 1896,” The California Supreme Court Historical Society Yearbook 2 [1995]: 49–131; Gayle Gullett, Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women’s Movement, 1880–1911 [Urbana, Ill., 2000], 65–106.) 5. San Francisco Call, 5 January 1896. SBA received a copy of the newspaper and dictated a letter to Frances Willard on January 13. In it, she reminded Willard about earlier attempts to plan how temperance advocates and secular suffragists could cooperate in state suffrage campaigns. She went on to complain that California’s temperance union leaders had not consulted with the state association or the Joint Campaign Committee before extending the invitation. (SBA to F. E. Willard, dictated 13 January 1896, shorthand, Film, 34:790–91, transcribed by M. D. Cohen; Papers, 5:662–64.) •••••••••
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Frances E. Willard to SBA Spartanburg, SC1
Jan. 18, 1896
Dearest Susan, I had not the faintest idea of antagonizing you or the suffrage movement in California. I think I must have felt that what our women in California thought was best would be the thing to do because they are one and all devoted to suffrage and they besought us to go.2 Now I will do my best to have the place of the Convention changed but it will not be a small undertaking—I must consult my sister officers and get the Californians to agree. It had better not be a subject of remark through the press or in your Convention but I promise you I will bring about the change if possible. I am [sideways in margins] exceedingly sorry that I was not awake to the situation for I am very loyal to you and even you are not more devoted to the enfranchisement of women than your ever affectionate sister U Frances. p.s. Please send me word at once as to the date of the voting—perhaps we can fix the date of our Convention later.3
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Y ALS, on letterhead of Woman’s Christain Temperance Union, Department of Juvenile Work, HM 10640, Ida Harper Collection, CSmH. 1. Above the handwritten place line, Frances Willard circled the address printed on her paper and wrote “Permanent Address.” Spartanburg was a stop on Willard’s southern tour in the winter of 1896. (Writing Out My Heart: Selections from the Journal of Frances E. Willard, 1855–96, ed. Carolyn DeSwarte Gifford [Urbana, Ill., 1995], 391–401.) 2. As discussions opened about moving the annual convention, one leader of California’s temperance union advised Willard that “there is not a shadow of a chance for the Am’t to pass.” (Beaumelle Sturtevant-Peet to F. E. Willard, 25 January 1896, and to Katharine L. Stevenson, 30 January 1896, IEWT, from Temperance and Prohibition Papers.) 3. SBA replied on January 23 that less harm would come of a union meeting after the election but it would be better to move the event into another state. She also sent a copy of Willard’s letter to leaders of the California campaign and asked them to meet with state temperance union leaders to press for a move. Other letters between SBA and Willard may have followed. Still in the South on March 15, Willard noted in her journal that SBA “will not hear to our having it there this year even after the voting on suffrage amendment. On the contrary we think the liquor people will vote against it any way & nobody can win the decent element like the WCTU & we believe our soc. has made more converts to woman’s cause than any other but Susan is ‘set’ & I think for good feeling’s sake we would better change.” At a special meeting in Chicago on March 24, Willard prevailed over recalcitrant officers, and the union moved its meeting to Kansas “for Susan B. Anthonys sake.” (SBA to F. E. Willard, 23 January 1896, and SBA to Ellen C. Sargent and Sarah B. Cooper, 23 January 1896, Film, 35:295–99; Willard, Writing Out My Heart, 397, 398n, 401, 403.) •••••••••
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ECS to Clara Bewick Colby1 26 West 61st
N.Y. Jan 24 [1896]
Dear Mrs Colby, I send you a copy of my appeal to the Congressional Committee as you may wish it for The Tribune.2 I have already sent the same to Miss Anthony, but I suppose she will give that to the Con. Record I would like to have you read Mrs Blatch’s letter, & present my resolution on that point,3 unless you already have a better one drawn up. I enclose my letter to Susan for you to read,4 because I want you to know the anima of Rachel Avery.5 It
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was too bad to speak so slightingly of all the writers of the Bible, in order to belabor me. Some of the best writers in this country & England have spoken in a most complimentary nmannerp of your comments. One says my chapter on Balaam & his Ass is one of the best peices of satire in the language6 Frances Lord7 who translated Ibsens plays & is a fine writer, in a long letter I received yesterday says I am reading The Women’s Bible through a second time, & think it most interesting. The style is strong as well as graceful & the humor refreshing. Mrs Avery knows nothing about style. I never saw any thing from her pen, that was not very commonplace. But as Phillips8 used to say, people always talk most of what they do not possess. All this is private not of course to be put in The Tribune!! The Bible will live in spite of Mrs Avery’s opposition. Now the question is are you ready after the convention reports are over to go with Part II John Brights sister & Jacob Brights wife9 have given their names to the committee for Part II. Perhaps we can induce Mrs Avery to write one chapter, to give us a lesson in style Bob wants more papers as you are selling them at five cents apeice I enclose $1.00 for twenty. Yours U E. C. S. Y ALS, Clara B. Colby Papers, Archives Division, WHi. 1. Clara Dorothy Bewick Colby (1846–1916), of Beatrice, Nebraska, and Washington, edited the Woman’s Tribune, one of two newspapers affiliated with the National-American association. (NAW; ANB. See also Papers 3–5.) 2. For the hearing before the House Judiciary Committee on 28 January 1896. See Film, 35:465ff, 522. 3. Harriot Blatch’s letter aimed to quiet war fever in the United States by asserting that Great Britain’s expansion into South America spread democracy, not monarchy. Similar pleas to editors by ECS led to its publication in the Woman’s Journal, 18 January 1896, and the Independent 48 (23 January 1896): 4. See also ECS to William Hayes Ward, 13 January 1896, Film, 35:267. 4. Enclosure missing. 5. Rachel G. Foster Avery (1858–1919), of Philadelphia, served as corresponding secretary of the National-American association and was a close confidante of SBA, willing and able to scold, defy, and disagree with her mentor. On 23 January 1896, she skipped the Executive Committee session at which her report was to be read, leaving Isabel Howland to drop the secretary’s bomb on the meeting. “During the latter part of the year,” Avery wrote, “the work has been in several directions much hindered by the general misconception of the relation of the socalled ‘Woman’s Bible’ to our association. As an organization we have been held responsible for the action of an individual (an action which many of our members,
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far from sympathizing with, feel to be unwise), in issuing a volume with a pretentious title, covering a jumble of comment (not translation, as the title would indicate), without either scholarship or literary value, set forth in a spirit which is neither reverent nor inquiring. If the organization were not in so many quarters held responsible for this work, I should feel it out of place to mention it here, but I should be untrue to my duties as secretary of this association did I fail to report the fact that our work is being damaged, and I recommend that we take some action by resolution to show that the association is not responsible for the individual actions of any of its officers when acting unofficially and as an individual simply.” After a short debate, Clara Colby moved and the delegates agreed to table the entire report. (ANB; NAW; Washington Evening Star, 23 January 1896, and New York Mail and Express, 25 January 1896, Film, 35:433–37, 440. See also Papers 4 & 5.) 6. Num. 22:21–34, and ECS’s commentary, Woman’s Bible, Part I, 112–15. Balaam’s female ass sees the angel of the Lord blocking their path, but because Balaam lacks that vision, she is twice beaten until she speaks to him about her faithful service. “The chief point of interest in this parable of Balaam and his ass, is that the latter belonged to the female sex,” ECS wrote. Like the ass, modern women had “the gift of speech, and they may have messages” from the Lord; “it would be wise for the prophets of our day to admit them into their Conferences, Synods and General Assemblies, and give them opportunities for speech.” 7. Henrietta Frances Lord (c. 1848–?), best known as the English translator of Hendrik Ibsen’s plays The Doll’s House and Ghosts, was ECS’s earliest collaborator on the Woman’s Bible, when she came to the United States from England in 1886. She soon moved to Chicago to study Christian Science, or Mind Cure, and after her return to England in 1887, she published Christian Science Healing: Its Principles and Practice. (Cambridge University, Girton College, Girton College Register, 1869–1946 [Cambridge, England, 1948], 8; Census of Britain, 1881; Allibone Supplement; Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible, passim; Eighty Years, 374, 377, 390–92.) 8. Wendell Phillips (1811–1884) of Boston was a great abolitionist orator who remained a reformer in the postwar period, noted for his advocacy of labor reform, woman suffrage, and greenbacks. (ANB. See also Papers 1–5.) 9. John Bright (1811–1889) was the leading Radical in Parliament for three decades and the senior member of a large, extended political family. (Oxford DNB.) Priscilla Bright McLaren (1815–1906), who lived in Edinburgh, was his sister and an astute politician in her own right. She became a good friend and ally of ECS in 1882. (Oxford DNB; Sandra Stanley Holton, “From Anti-Slavery to Suffrage Militancy: The Bright Circle, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the British Women’s Movement,” in Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives, eds. Caroline Daley and Melanie Nolan [New York, 1994], 213–33.) Their brother Jacob Bright (1821–1899) served as the parliamentary leader of woman suffragists in the early 1870s and advocated for votes for married as well as single women until he left Parliament in 1895. (Who’s Who of British Members of Parliament, vol. 2;
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Banks, Biographical Dictionary of British Feminists, 1800–1930.) Jacob Bright’s wife, Ursula Mellor Bright (1835–1915), shared her husband’s political interests. She joined the pioneering Manchester suffrage society, worked against the Contagious Diseases Acts, and led the Married Women’s Property Committee. (Oxford DNB. See also Papers 4 & 5 for all four members of the family.) •••••••••
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ECS to Clara Bewick Colby 26 West 61st
N.Y. Jan 28 [1896]
Dear Mrs Colby, Do your best not to allow the association as such to take any action on The Woman’s Bible. It would be a great pity for the only liberal association of women we have to cater to the religious bigotry of the age. The spirit of our times is setting in the direction of religious freedom. Prof Goldwin Smith1 in the December number of the North American Review says the Bible is the millstone round the neck of Christianity A resolution denouncing the Woman’s Bible with Susan B. Athony in the chair, would be a stain on Susan’s honesty that would never be forgotten Every one who knows her knows that she is at heart as liberal as I am, & that [a]ny action looking in the other direction is simply policy. If I were Susan I would [re]sign rather than endorse any such proceeding I have just written her a strong letter The best classes of men in favor of woman suffrage are afraid of it, as they say the influence of woman would be against the secular nature of our government & I fear it would We should get woman suffrage at too dear price, in a union of church & state, against which our fathers so carefully guarded I wish I could see you for a long talk If I had had any idea of such a betrayal of principle I should have gone to Washington to2 help strengthen the weak kneeded & oppose the bigots. I stood alone in demanding suffrage in the first convention but after prolonged discussion carried it unanimously at last. I trust Susan will be able to stand firmly for religious equality after fifty years of education I care more that she should be true to her convictions than for all beside. “The literary style of The Penteteuch” is too weak a basis for denunciation the real one “a fear of the popular faith as to the inspiration of the Bible” which is the true ground of the proposed resolution3 i[s] much
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stronger as well as true Make the speech of your life in favor of religious freedom Sincerely yours U Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Do you want any more Bibles. You can have all you want at thirty cents & sell for fifty Do you intend to go on another year, & do you wish to publish Part II from week to week.4 You might take names & addresses for the Bible & send to Bob,5 or he can [sen]d you another package. Y ALS, Clara B. Colby Papers, Archives Division, WHi. Letters in square brackets obscured by ink blots. 1. Goldwin Smith (1823–1910) was an English journalist and historian living in Canada. In “Christianity’s Millstone,” North American Review 161 (December 1895): 703–19, Smith reviewed contemporary ideas about literal readings of the Old Testament and recommended that “the time has surely come when as a supernatural revelation [the early books] should be frankly though reverently laid aside, and no more allowed to cloud the vision of free inquiry or to cast the shadow of primeval religion and law over our modern life.” (Oxford DNB.) 2. Here, at the bottom of her sheet, ECS wrote her initials, though her sentence carries over to a new sheet. 3. Omitted here is an extra quotation mark that ECS penned between this word and the next. 4. ECS refers to Colby’s chronic problems financing the Woman’s Tribune and asks if she will repeat the arrangement by which Colby published the Woman’s Bible, Part I in serial form in the Tribune prior to its publication as a book. 5. Her son, Bob Stanton. •••••••••
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Remarks of SBA to the National-American Woman Suffrage Association
Editorial note: This, the main debate about the Woman’s Bible took place at a public session in the afternoon of 28 January 1896. Lillie Blake tried to find a compromise during an Executive Committee meeting on 25 January 1896, proposing that criticism of the Woman’s Bible be struck from Rachel Avery’s report while “the part stating that the Association had no connection with it be allowed to remain.” SBA made strenuous objection. The two parts of Avery’s attack were equally objectionable, she said, and “[f ]or the association to pass this disclaimer will be but the beginning of an inquisitorial censorship to which there will be no
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end.” Blake withdrew her motion. This report of the debate on January 28 is the most complete, and it served as the chief source for the version of SBA’s remarks in the official report of the proceedings. A peroration from the official report is appended to the source text, set off by angle brackets. (Report of the Twenty-eighth Annual Convention, 1896, pp. 29, Film, 35:304ff.)
[28 January 1896] The interest of the closing afternoon centered in the report of the Resolution Committee.1 The resolutions were discussed, amended in various particulars, and finally adopted as given below. Resolution 8, referring to the Woman’s Bible, was the subject of sharp discussion.2 As soon as it was before the Convention it was moved by Mrs. Colby and seconded by Mrs. Thomas3 of Maryland that it be laid upon the table. The motion was lost. Mrs. Stetson4 moved to amend by striking out all after “religious opinions,” thus dropping off all reference to publications. She thought the Association should not take cognizance of the action of individual members. Mrs. Avery said that anything done by any member which seemed to strike at organization should be taken notice of. She had found no greater obstacle to the work of organizing than the general public misconception of the relation of this organization to the Woman’s Bible. This is the blow from which we are suffering. The organizers write that a great deal of time and strength is wasted in having to make explanations and doors are closed in the faces of the suffragists. Mrs. Colby spoke in favor of the amendment. Mrs. Hallowell5 thought it was not right to particularize in this way. Mrs. Simmons6 of South Dakota moved that the words, “with the so called Woman’s Bible,” be stricken out. This was seconded by Major Merwin.7 Mrs. Whitney8 of St. Louis thought the Woman’s Bible had done harm, but that we could educate people to understand that we were not responsible for it. This resolution commits us to a policy of negation. Mrs. Blake opposed the second amendment, agreeing with a point made by Mrs. Colby that if harm had been done this resolution would not neutralize it, because it would not be known. She said one of the great objections brought forward by opponents of woman’s emancipation is that women are priest ridden and hidebound in their views. If this resolution is carried it will be used against us confirming this belief. Mrs. Johns9 said that many of us were in entire sympathy with Mrs. Stanton. But if those who oppose our disavowing anything were doing field-work and finding doors slammed in their faces; people saying that
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they would not have anything to do with your organization as long as it had anything to do with the Woman’s Bible, they would change their opinion. Miss Keyser10 of New York said she had been engaged in organizing, and she had never had such an objection offered. When people had spoken to her about it she had replied she swore by Mrs. Stanton as a suffragist and not as a theologian. Mrs. Stryker11 of Kansas said, so soon as we make a disavowal of this work, we shall raise such opposition as we have never met before. We should have courage to stand to-day and ignore such objections. Miss Lewis12 of North Carolina and Miss Yates13 both spoke of the difficulty that the “Woman’s Bible” had placed in the way. Major Merwin opposed the resolution. He remembered when it was said of the woman suffragists that they were all free lovers and that men all wore long hair. Suppose the Association had passed resolutions about this, what absurd position it would to-day seem to have occupied. Mrs. Diggs14 said it was the wisdom of life to know when to make exceptions. She thought this was the exception and ought to be taken cognizance of in a resolution. She did not suppose Mrs. Stanton would object to our telling people what she had often said herself that this “Woman’s Bible” was an individual work. Mrs. Addison15 of Kansas said she had had this objection to meet in her work. Mrs. Catt said that the report had gone out all over the country that this matter had come up in the Association, and if we do not pass the resolution it will stand that we are responsible. The “Woman’s Bible” has been seriously injurious to the work of organizing. We all know that if Mrs. Stanton had produced something that had increased our membership we would all have been glad to declare that she was an officer of our association and that we wanted to share the honor with her. The people in a district in the southern part of Illinois had been writing all the year about organizing there. As much work was done there as was done in any of the States that were organized, and everything was ready. After the “Woman’s Bible” was published the report came from this district that they did not dare to take an organizer and we had to withdraw. Every organizer has reported that they met the obstacle of the “Woman’s Bible” everywhere. No lecturer who has not been in the field since December 1 has any right to say that it has not injured us. I have had hundreds of letters expressing this. I should feel sorely discouraged about organization and that we cannot do what we have planned if this resolution is not carried. The condition will be that we shall be considered to have endorsed the “Woman’s Bible” and we shall be put back many years.
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Miss Hatch16 thought we should not hurt Mrs. Stanton by passing it but we might the organization, and she would prefer that we maintained a dignified silence and let the whole thing drop. Mrs. Cary17 said in Brooklyn they had never found that the “Woman’s Bible” had done them harm. Mrs. Chapman18 of Brooklyn called for Miss Anthony who said in substance as follows: The one distinct feature of our Association has been the right of individual opinion for every member. We have been beset at every step with the cry that somebody was injuring the cause. You have endorsed me and I was born a heretic. I consider it great waste of time, and I have told Mrs. Stanton so, to descant on the barbarisms of 6,000 years ago. When people then did a cruel and brutal thing, they claimed to do it by command of God, and so it has been since. I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows. All the way down the history of our movement there has been the same contest on account of religious belief. Just forty years ago one of the most beautiful spirited men on our platform said, “You had better never hold another convention than let Ernestine L. Rose19 stand on your platform,” because that Polish woman who always stood for justice and freedom did not believe in the verbal inspiration of the Bible.20 Did we banish Mrs. Rose? Now a lot of new people come up and go over the same old ground. The question is whether you will sit in judgment on a woman that has written views different from yours. If she had written your views you would not object. There was a person once, in the early days, who wanted us to pass a resolution that we were not free lovers, and I was not more shocked then than I am to-day at this.21 It looks like the reviving of the old censorship. We have been growing larger and broader and I thought we had got away from this. When Lucy Stone22 did not take the name of her husband, many claimed it injured the cause and Olympia Brown23 said once, she had to spend much of her time in explaining that she was legally married. Suppose we had passed resolutions against a woman not taking her husband’s name. Thank God! we had strength not to do it. To pass such a resolution is to set back the hands on the dial of reform. I would say to the organizers, tell them we have all sorts of people in the Association and that a Christian has no more right on our platform than an atheist. When this platform is too narrow for all to stand on, I shall not be on it. I have endured many things in the convention that I thought would harm the cause.24 Who is to set up a line? Neither you nor I can tell but Mrs. Stanton will come out triumphant and that this will
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be the greatest thing ever done in woman’s cause. Lucretia Mott25 at first thought Mrs. Stanton had injured the cause of woman’s rights by insisting on the demand for woman suffrage, but she had sense enough not to pass a resolution about it. When in 1860 Mrs. Stanton made a speech before the committee in favor of a bill making drunkenness a cause for divorce, many people thought she had killed our cause.26 Just think of it. You ought to be able, girls, to stand this and go on with your work and say this has nothing to do with Mrs. Stanton’s views on the Bible. I should be pained beyond expression if we are not broad enough to drop this.27 We need not mind what the newspapers say about it. They are only talking to say something, and not because they care about the Bible. I have yet to see the first editorial word from an honest soul that takes the position that the Bible was directly inspired. You might just as well give up resolving or your hands will be full. Are you going to cater to the whims and prejudices of people that don’t like this or that? The two women that stood by Lucy Stone in keeping her own name were Mrs. Stanton and myself. Who are these people who are troubled about this? They are people that have not thought. If you fail to teach women a broad catholic spirit, I would not give much for them after they are enfranchised. If they are going to do without thinking, they had better do without voting. They are not yet indoctrinated in the broad principles of this Association that knows no creed line. We draw out from other people our own thought. If, when you go out to organize, you go with a broad spirit you will create and call out breadth and toleration. You had better organize one woman on a broad platform than 10,000 on a narrow platform of intolerance and bigotry. 28 The resolution was favored by Mr. Blackwell and Rev. Anna Shaw,29 after which three votes were taken by roll call. The two amendments were defeated and the resolution adopted by 51 to 41 according to the count of this writer but the official record shows 53 to 40.30 The corresponding secretary’s report was then taken from the table and was adopted, save the paragraph criticizing the “Woman’s Bible.” Unfinished business referred to the executive session, Wednesday morning. Y Woman’s Tribune, 1 February 1896; Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual Convention of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association Held in Wash-
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ington, D.C., January 23rd to 28th, 1896, ed. Rachel Foster Avery (Philadelphia, n.d.), 93. 1. Each state’s delegation to the convention selected one of their number to serve on the Resolutions Committee, making in this year a committee of thirtythree members. See Report of the Twenty-eighth Annual Convention, 1896, pp. 17–18, Film, 35:304ff. 2. “That this Association is non-sectarian, being composed of persons of all shades of religious opinion, and that it has no official connection with the so-called ‘Woman’s Bible,’ or any theological publication.” (Report of the Twenty-eighth Annual Convention, 1896, p. 91.) 3. Mary Henrietta Bentley Thomas (1845?–1923), a Quaker from Sandy Spring, Maryland, served as president of the Maryland Woman Suffrage Association from 1894 to 1904. She also contributed the state chapter to volume four of the History of Woman Suffrage. (Lawrence Buckley Thomas, The Thomas Book, Giving the Genealogies of Sir Rhys ap Thomas, K.G., the Thomas Family Descended from Him, and of Some Allied Families [New York, 1896], 60, 200; Federal Census, 1900; Sandy Spring Museum; History, 4:695–700; Friends’ Intelligencer 80 [1923]: 150; Maryland State Archives, Vital Records Indexing Project, Death Record Index, 1910–1951.) 4. Charlotte Ann Perkins Stetson (1860–1935), later Gilman, was already known as a writer, thinker, and strong lecturer before she published her most famous work, Women and Economics (1898). She qualified as a delegate from California at this convention, though she had left the state in 1895. (NAW; ANB.) 5. This was meant to be Caroline Hallowell Miller (1831–1905), widow of the attorney and teacher Francis Miller, who had charge of a school for girls in Sandy Spring, Maryland. An active member of the National association in the 1880s, she gained a reputation as an excellent speaker. Through local, state, and national societies, she pursued suffrage until the end of her life. (Woman’s Journal, 16 September 1905; Friends’ Intelligencer 62 [1905]: 575; History, 3:254–55, 956; 4:20, 72, 114, 147, 263, 267, 296, 695, 697, 1100.) 6. Anna Rebecca Johnson Simmons (1848–1936) was a member of the Resolutions Committee. A graduate of Cornell College in Iowa, she accompanied her husband, Thomas Simmons, to Dakota Territory in 1884 or 1885, when he was sent to organize a Methodist Episcopal church in Faulkton. The National-American sent Anna Simmons into Missouri as a lecturer in 1895, and from that year to 1900, she presided over the South Dakota Equal Suffrage Association. In the twentieth century, she worked more closely with the state and national Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. (SEAP; History, 4:791; C. H. Ellis, History of Faulk County, South Dakota, Together with Biographical Sketches of Pioneers and Prominent Citizens [Faulkton, S.D., 1909], 298, 303–4; South Dakota Death Index.) 7. James Burtis Merwin (1829–1917), delegate to the convention from Missouri, was a noted temperance advocate and former editor of the American Journal of Education, a journal he founded in 1867. (ANB.)
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8. Victoria Geraldine Conkling Whitney (c. 1857–?), a delegate from the Missouri Equal Suffrage Association and a member of the Resolutions Committee, would soon be at the center of a dispute between rival suffrage associations in the state. She was brought to Missouri from Ohio by her widowed mother in the 1870s. An early start as a teacher culminated in a year as a professor at the Missouri School of Mines in Rolla. There she met Professor Geordie Z. Whitney, a graduate of Oberlin College and the University of Michigan. After their marriage in Boston in 1886 and several cross-country trips in search of good health, the Whitneys settled in Springfield, Missouri, just before G. Z. Whitney’s death in May 1889. In her widowhood, Victoria Whitney trained for the law, helped by older brothers who practiced law in Missouri and Kansas. By one account, she was first admitted to the bar in Kingman, Kansas, where Lucius Conkling practiced. Reports of her birth vary widely; the year given here is derived from her marriage registration that gives her age as twenty-nine. (Anne André Johnson, Notable Women of St. Louis, 1914 [St. Louis, 1914]; The History of Pettis County, Missouri, Including an Authentic History of Sedalia [N.p., 1882], 581; Rolla New Era, 1, 22 September 1883, 28 March 1885, 19 May 1888; Registration of marriage, Boston, April 1886, vol. 372, p. 50, Massachusetts Archives; Will of Geordie Z. Whitney, Greene County Archives and Records Center, Springfield, Mo.; St. Louis city directory, 1896; with research assistance from Melody Lloyd and Sherry Mahnken, Missouri University of Science and Technology.) 9. Laura Lucretia Mitchell Johns (1849–1935) was recruited into the Kansas Equal Suffrage Association in 1884, not long after her move to Salina from Illinois, and she won election as president of the association in January 1887. Johns retained that position until 1895. In the meantime, her loyalties and duties grew more complex: she simultaneously served for several years as superintendent of the franchise for the Kansas Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and organized the Kansas Woman’s Republican Association. Johns worked for many years as an organizer for the National-American association, heading this year into Idaho as part of an amendment campaign. Johns and her husband left Kansas for California in 1911. (American Women; Woman’s Who’s Who 1914; Amy A. Mitchell, “Reminiscences of Laura Lucretia Johns,” typescript, Alma Lutz Papers, NPV; “Laura M. Johns,” Chronicle Monthly Magazine 2 [September 1894]: 3–5; Michael Lewis Goldberg, An Army of Women: Gender and Politics in Gilded Age Kansas [Baltimore, 1997], 72–74, 88.) 10. Harriette Amelia Keyser (1841–1936) worked with the Church Association for the Advancement of the Interests of Labor, founded by the Episcopal Diocese of New York, when she entered the New York City suffrage movement during the amendment campaign of 1894. She had supported herself in many ways, including a long stint as a stenographer for executives of the Western Union Telegraph Company. A close ally of Lillie Blake and the New York City Suffrage League, Keyser came to this convention representing the league’s Political Study Club. (WWW4; Erma Conkling Lee, comp., The Biographical Cyclopaedia of American
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Women [1925; reprint, Detroit, 1974], 2:211–16; New York Times, 11 October 1936; 1894. Constitutional-Amendment Campaign Year, 197–98) 11. Althea Briggs Stryker (1860–?), of Great Bend, Kansas, at this date, was a Populist with ambitions as an orator. She worked in the amendment campaign of 1894 and remained active in the equal suffrage association. Her husband, William Stryker, won election as a Populist to be Superintendent of Public Instruction, serving from 1897 to 1899. One story telegraphed to papers outside the state claimed she “was a prominent populist long before her husband was publicly known.” By 1900, the couple had moved to Wellington, Kansas, to publish a newspaper; by 1901, the husband was an editor in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and by 1910, he had been married for six years to a new wife. (Federal Census, 1900, 1910; Kansas Census, 1895; Men of Affairs and Representative Institutions of Oklahoma, 1916: A Newspaper Reference Work [Tulsa, Okla., 1916], unpaginated, s.v. “Stryker, William”; Wichita Daily Eagle, 1 June 1893, 3 March 1895; Kansas City Daily Journal [Mo.], 8 January 1897; Oswego Daily Times, 12 February 1897.) 12. Helen Morris Lewis (1852–1933), a native of South Carolina, was North Carolina’s pioneer in woman suffrage organizing and active with Laura Clay in her Committee on Southern Work. She served on the Resolutions Committee at this convention. Though growth of her state suffrage society was weak, she returned as a delegate to the convention in 1898.(William S. Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991], 4:58–59.) 13. Elizabeth Upham Yates (1857–1942) of Maine was one of the National-American’s busiest lecturers and organizers and a member of this meeting’s Resolutions Committee. A trained elocutionist, she went to China in her early twenties as a missionary for the Methodist Episcopal church. Returning to the United States five years later, Yates became a lecturer for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union before making her mark in the suffrage movement. It is likely that she first joined Lucy Stone’s New England Woman Suffrage Association; she was speaking for that society around Boston in 1890 and 1891. After making her debut as a scheduled speaker at the National-American’s convention in 1893, Yates found herself in heavy demand. She took part in the Kansas amendment campaign of 1894, traveled as a lecturer for the National-American across the South and the Northeast in 1895, and spent months working in the California amendment campaign of 1896. In the twentieth century, Yates settled for many years in Rhode Island, where she presided over the state suffrage association, enrolled as a special student at Brown University, and ran for lieutenant governor. (American Women; Woman’s Who’s Who 1914; History, 4:passim; Historical Catalogue of Brown University, 1950 Edition [Providence, R.I., 1951], 570; New York Times, 25 December 1942.) 14. Annie LePorte Diggs (1848–1916) of Kansas was already a national figure among Populists and a leader of the state suffrage association. She served as its president in 1899. (NAW; ANB; Goldberg, An Army of Women, passim. See also Papers 5.) 15. Kate Rowen Addison (1863–?) of Eureka, Kansas, was elected president of
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the state’s equal suffrage association in 1895 and served four years. In her efforts to rebuild the society after the defeat of 1894, Addison published the Kansas Suffrage Reveille as the association’s organ. Growing up in Iowa, she was the daughter of a former evangelical preacher turned insurance agent who served in the state senate and whose political connections won him consular posts for fourteen years in the Falkland Islands and Chile. Her husband, George W. Addison, whom she married in 1882, was a dealer in livestock. By 1900, the Addisons had moved to Kansas City, Missouri, and still resided there in 1920. (Federal Census, Greenwood County, Kan., 1900, Kansas City, 1910, 1920; Kansas Census, Greenwood County, 1895; B. P. Birdsall, ed., History of Wright County, Iowa, Its People, Industries and Institutions [Indianapolis, 1915], 395–97; Woman’s Who’s Who 1914.) 16. Lavina Allen Hatch (1836–1903), a former school teacher, was a founding member and officer of the National Woman Suffrage Association of Massachusetts, the rival to Lucy Stone’s Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association. Both groups were auxiliaries of the National-American. Hatch also wrote the group’s history for the History of Woman Suffrage. (Julia Ward Howe, ed., Sketches of Representative Women of New England [Boston, 1904], 114–17; Woman’s Journal, 4 April 1903; History, 4:750–54.) 17. Cornelia Hull Cary (1841–1907) was a leader of the Brooklyn Woman Suffrage Association and active for many years in the National-American. A Brooklyn native, she studied art as a young woman and taught art at the Pratt Institute before her marriage in 1871 to Isaac Harris Cary, a businessman active in local politics. (Henry Grosvenor Cary, The Cary Family in America [Boston, 1907], 105; New York Times, 22 December 1907; Woman’s Journal, 4 January 1908.) 18. Mariana W. Wright Chapman (1843–1907), a Brooklyn Quaker, led the borough’s suffrage association and became president of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association at the end of 1896, holding that post until 1902. A state delegate to this convention, she was made a member of the Resolutions Committee. (Quaker Genealogy, 3:67; Inventory of the Family Papers of Mariana Wright Chapman, 1808–1983, PSC-Hi; New York Times, 12 November 1907.) 19. Ernestine Louise Siismondi Potowski Rose (1810–1892), one of the first women to petition for reform in the laws regarding married women’s property, was a freethinker and a powerful speaker on the antebellum woman’s rights platform. Born in Poland and married in England, Rose arrived in New York in the 1830s. After the Civil War, she and her husband settled in England. (NAW; ANB. See also Papers 1–4.) 20. In the official report of this sentence, SBA is made to say “plenary inspiration.” Whether that corrects SBA’s mistake or Clara Colby’s mistake cannot be known. (Report of the Twenty-eighth Annual Convention, 1896, p. 92.) 21. Mary Livermore offered a resolution to that effect at the American Equal Rights Association meeting in May 1869. See History, 2:389. 22. Lucy Stone (1818–1893) and her husband, Henry Browne Blackwell (1825– 1909), known as Harry, shared editorial duties at the Boston Woman’s Journal until Stone’s death and controlled the powerful executive committee of the Ameri-
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can Woman Suffrage Association until it united with the National in 1890. (NAW, s.v. “Stone, Lucy”; ANB, s.v. “Blackwell, Henry Browne” and “Stone, Lucy.” See also Papers 1–5.) 23. Olympia Brown (1835–1926), an ordained Universalist minister, was pastor of the church in Racine, Wisconsin, and the state’s leading suffragist. She married John Henry Willis in 1873 and, like Lucy Stone, retained her maiden name. (NAW; ANB. See also Papers 2–5.) 24. In the official report, this sentence reads: “I have known many things said and done by our orthodox members that I felt exceedingly harmful to our cause.” (Report of the Twenty-eighth Annual Convention, 1896, p. 92.) 25. Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793–1880) helped to plan the woman’s rights convention at Seneca Falls in 1848. Although ECS said nothing of Mott’s opposition to the demand for suffrage in accounts of the meeting, Theodore Tilton, in a biography of ECS, commented that Mott “attempted to dissuade” ECS, and Laura Curtis Bullard, writing later, had Mott say, “ ‘Lizzie, thou wilt make the convention ridiculous.’ ” (NAW; ANB; T. Tilton, “Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” in James Parton, Eminent Women of the Age [Hartford, Conn., 1868], 347; L. C. Bullard, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” in Our Famous Women. An Authorized Record of the Lives and Deeds of Distinguished American Women of Our Times [Hartford, Conn., 1884], 614.) 26. The Tribune gives this year as 1836 in error; other reports use 1860. But SBA scrambles several different sensations ECS caused with her ideas about divorce. She first mentioned divorce for drunkenness in a letter she sent to a women’s temperance meeting in Albany in January 1852, in Papers, 1:191–93. A year later, she elaborated the idea in an appeal sent to another meeting in Albany, in Film, 7:513–14, and SBA described the uproar that appeal caused, in Papers, 1:217–19. The year 1860 came to mind because ECS brought resolutions about divorce reform to that year’s National Woman’s Rights Convention, in Papers, 1:418–31, causing an uproar in the press and among reformers. She did not, however, speak to the legislature about divorce that year. She spoke at a judiciary committee hearing on divorce on 8 February 1861, in Film, 9:1101–9. 27. Ida Harper made significant revisions and additions to SBA’s remarks in Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, 2:853–54, in Film, 35:441. One sentence that only she discovered falls here: “This year it is Mrs. Stanton; next year it may be I or one of yourselves, who will be the victim.” 28. Harper’s version of the conclusion is still more dramatic: “I pray you vote for religious liberty, without censorship or inquisition. This resolution adopted will be a vote of censure upon a woman who is without a peer in intellectual and statesmanlike ability; one who has stood for half a century the acknowledged leader of progressive thought and demand in regard to all matters pertaining to the absolute freedom of women.” (Anthony, 2:854.) 29. Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919), physician, minister, and popular orator, entered the suffrage movement through the American Woman Suffrage Association and the patronage of Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, but her infatuation
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with SBA drew her away. At this meeting she was reelected vice president at large of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association. (NAW; ANB.) 30. According the official published results, the final vote was fifty-three to fortyone. (Report of the Twenty-eighth Annual Convention, 1896, p. 93.) •••••••••
9
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Interview with SBA by Nellie Bly1 [c. 31 January 1896]2
Susan B. Anthony! She was waiting for me. I stood for an instant in the doorway and looked at her. She made a picture to remember and to cherish. She sat in a low rocking-chair, an image of repose and restfulness. Her well-shaped head, with its silken snowy hair combed smoothly over her ears, rested against the back of the chair. Her shawl had half-fallen from her shoulders and her soft black silk gown lay in gentle folds about her. Her slender hands lay folded idly in her lap, and her feet, crossed, just peeped from beneath the edge of her skirt. If she had been posed for a picture, it could not have been done more artistically or perfectly. “Do you know the world is a blank to me,” she said after we had exchanged greetings. “I haven’t read a newspaper in ten days and I feel lost to everything. Tell me about Cuba! I am so interested in it. I would postpone my own enfranchisement to see Cuba free.” I had gone to her to talk of her own great self, not Cuba, so after I told her briefly how matters stood, I instantly followed it up with a question about herself. “Tell me, what was the cause of your being a suffragist? How did you begin?” I asked. “My being a suffragist resulted from many other things that happened to me early in my life,” she answered, unclasping her hands and resting them on the arms of her chair. “I remember the first time I ever heard of suffragists I was bored and complained because my family were so intensely interested in the subject. ‘Can’t you find anything else to talk about?’ I asked my sisters in disgust. That was over fifty years ago.” Her Family History. “Let me tell you of my family, and then you can understand it better,” she continued. “I was born in South Adams, Mass. My mother and my fa-
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ther were born in the same town.3 My father was a Quaker and my mother was a Methodist, so you see at once began the question of education of us children. There were four girls and two boys in the family. My father was a practical man. He believed in the equality of his daughters, even in those days. One of my sisters was a splendid business woman and was a great assistance to my father. He said he would put Anthony & Daughters on his business house if he hadn’t known that such a move would kill him. People were very narrow in those days. “My family were my strong supporters when I first started out,” she said earnestly. “I don’t think I could ever have done my public work, Nellie, if I had had opposition at home. My youngest sister,4 who taught school twenty-six consecutive years, superintended everything I wore, and I was relieved of every home responsibility. Before I would go to a town to speak, ministers would preach against me. They would say I was a member of the Quaker Friends and, while we were good people morally, we had no orthodox religion. When I went home disheartened and told my father, he would say: ‘My child, you should have thought of such a text to quote against them.’ And he could always furnish me with some text that aptly replied to my enemies.” “But what gave you the idea of becoming a suffrage leader?” I urged. Her First Idea of Suffrage. “Many people will tell you,” she answered, smiling, “that from their earliest days they cherished the ideas that eventually became their life work. I won’t. As a little girl my highest ideal was to be a Quaker minister. I wanted to be inspired by God to speak in church. That was my highest ambition. My father believed in educating his girls so they could be self-supporting if necessary. In olden times there was only one avenue open to women. That was teaching. So every one of us girls took turns at teaching. I began when I was fifteen and taught until I was thirty. “I think the first seed for thought was planted during my early days as a teacher. I saw the injustice of paying stupid men double and treble women’s wages for teaching merely because they were men. “But I should go back,” she added. “When I was six years old we moved from Massachusetts to Eastern New York. A company to which my father belonged owned all the town except the tavern. My father was a pattern for capitalists. The men in those days had long hours and worked until 8 in the evening. My father started a free school for them, where they were
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taught from 8 until 9. He also had a Bible class, where they were taught good principles and general intelligence. “Being a Quaker, and public schools being very inferior, we always had a select school. When I was twelve years old my father made and burnt his own brick and built a splendid two-story brick house.5 And my mother boarded all the men engaged in the work. My father also made the woodshed two stories, and the upper floor was used for a schoolroom, where we Quaker children attended. You can know how thorough my father tried to be when he secured for our first teacher Mary Perkins, who graduated at Miss Grant’s school, in Islip,6 about the same time as did Mary Lyon,7 who founded the Holyoke Seminary. “That laid the foundation to our education,” she continued. “You probably know enough of Quakers to know they [think?] of the Bible as if it were a history. Not that it is especially sacred. So you see in what a free way I was brought up.” “Tell me about your first school,” I pleaded. “Were you frightened?” Susan B. Anthony leaned on the arm of the chair and smiled at me. Used to Think She Knew It All. “I wasn’t a bit timid,” she said frankly. “I was only fifteen, but I thought I was the wisest girl in all the world. I knew it all. No one could make me think anything else. The first time I taught was in 1835. An old Quaker lady came to our house for a teacher for her children and several of her neighbors’, making in all a class of eight.8 I accepted the position. I lived in her family, and for teaching the children three hours before dinner and three hours after, I got $1 a week and my board. “After that, as I wanted to finish my own studies, I taught in the summer and went to school in the winter. And my father was the richest man in the county, too. For several terms I taught district school and boarded around among my pupils. My pay was $1.50 a week. In 1838 I gave up teaching and came to Philadelphia to a boarding-school.” 9 “Did you ever whip any of your scholars?” I inquired anxiously. “Oh, my, yes!” she laughed. “I whipped lots of them. I recall one pupil I had. I was very young at the time. I had been warned that he had put the last master out of the window and that he would surely insult me. I went into that school boy when he began on me. I made him take off his coat and I gave him a good whipping with a stout switch. He was twice as large as I, but he behaved after that.
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“In those days,” she said, “we did not know any other way to control children. We believed in the goodness of not sparing the rod. As I got older I abolished whipping. If I couldn’t manage a child I thought it my ignorance, my lack of ability as a teacher. I always felt less the woman when I struck a blow. “You spoke in your article the other day about the way some of our women dress,” Miss Anthony observed, suddenly changing the topic. “Forty-five years ago I tried a reform dress. But I gave it up. People couldn’t see a great intellect under grotesque clothes. Although I saw Horace Greeley10 go before an audience once with one trouser leg inside his boot and one outside!” “For whom were you named?” I asked. “I was named Susan after my father’s sister and after my grandmother on my mother’s side. My grandmother’s name was Susanah, but they never put the ah on me. When I was a young woman there came a great craze for middle initials. We girls scratched our heads to find one. The aunt who named me afterwards married a man named Brownell, and I decided to take her initials for mine.11 So, you see, I named myself. And I am always glad I did. There might be a thousand Susan Anthonys, but the B. makes it distinctive.” Equal Rights with Men. “Now you want to know when I first heard of woman suffrage,” she resumed. “I will tell you. In 1848 I came home at the end of my school term to visit my family. Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Mott had just been in Rochester, and my family could talk of nothing else. I didn’t understand suffrage, but I knew I wanted equal wages with men teachers. However, I had no idea between voting and equality. I went back to my school and forgot all about it. “In 1849 I heard Abby Kelley Foster,12 the Quaker Abolitionist, and I read the reports of a great convention that gave me the first clear statement of the underlying principles of woman suffrage. The next year I went to an abolition meeting at Seneca Falls, where I met Mrs. Stanton, who was head of the Daughters of Temperance society. As I was a schoolma’am, I was asked to make a speech. I’ve got the yellow manuscript now of that speech. There was nothing to it.13 I never could think of points, and I can’t write a speech out. I must have an audience to inspire me. When I am before a house filled with people I can speak, but to save my life I couldn’t write a speech.
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“A little later the Sons of Temperance held a convention at Albany and they invited the Daughters to send delegates.14 I was one of the delegates. They were assembled in the hall and something was under discussion when I arose to address the Grand Worthy Master. ‘The sister will allow me to say,’ he shouted to me, ‘that we invited them here to look and learn, but not to speak.’ “I instantly left the hall, and Lydia Mott,15 cousin of Mrs. Mott’s husband, followed me. We hired a hall and got Thurlow Weed16 to announce in his paper, the Evening Journal, that the Woman’s Temperance Society would hold a meeting that evening. “Hon. David Wright17 and Rev. Samuel J. May, father of Rev. Joseph May,18 of Philadelphia, came to our meeting, and dear Rev. May taught us how to preside. I was made Chairman of the committee, and the first thing I did was to call a State convention. I got the call signed by such distinguished men as Horace Greeley19 and Henry Ward Beecher.20 We held a two days’ convention and Mrs. Stanton was made President and I was Secretary. And it all rose out of the men refusing to let me speak.” Secret of Her Work. “The secret of all my work,” she said, “is that when there is something to do, I do it. I rolled up a mammoth temperance petition of 23,000 names and it was presented to the Legislature. When it came up for discussion one man made an eloquent speech against it. ‘And who are these,’ he asked, ‘who signed the petition? Nothing but women and children.’ Then I said to myself, ‘Why shouldn’t women’s names be as powerful as men’s? They would be if women had the power to vote. Then that man wouldn’t have been so eloquent against temperance, for he would have known that the women would vote his head off.’ I vowed there and then women should be equal. Women could not respect themselves or get men to respect them as equal until they had the power to vote. “In the spring of 1853 we held the first annual convention of the Daughters of Temperance. Mrs. Stanton made an address advocating the right of divorce for women whose husbands drank. It raised an awful hubbub. The prejudiced women said Mrs. Stanton was going to violate the Bible. Same old battle, don’t you see? It resulted in their saying that Mrs. Stanton was not good enough Christian to be their President. I knew if she wasn’t good enough to be their President I wasn’t good enough Christian to be their
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Secretary. So I resigned. ‘If Mrs. Stanton was too much of an infidel,’ I said, ‘I certainly am.’21 “I want to go back to 1852 and tell you about the first convention held by the Temperance Association. We sent some delegates, but the men said that while it was good for women to be members, they could not be received as delegates because it was contrary to the teachings of St. Paul for them to speak. Nearly half the members were ministers, too. Twenty of them got up and fired away at us and then a vote was taken and we were voted down. William H. Burleigh22 said in his report that he ‘hailed the Women’s Auxiliary as a valuable power to temperance.’ Oh! it roused the most scandalous talk! Billingsgate wasn’t in with it. The result was that Mr. Burleigh had to strike the paragraph out. “In 1853 the Teachers’ Convention was held.23 By this time I had gained a little bit of public spirit, but not enough to speak. One man rose and said that men teachers were not respected as men in other professions were. He said teachers were more important than doctors, more necessary than ministers and lawyers. “Notwithstanding all this they were never elected to high offices and were called ‘Miss Nancys.’” How She Knocked Out a West Pointer. “I rose to my feet and said: ‘Mr. President!’ No woman’s voice had ever been heard in the hall before, and everybody sat dumb with amazement. The President was Prof. Davies,24 of West Point, and the author of several school books. He had on what was called a Websterian blue coat, with brass buttons. A very fine affair it was. He caught his thumbs under his arms and, coming to the side of the platform, said: ‘What will the lady have?’ Just as if I had fainted or something of that sort! “I said I wanted the privilege to say a few words. Prof. Davies said that must be at the pleasure of the convention. There were about one thousand women present and about two hundred men, but it was left for the men to decide. After half an hour’s discussion on the question it was decided in my favor, but you can imagine that then my heart was up in my throat. However, I was not going to back out then. I rose to my feet, and this is what I said. I remember it word for word: “Do you not see that so long as society says a woman hasn’t brains enough to be a lawyer, doctor or minister, but has ample brains to be a
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teacher, that every man who becomes a teacher tacitly admits before Israel and the sun that he has sunk to woman’s level? “Three men came down from the platform to shake hands with me and thank me for what I had done, but out of the 1,000 women there was not twenty who were not shocked. I heard them whisper all around me, ‘Who was that creature?’ ‘Do you know her?’ ‘Where does she come from?’ ‘I was so ashamed,’ said one woman, ‘that I wished the floor would open and swallow me.’ “Let me see,” Miss Anthony said, pausing. “That takes the school and temperance conventions. In 1853 I attended a woman’s rights convention in Cleveland and there I got fired up on divorce.25 So many women with families were supporting them on what they could earn by washing and white-washing, the only work besides teaching, for women in those days. But a wife had no right to her wages, her children, or what property she had brought into the partnership. Every thing belonged to the husband. And drunken husbands would not only collect and spend their wives’ wages, but would apprentice the little girl and boy out to the tavern-keeper and their wages would go to pay for his drink.” Devotes Her Life to the Cause of Women. “Mrs. Stanton wrote a magnificent address on divorce, which so inspired me that I said I would burn my bridges and would devote all my life to the cause of women. But while women were the bond slaves of men, it was no use to try to do anything. I knew what ought to be done, and I had the power to get people to do it for me. I sent a call for a woman’s convention. Mrs. Stanton and Lucy Stone were there. That began my suffrage work proper.26 “I had barked up the temperance tree, and I’d barked up the teachers’ tree and I couldn’t do anything. I had learned where our only hope rested. I got petitions signed for property laws and for suffrage. Until 1860 I took them in to Albany every year. Then I borrowed $50 from Wendell Phillips to pay my expenses for a canvas and I went through fifty-four counties.27 I had written one speech in two parts, ‘Legal Disabilities of Women’ and ‘Political Disabilities of Women,’ and I charged a York shilling (12½ cents) admission. When I was through I had paid expenses and had saved $100. I sent Wendell Phillips the $50 I borrowed, but he returned it, saying I had well earned it.” “In 1860 we got the Legislature to pass a law making equal the right of
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guardianship of parents, giving a woman the entire right to the money she earned outside her home and, if her husband died and left little children, giving her the possession of all property and control of children until the youngest became of age.28 “When we gained this we were the happiest mortals you ever saw. Then the war broke out and we thought it selfish to go on with our work during the time. But while we rested the lawyers had our property law repealed.29 In 1866 we banded together again and ever since we have been gaining steadily.” “Do you ever lose hope?” I asked the little silvery-haired warrior. “Never!” she answered stoutly. “I know God never made a woman to be bossed by a man. You know Lincoln30 said, ‘God never made a man good enough to govern other men without their consent.’ I say, ‘God never made a man good enough to govern any woman without her consent.’” “What do you think of women promising to obey?” “It was not to my liking,” Miss Anthony said smiling; “but it is different to-day. Women say, ‘I take him to love, but not as my master—to obey.’ That is fair and equal.” “What is the main thing the suffrage association is trying to get now?” I asked. Battling for the 16th Amendment. “The Sixteenth amendment: ‘Citizens’ right to vote shall not be denied on account of sex,’” was her reply. “What is your greatest ambition now?” “Oh, my!” with a laugh. “The right to vote. Not that I care for myself, but I want to see discrimination against women killed. We have three States in which women have the right now to vote, and we hope before ’97 to have Oregon and Nevada and perhaps California. “I understand,” she added with quick thought, “that Brown, 31 of Utah, is opposed to women’s rights. If he is, and he dares to peep, we’ll never come down to Washington again. “You know that the law says that only idiots, lunatics and criminals shall be denied the right to vote. So you see with whom all women are classed.” “Do you expect to see women enfranchised?” “Yes; if I live fours years longer. I expect to see it. A tidal wave will sweep us right over. Or it may sweep us back. Our work is exactly like the tide of the ocean. We are swept forward and back.”
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“Are you superstitious, Miss Anthony?” I asked, for I adore the little peculiarities of people. “No; never!” she declared, laughing. “But,” she added slyly, “I never see the new moon that I don’t stop to notice whether I see it over the right or left shoulder. Not that I believe it alters anything. And I never start away on Friday that I don’t think of it. Still, I do not change the time of my departure because it is Friday.” “Are you afraid of death?” “I don’t know anything about Heaven or hell,” she answered, “or whether I will ever meet my friends again or not. But as no particle of matter is ever lost, I have a feeling that no particle of mind is ever lost. The thought doesn’t bother me. I feel that nothing is lost and that the hereafter will be managed as this life is managed now.” “Then you don’t find life tiresome?” “Oh, mercy, no! I don’t want to die just as long as I can work. The minute I can’t, I want to go. I dread the thought of being enfeebled. I find the older I get the greater power I have to help the world. I am like a snowball—the further I am rolled the more I gain. When my powers begin to lessen, I want to go. But,” she added, significantly, “I’ll have to take it as it comes. I’m just as much in the hands of eternity now as when the breath goes out of my body.” Some Ideas on Prayer and Marriage. “Do you pray?” “I pray every single second of my life. I never get on my knees or anything like that, but I pray with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men. Work and worship are one with me. I know there is no God of the universe made happy by my getting down on my knees and calling him ‘great.’ “True marriage, the real marriage of soul, when two people take each other on terms of perfect equality, without the desire of one to control the other, to make the other subservient, it is a beautiful thing. It is the truest and highest state of life. But for a woman to marry a man for support is a demoralizing condition. And for a man to marry a woman merely because she has a beautiful figure or face is degradation.” “Do you think woman should propose?” “Yes!” very decidedly. “If she can see a man she can love. She has the right to propose to-day that she did not have some years ago because she
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has become a bread winner. Once a proposal from a woman would have meant ‘Will you please support me, sir?’ And I think woman will make better choices than man. She’ll know quicker what man will suit her and whether he loves her and she loves him. But what strange marriages people make! That matter of love is beyond the ken of mortal. The different classes of minds that get together and marry! All their friends know they are not suited and can never get on together before they marry, but they never suspect it and go blindly on to their fate. It beats me!” Flowers, Music, Art and Poetry. “Do you like flowers?” I asked, leading her into another channel. “I like roses first and pinks second, and nothing else after.” Miss Anthony laughed. “I don’t call anything a flower that hasn’t a sweet perfume.” “What is your favorite hymn or ballad?” “The dickens!” she exclaimed, merrily. “I don’t know! I can’t tell one tune from another. I know there is such a thing as ‘Sweet By and By’ and ‘Old Hundred,’ but if I heard them I couldn’t tell them apart. All music sounds alike to me, but still if there is the slightest discord it hurts me. “Neither do I know anything about art,” she continued, “yet when I go into a room filled with pictures my friends say I invariably pick out the best. I have good company, I always say, in my musical ignorance. Wendell Phillips couldn’t tell one tune from another. Neither could Anna Dickinson.”32 “What’s your favorite motto, or have you one?” “For the last thirty years I have written in all albums, ‘Perfect equality of rights for women, civil or political.’ There is another, one of Charles Sumner’s,33 ‘Equal rights for all.’ I never write sentimental things. There isn’t much sentiment in me. Neither can I read poetry. I cannot make it jingle. I suspect that is also due to my lack of musical ability.” Dress Reform and Bicycling. “What do you think of dress reform?” “I think the newer and better woman, the self-helpful and self-reliant woman, needs clothing that is more suited to her getting about than are the fashions of to-day. I don’t indorse hideous clothes merely because they are less cumbersome, but I think woman must evolve something that will give her freedom in clothes and yet not make her an object of ridicule. Men can wear trousers and change to gowns and caps when on the Judge’s bench. I want women to exercise the same freedom. I tried the experiment of short
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dresses forty years ago and it taught me one thing—you can’t carry two thoughts before the people at the same time. One or the other will suffer. And when a woman is working for a great cause she cannot afford to indulge in peculiar notions. “Let me tell you what I think of bicycling,” Miss Anthony said, leaning forward and laying a slender hand on my arm. “I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. It makes her feel as if she were independent. The moment she takes her seat she knows she can’t get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood.” “And bloomers?” I suggested, quietly. “Are the proper thing for wheeling,” added Miss Anthony promptly. “It is as I have said—dress to suit the occasion. A woman doesn’t want skirts and flimsy laces to catch in the wheel. Safety, as well as modesty, demands bloomers or extremely short skirts. You know women only wear foolish articles of dress to please men’s eyes, any way.” What Will the New Woman Be? “What do you think the new woman will be?” “She’ll be free,” said Miss Anthony. “Then she’ll be whatever her best judgment wants to be. We can no more imagine what the true woman will be than we can what the true man will be. We haven’t him yet. And we won’t until women are free and equal. The present unfair arrangement brings out the worst in man, as well as the worst in woman. And for a hundred years after we gain freedom we’ll not know what the real man and woman will be. They will constantly change for the better, as the world does. What is the best possible to-day will be childish tomorrow. I think just the same of the man. He can’t be real and great now. His absolute control develops all his autocratic powers, just as it subordinates the woman. No woman can possibly be honest so long as her position compels her to study to please a man merely because she belongs to him and knows she must suffer if she doesn’t.” “What would you call woman’s best attribute?” “To have great, good common-sense. She has a great deal of uncommonsense now, but I want her to be rounded down to a level—not to be gifted overly in one respect and lacking in others.” “What kind of a woman do you think succeeds best?” “The all-around woman. I have noticed that women especially gifted in
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one respect can never make a living. We want fewer extreme characters and ones more on the level. All abilities should be cultivated, or we lose them, and we are poor creatures when left with but one. It recalls to my mind what Sojourner Truth said.34 Sojourner Truth was as black as the ace of spades and six feet tall. She had been a slave for forty years, and attending one of our conventions after the war she was called upon to speak. ‘I can’t, chil’ern,’ she said. ‘Where the l’arnin’ ought to be is all growed up. That’s what becomes of our abilities that we neglect to cultivate—they grow up.” “What do you think is woman’s greatest forte in life?” “That she shall be a woman. My point is this, that she must first be a woman—free, trained, above old ideas and prejudices, and afterwards the wife and mother. The old theory of a wife and mother needing only the capacity to cook and scrub is rapidly going to the dark ages.” “Who is the greatest woman of our age?” “Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She is a philosopher, a statesman and a prophet. She is wonderfully gifted—more gifted than any person I ever knew, man or woman—and had she possessed the privileges of a man her fame would have been world-wide and she would have been the greatest person of her time.” “And now,” I said, approaching a very delicate subject on tip-toes, “tell me one thing more. Were you ever in love?” “In love?” she laughed, merrily. “Bless you, Nellie, I’ve been in love a thousand times!” “Really!” I gasped, taken aback by this startling confession. “Yes, really!” nodding her snowy head. “But I never loved any one so much that I thought it would last. In fact, I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man’s housekeeper. When I was young, if a girl married poor, she became a housekeeper and drudge. If she married wealth she became a pet and a doll. Just think, had I married at twenty, I would have been either a drudge or a doll for fifty-five years. Think of it!” “I want to add one thing,” she said. “Once men were afraid of women with ideas and a desire to vote. To-day our best suffragists are sought in marriage by the best class of men.” Appearance and Characteristics. Susan Brownell Anthony was born on the 15th of February, 1820. She is 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighs 156 pounds. She is very well-formed, splendidly so for an elderly woman, and she is so solid that she gives one the impression of being rather slender.
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Unlike most suffragists, or “brainy” women for that matter, Miss Anthony is very particular about her dress. She is always gowned richly, in style and with most exquisite taste. She has an abundance of jewelry given to her by admiring friends, but she wears very little. She always carries a gold watch, and it is fastened to her with a gold chain and a strong pin in the form of a dagger stuck through a crown. She wears one ring. It is a plain narrow wedding ring, and was given to her by her friend, Dr. Clemence Lozier,35 when she was thought to be upon her death-bed. Miss Anthony promised to wear the ring always, and she has done so. Miss Anthony possesses wonderful health. She never has headaches or the usual trifling complaints that afflict the modern woman. In fact, there has only been one time in her life when she had a doctor, and that was during her first illness in Kansas ten years ago. Perhaps her good health is due to the simplicity of her life. She is a very modest eater, and is absolutely temperate. She has never tasted liquor in any form. When she is traveling she must of necessity keep late hours, but she is a very early riser. Her home is in Rochester, N.Y., where she lives with her youngest sister, Mary Anthony. The home was left to them by their father. Two sisters are dead,36 but the two boys of the family, Daniel and Merritt Anthony, still live.37 They reside in Kansas. Miss Anthony has six nieces and five nephews and several grand nephews and nieces. At her home Miss Anthony rises at 7 and breakfasts on fruit, grain and coffee at 7.15. In the middle of the day she has her dinner of vegetables and one meat. She drinks water with it. At 6 she has tea with fruit and crackers. The thing she loves most of all and which she has all the time on her table is orange marmelade. At home she goes to bed at 10. She loves her home and is able to support it on a little money that has been given to her. A Mrs. Jackson,38 of Boston, left Miss Anthony $34,600, nearly all of which she spent in preparing and publishing and placing in libraries “The Woman’s Suffrage History.” Mrs. Rachel Foster Avery, a lovely and lovable woman whose good deeds are never ending and at whose home in Philadelphia I interviewed Miss Anthony, bought an annuity for Miss Anthony that gives her a regular income of $850 a year. Mrs. Avery is Recording Secretary to the Woman’s Suffrage National Association.
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In disposition Miss Anthony is very lovable. She is always good-natured and sunny tempered. Everybody loves her dearly and she never loses a friend. She has a remarkable memory and in speaking is both eloquent and witty. She keeps an audience laughing during an entire evening. Miss Anthony enjoys a good joke and can tell one. She never fails to see the funny side of things though it be at her own expense. Susan Anthony is all that is best and noblest in woman. She is ideal, and if we will have in women who vote what we have in her, let us all help to promote the cause of woman suffrage. Y New York World, 2 February 1896. Square brackets surround uncertain reading. 1. Nellie Bly (1864–1922) of the New York World had already circled the globe in record time, checked herself into a lunatic asylum to expose its horrors, waded into the perennial corruption in Albany, and polished her style as an interviewer of famous political figures before she met SBA in Philadelphia for this extensive interview. Bly was the penname of Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman. It appears that Bly knew to consult the History of Woman Suffrage to supplement her conversation with SBA, but for stories about family, education, and faith, Bly was crafting anew, two years before Ida Harper solidified similar accounts in her two-volume biography of SBA. (NAW, s.v. “Seaman, Elizabeth Cochrane”; ANB, s.v. “Bly, Nellie.”) 2. SBA reached Philadelphia in the evening of 30 January 1896 and stayed at Rachel Avery’s house during the daytime on January 31, skipping the first session of a conference called by the National-American association that afternoon. (Philadelphia Press, 1 February 1896, Film, 35:529–30, 534.) 3. She was the daughter of Daniel Anthony (1794–1862) and Lucy Read Anthony (1793–1880). Her mother grew up in a Baptist household, not Methodist. 4. That is, Mary Anthony. 5. She describes the family’s house in Battenville, New York. 6. In 1871, Mary Perkins Randall, then widowed, lived in San Francisco when SBA visited her. Still interested in education, she took SBA on a tour of the new Mills Institute, later Mills College. Before working at the Anthony school in Battenville, she graduated from Ipswich Female Seminary in Massachusetts, founded by Zilpah Polly Grant (1794–1874) in 1828. (Anthony, 1:23; Papers, 2:441–42; SBA diary, 12 December 1871, Film, 15:91ff; NAW.) 7. Mary Lyon (1797–1849), a pioneer in women’s education, founded the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. She taught at Ipswich with Grant but did not attend that school. (NAW; ANB.) 8. Possibly she refers to a family in Easton, New York, where she taught in the winter of 1837. Earlier than that, she recalled teaching only the very young children in her family’s school during the summer. See Anthony, 1:23–24. 9. To the seminary led by Deborah Moulson, where her stay was cut short by
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the Panic of 1837 and the destruction of her father’s wealth. See Anthony, 1:24–34 and Film, 6:89–196. 10. Horace Greeley (1811–1872) was the longtime editor of the New York Tribune. 11. Susannah Anthony Brownell (1795–1821) was Daniel Anthony’s next younger sister. She married a few months after SBA’s birth and died in childbirth less than a year later. For a variant of the naming story, see Anthony, 1:12. (Anthony, Anthony Genealogy, 171; “Records of the Society of Friends at East Hoosuck (Adams), Mass.,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 71 [October 1917]: 362.) Susannah Richardson Read (1755–1839) was her maternal grandmother. (Read family genealogical notes, SBA Papers, MCR-S.) 12. Abigail Kelley Foster (1811–1887) provided a model of organizer and lecturer for many women later active in the woman’s rights movement. (NAW; ANB.) 13. Events in this paragraph are scrambled: SBA made the point that both she and ECS worked in the temperance movement. She spoke to the Daughters of Temperance in Canajoharie in 1849 while there as a teacher before she met ECS or visited Seneca Falls in 1851. See Papers, 1:135–42, 182–84. 14. For this and the other stories of temperance work below, see History, 1:473– 513. SBA describes a meeting in Albany, to which ECS also supplied a letter, that took place in January 1852. See Anthony, 1:64–65; Film, 7:145–51; and Papers, 1:191–93. 15. Lydia Mott (1807–1875) made her home in Albany a headquarters for social reformers in the antislavery, woman’s rights, and woman suffrage movements. SBA had nursed her in her final illness. She was a cousin of James Mott (1788–1868), a merchant in Philadelphia and the partner in reform of his wife Lucretia. (Thomas Clapp Cornell, Adam and Anne Mott: Their Ancestors and Descendants [Poughkeepsie, N.Y., 1890], 134, 219; History, 1:744–45n; Woman’s Journal, 28 August 1875. See also Papers 1–3.) 16. Thurlow Weed (1797–1882), editor of the Albany Evening Journal, ruled New York’s Whig and Republican parties for decades. 17. David Wright (1805–1897), a lawyer in Auburn, New York, was married to woman’s rights activist Martha Coffin Wright. Though his presence at these meetings was not noted in the press, SBA also placed him there in a note on the manuscript of ECS’s letter to the meeting. See Papers, 1:193. 18. Samuel Joseph May (1797–1871), an early abolitionist and the Unitarian minister at Syracuse, New York, was a key ally in the state’s movements for woman’s rights and equal rights. Bly may refer here to the New York State Woman’s Rights Convention of 1853, where May presided. (ANB. See also Papers 1 & 2.) His son Joseph May (1836–1918) became minister of the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia in 1876 and stayed until his retirement in 1901. (Samuel A. Eliot, ed., Heralds of a Liberal Faith [Boston, 1952], 4:186–89.) 19. Mary Greeley, but not her husband Horace, signed the call to the New York State Woman’s Rights Convention of 1853. See Film, 7:840–41. Horace Greeley did take charge of a committee on women and work formed by the convention. See History, 1:589–91.
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20. Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) settled at Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church in 1847 and became one of the best-known ministers in the country. He came to woman’s rights nearly a decade later than this story suggests. 21. The ties of ECS and SBA to the Women’s New York State Temperance Society broke in June 1853. See Anthony, 1:92–96; Film, 7:714–33; and Papers, 1:222n. 22. Bly conflated two events here: what begins as a further comment on the meeting in Albany in January 1852 becomes a story about the meeting of the men’s New York State Temperance Society in June 1852. See History, 1:485–88, and Film, 7:263–72. William Henry Burleigh (1812–1871) was an editor of newspapers and a prominent abolitionist, who became corresponding secretary and lecturer for the New York State Temperance Society. As the society’s secretary, he read a report at the meeting in July 1852 praising the advent of the women’s temperance society and precipitated the venomous debate against women. (ANB.) 23. SBA placed this story about the New York State Teachers’ Association meeting in 1853 at the center of her personal narrative, telling it first in September 1853 at a New York Woman’s Rights Convention and repeating it for decades. For the original, see New York Teacher 1 (September 1853): 367–68, Film, 7:792ff. For examples of the retelling, see Papers, 1:226–29, 2:236, 3:300, 5:124. 24. Charles Davies (1798–1876), the man presiding at this meeting in 1853, was professor of mathematics. (BDAmerEd.) 25. A brief disagreement occurred at this, the Fourth National Woman’s Rights Convention about making drunkenness grounds for divorce. See History, 1:124– 52, and Proceedings of the National Women’s Rights Convention, Held at Cleveland, Ohio, on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, October 5th, 6th, and 7th, 1853 (Cleveland, Ohio, 1854). 26. On this statewide meeting at Rochester, 30 November 1853, see History, 1:577–91. Since neither ECS nor Lucy Stone attended it, this account confuses multiple events. 27. SBA conducted her campaign through New York’s fifty-four counties from the end of 1854 through 1855. See History, 1:591–619, and Papers, 1:288–89, 291–97, 301–3. 28. The Married Women’s Property Act of 1860 included provisions about equal custody of children. See History, 1:686–88, and Papers, 1:405–7. 29. The amendment to the Married Women’s Property Act of 1860 passed on 10 April 1862. Among other changes, women lost equal guardianship of their children. See History, 1:747–49; Anthony, 1:219–20; and Papers, 1:475–76. 30. Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) was sworn in as sixteenth president of the United States in 1861. While criticizing the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lincoln omitted God from the rule, saying, “no man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.” (Speech at Peoria, Illinois, in Reply to Senator Douglas, October 16, 1854, The Writings of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Arthur Brooks Lapsley [New York, 1905], 2:209.) 31. Arthur Brown (1843–1906) entered the Senate as a Republican when Utah became a state and served only from 22 January 1896 to 3 March 1897. (BDAC.)
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32. Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (1842–1932) was in her youth one of the most successful lecturers in the country on political and cultural subjects. During and after the Civil War, the Republican party employed her to campaign for their candidates. (NAW; ANB.) 33. Charles Sumner (1811–1874), former senator from Massachusetts, was an eloquent advocate of equal civil and political rights for African-American men. Despite his refusal to take up the cause of women, his constitutional arguments provided woman suffragists with apt quotations. (ANB.) 34. Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1883), a slave in New York State until 1827, became a speaker for abolition, woman’s rights, and universal suffrage before and after the Civil War. She spent her final years in Battle Creek, Michigan. (NAW; ANB.) 35. Clemence Sophia Harned Lozier (1813–1888), a successful physician in New York City, was dean and professor at the New York Medical College and Hospital for Women, an institution she organized in 1863. She served as president of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1877. (NAW; ANB.) 36. These were her married sisters Guelma Penn Anthony McLean (1818–1873) and Hannah Lapham Anthony Mosher (1821–1877). 37. Daniel Read Anthony (1824–1904), one of two younger brothers of SBA in Kansas, lived in Leavenworth. D. R., as he was known, was publisher of the Leavenworth Times and a prominent political and civic figure. (Anthony, Anthony Genealogy, 185–91; United States Biographical Dictionary: Kansas Volume [Chicago, 1879], 56–63. See also Papers 1–5.) Jacob Merritt Anthony (1834–1900), the youngest of SBA’s siblings and known always as Merritt, lived in Fort Scott, where he moved in 1869. Like his older brother, he joined the antislavery migration to Kansas in 1856. (Anthony, Anthony Genealogy, 173, 189; Alfred Theodore Andreas, History of the State of Kansas, Containing a Full Account of Its Growth [Chicago, 1883], 2:1076; Woman’s Journal, 23 June 1900.) 38. That is, Eliza F. Jackson Merriam Eddy (1816–1881), who divided a substantial portion of her estate between Lucy Stone and SBA, urging them to use it to further the cause of woman’s rights but placing them under no obligation to do so. When the estate was settled in 1885, they each received about $24,000. (Garrison, Letters, 3:186, 592, 5:493; NCAB, 2:318; Charles Henry Pope, Merriam Genealogy in England and America [Boston, 1906], 150, 250. See also Papers 4.)
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•••••••••
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ECS to Clara Bewick Colby [New York, c. 5 February 1896]1
Dear Mrs Colby, I have written you pretty freely in regard to the situation but do not put one word I say to you in print. When I feel moved to review the recent action of the convention I will do so You hit the nail on the head when you said “personal spite” That is all there is of it in the minds of the leaders “a sense of duty” is mere hypocrisy. “Blood will tell” If Rachels grandfather had learned to weild a pen as well as cleaver2 she would have made a better literary critic. She is glad to see her resolution in all its illiteracy printed in Blackwells paper & he is only too glad to do it.3 Was there ever such a flimsy pretext for the action of an association fifty years old, “style”? If she had had the instincts of a lady, she would have framed her resolution in better taste. In trying to spite me she kills six other writers, the living & the dead, that is she tries to do so, & the new fledglings nallp saynngp amen. One of the strongest objections our most liberal class of men make against woman suffrage is that we would destroy the secular nature of our government, that the vast majority are under the power of the priesthood & would vote no end of restrictive measures if they had the power When the most liberal organization in the nation among women, do what is just done, the danger is apparent. If women may not comment on what the Bible says of women & decide whether man or God, said she was the author of sin, cursed in her maternity, subjugated in marriage, a mere afterthought in the creation sentiments that cannot be symbolized nor beautified in any language, Latin Greek nor Hebrew twist & turn as you may, then I would like to know what freedom we acquired under Christianity. This is the most pitiful spectacle we have had since the inauguration of our movement. The defeat of an amendment in a state is nothing to this surrender. Our flag is lowered just as the shining lights in the church are devoting themselves to higher criticism. Bishop Colenzo4 Goldwin Smith & others [cut?] on The Penteteuch denying nitsp inspiration &
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much more beside, the suff association denounces the only women that dare express an opinion on the question. The most important work just now is to lift women out of their superstitions. As Susan said we better organize one woman on principle than 10,000 bigots in a suffrage club. One of our papers thus reports her. Another says, Miss Anthony said she did not think the Bible more sacred than the dictionary & the latter far the best book to be in our schools. Susan has just left She has had some hot scenes with her Lieutenants. She feels greatly outraged with their action in not consulting her.5 Are we to have any more of the birthday proceedings?6 Do you intend to continue a weekly. Could you not live cheaper & publish cheaper in Beatrice. Now since they will make the Wash con a movable feast & it will all pass into new hands, why stay there. Susan will resign at the end of this year & then Mrs Catt will no doubt take her place, & Blackwell will kill the association just as he did The American.7 Disintegration began when they joined the National, a few years more will do the work. My advice to you is to struggle no longer to keep your head above water in Washington. In your old home in Beatrice you can educate your children in the public edit your paper better, for you will have more time & less worry & live much cheaper. From what Susan tells me it is suicidal to struggle where you are. Think seriously of returning to Nebraska. Then you could slip round & campaign in those western states. I should like some more numbers of this weeks paper With kind regards sincerely yours U Elizabeth Cady Stanton [sideways in margin] Do you want more Bibles Y ALS, Clara B. Colby Papers, Archives Division, WHi. “Feb 96” added in unknown hand. 1. Dated with reference to SBA’s visit on 5 February 1896. 2. An “x” in the text directs the reader to a note at the bottom and in the margins of the page. It reads: “He was a butcher in my native town her mother & aunt were servants in our family. She knows that & thinks I look down on her but I have no such feeling”. Rachel Avery’s mother, Julia Manuel Foster (c. 1830–1885), was born in New York State, probably of Welsh parents. ECS is the sole source for this story about the Manuel family in Johnstown. She alluded to it earlier in a more friendly tone when she encountered Julia Foster in Philadelphia in 1881: “I did not know her the day she called at Miss Thompsons,” ECS wrote then to Rachel, “supposed it was the first time I ever saw her, just think of it, & how surprized I was when the fact dawned on me.” The Manuel family was based in Remsen, New York, in Oneida County, but one member, a John Manuel, lived in Johnstown with his family in 1830. (Federal Census, Montgomery County, N.Y., 1830; Samuel W.
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Durant, History of Allegheny Co., Pennsylvania [Philadelphia, 1876], 127, 128, 138; Adelaide Mellier Nevin, The Social Mirror; A Character Sketch of the Women of Pittsburg and Vicinity [Pittsburg, Pa., 1888], 30; Papers, 4:48.) 3. ECS reacts to the first coverage of the Washington convention in the Woman’s Journal, 1 February 1896. There the Blackwells tailored news about the debate over the Woman’s Bible to favor critics of the book and obscure the actions and words of its supporters. In that issue, they published Rachel Avery’s original recommendation to censure the book but omitted to say it was tabled and later amended to remove her strongest language. As SBA observed in the weeks that followed, coverage did not improve. Woman’s Journal, 29 February 1896, published the condemnation of the Woman’s Bible proposed by the Resolutions Committee, alluded to a debate without so much as listing who spoke, and then recorded the roll call vote. (Film, 35:406–27.) 4. John William Colenso (1814–1883), the controversial bishop of Natal, influenced ECS’s views on the Pentateuch. Her quotations from his work in Woman’s Bible, Part I indicate she had at hand the “People’s Edition” of The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined. Published in 1865, this edition derived from a longer and more erudite work he offered to the clergy. With a mission similar to her own, Colenso explained at the front the book, “I have desired to place, in a clear and intelligible form, before the eyes of the general reader, the main arguments . . . proving the unhistorical character, the later origin, and the compound authorship, of the five books usually attributed to Moses.” (Oxford DNB; ECS to Elizabeth S. Miller, 21 July 1895, Film, 34:253; Woman’s Bible, Part I, 119–21, 135–36.) 5. Writing to Colby again a few days later, ECS quoted SBA saying “she never had anything so humiliating in her life.” (ECS to C. B. Colby, 10 February 1896, Film, 35:559–62.) 6. A reference to the Reunion of the Pioneers and Friends of Woman’s Progress, held at the Metropolitan Opera House on 12 November 1895 to honor ECS on her eightieth birthday. Colby’s coverage of the event, in the Woman’s Tribune, 23 November and 28 December 1895, included many messages received by ECS and ECS’s speech but omitted all the other speeches that made up the program. 7. The editor of Free Thought Magazine saw a similar connection between Carrie Catt and Henry Blackwell with respect to the Woman’s Bible. Reporting on what he characterized as ECS’s conviction for heresy, the editor placed most of the blame for the resolution against her on Carrie Catt, with the Blackwells acting as her sidekicks. “It was generally understood that the Blackwells and Catts and the smaller fry—the recent converts who voted for the resolution—were a set of bigots who were constantly on their knees begging favors of the church.” Blackwell’s reply spoke only to the resolution’s meaning: it simply “correct[ed] a misstatement . . . to the effect that the suffragists had adopted and officially circulated the work in question.” The resolution, he avowed, “casts no reflection whatever upon the ‘Woman’s Bible,’ or upon its author. It applies equally to the original Bible itself, and to all theological works, no matter how orthodox.” (Free Thought Magazine 14 [March 1896]: 183–87, [April 1896]: 269, [May 1896]: 329–37.)
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SBA to Clara Bewick Colby Rochester, N.Y., February 10, 1896
My dear Friend: ¶1 Miss Nettie Louisa White,1 305 D St., N.W., wrote me Feb. 5th that she had been writing out the stenographic report of the Judiciary Committee hearing.2 I hope the official reporter has sent you the copy ere this and that you have had time to go over it. ¶2 Will you also ask the official reporter of the Senate hearing to let you see his copy before it goes to print?3 Miss White says what is true, that the committees cannot ask for an order to have the report printed until a copy of it is laid before the committee. So I shall depend upon you to read, correct and revise the speeches made at both hearings, for I know of nobody else in Washington who would be likely to understand so well what each one meant to say, whether the reporter caught it or not. ¶3 The Tribune of last week is not here yet, but the Woman’s Journal came this morning, making the second issue since the action of the convention at Washington, and it contains no hint even of the fact that I made the slightest protest against the Cor. Sec.’s paragraph or the resolution on the Woman’s Bible, so that all of its readers up to this date will be perfectly ignorant of the facts in the case. I visited Mrs Stanton before coming home, and found her, as you may well understand, thoroughly indignant over the petty action of the convention. She does not forget that three years ago, when her resolution about the Sunday closing was presented, that these very same women voted against it because they said the question was not germane to the object of the association.4 Certainly, if the question of opening the gates of that World’s Fair to the working men & women of the nation was irrelevant in our convention, this question of an individual member or officer writing a book against the plenary inspiration of Joshua, Peter and Paul in the Bible, must be quite as far from coming within the purview of the objects of our association. I am just in receipt of a letter from Mrs. Stanton which says, by all the rules of the British Parliament a “want of confidence” was voted
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against me, and, therefore, like the British leader, I ought to resign until there is another election; but I think I will hang on this year for the sake of the 40, more or less, staunch and true women whose votes showed no lack of confidence in their president. You see it was an awfully small margin by which the vote of censure was carried, and that vote and discussion have brought to the front the “Bible” question, making it take precedence of woman’s enfranchisement in the public mind for the time being, at any rate. Bob5 told me that all of the first edition of 2,000 were sold save 100; so that these short-sighted girls have precipitated the result which they declared they wished to avoid; so that you and I have a chance to say to them, “We told you so.” For the time being, the majority must have its way, but I greatly miscalculate if a year from now the vote won’t be rescinded, for it cannot be possible that well-meaning women can escape seeing that their action this year was not only unjust, but in the largest sense inexpedient, for nothing unjust can in the end be expedient, as you and I fully believe. ¶4 I am writing Mrs. Chapman-Catt that I think she ought to make arrangements for Mrs. Blake and you to lecture in Delaware, in view of the holding of a constitutional convention in that state next year.6 I think if you could give one or two lectures a week outside of your newspaper duties, and Mrs. Catt could arrange for you to give them in a state as near as Delaware, you could do that without impairing your paper; but for you to go off to California or Idaho7 for two or three months would just about ruin your chances of ever getting the Tribune onto solid ground. So, I hope, unless you are bound to give up the paper, that you will give to it all of the best of yourself; for what your readers want is some good editorial matter or comments on every possible question involved in the woman question, and that you cannot give them when you are travelling from 100 to 200 miles every day, sleeping in a strange bed every night, and making a speech every evening. It would have been a mighty nice arrangement if the manager of human affairs had made it possible for each of us to “keep our cake and eat it too”; than to stay at home and be away from home too; to edit a paper while lecturing every night three thousand miles away from it; but, instead, things are so fixed that we cannot be in but one place at a time, nor do but one thing at a time and do it well; so we have to choose whether we will go or stay, whether we will do or not do. Very sincerely, U Susan B. Anthony
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[in SBA’s hand] N.B. Now is your time to make the need of your paper felt by the liberal women of the country!!! Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead for 1894, year corrected, Clara B. Colby Collection, CSmH. 1. Nettie Lovisa White (c. 1850–1921) was a pioneer among stenographers in Washington, opening doors to women’s employment with Congress and its committees. She grew up in northern New York, moved to Washington in the 1870s, and, except for travels, stayed there until her death. White was a charter member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and a delegate to the International Council of Women at Berlin in 1904. Her work as a suffragist in Washington extended over many decades; she took charge of organizing pioneers for the woman suffrage parade of 1913. (American Women; Federal Census, Washington, 1910; Washington Post, 23 August 1921; Janet Beer, Anne-Marie Ford, and Katherine Joslin, eds., American Feminism: Key Source Documents, 1848–1920 [London, 2003], 1:378.) 2. This typescript, with corrections in Colby’s hand, is in Film, 35:476–520. The record was published as Hearing of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives. Washington, D.C., January 28, 1896 (Washington, D.C., 1896), also in Film, 35:465–75. 3. By vote of the Senate on 10 March 1896, this hearing was printed as a government document: Senate, Committee on Woman Suffrage, Report of Hearing before the Committee on Woman Suffrage. January 28, 1896, 54th Cong., 1st sess., S. Doc. 157, Serial 3364. On 26 March 1896, Wilkinson Call, the antisuffrage chair of the committee, acting by request, introduced Senate Resolution No. 106 to amend the Constitution. On 23 April 1896, he submitted his minority views against the resolution, a majority report without recommendation, and a request that the resolution be placed on the calendar. (Congressional Record, 54th Cong., 1st sess., 3072, 4295; Senate, Committee on Woman Suffrage, Views of the Minority, 56th Cong., 1st sess., S. Rept. 787, Serial 3365; 54th Cong., 1st sess., Joint Resolution Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, 23 April 1896, S.R. 106.) 4. This conflict within the National-American association over resolutions about opening the Columbian Exposition on Sunday arose in 1892 and 1893. See Papers, 5:436–39, 507–9. 5. That is, Robert Stanton. 6. Because Delaware was set to hold a constitutional convention in 1897, the National-American’s Organization Committee selected the state as a site for work in 1895. But a year after that committee’s formation, its control over the assignment of work in the association caused difficulties. At the recent meeting in Washington, SBA proposed that members of the committee no longer have the power to hire themselves as the association’s organizers. The change would, she reasoned, “prevent any feeling on the part of outsiders that there was special preference shown by the Committee to any of its own members in the division of the organization
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work for the coming year.” Carrie Catt, however, still had the authority to assign managers and lecturers to the committee’s projects. According to Lillie Blake, SBA and Carrie Catt both asked her, in the fall of 1895, to take charge of the Delaware campaign. According to SBA, when Catt called on her in New York City on February 5, they talked about Blake managing the work, and SBA assumed that Blake would soon have an offer from the Organization Committee. Meanwhile, Catt was sending in the organizers regularly employed by her committee. In December 1895 and January 1896, Mary Hay arranged meetings around the state at which Henrietta Moore spoke, and they oversaw the formation of a state equal suffrage association. In March and April, Catt sent Mary Bradford and Laura Gregg to work in Delaware. (Report of the Twenty-eighth Annual Convention, 1896, pp. 60, 70, 119–20, and Report of the Twenty-ninth Annual Convention, 1897, p. 75, and SBA to L. D. Blake, 7 February, 9 April 1896, and L. D. Blake to SBA, 2 April 1896, all in Film, 35:304ff, 552–53, 678–79, 690–91, 36:744ff; History, 4:563–64.) 7. Voters in Idaho would decide on woman suffrage at the election of November 1896. After the measure passed in the legislature in January 1895, Carrie Catt dispatched Emma DeVoe to the state as an organizer for two months. In the spring of 1896, she sent Laura Johns, adding Mary Bradford late in the summer. (History, 4:589–93; T. A. Larson, “Woman’s Rights in Idaho,” Idaho Yesterdays 16 [Spring 1972]: 2–19; Jennifer M. Ross-Nazzal, Winning the West for Women: The Life of Suffragist Emma Smith DeVoe [Seattle, Wash., 2011], 86–107.)
¶3
ll. 12–13 l. 16 l. 29
Textual Notes World’s Fair to the working men n& womenp of the nation within the pervue npurviewp told you so.” But, for nForp •••••••••
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SBA to ECS [Rochester, c. 10 February 1896]1
During three weeks of agony of soul, with scarcely a night of sleep, I have felt I must resign my presidency, but then the rights of the minority are to be respected and protected by me quite as much as the action of the majority is to be resented; and it is even more my duty to stand firmly with the minority because principle is with them. I feel very sure that after a year’s reflection upon the matter, the same women, and perhaps the one man, who voted for this interference with personal rights, will be ready to declare that their duty as individuals does not require them to disclaim freedom of speech in their co-workers. Sister Mary says the action of the convention convinces
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her that the time has not yet come for me to resign; whereas she had felt most strongly that I ought to do it for my own sake. No, my dear, instead of my resigning and leaving those half-fledged chickens without any mother, I think it my duty and the duty of yourself and all the liberals to be at the next convention and try to reverse this miserable, narrow action. Y Anthony, 2:855. 1. Ida Harper made no reference to a date for this text that survives only as she edited it. The mention of three weeks since the vote against ECS suggests a date a week later than shown here. The similarity between the views expressed here and those in the previous letter to Clara Colby suggest this earlier date. •••••••••
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ECS to the Editors, CRITIC1 26 West 61st Street, New York, 29 Feb. 1896.
To the Editors of The Critic:— On January 25th you printed a communication, signed Annie Bronson King2 (Oxford, England), in which the writers of “The Woman’s Bible” are attacked. They have published Part I., comprising comments on the Pentateuch, and are now busy on Part II., extending to the Book of Ezra. Our critic thinks that the women who compose the Committee are not fitted for the work they have undertaken.3 She says:— While the great scholars of Europe, the Oriental linguists, the anthropologists, the students of the monuments and the manuscripts, have been adding patiently, year after year, to the store of the world’s knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures, their discoveries have been almost wholly ignored in the teaching which has been given to the great mass of the American people. Sometimes this learning has been drawn upon in the pulpit, but it cannot be denied that there has been no attempt to diffuse it by Sunday-school or Bible teaching. Had these women received that better understanding of the Bible which the patient toil of the nineteenth-century scholar has brought us, theirs had never been compiled. To appreciate what these learned scholars have done; to have gathered
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statistics for an intelligent opinion on this wide-spread ignorance of the American people, and with one glimpse of the comments on the Pentateuch to measure the capacity of the thirty women on the Revising Committee, altogether argues such varied and remarkable ability that we fain would urge Miss King to join us and infuse into our counsels the needed wisdom. She need not be ashamed of such coadjutors. The Committee consists of six authors of very good books, of a dozen public speakers, of three editors of well-established papers, of three Reverends, who graduated at theological seminaries with honors. It is fair to suppose they were well versed in historical data and Biblical criticism. They were ordained and established as pastors over congregations and have preached acceptably for many years. The capacity of the Committee is equal to the work proposed, which is simply to comment, in plain English, on the few texts relating to woman, and to ascertain her status, as a factor, in the Scriptures. As she is mentioned in only one-tenth part of the Old and New Testaments, the work is by no means Herculean. Moreover, as we accept the last version of 1888, the result of the labors of wise men in different centuries, there is no necessity of our being scientists, linguists, archaeologists learned in monuments and manuscripts. 4 Reading the Book with our own unassisted common sense, we do not find that the Mother of the race is exalted and dignified in the Pentateuch. The female half of humanity rests under the ban of general uncleanness. Even a female kid is not fit for a burnt offering to the gods. Women are denied the consecrated bread and meat, and not allowed to enter the holy places in the temples. Woman is made the author of sin, cursed in her maternity, subordinated in marriage, and a mere afterthought in creation. It is very depressing to read such sentiments emanating from the brain of man, but to be told that the good Lord said and did all the monstrous things described in the Pentateuch, makes woman’s position sorrowful and helpless. The wife of the Scotch peasant, sitting in her cottage door, reading her Bible in the twilight hour, suggested a new trend of thought to the Bishop who asked her if she enjoyed the good Book? “Nay! nay! Reverend Sir, when I think of the evil woman has done, and for which there is no remedy, I am ashamed that I was born. I am sorry the good Lord ever wrote the Book, and told the men what He did. It gives them an excuse to treat all women with contempt and cruelty.”5 It was to speak to such as these that “The Woman’s Bible” was proposed. The first step in the elevation of women under all systems of
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religion is to convince them that the great Spirit of the Universe is in no way responsible for any of these absurdities. If the Bible is a message from Heaven to Humanity, neither language nor meaning should be equivocal. If the salvation of our souls depends on obedience to its commands, it is rank injustice to make scholars and scientists the only medium of communication between God and the mass of the people. “The Woman’s Bible” comes to the ordinary reader like a real benediction. It tells her the good Lord did not write the Book; that the garden scene is a fable; that she is in no way responsible for the laws of the Universe. The Christian scholars and scientists will not tell her this, for they see she is the key to the situation.6 Take the snake, the fruit-tree and the woman from the tableau, and we have no fall, nor frowning Judge, no Inferno, no everlasting punishment,—hence no need of a Savior. Thus the bottom falls out of the whole Christian theology. Here is the reason why in all the Biblical researches and higher criticisms, the scholars never touch the position of woman. U Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Y Critic n.s., 25 (28 March 1896): 218–19. 1. Jeannette Leonard Gilder (1849–1916) and her brother Joseph Benson Gilder (1858–1936) founded and edited the Critic, a literary and cultural journal published from 1881 to 1906. (ANB, s.v. “Gilder, Jeannette Leonard”; WWW1, s.v. “Gilder, Joseph Benson”.) 2. Anna Stevens King (1856–1940) enjoyed a brief career writing poetry and stories as Annie Bronson King, drawing attention to her kinship with Amos Bronson Alcott through her maternal grandfather, Hiram Bronson. Her work appeared in numerous journals, and in Our Children of the Slums (1892), she presented a collection of stories aimed at social reform. King began life at Bronson’s farm in Medina, Ohio, and returned for lengthy stays later, but her family moved before 1870 to Minnesota and before 1880 to St. Louis. D. H. King and Company was her father’s large dry goods firm in that city, and Harry Bronson King, her younger brother, carried it on. King’s critique of the Woman’s Bible is one of the last known pieces she published. She was busy for many years taking care of her widowed mother, care that included relocating to Italy. When her mother died there in 1918, King returned to St. Louis. (Guide to King Family Papers and assistance of Dennis Northcott, Archives, MoSHi; Certificate of Death, St. Louis, Missouri State Board of Health; Federal Census, Medina, 1860, and St. Louis, 1880; Elena Maria Bronson, Cimitero Accattolico, Rome, on-line records; Independent, 8 May, 31 July, 21 August, 11 September 1890.) 3. Twenty-five women were named in Woman’s Bible, Part I, as members of the Revising Committee. Authors of commentaries in this first part were ECS, the late Ellen Dietrick, Lillie Blake, Clara Colby, Louisa Southworth, Phebe Hanaford, and Ursula Gestefeld. For more on the members, see Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible, 135–71, and Papers 5. ECS quotes the second and start of the third paragraphs of King’s
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letter. King asked at the start, “How then are we to account for this spectacle of white-headed women, most of whom are grandmothers and many of whom have been devoted all their lives to good and great objects, posing in the rôle of the Deists of the last century?” (Critic n.s. 25 [25 January 1896]: 63–64.) 4. ECS refers to an edition of the English Revised Version of the Bible published in 1888, originally published in 1885. 5. This story plays on an old standard that several generations learned in Protestant Sunday School; in the orthodox version, a traveling gentleman assumes that the child reading her Bible at the cottage door performed her required task. When questioned, she contradicted him; she read the book simply “ ‘Because, Sir, I love my Bible.’ ” “These few words,” the tale continued, “under God’s blessing, were the means of the gentleman’s conversion: though before he was an infidel, and openly opposed the truth as it is in Jesus.” But the authorship of this antithetical variant is not known. When incorporating a nearly identical version into an address in November 1896, Ida Trafford-Bell said nothing about her source. (Sunday School Teachers’ Magazine and Journal of Education 6 [January 1855]: 32; Medico-Legal Journal 14 [March 1897]: 527.) 6. ECS paraphrases her commentary on Genesis 3:1–24. See Film, 33:803–4, 902, and Woman’s Bible, Part I, 23–26. •••••••••
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Grace Channing-Stetson1 to ECS Pasadena [Calif.] March 4th [1896]
Dear Mrs Stanton: We all thank you for the “Pentateuch,” in which nothing, however, affords me so much satisfaction as the sex of Balaam’s ass.2 As for your question:—I fail to see how a religious bigot—man or woman—can possibly exercise a political influence favourable to the preservation of the secular nature of our government. But I’ve great hopes that the political exercise will be good for the bigot’s health! Whatever else men are, they are not apt to be religious bigots, and the cause is not far to seek. I quite agree with Jane Addam3 (the “Saint Jane,” of Hull House fame) that the exceeding narrowness of the average woman is a worse social evil than any the saloon can beget. (She defends the saloon as being the main thing which keeps the frequenters thereof from being as narrow as their wives at home—) I do not myself find any compensation in the manifold “feminine virtues” for the limitations of women, but I’ve great hopes that we shall get ourselves gradually unlimited, even if we shed our feminine
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virtues largely by the way. I, myself like men and “manly virtues”—which goes far to console me for your saying that I write like a man! Was that commendation or condemnation? Where is Mrs Blatch? I thought she was to be in America. My sister with her children are in Cambridge, and my brother in the Weather Bureau in town.4 I, with my husband and his little daughter (whose mother is one of your efficient workers, as Miss Anthony can tell you) are staying here with my parents,5 both of whom have been very ill and are too feeble for me to willingly leave at present. We expect a great campaign here this year. I hear much of it from the Sargents of San Francisco.6 We are very useless, being so wholly a hospital, but we don’t feel that even our prayers are needed. Substantially the cause is won, even if there must be more or less fighting still. Just think what a revolution I have seen, in even my life time. You must feel as richly contented as any one human soul can ever feel. With warmest affection from all our household, and my own— U Grace Ellery Channing-Stetson [in ECS hand] Did you know that Grace Channing married Mrs Stetson’s husband She was at the wedding & gave the little daughter to Grace! It may all be according to the laws of the Universe, but it seems strange to our unassisted common sense. Perhaps the National Suff. association, should at its next convention bring in a resolution denouncing Mrs Charlotte Perkins Stetsons lax ideas on the marriage & maternal relations!! They must clear their skirts of any responsibility for her action Y ALS, ECS Papers, DLC. 1. Grace Ellery Channing-Stetson (1862–1937), a writer, was a daughter of ECS’s good friend William F. Channing. Her ill health had caused her parents to leave the Northeast for Florida and later Pasadena. In 1895, she married Charles Walter Stetson (1858–1911), the ex-husband of Charlotte Perkins Stetson, and took over the raising of his daughter Katharine Beecher Stetson (1885–1979). (Genealogical files, Grace Ellery Channing Papers, MCR-S; WWW1, s.v. “Channing, Grace Ellery”; Florence Bernstein Freedman, William Douglas O’Connor: Walt Whitman’s Chosen Knight [Athens, Ohio, 1985], passim; Peter Hastings Falk, ed., Who Was Who in American Art, 1564–1975: 400 Years of Artists in America [Madison, Conn., 1999], 3:3167, s.v. “Stetson, Charles Walter” and “Stetson, Katharine Beecher.”) 2. Num. 22:21–34, and ECS in Woman’s Bible, Part I, 112–15. 3. Jane Addams (1860–1935) opened the social settlement Hull-House in 1889 on Chicago’s West Side, and she was quickly gaining national attention for her
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views about urban life in America. Grace Channing-Stetson’s friend Charlotte Stetson was living at Hull-House at this time. (NAW; ANB.) 4. Mary A. Channing Saunders (1860–1934), later Wood, had two children with Charles W. Saunders, her first husband. After her divorce and a second marriage in 1900, the children used the surname Wood. Harold Stanley Channing (1869–1946) held many different jobs over a lifetime plagued by mental problems. (Genealogical files, Grace Ellery Channing Papers, MCR-S.) 5. William Francis Channing (1820–1901), formerly of Providence, Rhode Island, and Washington, D.C., was a medical doctor, trained at the University of Pennsylvania, who devoted his time to invention and reform. He had befriended ECS and SBA since the days when he wrote for their newspaper, the Revolution, and ECS considered him a reliable ally in debates on divorce. (DAB; alumni files, University Archives and Records Center, PU. See also Papers 2–4.) Mary Jane Tarr Channing (1828–1897) was his second wife. For fifteen years she was an officer of the National Woman Suffrage Association, first as vice president for Rhode Island and then as executive committee member from California. (Genealogical files, Grace Ellery Channing Papers, MCR-S. See also Papers 2 & 4.) 6. Channings and Sargents probably knew each other in Washington, when the late Aaron Augustus Sargent of Nevada City, California, served in the House of Representatives (1861 to 1863, 1869 to 1873) and the Senate (1873 to 1879) and moved his family to the capital. Sargent was the most important ally women had in Congress in the nineteenth century, working not only to gain suffrage but also to earn equal wages in federal employment and practice law in federal courts. His widow, Ellen Clark Sargent (1826–1911), was arguably the most experienced advocate of woman suffrage in California and a former officer of the National Woman Suffrage Association who had collaborated with ECS and SBA since the 1870s. In 1896 she presided over the state suffrage association. As the campaign structure developed, she held positions as chairman of the Joint Campaign Committee and a member of the State Central Committee. Ellen Clark Sargent Montgomery (1854– 1908), known as Ella, married the doctor Douglass William Montgomery in 1888, lived with him in San Francisco, and was the mother of three children. Her siblings lived with their mother. Elizabeth R. C. Sargent (1857–1900) was a physician of the eye who began her studies at Howard University, completed them in San Francisco, and pursued her speciality abroad. She played a large part in the amendment campaign, taking responsibility for press work in the San Francisco Evening Post, arranging spring meetings around the state, and managing petitions in the north. George Clark Sargent (1860–1930) was a lawyer in San Francisco and a supporter of his mother’s work. From 1899 to 1901, he represented her in a suit challenging her taxation without voting rights. (Family: Edwin Everett Sargent, comp., Sargent Record: William Sargent of Ipswich, Newbury, Hampton, Salisbury and Amesbury, New England, U.S. [St. Johnsbury, Vt., 1899], 218; unpublished paper by Paula Lichtenberg, San Francisco; Papers, 2:463–69, 3:passim, 4:24–25, 233–34. E. C. Sargent: Kathleen Bowes, “The Woman Suffrage Movement in Nevada County, California: 1869–1911,” Nevada County Historical Society Bulletin 46 [April 1992]:
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10–13; San Francisco Call, 26 July 1911. E. R. C. Sargent: San Francisco Call, 7 February 1900, 30 March 1901; Daniel Smith Lamb, Howard University Medical Department, Washington, D.C.: A Historical Biographical and Statistical Souvenir [Washington, D.C., 1900], 260. E. C. S. Montgomery: NCAB, 31:311; WWW4; Federal Census, 1900. G. C. Sargent: Federal Census, 1900; city directories, 1896, 1897.) •••••••••
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From the Diary of SBA [11–12 March 1896]
Wed. March 11, 1896. In San Diego at Niece Maggie M’Lean Bakers—1 tended the Woman’s Club this p.m.— Mrs—Ballou president—2
at-
1. SBA and Emma Sweet left Rochester on 27 February 1896 and reached San Diego on March 10, after visits to Ann Arbor, Chicago, and Leavenworth. In San Diego SBA stayed with her niece Margaret McLean Baker (1845–1912), whose father Aaron McLean died on 18 January 1896. Baker was the sole child of SBA’s older sister to live into adulthood. She married in Rochester, lived there until 1874, and began a westward migration following her husband’s career in railroads. (Baker Genealogical Ms., SBA Papers, MCR-S; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records.) 2. Harriett A. Whitcher Ballou (c. 1850–1943), the wife of George Henry Ballou, presided over the San Diego Woman’s Club from 1893 to 1896. She later led the county’s Red Cross. George H. Ballou was a wholesale dealer in tea and spices, once in business in Rochester, New York. (Adin Ballou, comp., An Elaborate History and Genealogy of the Ballous in America [Providence, R.I., 1888], 1163; Samuel F. Black, San Diego and Imperial Counties, California: A Record of Settlement, Organization, Progress and Achievement [Chicago, 1913], 2:65–66; State of California, California Death Index, 1940–1997, on-line.)
Thur. March 12, 1896. Left San Diego—Cal this morning & stopped off in Los Angeles—with Cousin Jessie Anthony1 at the Toltec— Sundry friends called in the evening—many of them disgruntled & wanting to form a Southern California Campaign Committee & run things all by themselves—without let or hindrance from Mrs Sargents State Com—2 1. Jessie Anthony (1856–1918), a granddaughter of SBA’s late uncle John Anthony, grew up with her grandparents in Coleta, Illinois. She followed her brothers to California in 1888, and her father, Joseph Anthony (1829–1897), later joined them. Father and daughter lived at the Toltec, a hotel at 601 Temple Street, Los
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Angeles, until they moved into a new house in 1897. Jessie Anthony became wellknown in Los Angeles as a clubwoman, an officer of a social settlement, and most of all as a woman suffragist. (Anthony, Anthony Genealogy, 198–99; Brief Account of Joseph Anthony, Sr., typescript, MNS-S; Caroline Williamson Montgomery, comp., Bibliography of College, Social University and Church Settlements, 5th ed. [Chicago, 1905], 18–19.) 2. Seven months later, one of those friends, Alice McComas, cast a more benign light on Southern California’s separatism. To a Northern California newspaper she wrote, “Although there was not in the beginning a positive plan to stand alone, work independently of all other suffragist organizations and pay all her own bills, such has come to pass.” When SBA arrived, campaign committees already existed in Los Angeles and surrounding counties. The National-American association dealt directly with the Joint Campaign Committee, based in San Francisco and led by Ellen Sargent; through that committee, the recognized state suffrage association was in an alliance with other organizations of women, but all its members resided in Northern California. Geography, regional ethnicities, and railroads stymied other reformers with statewide designs: the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union recognized northern and southern locals, for example. Whatever SBA counseled at this time, she could not remove suspicions, and in summer, when Mary Hay cracked the whip over the campaign, suffragists in Southern California resisted again. (San Francisco Call, 17 October 1896; History, 4:494–502; Gullett, Becoming Citizens, 96–97.) Y Excelsior Diary 1896, n.p., SBA Papers, DLC.
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Remarks by SBA to Meeting in Los Angeles [13 March 1896]
There were about seventy-five ladies present yesterday afternoon in the parlor of the Nadeau hotel1 to welcome Miss Anthony on her flying trip through Los Angeles. Mrs. McComas2 presided in the chair, and stated the object of the meeting was to call women together to arouse additional interest in the coming constitutional campaign. Miss Anthony said she had invited the ladies to talk to them on the work of the pending amendment campaign. She spoke of the immense amount of work to be done, and how in former times when the subject of suffrage was suggested, speakers were told to talk to women, but now men are to
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be converted; the rank and file do not attend suffrage meetings and cannot be reached in that way. Women have the training of children, the repairing of damages done society, philanthropy and all has been given women to do, much of which should be done by the state, because women are disfranchised and this work put into their hands instead of being done by the state lowers the standard of her ability. Miss Anthony gave graphic incidents of the difference between women and men in securing appropriations from the state to carry on philanthropic and reformatory work, the difference in the influence of the enfranchised and disfranchised sexes. What the women want to do is not to give or aid any party that does not declare their indorsement of this movement. In no state where the question has not been indorsed by political parties has a constitutional campaign been successful. Mrs. Routt3 of Colorado wrote the resolutions which Governor Routt presented to the state Republican convention of Colorado. Other parties followed, after them the county convention, then the editors took it up as a party measure, and women were employed as campaign speakers with the men, and the amendment passed by 7000 majority. In ten states it has been defeated because there was no plank in the platform. Politicians will not speak for it on the platform.4 Miss Anthony concluded by saying that she wanted California to be the second state to carry a constitutional amendment. The enfranchisement of women will not materially alter the balance of power, but will elevate party standards. At the conclusion of her remarks there was a warm hand clasp of welcome extended to the earnest speaker by all the ladies. Miss Anthony left last night for San Francisco. Y Los Angeles Herald, 14 March 1896. 1. At the corner of First and Spring streets, the four-story Nadeau Hotel was regarded as one of the finest in Los Angeles. 2. Alice Moore McComas (1850–1919) was a journalist and temperance union activist who ran the press committee for the amendment campaign in Southern California. In the southern counties, temperance and prohibition had strong political support, and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of that region could work openly with secular suffragists. McComas took credit for the amendment campaign tactic of organizing at the precinct level, and the organizers in Los Angeles carried it out very well. Born the daughter of a congressman and married in Illinois, McComas and her husband, a prominent lawyer, prosecutor, judge,
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and Republican politician relocated to Kansas and New Mexico before reaching Los Angeles in 1886. (History, 4:494–502; American Women; Woman’s Who’s Who 1914; New York Times, 3 December 1919; John Steven McGroarty, Los Angeles from the Mountains to the Sea [Chicago, 1921], 3:688–91; Gilman M. Ostrander, The Prohibition Movement in California, 1848–1933 [Berkeley, Calif., 1957], 63–67; SBA to Clara B. Colby, 10 May 1898, Film, 38:516–25.) 3. Eliza Franklin Pickrell Routt (1839?–1907) was the second wife of John Long Routt (1826–1907), Colorado’s governor from 1876 to 1879 and 1891 to 1893. A question of woman suffrage went to the voters during both of his administrations. SBA refers to the successful campaign of 1893. (BDGov; American Women; Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame, on-line resource.) 4. At this date, the defeats numbered nine, not ten. Voters rejected woman suffrage in Kansas in 1867 and 1894, Michigan in 1874, Colorado in 1877, Nebraska in 1882, Oregon in 1884, Rhode Island in 1887, Washington State in 1889, and South Dakota in 1890. (History, 4:xxi.) •••••••••
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From the Diary of SBA [13–14 March 1896]
Fri. March 13, 1896. In Los Angeles—stopping at the Toltec with cousin Joseph Anthony’s daughter Jessie Anthony— Mrs M’Comas called— Attended Friday morning Club—& talked to them on am’t—1 Robert—Bob Burdette2 there—& talked splendidly— the paper was on martial music—a male quartetted played Star-spangled—Banner—&c—but when asked to play Dixie—hadn’t the music—so couldnt— this made me tell them of Atlanta fellows who couldn’t play Yankee Doodle because they hadnt nthe music—p 1. The Friday Morning Club, founded in April 1891, held its meetings at this time in the Hollenbeck Hotel. For coverage of the event, see Film, 35:632. 2. Robert Jones Burdette (1844–1914), former journalist, humorist, and ordained Baptist minister was in California on a lecture tour. Two years later he moved to the state. (DAB.)
Sat. March 14, 1896. Reached San Francisco at 4.45— this p.m— Mrs & Miss Cooper1 met us at the 16th street Station in Oakland— Miss Cooper took Mrs Sweet to Hotel Berkshire2—& Mrs Cooper went with me to Mrs Sargents—where I found all well—3 Son George up in Nevada County
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at their Gold Mine4 Lucy E. & Miss Shaw there— Miss Shaw & Miss Hay5 had arrived the night before—Miss Hay stopping at the Berkshire [no entry for March 15] 1. Sarah Brown Ingersoll Cooper (1835–1896), originally from New York State and a widow, gained a national reputation for founding, encouraging, and training teachers for kindergartens. She was a recent convert to woman suffrage, but one of the most experienced organizers and managers in the city. She presided over the Amendment Campaign Association and was vice-chairman of the Joint Campaign Committee. (NAW; ANB.) Harriet Cooper (1856–1896) lived with her mother, acted as her secretary, and helped to supervise the kindergartens. That Harriet was extremely depressed and periodically attempted suicide was not known to suffragists working in the campaign. On the morning of 11 December 1896, Harriet succeeded in killing herself and her mother. (San Francisco Call, 12 December 1896.) 2. On Jones Street. 3. At 1630 Folsom Street, where SBA made her home until after the November election. Until June, the Joint Campaign Committee’s headquarters were in a wing of the house. For a description of the space, see San Francisco Chronicle, 13 May 1896, SBA scrapbook 25, Rare Books, DLC. 4. The Sargents still owned property in Ventura County, site of Nevada City, where Aaron Sargent settled about 1850 and brought his bride in 1852. 5. Mary Garrett Hay (1857–1928) of Indiana came to national attention as an organizer during the New York State amendment campaign of 1894. Within the year she became Carrie Catt’s valued lieutenant, and in California, she represented the Organization Committee of the National-American. When suffragists in Northern California reorganized their campaign in July 1896, Mary Hay chaired the new State Central Committee. (NAW; ANB; Robert Booth Fowler, Carrie Catt: Feminist Politician [Boston, 1986], 50–52, 129.) Y Excelsior Diary 1896, n.p., SBA Papers, DLC.
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Interview of SBA in San Francisco [c. 17 March 1896]
Susan B. Anthony, who is here to give the benefit of her experience to the committee managing the woman-suffrage joint campaign, says of her mission to this State: “Our representatives in Washington are always ready to accept invitations to the suffrage platforms in States where we have succeeded, but those representing New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and the older States where suffrage has not existed, the members of Congress, although they may personally express belief in suffrage, are never willing to come forward to announce these views, and seldom accept invitations to the platform. “In New York Chautauqua is the only thoroughly organized county, and from it no man has ever been elected to the State Legislature nor to Congress who is not an avowed suffragist.1 “It is to secure this sort of organization that the double series of conventions are to be held in every county of this State. Hitherto, in all my experience in the effort to influence political conventions to put a suffrage plank in the platform, the response has invariably been ‘Our constituents have never asked us to do so.’ “We therefore want a petition overwhelmingly large to be presented to the nominating conventions of the political parties, that each be influenced to introduce into their platform an indorsement of the suffrage amendment. “We want this large number of signatures to be able to refute that timeworn objection on the score of constituents. “I haven’t the shadow of a doubt that we will succeed if we are able to carry up to the conventions a mammoth petition. It is our desire to stir up those already converted and have them do in each township what the general organizers are doing for the counties of the State.” Y San Francisco Examiner, 18 March 1896. 1. At the time of the amendment campaign of 1894, Chautauqua County boasted nineteen local suffrage clubs with a paid membership of four hundred and fifty, and county activists collected fourteen thousand signatures on petitions to
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the constitutional convention that year. See 1894. Constitutional Campaign Year, 185–88, and John P. Downs, ed., History of Chautauqua County, New York, and Its People [Boston, 1921], 1:351–56. •••••••••
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SBA to Mary McHenry Keith1 1630 Folsom St
San Francisco Mch 20/’96
My Dear Mrs Keith, Dr. Elizabeth Sargent brings me your note and the News Letter clipping— How can I state our position as to the political parties—so as to be understood— Women can belong to no party—in the sense that men belong— We stand outside of each and all alike—and plead with the leaders of all— alike—to put Suffrage Amendment resolutions in their platforms—thereby making their party editors—and party stump orators free to advocate the amendment without being told they are going outside their platform of principles and policies— What we try to do is to keep our women from saying they’ll belong to—or work for—any political party—until after they are enfranchised— Now— we are beggars of each and all—to declare they’ll help carry the amendment— If one, or all, of the parties—puts a plank in platform—they will not only tolerate men’s advocating the amendment—but will be likely to invite women to speak at their party rallies—all over the State—and our speakers are implored to speak only on the one plank—that of Suffrage amdt— For instance—if any one of the State Committees should invite me to speak at one of their party meetings—I should say yes—I shall be happy to do so—provided I may speak only on the W.S. amdt plank—but that I should say nothing on their other planks—whether gold or silver—free trade or tariff—etc— You see our policy is—and will be not to be partisan—but to help the amendment by speaking for it anywhere and everywhere we can get the opportunity to do so. Of all the other points—or plots—in the article, you can deal better blows than can I. If such men could only believe in Nature’s Laws—that neither men nor women can change their sex—that to allow women’s opinions to be counted at the ballot-box, will no more interfere with their wifehood and motherhood—than voting now interferes with men’s husbandhood or father-hood.
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The great fact of woman-hood is over and under all the incidents of life—as manhood is over and above all the incidents of his life— Isn’t it sickening that these old flimsey objections are thrust before us today—just as they were a half century ago when our claim was first made Sincerely Yours U Susan B. Anthony Enclosed is the last Republican Convention’s W.S. plank—I do hope they will re-affirm it—2 S. B. A— Y Transcript in unknown hand, AF 26(1), Anthony Family Collection, CSmH. 1. Mary McHenry Keith (1855–1947) grew up in San Francisco, graduated from the University of California, and became the first woman to graduate from the Hastings College of Law. In 1883, she married the artist William Keith and made her home in Berkeley. From there, she emerged as a hardworking and thoughtful advocate of woman suffrage as well as a donor to the state’s campaigns. She remained active for decades to come. (Guide to the Keith-McHenry-Pond Family Papers, C-B 595, CU-BANC; Noel Wise, “An Uncommon Journey: Reflections on the Life of Mary McHenry Keith,” 2002, Women’s Legal History Biography Project, Law School, Stanford University, on-line.) 2. Enclosure missing. SBA may have sent the plank from the California Republican platform of 1894: “Believing that taxation without representation is against the principles of the Government, we favor the extension of the right of suffrage to all citizens of the United States, both men and women.” (San Francisco Call, 3 May 1896.) •••••••••
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SBA to ECS [San Francisco, April? 1896]1
You say “women must be emancipated from their superstitions before enfranchisement will be of any benefit,” and I say just the reverse, that women must be enfranchised before they can be emancipated from their superstitions. Women would be no more superstitious today than men, if they had been men’s political and business equals and gone outside the four walls of home and the other four of the church into the great world, and come in contact with and discussed men and measures on the plane of this mundane sphere, instead of living in the air with Jesus and the angels. So you will have to keep pegging away, saying, “Get rid of religious bigotry
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and then get political rights”; while I shall keep pegging away, saying, “Get political rights first and religious bigotry will melt like dew before the morning sun”; and each will continue still to believe in and defend the other. Now, especially in this California campaign, I shall no more thrust into the discussions the question of the Bible than the manufacture of wine. What I want is for the men to vote “yes” on the suffrage amendment, and I don’t ask whether they make wine on the ranches in California or believe Christ made it at the wedding feast.2 I have your grand addresses before Congress and enclose one in nearly every letter I write. I have scattered all your “celebration” speeches that I had,3 but I shall not circulate your “Bible” literature a particle more than Frances Willard’s prohibition literature. So don’t tell Mrs. Colby or anybody else to load me down with Bible, social purity, temperance, or any other arguments under the sun but just those for woman’s right to have her opinion counted at the ballot-box. I have been pleading with Miss Willard for the last three months to withdraw her threatened W.C.T.U. invasion of California this year, and at last she has done it; now, for heaven’s sake, don’t you propose a “Bible invasion.” It is not because I hate religious bigotry less than you do, or because I love prohibition less than Frances Willard does, but because I consider suffrage more important just now. Y Anthony, 2:857. 1. Ida Harper offered no date for this letter except the obvious, that it was written during the California campaign. The text refers to the decision made by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union to move its annual meeting out of California. That decision was made on 24 March 1896 and communicated immediately to San Francisco. See Frances E. Willard to Lillian Stevens, 24 March 1896, and Sarah B. Cooper to F. E. Willard, 25 March 1896, IEWT, from Temperance and Prohibition Papers. 2. John 2:1–10. 3. For the speech ECS prepared for her birthday celebration in 1895, see Papers, 5:719–30.
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SBA to Lillie Devereux Blake 1630 Folsom St., San Francisco, Cal., April 9, 1896
My dear Mrs. Blake: Your letter of the 2nd is before me. I am surprised at all you say with regard to the work in Delaware. I surely thought when I talked the matter over with Mrs. Catt that she full agreed with me that you should be the one to take the responsible lead of things in that state, and I have had no word to the contrary from her.1 Of course, Mrs. Catt having been elected Chairman of the National Organization Committee, it would not be within my province to interfere with her plans and decisions; but certainly I cannot see why she should not have accepted the proposition for you to go to Delaware, nor can I see why she should go there herself when you are willing to go, while she refuses to come to California and the committee feels that her refusing to come jeopards the amendment. She must have some reason for her action wholly unknown to me. But, as I said before, I do not feel that I have a right to countermand her orders, or to give her orders during this year. If she doesn’t do the organizing work to suit a majority of the states, the delegates at the next National Convention must tell her so and elect some other person to do the work. I can advise with the chairman of a committee, as I did advise with her with regard to your going to Delaware, but I can’t command—or, at least, I don’t propose to, but I am awfully sorry that she hasn’t seen fit to leave Delaware to you, and to come herself to California and help carry on the herculean job the women have in hand here. Mrs. Stanton in her last letter had told me of the death of your husband, 2 and I fully intended to have written you by next mail; to have congratulated you in that he had passed out of his sufferings here which have been of so many years’ duration. I have felt the deepest sympathy with you through these years, because I have known how your every thought of him and your every visit to him was but an added heartbreak to you. So I cannot mourn, nor bid you mourn, that he has passed to the beyond; and I hope the day will soon come to you when these last tragic years can be overlooked and
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overleapt, and you can see your dear husband as he was in the prime and vigor of his manhood. Yes, I well remember how he used to laugh and tell me he was “a reporter” whenever I met him at the door of 49 West 23rd St., as he came for you at the close of our meetings at the Woman’s Bureau. You always seemed so devoted to him and he to you, that I always admired both of you on that very account. Give my love to both of your dear girls.3 I am sure that they as well as you have pleasant memories of your husband, because of their always having treated him with the greatest respect and the tenderest love, and there is nothing that contributes so much to our joy in a great grief as the fact that we have during the lifetime of the one who is gone, done our duty in ministering to the happiness of that one, and I know that you and your girls did everything in your power to make happy the life of Mr. Blake. To-day comes Mrs. Gage’s daughter’s4 letter to Mrs. Stanton, forwarded to me by yourself. Mrs. Stanton had written me some time ago of Mrs. Gage’s illness, and I had written to her daughter, Maud; and I have to-day written again to all of the girls, who, Maud says, are there with her. Mrs Gage is a bright woman and has done her part well in the great battle for woman’s freedom. How few of the pioneers are now left, and how soon the world will know us no more! The campaign here can now be said to be fairly opened. Inclosed is a printed list of the two days’ county conventions that are in progress; and while those four easterners5 are trotting around from county to county,6 I am remaining in San Francisco with dear Mrs. Sargent, going out afternoons—and evenings quite frequently—holding parlor meetings. A Jewish lady7 was in to-day who has taken dates to secure for me four parlor meetings in Jewish families two weeks hence. Every date for the next two weeks is filled either in town or outside. All of this work may go for naught, but, nevertheless, we would never forgive ourselves if we didn’t do it. Sincerely yours, Y TL, on NAWSA letterhead, Lillie D. Blake Papers, MoSHi. Signed for SBA by secretary. 1. That SBA wrote to Carrie Catt and enclosed Blake’s letter and parts of this reply is evident in a letter Catt wrote to Lillie Blake a week later. “It is a curious thing that one has to hear news from New York by way of San Francisco. . . . I must confess I was thoroughly astonished at your letter,” Catt protested. “If you were dissatisfied with anything I had said or done you surely ought to have come to me first.” Catt went on to claim that SBA never spoke to her about Blake going
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to Delaware, that Blake never sent her a letter offering to work in Delaware for her expenses, and that both SBA and Blake misunderstood the mission of the Organization Committee. (C. C. Catt to L. D. Blake, 16 April 1896, Lillie D. Blake Papers, MoSHi.) 2. Grinfill Blake (c. 1835–1896) died on March 10. After he married Lillie Blake in 1866, ill health led to frequent changes in his employment and hard times for his family. Nearly three decades earlier SBA mistook him for a reporter when he called for his wife at the Woman’s Bureau on Twenty-third Street, and his family never let her forget it. (New York Times, 11 March 1896; Woman’s Journal, 14 March 1896; Grace Farrell, Lillie Devereux Blake: Retracing a Life Erased [Amherst, Mass., 2002], 166.) 3. Lillie Blake’s daughters were the children of her first husband. Elizabeth Johnson Devereux Umsted Robinson (1857–?), after a career teaching, married John Beverly Robinson, an architect, in 1885. Katherine Muhlenbergh Devereux Umsted (1858–1950) changed her name to Blake at some point as an adult. She was a teacher and the companion of her mother. (Blake and Wallace, Champion of Women, passim; Woman’s Who’s Who 1914.) 4. Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–1898), originally of Fayetteville, New York, had worked with ECS and SBA since the 1850s. As her health declined, she moved into the household of her youngest daughter, Maud Gage Baum (1861–1953), in Chicago. They were joined by Helen Leslie Gage Gage (1845–1933) and Julia Louise Gage Carpenter (1851–1931), who visited from their homes in North and South Dakota. (NAW; ANB. See also Papers 1–5.) 5. That is, Mary Hay, Harriet May Mills, Anna Shaw, and Elizabeth Yates. Hay and Mills managed county conventions, work they performed in New York in 1894. Shaw and Yates spoke at those conventions. Mills (1857–1935) was a star of the campaign of 1894 as a lecturer and organizer. She was the daughter of Charles de Berard Mills of Syracuse, a noted abolitionist, lecturer, and student of Buddhism. After her graduation from Cornell in 1879, she taught school, became an authority on Robert Browning, and began her own career as a lecturer. Politics held her interest for the rest of her life: she presided over the New York suffrage association from 1910 to 1913; after 1920 she worked in the Democratic party, where she became a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt; and she was the first woman to run for statewide office in New York. (NCAB, 15:374–75; WWW4; New York Times, 17 May 1935.) 6. Enclosure missing. The round of county conventions began in Southern California in early April and continued, working northward, for two months. The events kicked off local organizing among women and put petitions aimed at state political conventions into circulation. For a schedule of the two months, see undated flyer, SBA scrapbook 25, Rare Books, DLC. 7. This was Selina Solomons (1862–1942), whose work in the campaign pitted her against her family’s rabbi, Jacob Voorsanger. Later in April, Solomons was obliged to cancel her series of appearances with SBA. San Francisco’s wealthy Jews refused to open their homes for suffrage socials, and Voorsanger refused to let them use the synagogue’s parlors. Recalling her work in the campaign of
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1896, she described canvassing two precincts of San Francisco, one well-to-do, American area where she lived with her mother and siblings, and the other an immigrant area “South of Market.” In their knowledge of the campaign and attitudes toward woman suffrage, she wrote, men and women in both neighborhoods were very much alike. Rich and poor, she observed, contributed equally to the amendment’s failure in the Bay area. (M. K. Silver, “Selina Solomons and Her Quest for the Sixth Star (Women’s Suffrage),” Western States Jewish History 31 [Summer 1999]: 301–18; Selina Solomons to Editors, 2 December 1896, Woman’s Journal, 19 December 1896; Selina Solomons, How We Won the Vote in California: A True Story of the Campaign of 1911 [San Francisco, (1912?)], 3; Shirley Sargent, Solomons of the Sierra: The Pioneer of the John Muir Trail [Yosemite, Calif., 1989]; SBA diary, 20 April 1896, Film, 34:877ff.) •••••••••
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From the Diary of SBA [1–2 May 1896]
Fri. May 1, 1896. Fabiola Fiesta—Oakland—1 Mrs Sargent & self went over on 11 a.m. Boat were met by Mrs Stocker2 Pres of Alameda County club—Mrs Borland3 Pres of Oakland City club—& rode in beautifully decorated carriage—in the procession—inside the Fair Grounds—so all had to pay 50 cts to get in & see it reached home at 5—met Ida A. Harper4 on Boat & she & Mrs Sargent went to call on leading Republicans—& Mrs H. staid all night & wrote article 3— for Examiner— 1. To benefit the Fabiola Hospital in Oakland, founded in 1877 to serve the worthy poor and train nurses. 2. Alice M. Howe Stocker (1846–?) lived outside Oakland but near enough for her husband, Abner Hoyt Stocker, to work in the city at his title insurance business. Abner Stocker spent a year at the University of Michigan law school during the Civil War, and by 1870, he and Alice lived in Chicago with one child. Before 1878, they had moved to Nevada, though Alice Stocker was back in Chicago in June of that year for election to membership in the prestigious Illinois Social Science Association. From Nevada, the Stockers moved to Alameda County about 1881 or 1882. When Alice Stocker was deposed as president of the county suffrage association in September 1896, SBA observed that “the Stocker regime had checkmated every move & wish of the State.” Nonetheless, Stocker was active in California’s suffrage movement well into the twentieth century. (Federal Census, Chicago, 1870, Grantsville, Nev., 1880, Alameda County, Calif., 1900, 1910, 1920;
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Chicago city directory, 1871; Nevada state directory, 1880; Oakland city directory, 1881, 1884; San Francisco Call, 6 & 7 June 1904; SBA diary, 1 September 1896, Film, 34:877ff.) 3. Sarah C. Borland (1852–1925) was conspicuous in the civic life of Oakland as a leader in the Ebell Society, Associated Charities, and Civic Association, as well as president of the suffrage society. She moved to Oakland from Kansas City about 1882 with her husband, David C. Borland, a paperhanger and painter, and their daughter. In time, David Borland worked his way into owning a paint and paper store. (Federal Census, Kansas City, Mo., 1880, and Oakland, 1900, 1910, 1920; Kansas City directory, 1881; Oakland city directory, 1882; San Francisco Call, 14 August 1896, 27 January 1897, 23 September 1903, 24 January 1904; California Tombstone Project, Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland, on-line transcriptions.) 4. Ida A. Husted Harper (1851–1931), originally of Indiana, relocated to California when her daughter enrolled at Stanford University. The amendment campaign of 1896 proved the testing ground for her long career as a suffragist journalist. She led press work for the amendment campaign and wrote a weekly column for the San Francisco Examiner that appeared under SBA’s byline as well as articles elsewhere in her own name. (NAW; ANB.)
Sat. May 2, 1896. At Mrs Sargents— Mrs Harper staid till after Lunch— & got off a very splendid article— Mrs N. H. Blinn1 called with letter from Hon Isaac Trumbo2—telling that “The Call”—was coming out tomorrow a.m. with for the W.S. am’t. It was too good to believe possible—but in the p.m. Mr Perkins3 called to get what each of us had to say of The Calls coming out for us— So it is true—& we can only rejoice from the crowns of our heads to the soles of our feet— 1. Ellen Gertrude Holbrook Blinn (1853?–1909), known as Nellie, was made president of the California Woman Suffrage Association in 1895 and during the campaign, she was a member of the State Central Committee. Speaking was the chief contribution she made. Blinn, after moving to San Francisco from New England, taught school, went on the stage, married a veteran in 1870, and gave birth to a son in 1872. By one account, she was the first American actress to play Hamlet. From the stage she migrated to the political platform as an orator and became a favorite of the Republican party. She was also active in the Woman’s Relief Corps. (NCAB, 21:220–21; San Francisco Call, 5, 6, 7 July 1909; Woman’s Journal, 17 July 1909.) 2. Isaac Trumbo (1858–1912) was a well-known Silver Republican who moved between California and Utah. He and his friend Charles Shortridge, the Call’s publisher, were preparing for the Republican National Convention in June. There Trumbo served as a delegate from Utah and provided substantial help to women making the case for a suffrage plank in the party’s platform. (The Bay of San Franciso, the Metropolis of the Pacific Coast and Its Suburban Cities. A History
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[Chicago, 1892], 2:486–87; Edward Leo Lyman, “Isaac Trumbo and the Politics of Utah Statehood,” Utah Historical Quarterly 41 [Spring 1973]: 128–49; New York Times, 14 June 1896, 9 November 1912; Los Angeles Times, 14 June 1896, 9 November 1912.) 3. This was Frank L. Perkins (1878–?), recently hired as a reporter at the San Francisco Call. In her statement, SBA observed that “it is positively the first time that any great political paper has made the announcement that it intended to advocate the cause of the weaker sex.” (SBA diary, 27 April 1896, and San Francisco Call, 3 May 1896, Film, 34:877ff, 35:727; city directories, 1895 to 1897; Federal Census, 1900.) Y Excelsior Diary 1896, n.p., SBA Papers, DLC.
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Lecture by SBA at the A.M.E. Zion Church in San Francisco
Editorial note: SBA spoke in the evening to members of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church on Stockton Street, also known as the Starr King A.M.E. Zion Church. The congregation acquired its building from Unitarians in 1864 when the Reverend Thomas Starr King died. After “the customary devotional exercises,” SBA took her place at the pulpit and spoke for an hour. (San Francisco Call, 4 May 1896, Film, 35:726.)
[3 May 1896] “This pulpit,” commenced Miss Anthony, “was once the place from which the great Starr King1 swayed the minds and hearts of men by means of his brilliant eloquence and noble piety. This grand man I knew in Boston. He was a great battler for equal rights. How gloriously he stood up for the victims of oppression! “We know that before the war, both in the North and in the South, the negro had nothing in life worth living for. However, the attempted secession of the Southern States forced President Lincoln to free the slaves as a military measure. He himself said that if it were possible to put down the Rebellion without freeing a single slave, he would not have freed one. But the slaves were freed at last, and then came the question as to whether the negro should vote. “The fourteenth amendment to the constitution originally provided
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that all citizens, whatever their color or race, might vote. This, however, would admit negro women to the privilege, or rather the right of the ballot. The dreadful result was foreseen, and in order to save the country from so terrible a calamity the grand patriots in Congress assembled, amended the amendment so as to make it apply only to ‘male’ citizens. Still some of the States hung fire, and until the passage of the fifteenth amendment to the constitution the negro was not free to vote in whatever part of the Union he might live. The first time all the colored men of the Republic were allowed to vote was in the spring of 1870. “Thirty years ago I told the colored women and men of Kansas that the time was coming when they would have to vote.2 So far as the black men were concerned my prophecy came true. Let us hope that the prophecy I voice to-day may come true in its entirety. Women of California, black and white, I tell you you are going to get the vote here in your own State. When the day comes use your power rightly. The black man has proved his ability to make a right use of the elective privilege. Can we believe that woman, black or white, is inferior to the negro, only recently let loose from slavery? “Now I have one petition to present to you colored men. I beg you when you approach the polls at the coming election to mark your tickets in favor of woman suffrage. “You make a good use of your right to vote; why cannot your wives or your mothers do the same? It is only just. One of the cornerstones of our Republic is the equality of rights for all the citizens. The first violation of this principle of equal rights took the form of denying the franchise to the poor. The last and only remaining violation, now that male negroes can vote, is the unjust discrimination made against women. “Taxation without representation is tyranny for women now, as it was for men in the days of King George.3 But, thank heaven, though we have no representation before the lawmaking tribunals of this State, we have a representation before the people; The Call has taken up the matter in earnest and in so magnificent a fashion that the other papers will have to follow suit or fall behind. This is a grand victory for us, and I earnestly believe it is only the glimmering of the dawn before the glorious rising of the sun of liberty.4 “For thirty years we have worked for woman suffrage. For thirty years we have been thrust aside by the Senators of our country when we have asked for the vote. This has been a bitter pill for us to swallow. Still The Call has given us a sweet morsel in order to take away the bad taste which has
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remained in our mouths for over thirty years. But The Call promises to do yet more, and its promise will be kept. In the most public and irretractable manner that grand paper has espoused our cause. With such an advocate how can we fail?” Y San Francisco Call, 4 May 1896. 1. Thomas Starr King (1824–1864), a legend in San Francisco, entered the Universalist and Unitarian ministry as a protege of Theodore Parker and by 1848 was one of Boston’s leading clergymen at the Hollis Street Unitarian Church. After moving to San Francisco in 1860 as a Unitarian missionary, King played an important part in keeping California in the Union during the Civil War. (ANB.) 2. SBA spoke on the need for universal suffrage at Fourth of July celebrations in Ottumwa, Kansas, in 1865. See Papers, 1:550, and Film, 11:190–98. 3. George III (1738–1820), king of England, reigned at the time of the American Revolution. 4. This self-promotion on the part of the San Francisco Call, conducted through the mouth of a newsworthy individual, was characteristic of its style and, in the wake of its editors’ endorsement of woman suffrage, evident in every report of SBA speaking in public. •••••••••
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From the Diary of SBA [3–4 May 1896]
Sun. May 3, 1896. Rabbi Voorsanger Colored Church—Mr Meacham— Pastor—1 The Call—came out this morning for woman suffrage—with great head lines—declaring it was till election & victory won—, & we sent off 500 copies east & west—& in the state— Mr Noble2 of The Examiner called—the boy left my article at the Business office—so Mr Noble didn’t get it till this a.m.— he wants more frequent articles— will telegraph Hearst3 if the paper shall come out for the am’t— it would be too good to believe—if both nthep Republican & Democratic leading papers should champion us editorially— 1. J. P. Meacham was thought by the San Francisco Call to be already removed from his job as pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church because “his exhortations did not bring congregation or revenue to the church.” Later in May the church was threatened with the loss of its building to pay a judgment
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against it for one of Meacham’s temporary replacements. (City directory, 1896; San Francisco Call, 23 May 1896.) 2. Francis Lester Hawks Noble (c. 1867–1948) had been a college chum of William Randolph Hearst at Harvard and followed him west to work as an editor at the San Francisco Examiner. Although he eventually joined Hearst in New York to work at the Journal and later the World, he stayed in San Francisco until 1896 or 1897. (Harvard College, Class of 1888. Secretary’s Report No. IV [December 1898], 77; Aldice G. Warren, ed., Catalogue of the Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity [New York, 1910], 515; New York Times, 4 February 1948.) 3. William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951) owned the San Francisco Examiner, the first newspaper in his media empire, though he had by this date moved to New York City to publish the New York Morning Journal. (ANB.)
Mon. May 4, 1896. In San Francisco Woman’s Congress of the Pacific Coast opens this day1 1. Starting in 1894, a Woman’s Congress gathered annually in San Francisco to bring disparate organizations of women along the Pacific Coast into conversation. SBA attended the congress in 1895, but her trip to Sacramento for the State Republican Convention caused her to miss most sessions in 1896. See Gullett, Becoming Citizens, 74–79, 84–87, and Film, 35:728–43. Y Excelsior Diary 1896, n.p., SBA Papers, DLC.
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Theodore W. Stanton to ECS Basingstoke, [England] Sunday, June 14, 1896.
My dear Mother: I wrote you a card from Paris just before starting tellningp you I would give you some account of the sad affair here.1 Well, I arrived here early Saturday morning with beautiful weather. Hatty broke down for a moment on meeting me but she does not look so worn out as I feared would be the case. She has worked like a Trojan since Thursday. Almost alone, though greatly aided by Alice Blatch2 & by Harry3 in some things, she arranged everything & arranged it admirably. The little coffin, set in the baby carriage, whose wheels were trimmed with flowers; the conservatory off of the parlor where the body lay; the rooms all tastefully ornamented with flowers; two little tables near the coffin holding photographs of you all—Nanny & Cousin Lizzie4 were there—& favorite books & one or two play things of the child; five or six of
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the cousins—children—grouped in one corner of the conservatory, Nora5 at the foot of the carriage, Hattie & Harry on either side at the head, I a little back next to Hatty; the Unitarian clergyman,6 who did his part very well, the three Blatch sisters7 & three ladies from London in the parlor; Conran & Platers in two chairs outside of the parlor at the open window; two pretty songs by two excellent Basingstoke voices, Alice presiding at the piano; a violin peice delicately executed by Jacob Bright’s daughter;8 Hattie & I carrying the coffin, after the ceremony which lasted not more than a half hour, to the carriage standing near the terrace; Alice & the trained nurse accompanying it to Working,9 whither five or six of us—Hattie, Harry, Mrs. Savile,10 & Elizabeth11—went by train; the cremation, which consumed two hours & passed off without any unpleasant feature, the return by train, getting home by six,—such were the chief features of yesterday’s ceremonies. Everything went off quietly, without a hitch, with much dignity & feeling & reflects the greatest credit on Hattie’s taste & good sense. One is almost tempted to say that such a funeral is pleasant. Anyway there is nothing repulsive about it. I was continually recalling the chill & shocking features of the Berry funeral last summer.12 Fortunately the weather was simply perfect. The crematory part of the proceedings has removed from my mind the slight prejudice I had against that manner of disposing of the dead. It is the only rational way of being buried. Marguerite & the children sent over by me a lot of beautiful white roses. One of them was cremated with the body. I am now trying to get Hattie to go back with me for a week or two. Nora is delighted with the idea. But H. is so changeable that I can’t tell whether she will go or not. One moment she says yes & the next no. When I get back to Paris, I will drop you a line as to the result. She ought to leave here, for a few days at least. The Blatches all say so & I think so too. I go over Monday night. Best love to all, U Theodore. Y ALS, Clara B. Colby Papers, Archives Division, WHi. 1. Helen Stanton Blatch, Harriot Blatch’s second child, was born 23 July 1892 and died 11 June 1896. About her illness in the years before death, see also Ellen Carol DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (New Haven, Conn., 1997), 72, 82–83. 2. Alice Blatch (c. 1853–?), later Edwards, a sister-in-law, lived in Basingstoke with her father at the time of Harriot Stanton’s marriage into the family, and as the Stantons told the story, they made a project of finding an occupation for Alice. She took up kindergarten teaching, won election to the Basingstoke school board, and in the 1890s, having moved to London, served as a poor law guardian in Islington.
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In 1901, she married George Edwards, a much younger civil servant at Scotland Yard. (Census of Britain, 1881; Harriot Stanton Blatch and Alma Lutz, Challenging Years: The Memoirs of Harriot Stanton Blatch [New York, 1940], 68–70; DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch, 56, 173, 292n. See also Papers 4.) 3. William Henry Blatch, Jr., (1851–1915), known as Harry, married Harriot Stanton in 1882. He was employed in his family’s breweries in Basingstoke. (New York Times, 3 August 1915.) 4. Elizabeth Smith Miller (1822–1911), the daughter of ECS’s cousins Gerrit and Ann Smith and one of ECS’s best friends since childhood, was a reformer and philanthropist. (NAW; ANB. See also Papers 1–5.) Her daughter, Anne Fitzhugh Miller (1856–1912), known as Nannie, lived with her mother in Geneva, New York. In the 1890s, she joined the suffrage movement as an organizer of political equality clubs in Ontario County and a regular participant in the state association. (Geneva Daily Times, 2 March 1912, and Geneva Advertiser-Gazette, 7 March 1912, courtesy of the Geneva Historical Society and Museum; Robert A. Huff, “Anne Miller and the Geneva Political Equality Club, 1897–1912,” New York History 65 [October 1984]: 324–48.) 5. Nora Stanton Blatch (1883–1971) was the child of Harriot and Harry Blatch. (NAW Modern Period and ANB, s.v. “Barney, Nora Stanton Blatch.”) 6. Silas Farrington (1830–1911) was an American who settled in England in 1872. From 1890 to 1904, he was minister of the Richmond Free Church. (Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 1, Cambridge Essays, 1888–99, ed. Kenneth Blackwell et al. [London, 1983], 381.) 7. In addition to Alice Blatch, two more sisters of Harry Blatch were in attendance. Kate, or Katherine, Blatch Stark (1855–1900) lived in Basingstoke with her husband, William Playters Wilkinson Stark (1849–?), and their three children. Further along in this letter, Stanton refers to Kate’s husband as Platers. Agnes Blatch Conran (c. 1859–1936) also lived in Basingstoke with her husband, Edward Petman Conran (c. 1851–?), and their four children. (Census of Britain, 1881; Blatch family tree, copy from Derek Conran, Oxford, England; Brian Tompkins, “Descendants of Phillip Blatch,” 54–57, copy in editor’s files.) 8. Esther Bright (1868–?), who had studied music in Berlin, was the daughter of ECS’s friends Jacob and Ursula Bright. She was a member of the Theosophical Society in London and one of Annie Besant’s closest friends, hosting Besant when she returned to England each summer to avoid India’s heat. (Esther Bright, The Ancient One: To the Young Folks at Home [London, 1927].) 9. Stanton misunderstood their destination, Woking. 10. Sybilla Savile (c. 1844–?) was married to Captain Albany R. Savile, a professor at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. ECS met and liked her immensely in 1883. (Census of Britain, 1881; History, 3:951; with the assistance of Dr. A. R. Morton, Archivist, Sandhurst Collection. See also Papers, 4:310–11, 5:370, 372n.) 11. Elizabeth Bransom (c. 1865–?) went to work for Harriot Blatch as a nurse in 1883, just before the birth of Nora, and continued in the family’s service until 1923, after the births of Nora’s children. Nora thought Bransom was age eighteen when
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first employed; the federal census in the United States recorded her as forty-eight in 1910 and fifty-six in 1920. (Federal Census, New York City, 1910, and Greenwich, Conn., 1920; Ellen DuBois, ed., “Spanning Two Centuries: The Autobiography of Nora Stanton Barney,” History Workshop Journal, no. 22 [Autumn 1986]: 136.) 12. Stanton married into the Berry family of Paris. Marguerite Marie Berry Stanton (1857–1951), mentioned below, married Theodore Stanton in 1881. Their three children did not accompany him to the funeral. (Genealogical notes of Robert and Francis Stanton, Mazamet, France; Blatch and Lutz, Challenging Years, 55–58. See also Papers 4.) •••••••••
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Harriot Stanton Blatch to ECS Basingstoke, [England] June 24 [1896]
Dear Mother: Just two week ago today was Helen’s last day with us here. We knew she was ill, but all thought there were weeks if not months before her, and I felt she would recover. It was not till Thursday moring about 6.30 that we saw a change in her. In an hour the little spirit had slipped away. I had never seen any on die before, and in her case there was nothing but a sweet gliding away. There was not a struggle, she breathed more & more slowly and gently, and had a sweet smile on her face. She said about seven “I feel so comfortable.” The doctor here said the trouble was probably consumption of the bowels, but for Nora’s sake I could not let such a question rest on probabilities. A leading doctor from the Royal College of Physicians came down & made a careful examination. There was no consumption, no suggestion of tubercle anywhere. Every organ was sound. There was slight, very slight chronic inflamation of the bowels, the remnant of the cold she caught in the bowels when I left her with the first trained nurse at Ilkley to come home & get Nora ready for school. On Saturday June 13, we had the last sweet service for Helen. Theodore came. The little white coffin was lined with blue, one of her favourite colours. It stood in her big white perambulator which she gone out in all this winter. The green-house was thrown open to the drawing-room. In the middle of the green-house, which had been bright all the spring with flowers stood the carriage with its precious burden. The wreaths sent were
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tied to the wheels, making it look like a chariot of flowers. Round the coffin were great branches of white labernum, and on the top were lovely coppercoloured roses and quantities of maidenhair fern. Nora & Dolly1 in white sat at the foot of the perambulator, and Theodore & Harry & I, & the rest of the children were in the green-house too. The Unitarian clergyman from London, Mr. Farrington, an American, read some beautiful poems, Esther Bright played on the violin, and a friend, who is a concert singer & who knew & loved Helen, sang exquisitely. After our pretty service, Alice & the nurse took Helen in an open carriage with the beautiful June sun shining down upon her and drove to the Crematory near Woking. Theodore, Harry, Mrs. Savile & I went by train. I am having made a silver vase for the ashes, and when I die I want dear little Helen’s dust mingled with mine & buried. Your letter & Maggie’s have just been given me by Harry. No, there is no comfort except in the sympathy & love given by friends at such a crisis. But I am not broken down by my loss. Life and death are equal mysteries. There seems a sweet calm about all the things connected with her. I love to be in the rooms where she was, & touch and handle the things she liked. She seems to be there. I have much to tell you, and will soon write again. With fond love, U H. Y ALS, Clara B. Colby Papers, Archives Division, WHi. 1. Dolly was the nickname of Katherine Mary Conran (c. 1887–?), the only daughter of Agnes and Edward Conran. (Blatch family tree, copy from Derek Conran, Oxford, England.) •••••••••
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SBA to Harriot Stanton Blatch 1630—Folsom Street San Francisco Cal. July 3, 1896—
My Dear Hattie The Card telling of the great sorrow that has come to your dear mother’s heart—reached me here at Mrs Sargent’s yesterday—the same morning papers brought word of the death of the other extreme of life—Harret Beecher Stowe’s death1—the last a glad welcome to all her friend’s—because her work had been completed years ago—and only the wreck of body and mind
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remained among us—while with your darling—there was the beginning the promise—the one the falling of ripe fruit—the other the ruthlessly torn of blossom— And dear Mr Blatch—how crushing a blow to him—and to dear Nora—now almost thirteen—my hearts sympathies go out to you each all—and your dear mother—how her mother’s heart is aching for the first great sorrow of her darling Hattie! She has told me of little Helen’s delicate health—from time to time—but I had hope she would outgrow the difficulty and live to bless & be blessed— but she is gone from your sight, sound & touch— oh what a longing to see—to hear— I know it all my dear—as one after another—father, mother—sisters, nieces & nephew—bound as closely as human ties can fasten—what wrenches—what heartbreaks the human family suffers!! I wish I could see you my dear child—for you have always been closer to me than any other, save my very own blood nieces— Your mother & Maggie narepat Geneva—so they will have the sympathy of dear Cousins Lizzie & Nannie— Charlie is gone out from that home since I have visited it!!2 But darling—I only wanted to tell you I am grieving with you—that you must suffer the loss of one of your precious girls— may the other be spared to you & Mr Blatch—give him my love & sympathy—& Nora also—and believe me ever and always affectionately, Sympathizingly yours U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, ECS Papers, DLC. 1. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), author most famously of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, died on 1 July 1896. (ANB.) 2. ECS spent most of this summer with her cousin Elizabeth Smith Miller, principally at Lochland, Miller’s house in Geneva, New York. Charles Dudley Miller (1818–1896), Elizabeth Miller’s husband, died on 2 February 1896. (Obituaries, genealogical scrapbook, Smith Papers, NSyU.) •••••••••
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ECS to Theodore W. Stanton Peterboro, [N.Y.]1 July 24, 1896.
Dear Theodore:— We are having a good time here in old Peterboro. Altogether we have eleven regular guests and extra company almost every day. It is coming and going all the time. We could not have a pleasanter place for summer. It is just
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like being in your own house. Seven of our guests have bicycles and when they all start out together, they make quite an imposing procession. We have fires here almost every evening and sleep under two blankets. We were out driving one hot day this week and when five miles from home, there came up a sudden thunder storm which soaked us all to the skin. There was not the least appearance of a storm when we started and it was so warm that we took no wraps and had but little on to speak of, with only two parasols for shelter. As it turned cold suddenly, I was chilled to the bone, but no bad consequences came from it. We could not hurry our steeds, now of age, the legal age to vote according to the State Constitution; so we walked up all the gentle ascents in a pelting rain. The driver said that if we hurried, they would drop with palpitation of the heart and then we should be in a worse predicament, for we would have to walk, ourselves. Can you imagine me on the highway, hobbling along2 with a cane, dripping wet, my thin garments all clinging to my robust person? How humiliating for “the champion of her sex!” All the talk now, public and private, is about the Democratic convention and the split in the party.3 A gentleman from Cazenovia—Rush Wendell4— was here yesterday and talking on this point said he should not be surprised if the populists and silver men brought about a revolution,—the western and southern states against the eastern!! I do not see any such danger, ahead; but I am getting blind of one eye! Much love, U Mother. Y Typed transcript, ECS Papers, NjR. 1. For a part of her time as Elizabeth Miller’s guest, ECS stayed in Peterboro, Madison County, at the estate of Miller’s late father, Gerrit Smith. There Smith’s grandson Gerrit Smith Miller farmed. 2. The transcript reads “hobbling alone with a cane”; “along” seems a more likely word. 3. Two Democratic parties fielded candidates for the presidency in the summer of 1896. The Democratic National Convention, meeting in Chicago at the start of July, nominated William Jennings Bryan for president. Repelled by Bryan’s advocacy of free silver, gold Democrats created the National Democratic party and nominated John M. Palmer. 4. Benjamin Rush Wendell (1855–1937), known as Rush, descended from several families of New York’s Dutch aristocracy. He graduated from Yale College in 1878 and Columbia Law School in 1882. (Genealogical Record. Saint Nicholas Society of the City of New York, Containing the Lines of Descent of Members of the Society So Far as Ascertained by the Committee on Genealogy to July 1, 1905 [New York, 1905], 185; New York Times, 1 June 1937.)
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SBA to Clara Bewick Colby 1630—Folsom street San Francisco Cal—July 26, 1896—
My Dear Mrs Colby Only to think it is now just five months since I left Rochester—and it will be well into four more—before I shall reach Rochester— It does the cruelest thing in the world—that the men of each state make their women go down on their knees to each individual man—& beg him to vote to let them vote!! With all that we hope here—just enough of our friends may fail to stamp “Yes”—against Amendment No XI to compel the women of California to go through all of this humiliating begging another time!!1 I was at Head Quarters yesterday2—& Miss Hay read me your letter—& I said I’ll scribble a line to Mrs Colby just to tell her—it is impossible to say or know how many & whom—we shall want—to speak in the campaign until after all of the Political Party State Central Committees get settled down to their business!! And that wont be until after the Silverites & Populists have had their ratification meeting—probably Aug 5th—3 And after that—it will take some time to get from each the number of speeches they want from our non-partisan women— The Suffrage Com. will have nothing to say or do with any Party woman speaker! the Political Committees will engage them direct— The Repub’s have already engaged Mrs Holbrook Blinn—and the Pops were going to try to engage Mrs Diggs—at St Louis—but they are not back yet—& the Dem’s may employ Mrs Gordon4—& so on—but no woman furnished by this Suffrage Com. is to know Silver or Gold—but only woman & her disfranchisement— I doubt if the ndifferentp political Committees will want to give more places than can be filled by Miss Shaw & Mrs Catt— Of course since it is pledged to pay them—it will not engage to pay any other one—unless there are more places than those two can fill—and that remains to be seen— I am pulling every possible string to get as many places for non partisan women speakers as possible—and your name stands first on my list—after Shaw & Catt whom the Com—engaged a long time ago— If the Party Central Committees should back out from giving places to any of our speakers—then a new plan of campaign will have to be invented! but if
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they should refuse to put our speakers into their regular meetings—I shall feel that nlosep all hope of carrying the amendment!! But they must not at this stage throw us overboard— I cannot believe they will—but I wait almost breathless to hear the decision—that it hasn't been made long ago—alarms me not a little— But my dear this is private—not for publication— Miss Hay will write you the moment the matter is decided—but I wish you would write the lowest you will work for to her— I really have forgotten what you said— remember that you are no more known on this Coast than Mrs Catt—or than Miss Yates was! I have never seen it so hard to get money!!5 None of the rich women have given—except Mrs Sargent & Mrs Goodrich6 & Mrs Sperry—7 Where the money is coming from to pay the Sept. & Oct. campaign speakers the Lord only knows, I dont!! But it must come!! that is sure— Lovingly yours U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, Clara B. Colby Collection, CSmH. 1. A proclamation of 20 July 1896 assigned new numbers to the amendments on the November ballot. Suffragists, who had worked for a year to pass “Assembly Constitutional Amendment No. 11,” now needed to campaign for “Amendment Number Six.” For the proclamation, see unidentified and undated clipping, SBA scrapbook 25, Rare Books, DLC. 2. Woman Suffrage State Headquarters opened late in June on the fifth floor of the Parrott Building on Market Street. The Joint Campaign Committee shared the rooms with a new State Central Committee, chaired by Mary Hay. Other members of the new committee were Ellen Sargent, Nellie Blinn, Mary Swift, Mary Sperry, and SBA. (A. L. A. Himmelwright, The San Francisco Earthquake and Fire: A Brief History of the Disaster [New York, 1906], 54–61.) 3. Later this day, SBA called on Burdette Haskell “& talked over Populist fusion with Democrats at the St Louis Con—” In California, the two parties opened talks about fusion in late August, and by mid-September, reached agreements for many local, state, and federal races. But only one of the parties had endorsed the suffrage amendment. What impact fusion had on the amendment campaign is not known; even Ida Harper’s indignant accounts of party behavior toward the campaign concede that women spoke at partisan rallies to the end. No one since the campaign has tracked the participation of women in rallies statewide. (SBA diary, 26 July 1896, Film, 35:1ff; Gullett, Becoming Citizens, 93; Anthony, 2:883–84; History, 4:491–92; R. Hal Williams, The Democratic Party and California Politics, 1880–1896 [Stanford, Calif., 1973], 240–52; David B. Griffiths, Populism in the Western United States, 1890–1900 [Lewiston, N.Y., 1992], 1:55–64.) 4. Laura De Force Gordon (1838–1907) was an early organizer of the suffrage movement on the West Coast, ally of the National Woman Suffrage Association,
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skilled speaker, attorney at law, and, by this date, a former Democrat turned Populist. Although she played a large part in winning passage of the constitutional amendment in the legislature in 1895, she was conspicuously absent from the amendment campaign a year later after losing her position at the head of the state association. (NAW; ANB; Gullett, Becoming Citizens, 82–84, 88–89; Rebecca J. Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914 [New York, 2004], 78–82. See also Papers 2–4.) 5. California was still in a depression that started with the Panic of 1893. During 1896, farm income and prices, key to the state’s economy, hit their lowest point while unemployment continued its rise. For a chronological treatment of the hard times, see Douglas Steeples and David O. Whitten, Democracy in Desperation: The Depression of 1893 (Westport, Conn., 1998). 6. Sarah Louise Browning Knox-Goodrich (1825–1903) of San Jose was an auditor of the Joint Campaign Committee and one of the state’s pioneers of woman’s rights and suffrage agitation. She hosted SBA in April 1896 and accompanied her to the Republican State Convention in May. She moved to California in 1850 with her first husband, William J. Knox, a physician and state legislator. Living first at Nevada City, the couple removed to San Jose in 1863. William Knox died a few years later, and it was as a wealthy widow that Sarah Knox came to national attention in woman suffrage circles. SBA first met her in San Jose in 1871, after Knox had built a large suffrage society in the city. In the next decade, she was conspicuous in state campaigns for equal employment and school suffrage and protests against taxation without representation. In 1879, she married Levi Goodrich, an architect. By that time, she held positions of leadership in the National and American woman suffrage associations, and she gave money for the founding meeting of the International Council of Women in 1888. SBA also visited Knox-Goodrich on her trip to California in 1895. (History of Santa Clara County, California [San Francisco, 1881], 759–60, 765–69; History, 3:765–66; Mead, How the Vote Was Won, 23–24; SBA diary, 3 August 1871, 9–10 June 1895, 20–23 April, 3 September 1896, Film, 15:91ff, 33:80ff, 34:877ff, 35:1ff; San Francisco Call, 31 October, 7 November 1903; Woman’s Journal, 28 November 1903.) 7. Mary E. Simpson Sperry (1833–1921) was treasurer of the Joint Campaign Committee and a member of the State Central Committee. Active until California adopted woman suffrage in 1911, Sperry later served as president of the California Equal Suffrage Association from 1902 to 1909 and an auditor of the NationalAmerican association. The death of her husband, Austin Sperry, in Oakland in 1881 left her a wealthy widow responsible for the large Sperry and Company Mills in Stockton until her children were old enough to take charge. By 1896, she occupied a mansion in San Francisco. (Hubert Howe Bancroft, Chronicles of the Builders of the Commonwealth: Historical Character Study [San Francisco, 1892], 4:471–91; History, 5:204, 213, 247, 6:29–31, 34; Certificate of Death, San Francisco County, California Department of Public Health.)
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Article by SBA San Francisco, August 1 [1896]. Woman Suffrage Must Be Non-Partisan.
Los Angeles, Cal., July 31.—The different woman suffrage committees of Southern California, it is understood, are planning to do some very effective campaign work in behalf of the eleventh amendment by forming allied women’s clubs to the old parties. The plan, it is argued, will be perfectly consistent, owing to the fact that the Republicans, Populists and Prohibitionists all put a woman- suffrage plank in their State platforms, and that while the Democracy refused this, many of the delegates from this end of the State favored it and are staunch supporters of the movement. It is considered “good politics” to work in connection with instead of independent of the present organized political parties.1 The plan of action proposed in the above item from Los Angeles in yesterday’s Call would be most disastrous to the woman’s suffrage amendment.2 Every one must see that for a part of the suffrage women to thus ally themselves with the Republican party, another portion with the Democratic party, another with the Populist, another with the Prohibition, another with the Nationalist, and yet another with the Socialist Labor party, would be to divide and distract public thought from women as suffragists to women as Republicans, Populists, etc. To do this may be “good politics,” for the different political parties, but it would surely be very “bad politics” for amendment No. XI. It doesn’t need a prophet to see that “allied clubs to the old parties” will turn the thought of the women themselves to proselyting for members to their respective political party clubs instead of each and every one holding herself non-partisan, or better all-partisan, pleading with every man of every party to stamp “yes” at amendment No. XI, not for the purpose of insuring success to his party at the coming election, or to win the good will of the women of the State for future partisan ends, but
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instead, pleading with every one to thus vote that he may help to secure to all the women of California who can “read the constitution in the English language” their citizen’s right to vote to help the political party of their choice in all elections in the good times to come.3 Of course each of the political parties, old and new, would be glad of the help of the women throughout this fall campaign, but who can fail to see that the women who should join one alliance would thereby lose their influence with the men of each of the other parties. They would at once be adjudged partisans, working for the interest of the party with which or to which they were allied. Women of California, you cannot keep the good will and win the good votes of all the good men of all the good parties of the State by allying yourselves with one or the other or all of them! You must stand as disfranchised citizens—outlaws—shut out of “the body politic,” humble suppliants, veriest beggars at the feet of all men of all parties alike. The vote of the humblest man of the humblest party is of equal value to that of the proudest millionaire of the largest party. And every woman must see that if a vast majority of the women of the State should, under the Los Angeles plan, ally themselves to either one of the parties, the men of all the others might well take alarm lest their party’s chances of success would be vastly lessened if women were allowed to vote and so from mere party interest, be influenced to stamp “no” at amendment No. XI. It is very clear to every student of politics that what is “good politics” for political parties is “mighty poor politics” for a reform measure dependent upon the votes of the members of all parties. It will be time enough for the women of California to enroll themselves as Republicans, Democrats, Populists, etc., after they have the right to vote secured to them by the elimination of the word “male” from the suffrage clause of the constitution. And to work most efficiently to get the right to become a voting member of one or another of the parties of the State women must now hold themselves aloof from affiliation with each and all of them. The State Suffrage Campaign Committee has settled upon a wise plan of campaign, and the women of every county should advise with it, by letter or by calling at the headquarters, 564 Emporium building, this City.4 A good plan well executed is sure to bring victory. To this end it is to be hoped that the women of every one of the fifty-seven counties will hold themselves all-partisan and act in harmony with the State Central Committee. U Susan B. Anthony. Y San Francisco Call, 2 August 1896.
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1. The entire article from the San Francisco Call, 1 August 1896, is reproduced. It is not obvious what triggered the report, though daily news of organizing in the Los Angeles area appeared in the city’s Herald. (Los Angeles Herald, 28 July, 3 August 1896.) 2. SBA “was startled this a.m.” by the item in the Call. “Wrote a protest—tried to get Call to put it in as an Editorial,” she continued in her diary, “but Mr Boyce refused—so it went in over my name—& he promised to send its substance off by Associated Press.” Recalling the partisan strife among woman suffragists in Kansas in 1894, she concluded, “It will beat the dogs if we are to have The Kansas Kilkenny cats played over here in California—suffrage forces joining the political parties!!!” Kilkenny cats fight so hard they eat each other up. (SBA diary, 1, 2 August 1896, Film, 34:877ff.) 3. In 1894, Californians amended their state constitution to further restrict male suffrage (the constitution already barring natives of China from the franchise) with an educational qualification. The amendment stated that “no person who shall not be able to read the Constitution in the English language and write his name, shall ever exercise the privilege of an elector in this State.” Had the woman suffrage amendment been ratified in 1896, the same restrictions on qualifying to vote would have applied. (California Const. of 1879, art. II, sec. 1, as amended 6 November 1894.) 4. The Parrott Building was known also as the Emporium. •••••••••
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SBA to Jessie Anthony San Francisco, Saturday night Aug 1/96
Darling Cousin Jessie After scribbling the enclosed to Mrs M’Comas—I bethought me—I wanted you to see it—so here it is—read & hand to her—1 It does seem so very strange that any one person should thus give to the press a plan in direct opposition to what every one knows the State Committee has adopted— even it were a better plan—it should have been submitted to the State Com—before rushing it into print—but when it is a suicidal plan—what can I say!! But I hope the Los Angeles women will antidote it by declaring that they are not going to follow it—but instead are going to hold themselves non-partisan—or better All-partisan—so as to be free & able to ask of all parties— I wish you could see the strife & vexation that would surely come of that alliance to the old parties & working with them!— Oh I have been through the partisan battle—& dont want to see it again—
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Well—you got poor Phoebe off—& sent me back my check—2 I am sort of sorry you did the latter—still it will keep & may be needed to help her out of the next financial hole she gets into!! I am awfully sorry for her— but very grateful to each & all who helped her to get off & into her own native state [in margin of first page] Hastily though Lovingly U Cousin Susan B. A. Y ALS, on Joint Campaign Committee letterhead, AF 18(13), Anthony Family Collection, CSmH. In margin of second page, SBA mistook this for the enclosure and wrote “Read & hand to Mrs Mc”. 1. Enclosure missing. 2. Phoebe Wilson Couzins (1839?–1913), a lawyer and lecturer from St. Louis, was a founder of the National Woman Suffrage Association and occasionally one of its officers. Her attempts to support herself as a lecturer were often frustrated by illness and a difficult personality. SBA takes note of her departure from Los Angeles, after suffragists paid for her transportation and covered some of her debts. In California since early 1895, Couzins was unable to make enough money from lectures to support her style. Ellen Sargent and Sarah Knox-Goodrich helped with large gifts while she stayed in San Francisco the first year, but in May 1896, newspapers across the country carried her complaint that Sargent would not do more for her. She dismissed the upcoming amendment campaign as futile; “there has never been a suffrage campaign conducted by women that ended in anything but overwhelming defeat,” she told the press at the end of 1895, and this campaign would be no different. Back in St. Louis, Couzins continued to claim that suffragists were denying her her rightful salary. (NAW; ANB; San Francisco Chronicle, 23 May 1896, SBA to J. Anthony, 21 June, 1, 3, 10, & 13 July 1896, and SBA to Clara D. B. Colby, 11 October 1896, all in Film, 35:782, 818–23, 839–48, 863–74, 878–87, 36:28–35; San Francisco Call, 24 March & 27 November 1895, 20 July 1896; Milwaukee Journal, 22 May, 8 June 1896. See also Papers 3 & 4.) •••••••••
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SBA to Jenkin Lloyd Jones1 1630 Folsom St., San Francisco, Aug. 4, 1896
Dear Friend: Your letter of July 11th with inclosures has been forwarded to me here. It is impossible for me to respond to your call financially. I am up to my ears in hard work in the suffrage amendment campaign here in California, and do not expect to return east until after its fate has been decided at the ballot
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box on Nov. 3rd. I hope enough other women, and men also, will find time and heart to look after your Liberal Christian work so that I shall not be missed. It certainly fills every thought and every moment with me to devise ways and means to carry forward the educational work in the direction of securing the ballot to the women of this nation. “Justice” to women, “Love” to women, “Reverence” to women, “Knowledge” for women—one-half the people of the world—give me about all the work I am equal to. I know the Liberals say that if all the people would believe in liberal religion, women would have their rights, but I prefer to work for them straight to getting them through any religious movement. You will think me exceedingly narrow, as does Mr. Gannett and the whole lot of you; but, nevertheless, you will have to think that way, and I shall have to work my way. So, with hope that everything will work to your best understanding, I am, Very sincerely, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Jenkin Lloyd Jones Papers, ICU. 1. Jenkin Lloyd Jones (1843–1918), pastor of the Unitarian All Souls’ Church in Chicago, organized the American Congress of Liberal Religious Societies in 1894, in the wake of the World’s Parliament of Religions at the Columbian Exposition. He prevailed on SBA to be one of its officers, and in his missing letter to her, he requested that she speak at the annual conference in Indianapolis in November 1896. Jones also published this letter from SBA in New Unity, the journal affiliated with the congress. (ANB; Film, 35:940.) •••••••••
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SBA to Clara Bewick Colby Aug. 11, 1896— San Francisco Cal—
Dear Mrs Colby Mrs Sargent—yesterday—authorized Miss Hay—as Chair of Central Com for Lecture work of Campaign—to write you—the ins & outs of the campaign—but that $200— was more than the hope even—if the treasury would allow—but the one condition of absolutely no color—as to Political party policies—must be adhered to— the Com. cannot give authority to any speaker who expresses sympathy with one or the other party— She can’t even be Chameolon—that is be of the color of the party she is with for the time being— She must ever & always proclaim herself without
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opinions—until the State Constitution will count them at the ballot box— or allow them to be counted— You will see by the enclosed that there is threatening in the direction of partisanship—and you will see my protests—1 I think this Southern diverting from the line comes from the Woman’s Journal & H. B. B’s advice!2 It is strange that he must forever run a muck with our settled plans & policies— nobody has scored that resolution of his at St Louis— to begin with my condemnation of it I just wanted to hire somebody of the male persuasion “to swear” strong enough!!3 Luckily the paper is not taken in the north of the state!!—his talk does us more harm than he can do good the rest of his life— Next—Miss Hay will tell you that there can be no asking for a dollar for anything but the state work—not even for the Tribune some 250 papers of the state stand ready to publish everything the women will send to them—and they already have their subscribers & readers—hence it would be waste time & money to try to get a new paper wedged in— The difficulty here is that the women dont appreciate the power of the press & so don’t get items of news & arguments sent to the papers— it is not more papers—but more contributions—that we need here in California Everything is standing now—waiting the routes of the different party speakers before Miss Hay can begin placing our speakers— I hope the skies brighten with you & yours—but how can they be other than dark—when they are so all round and to all the people throughout the country— What an upheaval it it is— I have learned that the Populists have no money pledged even—& that they have not yet paid Mrs Diggs for her former services for them—hence she will not come for them—then the Democrats who formerly drew upon their “barrells” to pay Democratic campaign expenses are all Gold basis fellows— [who?] wont shell out for Bryan4 & Sewal or Watson5—So they are in a low state financially— They say Gen’l Barnes6 is going East & will be paid $1,000— a week for his Oratory—he aspires—you know to excel Depew!!7 This is all gossip—but it is in line with the very sad depletion here with both the Pops. & Dem’s—but we shall see— Miss Hay has wonderful skill & tact—& if anybody can engineer us through & into the harbor of the valley she can— So I rely on her largely— Lovingly yours U S. B. A N.B.—Have you not received the Sunday Examiner—with my articles on
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the Editorial page? right along every Sunday!! I havent missed but one Sunday in two months if not three months— Oh—dear—there things enough to do to keep a dozzen good clerks working 12 hours every day! So if they haven’t sent you the Examiners—it is because they couldn’t get a minute to send for them & mail them— My secretary8 gives every minute & good deal more than her 10 hours— she has given me but one forenoon in six weeks—& this because she knows how to second & help Miss Hay at the down town office!! there never was a time—it seems to me—that so nearly no women came to help either in clerical work—or in speaking & organizing!! S. B. A. I had a whole long paragraph—in which I told of the Precinct organization in every county—over 3,000 of them—and asked what a pandemonium would come if ninp each of those precinct convs—some women werentalkingp working for the success of the Dem. party others for the Repub. &c—instead of all sinking their political preferences out of sight & talking & working in private & in public for one plank that is in all the party platforms of the state— It is worse than a blunder—it is a crime for Cal. nsuffragep women to divide into Republican Suffrage Clubs—and Peoples Party Suffrage clubs & Dem. party Suffrage clubs—for the State of California will run a strait Pop—party state ticket—&c— Oh—dear a me—I wish I were wise enough to say the word right enough to make all see & hear!! Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, Clara B. Colby Collection, CSmH. Square brackets surround uncertain reading. 1. Enclosure missing. 2. This suspicion arose because Henry Blackwell opposed nonpartisanship during the California amendment campaign. In a recent example that SBA kept for her scrapbook, he explained to readers in Orange County, “Women are excluded from politics mainly because they are not personally active in politics.” He urged women of all political opinions to “engage actively, this summer and fall, in the work of party organization.” He insisted that it mattered little whether a party had demanded suffrage in deciding whether to work for it. “Voting is only one form of political power,” he concluded, “and when the other forms are exercised it cannot long be withheld.” (Orange Post, 8 August 1896, SBA scrapbook 25, Rare Books, DLC; Papers, 5:456–57.) 3. The Republican National Convention, meeting in St. Louis in June, adopted a plank in its platform which read, as rendered at the time: “The Republican party is mindful of the rights and interests of women. Protection of American industries includes equal opportunities, equal pay for equal work and protection
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to the home. We favor the admission of women to wider spheres of usefulness and welcome their cooperation in rescuing the country from Democratic and Populist mismanagement and misrule.” (Later versions joined the first two sentences, to read “interests of women, and believes that they should be accorded equal opportunities,” etc.) Henry Blackwell placed this text in the hands of key delegates while traveling to St. Louis, and upon arrival, he lobbied everyone on the resolutions committee for its adoption without any effort to win an endorsement of woman suffrage. As Clara Foltz later remarked of Blackwell’s handiwork, “It was intended to mean nothing and is a success.” (SBA to L. D. Blake, 15 May 1896; SBA to Addie M. Johnson, 15 May 1896; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 16 June 1896; and Report of the Twenty-ninth Annual Convention, 1897, pp. 45–46; all in Film, 35:767–68, 770–73, 804, 36:744ff; New York Times, 14 June 1896; St. Louis Republic, 17 June 1896; Woman’s Journal, 27 June 1896; “Memorial to the National Republican Convention” and Syracuse Sunday Herald, n.d., both in SBA scrapbook 25, Rare Books, DLC; National Party Platforms, 109.) 4. William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) of Nebraska captured the presidential nomination of the Democratic party in 1896 after delivering one of the most famous speeches in American history, “The Cross of Gold.” Subsequently, the People’s party seconded that nomination. (ANB.) 5. Arthur Sewall (1835–1900), a shipbuilder from Maine, was chosen to be William Jennings Bryan’s running mate by the Democratic National Convention in 1896. But delegates to the People’s party insisted on nominating their own vice presidential candidate with better Populist credentials. Thomas Edward Watson (1856–1922), member of Congress from Georgia, was chosen. (ANB.) 6. William Henry Linow Barnes (1836–1902), a prominent lawyer in San Francisco, already starred on the platform of the state Republican party as an orator. Barnes settled in California in 1863, after brief service as a corporal in the Civil War. He took to calling himself General Barnes for subsequent service in the National Guard. Barnes was briefly and disasterously engaged to Lillie Devereux, later Blake, during his senior year at Yale College. His decision to break the engagement led to charges he had impugned her character, and for that he was expelled before graduation. (Oscar T. Shuck, ed., History of the Bench and Bar of California [Los Angeles, 1901], 617–19; San Francisco Call, 22 July 1902; Farrell, Lillie Devereux Blake, 14–20.) 7. Chauncey Mitchell Depew (1834–1928) was the president of the New York Central Railroad and a prominent Republican orator. (ANB.) 8. That is, Emma Sweet.
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ECS to Charles P. Somerby1 New York, Aug. 15, 1896.
Dear Mr. Somerby: Please send me a few copies of Commonwealth containing that valuable article by John Swinton2—the issue of July 25th. That should be printed in leaflet form and scattered all over this country. The apathy of our people in the present disturbed condition of our country is truly surprising. The movements of the populists, socialists and bimetalists are but the faint notes of the impending revolution. We are on the eve of a greater battle than the one we fought against slavery. While one man can boast an income of $20,000 a day, while multitudes of homeless wanderers—men, women and children—have neither shelter, food nor clothes, there is something wrong in our social, political and religious theories. We must arouse the religious conscience of the nation to the duty of equalizing human conditions, securing equal rights to all. Commonwealth is doing good service in this direction. Aside from the ethics you teach, your magazine is valuable for its clear, good print, white paper and black ink. The glossy paper and pale ink of so many of our magazines make them a sealed book to us octogenarians, and the fine print of the daily journals cuts us off from that literature. But Commonwealth all can read and enjoy. Cordially yours, U Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Y Commonwealth 3 (22 August 1896): 5. 1. Charles Pomeroy Somerby (1843–1915) edited and published Commonwealth: A Weekly Magazine and Library of Sociology from 1893 to 1902. A printer by trade, Somerby ran a freethought publishing house in New York in the 1870s and, starting in 1883, worked as business manager of the Truth Seeker Company for a decade. Commonwealth reflected his interest in socialism. After Somerby published this letter, ECS sent him numerous short articles over the next five years. (Joseph Mazzini Wheeler, A Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers of All Ages and Nations [London, 1889], 302; George E. Macdonald, Fifty Years of Freethought; Being the Story of the Truth Seeker, with the Natural History of Its Third Editor [New York, 1931], 2:68; Marshall G. Brown and Gordon Stein,
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Freethought in the United States: A Descriptive Bibliography [Westport, Conn., 1978], 57–58.) 2. “John Swinton’s Voice: The Terrors of the Times,” Commonwealth 3 (25 July 1896): 21–25, an excerpt from his book Striking for Life. Labor’s Side of the Labor Question: The Right of Workingmen to a Fair Living (1894). The article examined the extreme concentration of wealth in the United States that occurred since the Civil War. Swinton (1829–1901), journalist and labor activist, worked at the New York Sun from 1875 to 1883, at a time when Henry Stanton worked there, and he returned to the paper in 1887. In that interval, he published John Swinton’s Paper, a journal of labor politics, social criticism, and economic justice. (ANB.) •••••••••
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ECS to Clara Bewick Colby Peterboro N.Y. August 20 [1896]
Strictly private Dear Mrs Colby, I send hereby the 1st chapter in Judges. Add a few remarks by Mrs Neyman, she speaks of one authority I forget the name.1 If you can read her writing you will see what is worth preserving I could not make one half out. What she says about the incapacity of warriors looking after money matters might be added to Ashcah If you see a good point to add, or criticism to be made, do so. The comments on the women to follow will be more interesting. One point I keep ever in view is to depreciate the Bible view of the Lord, on such familiar terms with Israel. What could “iron chariots” be in the way of one who engineers hurricans & earth-quakes & the pyrotechnics in a thunder storm2 My chapter on Joshua had so many gross mistakes that I sent an “Errata” for publication which does not appear I send this in abundent time for me to get the proof.3 You are right The Womans Journal does not take the place of The Tribune which is far more liberal more hospitable to new ideas. I do wish you could afford to give all your time to it. If the Woman’s Bible is a block in your way, I can send it to the Boston Investigator or The Free Thought Magazine4 though so many of our women would not then see it I had hoped it might be an attraction & help you. If I had money I would help you. The California campaign should have done much for your paper, but Susan is so narrow that she sees nothing but suffrage. She will not
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even circulate my birthday speech on account of my advice in regard to the church.5 I have her to blame for that resolution of denunciation in Wash. Con. She deplored The Woman’s Bible in the hearing of all her younger coadjutors, so that they really thought she would favor such a resolution She urged me to strike out that passage on the church in my birthday speech.6 She does not like your articles on dress & labor your poetry & Zilka.7 If your columns were all suffrage she would work for it. She does not like Blackwell nor The Woman’s Journal, but it sticks to suffrage I do not believe that you will be invited to speak in California. Yours sincerely U Elizabeth Cady Stanton Y ALS, Clara B. Colby Papers, Archives Division, WHi. 1. Commentaries on the first chapter of the Book of Judges, by ECS and Clara Neymann, were published in Woman’s Tribune, 26 September 1896, Film, 35:1098, and later in Woman’s Bible, Part II, 15–17. Clara Low Neymann (c. 1840–1931), whose name usually appeared as Clara B. Neymann, was a widow, German-American freethinker, and noted lecturer, active in the New York city and state suffrage societies. In addition to writing commentaries, she served on the Woman’s Bible Revising Committee. (Federal Census, 1880; city directories, 1880 to 1891; Woman’s Who’s Who 1914, s.v. “Glucksmann, Olga Neyman”; Woman’s Journal, 23 February 1884; New York Times, 28 May 1931.) Neymann referred to George Foot Moore (1851–1931), who believed, as Neymann put it, that “an older collection of tales” about the heroes of Israel provided the basis for Judges. Moore, professor of Hebrew at Andover Theological Seminary, published A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Judges in 1895. (ANB.) 2. Chariots of iron, capable of limiting the power of the Lord, appear in Judg. 1:19. Otherwise ECS quotes herself; see Woman’s Bible, Part II, 15. 3. Scattered commentaries destined for the Woman’s Bible, Part II, appeared in the Woman’s Tribune before Part I was published, but a steady flow of new contributions began in the summer of 1896. ECS’s first comments on the Book of Joshua were in Woman’s Tribune, 11 and 25 July 1896, Film, 35:875, 904. 4. The Boston Investigator, a freethought weekly, “Devoted to the Development and Promotion of Universal Mental Liberty,” started in 1831 and continued until July 1904, when it merged into the Truth Seeker. Ernest Mendum was its editor at this time. The Free Thought Magazine, a monthly originally based in Buffalo and dating back to 1882, was published in Chicago at this time by H. L. Green. A testimonial from ECS appeared in every issue. 5. Above at April? 1896, SBA told ECS quite the opposite of this claim. 6. In her diary on 7 November 1895, SBA wrote, “found Mrs Stanton well—& working on her speech—which she read to me—but which I criticised—saying she should treat the moral—the intellectual work done in nthep church—as in the nshep treated it done in the State—&c.” See Papers, 5:715–16.
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7. ECS means to say Zintka, the Lakota infant who survived the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 and was carried away by Clara Colby’s husband to be raised by the couple. SBA objected to Colby’s style of imposing her toddler on meetings and hostesses. On Zintka’s life, see Renée Sansom Flood, Lost Bird of Wounded Knee: Spirit of the Lakota (New York, 1995). •••••••••
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Article by ECS [26 August 1896]
Specially Inspired Men. In Hardship and Suffering They Dig Down to Hardpan. Some persons object that it was not the “intention” of the framers of the original constitution, nor of its amendments, to enfranchise women.1 When ordinary men, in their ordinary condition, talk of the “intentions” of great men specially inspired to utter great political truths, they talk of what they cannot know or understand. When by some moral revolution men are cut loose from all their old moorings and get beyond the public sentiment that once bound them, with no immediate selfish interest to subserve—as, for instance, our fathers in leaving England—in hardship and suffering they dig down to the hard pan of universal principles, and in their highest inspirational moments proclaim justice, liberty, equality for all. Visiting Chicago soon after the fire there,2 I saw great pieces of rock of the most wonderful mineral combination—gold, silver, glass, iron, layer after layer, all welded beautifully together, and that done in the conflagration of a single night which would have taken ages of growth to accomplish in the ordinary rocky formations. Just so revolutions in the moral world suddenly mold ideas, clear, strong, grand, that centuries might have slumbered over in silence—ideas that strike minds ready for them with the quickness and vividness of the lightning’s flash. It is in such ways and under such conditions that constitutions and great principles of jurisprudence are written. The letter and spirit are ever on the side of liberty, and highly organized minds, governed by principle, invariably give true interpretations; while others, whose law is expediency, coarse and material in all their conceptions, will interpret law, constitution, everything in harmony with the public sentiment of their class and condition. And here is the reason why men differ in their interpretations of law. They differ in their organizations. They see everything from a different standpoint.
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It is an insult to those revolutionary heroes to say that, after seven years’ struggle with the despotic ideas of the old world, in the first hour of victory, with their souls all on fire with newfound freedom, they sat down like so many pettifogging lawyers and drew up a little instrument for the express purpose of robbing women of their inalienable rights. But able jurists tell us that the “intention” of the framers of a document must be judged by the letter of the law. With or without intent, a law stands as it is written—“Lex ita scripta est.”3 The true rule of interpretation, says Charles Sumner, under the national constitution, especially since its additional amendments, is that anything for human rights is constitutional. “No learning in the books, no skill in the courts, no sharpness of forensic dialectics, no cunning in splitting hairs, can impair the vigor of the constitutional principle which I announce. Whatever you enact for human rights is constitutional, and this is the supreme law of the land, anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.”4 U Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Y “The New Citizen,” San Francisco Evening Post, 26 August 1896. 1. As part of the statewide effort to use the press in support of the amendment campaign, the San Francisco Evening Post put Elizabeth Sargent in charge of a column entitled “The New Citizen.” To fill her space, Sargent often took excerpts from classic statements about woman suffrage, probably found in the History of Woman Suffrage. By this means, ECS published four articles in the Post during the campaign. For the column dated August 26, Sargent picked a passage from testimony ECS delivered to the House Judiciary Committee in 1872 in support of a declaratory act for woman suffrage. It is not known if the small changes made to the text were solicited from ECS or initiated by Elizabeth Sargent. See History, 2:511–13, for the passage reprinted, and Film, 35:953, 1049, 1097, for other columns by ECS. 2. In 1871. 3. The Latin phrase usually functions like a shrug of the shoulders, a mild protest that the written law allows no room for imagination or interpretation. 4. From Charles Sumner’s speech of 5 February 1869, “Powers of Congress to Prohibit Inequality, Caste, and Oligarchy of the Skin,” in Sumner, Works, 17:38.
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SBA to Jessie Anthony 1630— Folsom street— San Francisco Cal—Aug 29/96
My Dear Cousin Jessie Miss Mary G. Hay is to reach the Hollenbeck Hotel on Monday a.m.— from San Francisco— she stops there to attend the meeting—your Campaign has called for Monday—of all southern California women who favor organizing a Southern Com. to control southern California—without any connection with the State Committee—1 I came near starting out—but I must be back here Sept. 10— so will wait until I can remain two or three weeks— It does seem too bad that the women of Los Angeles want to secede so badly that they can do nothing until they have thus declared themselves out of union with the State Com— It would be too funny—if it weren’t jeoparding the amendment—to thus fritter away the time— If it is an open meeting can you go & see & hear & tell me what the hitch is!! Lucy E.2 & Miss Shaw are here—all well as usual—and so is your affectionate Cousin U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, AF 18(14), Anthony Family Collection, CSmH. 1. Mary Hay and Nellie Blinn made the trip together in response, according to the San Francisco Call, to a recent decision by a large majority of Los Angeles suffragists “that the work of this county should continue as heretofore—co-operative, but not auxiliary.” They met with the city’s executive committee on Monday morning, attended a mass meeting and a parlor meeting later that day, and ate lunch with local leaders on Tuesday, before they headed north. “As State organizer,” Hay explained on her return, “it was incumbent upon me to note the progress of the work in every section of the State.” (San Francisco Call, 1 & 3 September 1896.) 2. A real niece, Lucy Elmina Anthony (1860–1944) was the daughter of SBA’s brother Jacob Merritt Anthony of Fort Scott, Kansas. After graduation from the Rochester Free Academy in 1883, she found a variety of roles in the suffrage movement and became both partner and secretary to Anna Shaw. She accompanied Shaw to California and worked on the campaign. (Anthony, Anthony Genealogy, 189; New York Times, 6 July 1944.)
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SBA to ECS San Francisco Sept. 8, 1896—
My Dear Mrs Stanton 1st I resurrected Mrs Hookers1 letter & returned it to her with the nicest word I could say—on mundane—not etherial affairs— Well—we must take our fate—being so of “the earth-earthy”— 2d I enclose a letter from a dear soul who has cherished your lovely curls & loving words all these years—as belonging to me—2 It is too funny the way peoples memories do carry you & me one for the other & both as one— Well so [must?] it be— I was at Ukiah—last Saturday—spoke at the opening of nthep Mendocino County Democratic campaign to a big crowd—fully one half women— I never saw women turn out en masse before at political meetings— they go just the same when no woman is announced to speak—they say—3 I was the guest of Mr A. O. Carpenter—the son of dear Mrs Clarina Howard Nichols—who died at Potter Valley—16 miles farther north—at another sons—eleven years ago— it brought back old times— I lunched with Mrs Stanford4—had a lovely time— She has sent R.R. Passes for Harriet May Mills—& Mrs Chapman Catt—and will give one to darling Harriot if she decides to come over— I doubt if she would feel like trying to secure Passes over the entire route— Get Theodore to try Chauncey Depew he would do it for your sake—I am quite sure— I would nlovep to have her here but unless she remained after the election for a time—she wouldn't see much—but hurry—as that is the order of things henceforth— Our scheme is getting well into operation—that is—we are being invited to speak in the regular meetings of each & all of the political parties— I have spoken at the opening of nthep Democratic, Republican & Populist Campaigns in this City & Oakland & in several of the Counties already & so has Miss Shaw— And we hold a rally in the finest audience chamber nin this cityp—Metropolitan Temple—on Thursday night to introduce Mrs Mrs Catts—they print it here—on the 10th after which the invitations will come for her also—5 We are proving that all
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parties are glad to get us non- or all partisan speakers—and if we carry the State—we shall prove that by thus advocating the cause before the voters of all parties is the way to convert the men of a state— I have no meeting to day or evening—have staid home from Mrs Catts parlor meeting—so as to write & this nisp the 15th not short scratch—and I am awfully tired of it— You see I give my secretary to the State Committee—free gratis—& then do my own work myself—just as I used to when I didn’t scratch my last dollar to pay a secretary— I am now writing around to our rich women at the east—begging them to help California— they cannot raise the money to pay expenses— I have never seen harder times anywhere— Well—soon you’ll have darling Hattie with you— Oh yes—Miss Shaw & I are to go to Providence—& Valley Falls—R.I—for Nov nDecp 9th Dec. 9th to help dear Elizabeth B. Chace6 to celebrate her 90th birth day—& she wants you to be there too— I shall go there via New York—so I shall be on hand to be your escort—but Harriot must go too— Then I have to-day written Rachel—who is Chairman of Program—Committee—that Harriot will be at nourp Washin nNationalp Convention—which is to be the week between Sundays of Jan. 24 & 31—the place is not settled upon—7 it may be Charelstown S.C. or Memphis Tenn— I wish it was to be in Washington where it ought to be— Oh—If Harriot is in the country—I would love to have her at our New York Annual Con which is to be held in Rochester on Nov 17, 18, 19, 20— Miss Shaw & Mrs Catt are to be there—& the night of the 19th is to be a Jubilee!—over our victories in Idaho & California!! and the evening nofp the 20th a banquet— I do hope—my next will be more decent—but really it is this or nothing— Oh—how I do think of you & wish I had you here to help on the work— Cant you write on some point & send it on— I can ngetp all and more published than I can get— Lovingly yours— U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, on Joint Campaign Committee letterhead, AF 24(4), Anthony Family Collection, CSmH. 1. Isabella Beecher Hooker (1822–1907) of Hartford, Connecticut, was a longtime political ally of ECS and SBA as well as a mainstay of the woman suffrage movement in Connecticut. She had just lost her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the implication here is that her letter to ECS expressed her intense spiritualism. (NAW; ANB. See also Papers 2–5.) 2. Enclosure missing. 3. SBA took the train from San Francisco north to Ukiah on Saturday, Sep-
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tember 5, in order to address the campaign rally. She then spent the night as the guest of Aurelius Ormond Carpenter (1836–1919), a son of Clarina Irene Howard Nichols (1810–1885) by her first marriage. On Sunday morning SBA spoke to “a great audience of Church women,” before returning to San Francisco. Carpenter, a journalist and photographer, moved to California before the Civil War, and in 1871, his half-brother George Bainbridge Nichols (1844–1935) and his mother followed him. Clarina Nichols, journalist and pioneer agitator for woman’s rights in Vermont and Kansas, lived in Potter Valley until her death. There George Nichols took over Carpenter’s large farm. SBA visited the family again in October to attend the wedding of a Nichols granddaughter. (San Francisco Call, 7 September 1896; NAW, “Nichols, Clarina Irene Howard”; History of Mendocino County, California: Comprising Its Geography, Geology, and Topography [1880; reprint, N.p., 1967], 632–34, 686; family notes, Clarina I. H. Nichols Papers, MCR-S; Marvin A. Schenck, Karen Holmes, and Sherrie Smith-Ferri, Aurelius O. Carpenter: Photographer of the Mendocino Frontier [Ukiah, Calif., 2006]; SBA diary, 5 September, 4 October 1896, and SBA to Jane E. L. Stanford, 8 September 1896, Film, 35:1ff, 1029–31.) 4. Jane Eliza Lathrop Stanford (1825–1905) was the widow of Leland Stanford, wealthy politician and railroad man. She came to know ECS and SBA in Washington, during her husband’s time in the United States Senate. After his death in 1893, it fell to her to complete their plans to establish and fund the Leland Stanford, Jr., University as a memorial to their one child who died as a teenager. She also assumed some aspects of her husband’s role in the Southern Pacific Railroad, and through those connections, she contributed to the amendment campaign by acquiring railroad passes for organizers and lecturers. (NAW; ANB.) 5. This mass meeting, or demonstration, in Metropolitan Temple marked the start of the amendment campaign, “the signal for the opening of the precinct meetings all over the City and State,” according to the San Francisco Call, 8 September 1896. SBA presided over a program that included speakers from the Socialist Labor, Populist, and Democratic parties. Carrie Catt made her California debut, and Anna Shaw closed the evening. For meeting coverage, see Film, 35:1050–52. 6. Elizabeth Buffum Chace (1803–1899) was an early supporter of William Lloyd Garrison and a leader in Rhode Island’s suffrage association. (NAW; ANB.) 7. Annual conventions of the National-American association met in Washington only in alternate, even-numbered years. With invitations from a dozen locations, the Executive Committee agreed in January 1896 to take the meeting where it could do the most political good, and they put off a decision until later in the year.
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ECS to William McKinley,1 with Comments by Henry B. Blackwell 26 West 61st Street, N.Y., Sept. 8, 1896.
Honored Sir: As a representative of a disfranchised class of American citizens, numbering thirty-five millions, I would suggest to you, as an act of justice, to remember them in your Inaugural address, should you be chosen for our next President.2 I urge you to recommend Congress to pass a Sixteenth Amendment to the National Constitution, forbidding the several States to disfranchise their citizens on the ground of sex. As personal rights are more sacred than those of property, so is this measure far more important than tariffs and finances, considered the vital questions at this hour. You have a precedent for giving some thought to this measure, for its tender recognition in the platform of your party on several occasions. Twenty years ago, when the Republican party, born of the principle of equal human rights, was appealed to at the National Convention held in the year of our centennial celebration, its platform announced that the demand for equal political rights by women “deserved respectful consideration.”3 No evidence of such consideration has appeared in the platforms of national conventions of the Republican party since that time. State action alone has placed women in the ranks of full citizenship, and only in four States has the tyranny been removed which caused our Revolutionary sires to declare independence—the tyranny of taxation without representation. It has remained for the Republican party assembled in national convention in 1896, to issue the pusillanimous statement called a plank in their platform. The respectful consideration bestowed is, that “we are mindful of the rights and interests of women.” 4 This has not had any manifestation politically. The faint recognition of woman’s equal rights as a citizen manifested by the Republican party
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in its late convention is that “we favor their admission to wider spheres of usefulness.” These resolutions are mere mockery, an insult to the educated women who, in intelligence and cultivation, are the equals of their sires and sons. It is not a wider sphere of usefulness we desire, but equal civil and political rights in the ranks we now fill. We are already useful, to the point of exhaustion. While the ordinary man devotes himself for a specified time to one form of industry, one trade or profession, the woman for an indefinite time fills half a dozen fields of usefulness. We do not ask “respectful consideration” nor “wider spheres of usefulness,” but the rights that belong to every citizen of a republic, as set forth in the fundamental principles of our government. Principle and precedent alike favor this measure. In none of the constitutions of the thirteen original colonies, was the right of suffrage limited to men, the word male appears in none of them, and women voted as they had done in the mother country, on a property qualification. A fair interpretation of our National Constitution, especially on the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, gives all citizens a voice in the government. Able lawyers, judges and statesmen took the ground that women, as well as the slaves, were enfranchised by the Fourteenth Amendment, and many women in different States voted, until the Supreme Court declared their action unconstitutional.5 If a recommendation to Congress in your Inaugural should decide this question, and thirty-five millions of American citizens be enfranchised, you would deserve a place in history by the side of Chief Justice Mansfield,6 who, in the Somerset case, in a moment of inspiration, rose above party and precedent, and declared no slave could breathe on British soil. “It is a wild and guilty fantasy,” said he, “that man can hold property in man.” Since the end of the anti-slavery struggle, culminating in our Civil War, we have had no discussions in Congress to electrify the nation, based on the broad principles of justice and equality. It would be a proud position for you to be the first President of the United States to issue a Proclamation of Emancipation for the mothers of the Republic, and thus recall our statesmen to another discussion on human rights. Your place on the page of history would be prouder far than that of Abraham Lincoln, for only in the elevation of woman can we secure a higher and purer civilization. Recommend to us another measure of safety against foreign ignorance and native indifference, an educational qualification,
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compelling all voters to read and write the English language intelligently. This in no way conflicts with our cherished theory of “universal suffrage,” as it is a qualification attainable by all; a healthy check against the thousands of foreigners landing on our shores, and a stimulus to the youth of the nation, to equip themselves for the duties of citizens of a republic. These two beneficent measures should gild the dawn of the twentieth century. Respectfully yours, U Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Honorary President of the Woman Suffrage Association. I do not agree with our venerable correspondent in her depreciation of the woman’s rights plank of the National Republican platform. So long as a majority of women continue to remain personally inactive in politics, it will be very difficult to secure an unqualified endorsement of woman suffrage from a national party on the eve of a presidential election. As a matter of fact, even the Populists and Prohibitionists refused to give it, although they claim to occupy advanced ground on this reform.7 To recognize women as citizens having rights to be protected and interests to be promoted by legislation; to declare in favor of giving them equal opportunities, and equal pay for equal work, which they do not now possess; to advocate their admission in future to wider spheres of usefulness; and to invite their active coöperation in political work, may seem “pusillanimous” to Mrs. Stanton, but it seems to me to have been chivalrous, manly, and perfectly sincere. Everything which encourages women to think and act politically helps the suffrage cause, and in this, as in the anti-slavery movement, “half a loaf is better than no bread.” U H. B. B. Y Woman’s Journal, 12 September 1896. 1. William McKinley (1843–1901) of Ohio was the Republican nominee for, and elected in November as, the twenty-fifth president of the United States. ECS also wrote letters to William Jennings Bryan and John M. Palmer. For her letter to Palmer, see Film, 35:1040. 2. This sentence was later challenged on the basis that there were not thirty-five million women of voting age in the United States. ECS answered that all women and girls “would be endowed at once with the right of suffrage; some actual and some prospective voters, if the qualification of sex were abolished.” Woman’s Journal, 19 September 1896, Film, 35:1085.
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3. Members of the National Woman Suffrage Association thought little of this plank at the time. See Papers, 3:230–33. 4. For the Republican plank, see notes above at 11 August 1896. 5. Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wallace 162 (1875). 6. This was ECS’s favorite example of judicial activism as well as principled leadership. In 1772 chief justice of the Court of Kings Bench, William Murray, Earl of Mansfield (1705–1798), freed the slave James Somersett, who was brought to England from Virginia, ruling that in the absence of positive law creating slavery, slaves could not lawfully be kept in England. 7. Henry Blackwell is correct: the platform of neither the People’s party nor the Prohibition party mentioned woman suffrage. Only for the latter was this a change from previous national elections. •••••••••
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SBA to ECS San Francisco Sept. 19, 1896.
My Dear Mrs Stanton Haven’t Miss Hay and Mrs Sweet come out in fiery colors?1 Think of these envelopes glaring the Post Office in the face as they stamp stamp piles & piles of them at each end of their route! We now have the prestige of all of the political parties inviting all of us to speak on their platforms side by side of their regular stump orators—which is something we never had before in any of the Eleven Suffrage amendment campaigns— Then the State annual meetings of the Christians—the Baptists & the Methodists—already held—passed strong resolutions in our favor—and the Congregationalist & Presbyterian nannualp meetings are to come in October & we are pledged that good resolutions will be adopted—2 Then in 50 out of the 57 counties—Clubs are formed in nearly every voting precinct— in this city there 300 Election precincts–and over 150 of them have clubs organized & hard at work making a poll of our friends—& our enemies— the first poll with a majority against us—came in this morning— every one before has had a majority of 2 & 3 to 1 for us!!3 But what a long drawn out agony of suspense it is! It does seem that we must carry the am’t— But my dear—I am awfully put to it to get my Sunday articles for the Examiner— I do wish your “Jimmy Grind” order would come to you & be obeyed and that you would send me some short articles on whatever point
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you feel will help make the rank & file of the Democracy see & believe it their duty to vote for—“Amendment No. 6”— Oh how I have longed for you at my side to put into your matchless sentences the words that wait the saying— none of the young women are good—clear, crisp writers— Mrs Harper answered these objections—but how unlike your answers— Still no one here could do them better or stronger— I wonder if you get the Sunday Examiner— my orders are to have a copy mailed to you every Monday morning— Well—I think of dear Edward M. Davis4—about the two of us together being an invincible team— I feel every day—like Sampson shorn of his locks—without you— Yours of the 12th with Hatties card is here— You will have received my report of Mrs Stanford’s not feeling like asking for any more R.R. passes— So we shall have to give up having Hattie unless the R.R. Courtesy can be obtained at that end of the line— I should be so glad—so proud—to introduce her to a San Francisco audience—as the representative of her noble mother—whom all admired & honored here a quarter of a century ago— But—when she arrives in October—have her hold herself ready to start for if it should be possible to get the Committee to pay her expenses— I will send a telegram to you—instanter— They are just going wild over Mrs Catts eloquence, beauty & power—and what wouldn’t they do over our Harriot?— Your letter to the Gold Dem. Nominee is good—5 In due time the W.J. will bring yours to M’Kinley—6 Remember Frank Birds7 saying in 1881—as we sat in that hotel parlor waiting for the banquet to be announced—“Mrs Stanton Blackwell is an Ass”—and all his stuff to women about their position toward the parties proves Mr Birds assertion— Lovingly yours U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, on state headquarters letterhead, Clara B. Colby Papers, Archives Division, WHi. 1. New stationery for the new campaign headquarters displayed a full-color flag with red and white stripes. On a blue field in one corner, three white stars recognized the suffrage states of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming and a faint, emerging fourth star represented California. (With thanks to Harry Miller, Wisconsin Historical Society.) 2. Under the headlines “Equal Suffrage the Fad,” the San Francisco Call, 19 September 1896, made the point that SBA here relayed to ECS. SBA addressed the Christian Ministers’ Association when it met near Santa Cruz in July; see Film, 35:920. The Baptists met in August, and the Methodists completed their meeting
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on September 11. See also Edelman, “ ‘Red Hot Suffrage Campaign,’ ” 104–6. SBA updated this list in a letter to Clara Colby, 11 October 1896, Film, 36:28–35. 3. Two hundred precinct workers were polling San Francisco’s voters about their support for the suffrage amendment. By September 18, with eight thousand interviews completed, suffragists had found that support for the amendment stood about three to one. The campaign conducted similar work in other cities and counties. (San Francisco Call, 18 & 24 September 1896, SBA scrapbook 25, Rare Books, DLC.) 4. Edward Morris Davis (1811–1887), a son-in-law of Lucretia Mott, was an ally and friend of ECS and SBA for twenty years, working through Philadelphia’s Radical Club and Citizens’ Suffrage Association. (Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott, ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer [Urbana, Ill., 2002], xlvi; Philadelphia Inquirer, 28 November 1887. See also Papers 1–4.) 5. ECS to John M. Palmer, Film, 35:1040. 6. Above at 8 September 1896. 7. Francis William Bird (1809–1894) of Massachusetts was an antislavery politician, Radical Republican, and founder of Boston’s Bird Club, who joined the Liberal Republicans in 1872 and finally became a Democrat. When the National Woman Suffrage Association met in Boston in 1881, Bird addressed the convention, and he also entertained ECS, SBA, and Harriet Robinson at the Bird Club on 28 May 1881. (Papers, 4:93–94; National Citizen and Ballot Box, June 1881.) •••••••••
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ECS to the Editor, NEW YORK JOURNAL1 [New York, before 20 September 1896]
Editor of the Journal: Just returning from my Summer outing and inquiring into the political attitude of the metropolitan press, I learn that the Journal is the only daily paper that supports William J. Bryan as the regular Democratic candidate for President.2 An enthusiastic supporter of Mr. Bryan has just read to me his Labor Day speech delivered in Chicago on September 7. It certainly has a true ring from beginning to end. Ignoring all minor questions, such as tariff and finance, that might have confused his audience—as they do everybody—he dwells on the fundamental principles of just Government, which, if carried out, would secure equal rights to the 35,000,000 of disfranchised women.3 The ballot as he describes it, in the hand of every citizen, would indeed
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be a sceptre of power; a crown of royalty. A man who, as President of the United States, would use his influence to carry out such principles, I would be glad to see in the highest position in the gift of the American people. 4 U Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Honorary President Woman’s Suffrage Association. Y New York Journal, 20 September 1896, SBA scrapbook 25, Rare Books, DLC. 1. Willis John Abbot (1863–1934) edited the New York Journal for William Randolph Hearst. (DAB, Supplement 1.) 2. ECS accurately describes the partisan positions of the New York City press during the presidential election, as eastern Democrats hesitated to accept the party’s nominee and free silver. Although Hearst did not agree with Bryan about silver, he guided the New York Journal into the forefront of Bryan’s campaign. (Ben Procter, William Randolph Hearst: The Early Years, 1863–1910 [New York, 1998], 89–94.) 3. Bryan was the guest of Chicago’s Building Trades Council to deliver a nonpartisan speech on Labor Day. “The great common people believe in a democratic form of government,” he told the crowd, “because it is only under a democratic form of government that they are able to fully protect their rights and defend their interests.” He went on to talk about the ballot, defining it as an individual right and as “the weapon by which the people of this country must right every legislative wrong.” (William J. Bryan, The First Battle: A Story of the Campaign of 1896 [1896; reprint, Port Washington, N.Y., 1971], 1:375–85.) 4. ECS recycled this text into an open letter to Bryan in October. See Film, 36:45. •••••••••
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Mary S. Anthony to ECS Rochester, N.Y., Sept. 22 1896
Dear Mrs. Stanton Inclosed find letters of Theodore & Hattie to you, forwarded by Susan B. to me to read—1 I sent them to Mrs Willis & Mrs. Hallowell to read, & now return them to you— It seems exceedingly sad & yet beautiful, to thus be parted—even with illegible hope of meeting again— The short life here will always live in her memory— A letter from Susan B. to day— She says dear Mrs Sargent is struggling to find the money to foot the enormous bills of their campaign
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work— They have been obliged to go in debt largely— I do hope some of the rich women somewhere in the country, will give them a lift out of it— I think women never worked harder or more earnestly to get suffrage, & it has looked very hopeful; but now the courts are now giving naturalization papers to thousands of men who have lived there for years, and never thought of wanting to vote; there is no doubt but the saloon power is at the bottom of it, and they will be thoroughly instructed to vote “No” on the Amendment—2 So Susan says the intelligence, culture & thrift will have to wait the pleasure of idleness, drunkenness & ignorance, in making the laws & lawmakers. She says if they lose the amendment, it will only show, as in New York & Dakota,3 how impossible it is to get a majority of men to vote for a reform measure, when so large a number of them are ignorant foreigners unable to understand the first principles of our free government— She will not be home before Nov. 19th— We are to have a banquet soon after her return— how I wish you could be here— Very truly yours U Mary S. Anthony Y ALS, on New York State Woman Suffrage Association letterhead, Clara B. Colby Papers, Archives Division, WHi. 1. Enclosed were the letters to ECS at June 14 and June 24 above. 2. In 1894, the liquor industry organized into the California State Protective Association and pushed back against a temperance movement that had considerable success in Southern California and eager adherents, if not power, in Northern California. In San Francisco, the lobby showed its muscle immediately by electing its candidates to office. Opposition to the suffrage amendment was just one step along the path to protect the industry. Dealers and saloon keepers met in San Francisco on 18 September 1896 to create a committee charged with looking “after the interests of the liquor trade during the coming campaign.” Five weeks later, when the group’s opposition to the suffrage amendment had been made explicit, the Call reported, “Never before in the history of the State have the liquor forces been so well and widely organized as for this campaign.” The group claimed to control fourteen thousand votes in San Francisco alone, and those voters, the committee threatened, “will do active work at the polls on the day of election to bring about the defeat” of the amendment. (San Francisco Call, 19 September, 25 October 1896; Edelman, “ ‘A Red Hot Suffrage Campaign,’ ” 88–92; Ostrander, Prohibition Movement in California, 78, 81, 83–84.) 3. In South Dakota in 1890, voters rejected a constitutional amendment to enfranchise women. In New York in 1894, a constitutional convention refused to submit such an amendment to the voters. For more on these events, see Papers 5.
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SBA to Mary S. Anthony [San Francisco, 30 September 1896]
Five weeks from to-day the long drawn out agony will be ended either in death or in a beginning to live, and five weeks from Saturday night, November 7th, we all start eastward—homeward, thank heaven! 1 I am just in from Sausalito across the bay, where I spoke in a pool-room. The gamblers had cleaned it all out and printed in red and white chalk on a great blackboard on which they keep the tally of the games: Welcome! Susan B. Anthony and 2 Kate Tupper-Galpin. Equal Rights for the Women. Numbers of them were present and seemed interested. 3 To-night I am to dine and sleep at Hon. Fred Stratton’s, in Oakland. He is the Republican nominee for state senator, and his wife a leader in society. 4 I am to speak at somebody’s house to a parlor full of men, they say. Miss Shaw is just in from Calistoga and Napa, where she had large audiences in three Republican wigwams. Miss Hay says the Republican committees are asking for Miss Shaw because she is a Republican, and other committees are asking for Mrs. Catt because she is a Democrat. It is too funny, the way poor partisans worry over our non or all partisanship. I was introduced to two or three bankers on the ferry boat this morning, and one said he had never thought much about it, but was going to vote for the amendment. I said to them one of two things was, either the men of California were too chivalrous to say “No” to anything they thought the women wanted them to say “Yes” to, and were champion liars; else all men are going to vote for us. It does seem marvelous how every man we approach personally is going to vote for us—that is sure. Y Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 11 October 1896, SBA scrapbook 25, Rare Books, DLC. 1. This event took place on September 30.
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2. Kate Tupper Galpin (1855–1906) of Los Angeles spent a month with the amendment campaign in Northern California. SBA was impressed by her speaking skills when she first heard Galpin on September 29 in East Oakland. After growing up on a farm in Iowa, in a family that produced several distinguished women, Galpin taught school, graduated from the Iowa Agricultural College, and held professorships at colleges in Wisconsin and Nevada. Oratory and dramatics were her special interests, and after her marriage and move to California in 1890, she developed very popular classes for women to study the plays of Shakespeare. (American Women; Louis S. Lyons, ed., Who’s Who among the Women of California: An Annual [San Francisco, 1922], 158; Los Angeles Herald, 8 September 1896, 11 January 1906; SBA diary, 29 September 1896, Film, 34:877ff.) 3. Frederick Smith Stratton (1859–1915) was an Oakland native, a lawyer, and candidate for the state senate from Alameda County. SBA thought he tempered his support for the suffrage amendment lest it weaken his chance for election. He and his wife, Alice Tasheira Lee Stratton (c. 1861–1897), hosted SBA overnight on this occasion. (WWW1; Guide to Frederick Smith Stratton Papers, 1900–1917, CU-BANC; Henry Anthon Bostwick, comp., Genealogy of the Bostwick Family in America. The Descendants of Arthur Bostwick, of Stratford, Conn. [Hudson, N.Y., 1901], 783; San Francisco Call, 19 May 1897; SBA diary, 1 October 1896, Film, 34:877ff.) 4. The meeting was held at 222 Eleventh Street, in the home of Emma Rogers Babson Friend (1839–1905). Friend came to California from Massachusetts in 1869 with her husband, William Hovey Friend, a businessman and Republican activist. Emma Friend was a founder of the Ebell Society and a local leader in the amendment campaign. (Joseph E. Baker, ed., Past and Present of Alameda County, California [Chicago, 1914], 2:472–74; San Francisco Call, 13 March 1905.) •••••••••
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Interview of SBA in Santa Barbara, California [16 October 1896]
“Please tell me something of your trip. Did the people of Santa Barbara 1 county treat you nicely?” asked the reporter. “Yes indeed. They gave me a perfect ovation,” she answered. “At San Luis Obispo I addressed a Republican meeting with Senator 2 Perkins. From there south I was the guest of Superintendent Johnson of the narrow gauge railroad, a strong equal suffragist who arranged 10 minute 3 addresses for me at each place the train stopped.”
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“At Arroyo Grande there were 1000 people awaiting us. Next was Nipomo where there were fully half that number. At Santa Maria there were considerably over a 1000 people waiting. They had prepared a stage for me to speak from. The people were very enthusiastic and carried me bodily from the train to the stage. We did not intend stopping at Los Alamos but there were so many people waiting at the train, clamoring to be talked to, that we paused a few minutes. “I go to Ventura tonight to address the people with Mrs. Chapman Catt and tomorrow night we speak here.” Y Santa Barbara Daily Independent, 16 October 1896, SBA scrapbook 25, Rare Books, DLC. 1. SBA left San Francisco on Monday, October 12, and arrived in San Luis Obispo that day, after “a hot dusty nine hours on the train through Salinas Valley.” She spoke that night. The train trip that she describes in this interview began on October 14. After her lecture in Santa Barbara on October 17, she stayed in southern California, speaking in San Bernardino, Los Angeles, Riverside, and Colton, and turned northward again to keep engagements in Bakersfield, Fresno, and Port Costa, before arriving back in San Francisco on October 26. Carrie Catt was with her for much of this trip. For reports of her speeches, see Film, 36:39, 46, 50–54, 59. 2. George Clement Perkins (1839–1923), shipowner and banker, was a former Republican governor of California and current senator, appointed to succeed the late Leland Stanford. He served in the United States Senate from July 1893 to 1915. (DAB; BDAC.) 3. Charles O. Johnson of San Luis Obispo was superintendent of the Pacific Coast Railway from 1892 to 1900. His wife was a vice president of the San Luis Obispo Political Equality Club, organized in May 1896. SBA traveled about sixtysix miles on this narrow gauge line that began at the ocean in Port Harford, traveled inland to San Luis Obispo, and headed south into Santa Barbara County, ending at Los Olivos. Freight was its primary purpose and chief source of revenue. For passengers, a stage connected the terminus to the city of Santa Barbara further south. (Gerald M. Best, Ships and Narrow Gauge Rails: The Story of the Pacific Coast Company [Berkeley, Calif., 1964], 8, 47; Wilmar N. Tognazzini, comp., 100 Years Ago, 1896: Excerpts from the San Luis Obispo Morning Tribune and Breeze [San Luis Obispo, Calif., 1995?], 49, 54, 83–84.)
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From the Diary of SBA [1–3 December 1896]
Tues. Dec. 1, 1896. Left Bensonhurst at 3 p.m. barely reached Fall River 1 Boat at 6 Oclock—Rachel with me— it was my first Sound trip since 30 years ago—pleasant but cold— R. got into berth with me & talked until almost morning—while the great machinery paddled us along— R. is a wonderfully strong woman in many directions— If only she hadn’t put that censure of Mrs Stanton’s Bible into her last years report as Cor. Sec.!!—I should say in all directions—but that was caused either by a weak or wicked spirit— I cannot divine which—even at this distance— 1. A part of Brooklyn, Bensonhurst was home to Carrie Catt. SBA spent ten days traveling east from California, stopping to attend state suffrage meetings in Reno and Kansas City and reaching Rochester in time to attend the New York association’s annual meeting there. She was en route to Boston for meetings of the National Council of Women. By taking the Fall River Line, she and Rachel Avery could sleep while making the trip. Ships of this line traveled the East River north to Long Island Sound, eastward the length of the Sound, around Point Judith in Rhode Island, and up Narragansett Bay to Fall River, Massachusetts. A train carried passengers from there north to Boston. 1
Wed. Dec. 2, 1896. Wm L. & Ellen W. Garrison 1763—Brooklineneaconp Street Brookline Mass— Rachel Foster Avery & I reached the Hotel 2 Vondome—Boston & there found—the first I met Mrs Emma Shafter 3 Howard of Oakland—Mrs Charles Webb Howard the fashionables call her— after breakfast—I went to her room & talked & rested & lunched until 2 p.m. then went into Council Ex. Com. meeting in parlor—Miss Shaw 4 with very many of officers present— at 5.30—Miss Shaw & self went out to the Garrisons— William was going off to speak this evening—so we visited with dear Ellen & Agnes all the evening— 1. Ellen Wright Garrison (1840–1931) and William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., (1838– 1909) often hosted SBA at their home near Boston. Growing up in Auburn, New York, the daughter of Martha Coffin Wright, Ellen Garrison had adored SBA, and she remained a friend for life. William Garrison was both businessman and reformer with a strong interest in the woman suffrage movement. He was probably
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out lecturing on the Single Tax; he would later take a prominent part in the antiimperialist movement. Agnes Garrison (1866–1950) was the eldest of their five children. (Wright genealogical files, Garrison Papers, MNS-S; New York Times, 13 September 1909. See also Papers 1–5.) 2. The Vendome was an eight-story, marble palace of a hotel, located on Commonwealth Avenue, two blocks north of Copley Square. 3. Emma Lovell Shafter Howard (1842–1916), the estranged wife of Charles Webb Howard, met SBA in Oakland, California, in 1895 and befriended her again during her stay in 1896. When SBA sailed to London in 1899, Howard was one of her companions. Born in Vermont, Howard moved west while a child, attended high school in San Francisco, married in 1862, and gave birth to six children. Her husband, her father (Justice Oscar L. Shafter of the state supreme court), and her uncle, owned seventy thousand acres at Point Reyes Station on which they created dairy farms, and her husband also owned a waterworks that supplied San Francisco. At the time of C. W. Howard’s death in 1908, all this wealth pitted mother against children in a contest over her share of the couple’s community property. (Woman’s Who’s Who 1914; California Tombstone Project, Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland, on-line transcriptions; Jacob G. Ullery, comp., Men of Vermont: An Illustrated Biographical History of Vermonters and Sons of Vermont [Brattleboro, Vt., 1894], pt. 3, pp. 88, 90; Mildred Brooke Hoover, Hero Eugene Rensch, and Ethel Grace Rensch, Historic Spots in California, 3d ed. [Stanford, Calif., 1966], 179–80; San Francisco Call, 20 August, 3 November 1908.) 4. For this meeting of the executive committee, see Louise Barnum Robbins, ed., History and Minutes of the National Council of Women of the United States (Boston, 1898), pp. 276–84, Film, 36:118ff.
Thur. Dec. 3, 1896. In Boston Ex Com—Public Meeting Young Men’s 1 Christian Ass’n Hall—at 9.50— not over 200 gathered at during the whole morning— Lunched with dear Mrs Garrison—reception at Mrs 2 Bonds —Commonwealth Avenue from 4 to 6— after it went with Mrs Howard to dinner at the Vendome and nthenp a Business meeting in eve3 ning —and back to Garrisons to sleep 4 5 Mrs Dickinson does splendidly & Mrs Robbins vastly better than I had expected— 1. On Boylston Street. “The Work of Organizations Composing the Council” was the topic of this public session. See Film, 36:136. 2. Isabella Bacon Bond (1859–1931) hosted a party at her home at 128 Commonwealth Avenue, and SBA received with her. She and SBA were first introduced in Washington by Jane Spofford, a relative of Bond’s father. Trained in oratory before her marriage in 1883, Bond spent two years traveling as a dramatic reader along the East Coast. In 1896, she had a houseful of young children. (Boston Daily Globe, 4 December 1896, Film, 36:136; Woman’s Who’s Who 1914; Memoirs of Isabella Bacon Bond [Boston, 1934]; Samuel Atkins Eliot, ed., Biographical History of
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Massachusetts: Biographies and Autobiographies of the Leading Men in the State [Boston, 1909], vol. 2, s.v. “Charles Henry Bond” [unpaginated].) 3. See Robbins, History and Minutes of the National Council of Women, pp. 285–89, Film, 36:118ff. 4. Mary Lowe Dickinson (1839–1914) became president of the National Council of Women in 1895, and in that capacity organized ECS’s eightieth birthday celebration in New York City. A poet, novelist, teacher, professor of literature, and editor, Dickinson also distinguished herself as a leader in women’s organizations, notably as the longtime leader of the King’s Daughters. (WWW1; Woman’s Who’s Who 1914; Mary Simmerson Cunningham Logan, The Part Taken by Women in American History [Wilmington, Del., 1912], 713–15; New York Times, 9 June 1914. See also Papers 5.) 5. Louise A. Barnum Robbins (1844–1918) was corresponding secretary of the National Council of Women from 1895 to 1899. A graduate in 1864 of Adrian College and president of its alumnae association, she married after the Civil War and stayed in Adrian, where her husband, Richard B. Robbins, practiced law and served in the state legislature. Before she came to the attention of leaders in the National Council of Women in 1895, Robbins had served as president of the Michigan Woman’s Relief Corps. (“Mrs. Louise Barnum Robbins, B.S.” College World 11 [1 April 1896]: 110–17; Woman’s Who’s Who 1914; Certificate of Death, Lenawee County, Michigan Department of State, in Death Records, 1897–1920, Mi; with the assistance of Noelle C. Keller, Shipman Library, Adrian College.) Y Excelsior Diary 1896, n.p., SBA Papers, DLC.
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Remarks by SBA to the National Council of Women
Editorial note: SBA was not announced to be a speaker at this public session of the National Council’s meetings. The topic was “Work of Departments.” She may have been asked to address the audience when Frances Willard failed to keep her engagement as a speaker.
[4 December 1896] Miss Susan B. Anthony was introduced as embodying the true spirit of ’76, and was received with waving handkerchiefs and applause. She said that, being in Boston, she never dreamed of being so received. The papers say that Anna Shaw and Susan B. Anthony have returned from California with their feathers drooping, she said. (Applause) (“Not a bit of it.”) “Bless 1 you,” she continued, “how little men know.”
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For 50 years we have been trying to educate men to know that liberty is just as precious to women as to men. As yet, only one state, Colorado, has learned the lesson. In California, that land of the brave and home of gallantry, we hoped much. Seven women from the East have tramped up and down the hills preaching liberty to women. But we had in California, what we have almost everywhere, the upper crust against us. It is queer, but the millionaires seem to have no use for women except as pets or drudges. We were beaten there by numbers, it is true, in San Francisco and Oakland by the influence of one great business concern. The press, the religious influence, and all organizations were for us. All the parties put full-fledged suffrage in their platforms. What do you guess was the business that didn’t like us? (“Rum.”) They thought it would destroy their business. And 20,000 votes were polled in San Francisco alone against the suffrage amendment. You Boston folks are not so immaculate that you don’t know what that business was. We are not beaten. The lines are closely drawn. There is but one organized enemy. Shall all other enterprises be held back by this one business? Miss Anthony was frequently interrupted by applause. Y Boston Herald, 5 December 1896. 1. Voters in California defeated the amendment by a vote of 110,355 to 137,099. Sharp regional differences were evident: in Los Angeles the amendment passed handily, and voters in many southern counties favored it; in San Francisco voters trounced the amendment, and it lost by a narrower margin across the Bay in Alameda County, though Berkeley voters passed it. The amendment fared better where temperance and prohibition were popular, while its defeat in the cities on the Bay coincided with the presence of powerful liquor lobbies. (California Secretary of State, Statement of the Vote of California for Presidential Electors and Congressmen, Nov. 3, 1896 [Sacramento, Calif., 1896], p. 15, in SBA scrapbook 25, Rare Books, DLC; Ostrander, Prohibition Movement in California, 63–84; Edelman, “ ‘Red Hot Suffrage Campaign,’ ” 85–96.)
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Article by ECS [5 December 1896] The Woman’s Bible. 1
The criticisms on this book are as varied as they are unreasonable. 2 Both friend and foe object to the title. When John Stuart Mill wrote his “Subjection of Woman” there was a great howl against that title. He said that proved it to be a good one. The critics said: “It will suggest to women that they are in subjection, or make them rebellious.” “That,” said he, “is 3 just the effect which I wish to produce.” Rider Haggard’s “She” was denounced so universally that everyone read it to see who “She” was. Thus the title in both cases called attention to the book. The critics say that our title should have been “Commentaries on the Bible.” That would have been misleading, as it is simply a few comments on the passages referring to woman, which altogether make barely a tenth part of the Old and the New Testaments. Some say that it should have been “The Women of the Bible”; but several books with that title have already 4 been published. The Rev. Mr. Talmage said: “You might as well have a ‘Shoemakers’ Bible’; the Scriptures apply to women as well as to men.” As the Bible treats woman as a different class, inferior to man or in subjection to him, which is not the case with shoemakers, Mr. Talmage’s criticism has no significance. Another clergyman says of the authors: “It is the work of women, and the devil.” This is a grave mistake. His Satanic Majesty was not invited to join the Revising Committee, which consists of women alone. Moreover, he has been so busy of late years attending Synods, General Assemblies or Conferences, to prevent the recognition of women as delegates, that he has had no time to study the languages of “higher criticism.” Other critics say that Part I is not marked with a profound knowledge of Biblical history or of the Greek or the Hebrew languages. As the position of woman in all religions or languages is the same, it does not need a knowledge either of Hebrew or of the works of scholars to show that the position of woman in the Bible is degrading to the mothers of the race.
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Furthermore, “The Woman’s Bible” is intended for readers who do not care for, and would not be convinced by, a learned, technical work of socalled “higher criticism.” The church in all ages has taught this doctrine, and acted on it; and it claims Divine authority in the Scriptures for such teaching and action. The Old Testament makes woman a mere afterthought in creation, the author of evil, cursed in her maternity, a subject in marriage, of all female life, animal or human, unclean. As Christ is the head of the church, so is man the head of woman. This idea of woman’s subordination is reiterated times without number, from Genesis to Revelation; and this is the basis of all church action. In plain English Part I states this, agreeing fully with Bible teaching and church action. And yet women meet in convention and denounce “The Woman’s Bible,” while clinging to the church and their Scriptures. The only difference between us is, that we say that these degrading ideas of woman emanated from the brain of man, while the church says that they came from God. Now, to my mind, the Woman’s Revising Committee in denying Divine inspiration for such demoralizing ideas, shows a more worshipful reverence for the great spirit of all good than does the church. We had made a fetich of the Bible long enough. The time has come to read it as we do all other books, accepting the good, and rejecting the evil, which it teaches. 5 Andrew D. White, formerly President of Cornell University, shows us in his great work, “A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom,” that the Bible, with its fables, allegories, and endless contradictions has been the great block in the way of civilization. All through the centuries scholars and scientists have been imprisoned, tortured, and burned alive, for some discovery which seemed to conflict with a petty text of scripture. Surely the immutable laws of the universe can teach more impressive and exalted lessons than the holy books of all the religions on earth. U Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Y Boston Investigator, 5 December 1896. 1. In a note preceding this article, the editor of the Boston Investigator announced “that we are to enjoy the distinguished honor of publishing the second part of ‘The Woman’s Bible’ . . . . It is, of course, somewhat of an innovation for the Boston Investigator to transform itself into a Bible publishing house; and possibly
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some may charge us with inconsistency on this account. We think, however, that our readers, if they will be patient and read ‘The Woman’s Bible’ to the end, will have little cause to accuse us of an espousal of Christianity.” Quite the contrary, he continued; the book furthers the journal’s mission “of destroying this superstition” that is Christianity. In order to offer its readers all of the Woman’s Bible, Part II, the Investigator first reprinted the commentaries recently published in the Woman’s Tribune. New material appeared in the issue of 30 January 1897. (With thanks to Tamar Weinstock for her research on the publishing history.) 2. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was a British philosopher, champion of woman suffrage, and member of Parliament from 1865 to 1868. His book Subjection of Women (1869) immediately influenced ECS and other American suffragists. 3. Henry Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure (1887) was the second novel of African adventure published by Haggard (1856–1925), an English writer. Usually called simply She, the book recognizes Europeans as superior to the people inhabiting their empires and traces a victory for patriarchy over empowered women. 4. Thomas De Witt Talmage (1832–1902), formerly a Dutch Reformed minister, was at this time minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Washington. In his contribution to a generally hostile symposium about the Woman’s Bible published before the book went on sale, Talmage insisted there was no need for such a book; “You might as well publish a man’s Bible, or a child’s Bible, or a lawyer’s Bible, or a shoemaker’s Bible,” he continued. (ANB; New York Journal, 17 November 1895.) 5. Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918), an historian and the first president of Cornell University, published A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology (1896) in two volumes. (ANB.) •••••••••
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SBA to Lillie Devereux Blake Rochester N.Y. Dec 24, 1896
My Dear Mrs Blake It is a shame that yours of Nov 23d was not duly answered—and that I failed to call on you—going or returning through New York— I reached 1 there Saturday evening spent night at my cousins —called Mrs Stanton’s 2 on Sunday—& also on my nephew just moved there —then went to Bensonhurst—Monday a.m. & back to the Fall River Boat Tuesday p.m—all in pouring rain & slush & snow & cold— And on my return I arrived at 3 Friday p.m.—called on Mrs Stanton—spent night at my cousins—& took train—Dec. 12 for home— I hope—at Des Moines—the members
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of the Executive & after them—the Business Committee—will every one of them stay—attend to business & do it so as to really know—what was decided—& who appointed and to do what &c— The time will soon be 3 here—for us to pack up and go west!! I saw by the Mail & Express yesterday—that yo nThep Pilgrims Moth4 ers dinner went off well as usual— am glad of every good work at the top—but before we can carry amendments we must have our idea accepted by the bottom of society— I wish—not to stop top work—but to add to it— We could all take hold & form a working Committee or Club in every single Voting Precinct— Not a county was lost in California that was thus organized & a house to house missionary work done!!— It is the way to make sure of winning any state— With a good Christmas & New year Sincerely yours U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, Lillie D. Blake Papers, MoSHi. 1. In New York City, SBA frequently stayed with Semantha Lapham Vail Lapham (1826–1905), a second cousin and childhood friend, now widowed. (Quaker Genealogy, 3:198, 332; Bertha Bortle Beal Aldridge, Laphams in America [Victor, N.Y., 1932–1952], 182–83; Friends’ Intelligencer 62 [1905]: 124; William Penn Vail, Moses Vail of Huntington, L.I., Showing His Descent from Joseph (2) Vail [N.p., 1947}, 224. See also Papers 1, 3, & 5.) 2. A great-nephew, Henry Anthony Baker (1870–1940) was the oldest child of Margaret McLean Baker. After he graduated from the University of California Medical School in 1891, he practiced in many places, including aboard the S.S. City of Peking, sailing the Pacific Ocean for four years. In 1895, SBA counseled that he “henceforth keep himself within the limits of civilization.” In New York, he found work in the insurance business with his second cousins the Moshers. (SBA diary, 8 June 1895, 10 July 1896, Film, 33:80ff, 35:1ff; Baker Genealogical Ms., SBA Papers, MCR-S; Journal of the American Medical Association 115 [28 December 1940]: 1905.) 3. Des Moines, Iowa, was the place selected to host the twenty-ninth annual convention of the National-American association opening on 26 January 1897. 4. On 22 December 1896. For another report, see New York Sun, 23 December 1896.
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SBA to Caroline Bartlett Crane
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Rochester N Y Jan 4, 1896n7p My dear Miss Bartlett Your New Year's Eve—announcement brought great surprise to me— but to my ejaculation Sister Mary said you had told her of your agitation of mind on the subject—when you were here last spring—after I had left for California— Well—I cannot say whether I rejoice over the act—until time shall tell whether the marriage proves a help to you in your chosen profession— I cannot see into the result upon your aims & purposes—as a human—& as a preacher— My feeling is that nearly every woman who undertakes any sort of public life—makes a mistake to try to adjust herself to too many dividing and distracting kinds of work—after the old saying—“they have too many irons in the fire”— I believe marriage & maternity a profession by themselves—incompatible with what the world calls a career!! Either the home or the Profession—or more likely both suffer— But this is an age of experimenting—with women—that is sure— But you didn’t expect advice nor philosophy— at any rate—my dear—I hope all the good possible may be yours—in your new combination—that you may find more in the man you have married than you expected—& he find more in you—and thus that both lives may reap added power from the copartnership—and that the world may be the better because of the united work of the twain made one— So with the old nlovep & a Happy New Year I am as ever yours— U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, Caroline B. Crane Papers, Regional History Collection, MiKW. 1. Caroline Julia Bartlett Crane (1858–1935) married on 31 December 1896. She was the Unitarian minister in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she settled in 1889. She and SBA knew each other through Michigan suffrage meetings and the National Council of Women. Augustus Warren Crane (1868–1937), her new husband, was a physician and pioneer radiologist. (NAW; Cynthia Grant Tucker, Prophetic Sisterhood: Liberal Women Ministers of the Frontier, 1880–1930 [Boston, 1990], passim.)
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SBA to ECS [Rochester, N.Y., c. 8? January 1897]
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N.B.—Just to think of the work that will not be well done—the right word 2 3 on Mary Grew —Mrs Cooper & lots of others— the work is placed in Mrs Colby’s hands— So it was last year—after you refused—but in her 4 usual hurry—she didn’t get time to do it well—as she is capable!! Mrs Colby writes she will start for Des Moines the 21st— She has sent 5 me a big batch of new rules for the association— I do wish she had the faculty of chiming in with the other young girls—and so become a helper— and not a mere criticiser!! If she could be a free editor—for a National Suffrage paper—one that would really be an organ of our society—it would be splendid—but she 6 won’t abate one jot or tittle of her own personality—or Ghandi —or 7 Coxey —and no Association her position and words on them & sundry other things— Both the W.T. and the W.J. are wholly & merely personal papers—giving of their own special freaks—the prominence—never [studing?] & publishing only what will build up the Association! The time is past—when the mass of the suffrage women will be compromised by any one persons peculiarities!! We number over 10,000 women— & each one has opinions & rights &c—and we can only hold them together to work for the ballot—by letting alone—their whims & prejudices on other subjects!! Well—I wish you hadn’t thrown up the office you filled so well—the one that no other woman can fill so well— Lovingly— U S B A Y ALS fragment, AF 24(4), Anthony Family Collection, CSmH. 1. This undated fragment became separated from the letter it supplemented. By 8 January 1897, SBA knew that ECS was refusing to write memorials for suffragists who died in 1896, a ritual of the upcoming annual convention. She also knew that little time remained for her alternate, Clara Colby, to write them well, since Colby intended, as SBA states here, to leave for the meeting in Des Moines, Iowa, on January 21. (SBA to Rachel F. Avery, 8 January 1897, Film, 36:669.)
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2. Mary Grew (1813–1896) died on October 10. One of the pioneers of woman’s rights, Grew was active in Philadelphia’s Female Anti-Slavery Society, took part in the city’s first woman’s rights convention, and became president of the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association at its founding in 1869. (NAW; ANB.) 3. On the night of 11 December 1896, near the anniversary of her father’s suicide, Harriot Cooper committed suicide and took her mother’s life at the same time by turning on the gas in their bedroom. (San Francisco Chronicle, 12 December 1896, and San Francisco Bulletin, 12 December 1896, both in SBA scrapbook 25, Rare Books, DLC.) 4. On ECS’s previous refusal to write memorial resolutions, see ECS to SBA, before 17 January 1896, and ECS to C. B. Colby, before 19 January 1896, and SBA to C. B. Colby, 19 January 1896, Film, 35:280–81, 289–92. 5. Clara Colby replaced Carrie Catt as chair of the Plan of Work Committee in 1896, and SBA saw the plan that Colby intended to present at the upcoming National-American convention. At the convention, it was, in the words of the Des Moines Leader, “riddled. Clause after clause was taken up and either stricken out or emasculated.” Debate spread out across four sessions of the convention, as Carrie Catt and her organizers tackled each item in turn. (Des Moines Leader, 29 January 1897, and Des Moines Register, 29 January 1897, and Report of the Twentyninth Annual Convention, 1897, pp. 27, 33, 46–50, all in Film, 36:744ff, 817–21.) 6. Virchand Raghavji Gandhi (1864–1901), a lawyer from Bombay, became popular in the United States after speaking about the Hindu sect of Jain at the World’s Parliament of Religions at the Columbian Exposition in 1893. He returned for several lecture tours thereafter and won the allegiance of Clara Colby. Late in 1897, she began to publish a series of his lectures under the heading “School of Oriental Philosophy.” (Woman’s Tribune, 6 November 1897.) 7. As part of her familiar litany of complaints about the way Clara Colby used her newspaper to explore her many passions, SBA referred to Coxey’s Army of workers who marched on Washington in 1894 in support of public works to ease the staggering unemployment following the Panic of 1893. See also Papers, 5:700. •••••••••
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Meeting of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association
Editorial note: On the final afternoon of the National-American association’s twenty-ninth annual convention in Des Moines, after the last reports from state presidents were heard, the program called for a discussion on suffragists’ perennial difficulties over nonpartisanship.
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A discussion followed on the question, “Resolved, That the propaganda of the woman suffrage idea demands a non-partisan attitude on the part 1 of individual workers.” It was led by Miss Clay in the affirmative and Mr. Blackwell in the negative. Miss Clay said, in part: It is a well-established rule that the greater should never be subordinated to the less. Therefore, suffrage should never be made a tail to the kite of any political party. There are momentous issues now before the people, but none so momentous as woman suffrage. This principle appeals to the conscience of the people, and will ultimately convince those who cherish the political principles of our fathers. Already we believe we have convinced a sufficient number of the people to make this a practical question. What we have now to deal with is the politicians. They may be divided into two classes, men of high ideals, and those who cling to party, right or wrong. It is necessary to gain both classes. Partisan methods are not suited to the discussion of this question. We must show that when enfranchised we shall hold a self-preservative attitude. Women must show that they know their rights, and, knowing them, dare maintain. Wisdom is less tangible than force, but more powerful in the end. Women are different from men, and their political methods will differ from those of men. Women will never win as long as they consent to barter their services for vague promises of what will be done for them in the future, or to subordinate woman suffrage to the interests of any party. 2 This has been illustrated in the case of the Third Party Prohibitionists. Either one of the great parties can enfranchise women, but there must be a solid forecast that women will support the party that enfranchises them and that stands by them afterward. Should any woman be willing to vote for a party that is not pledged to suffrage? Mr. Blackwell: We are all agreed that Woman Suffrage Associations, local, State and national, are and must be non-partisan. But a clear distinction should be made between the attitude of a woman suffrage society and that of the individual women and men who compose its membership. Suffrage societies, being composed of men and women of all shades of political belief, cannot take sides on any other question without violating each member’s right and duty to have and express personal political opinions. But, as individuals, it is our duty to be partisans. Woman suffrage is not the only issue. In almost every political contest, one party is right and the other wrong. Everybody is bound to do what he or she can to promote the success of the right side. If no moral questions were involved, political con-
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tests would be ignoble and insignificant. We value suffrage mainly because 3 questions of right and wrong are settled by votes. Lowell has well said: Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of truth with falsehood for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever, ’twixt that darkness and that light. Every woman, equally with every man, therefore, should be affiliated with some political party. Politics is the art of getting things done which ought to be done. Practical politics, which is applied politics, can only be accomplished through political parties, and if women wish to help sustain good government, they must work with and through parties. One of the greatest practical obstacles to the establishment of woman suffrage is the general indifference of women. Every manifestation by woman of intelligent interest in political questions helps woman suffrage. Political questions necessarily become party questions, for we live under a government of parties. A non-partisan attitude is a phrase which needs definition. If “partisan” means “our party, right or wrong,” then no woman and no man should be a partisan. An attitude of moderation and conciliation befits every candid person. I am for holding equal suffrage paramount to ordinary political questions, but I am not for repudiating party ties altogether. Woman suffrage, though the most important question, is not always the question to be first settled. It is not the only question. Voting, though the most direct form of political power, is not the only political power. Women, even without the ballot, have great political power. They are responsible for its exercise. They are “citizens of the United States and of the States in which they reside.” They are a part of the body politic. Their interests and those of their children are involved, equally with those of men, in every question of finance, currency, tariff, domestic and foreign relations. They have no right to be neutral or apathetic. So long as they remain silent and inert they command no attention or respect. Voting, itself, is only a means to an end.
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If the end is of no importance, voting, also, is of no importance. I maintain, therefore, that affirmative political activity, working by and through party machinery, is the duty of every individual citizen—whether man or woman. In saying this, I do not mean that at all times and places it is wise to work on party lines. In States where a suffrage amendment is pending, in meetings where suffrage is advocated, party politics should be laid aside for the time being. In religious meetings no distinction should be made between Republicans, Democrats or Populists. In political meetings no distinction should be made between Methodists, Baptists or Presbyterians. In suffrage meetings there should be no distinction of sect or party. But we hold our individual opinions all the same. Miss Anthony: I want to say that you cannot possibly divide yourself up as Mr. Blackwell suggests. You cannot be a Republican in one convention yesterday, and a non-partisan here to-day. The men who believe in suffrage are voters, and must have their parties, of course. But any woman who champions either political party makes more votes against suffrage than for suffrage. I could give examples. Do not be deluded with this idea that one party is right and the other wrong. Which is it? One party seems right to one-half the people, and the other party to the other. As long as women have no votes, any woman who will go out and make a speech either for gold or for silver is lacking in self-respect. 4 Miss Blackwell: Miss Clay seems to have understood the question presented for discussion in a different sense from what I did. I do not believe in making suffrage a tail to any party kite, of course; but women as well as men are bound to do what they can to promote good government, and hence to promote by all legitimate means the party which they believe to be in the right. They will inevitably do this more and more as they become more interested in public questions. See how many women took part in the late campaign, making speeches for gold or silver, not with any eye to woman suffrage—for neither party was committed to suffrage—but purely for the sake of the welfare of the country, as they understood it. I cannot agree that they were lacking in self-respect. Miss Anthony has said she thinks any woman who makes speeches for either gold or silver is lacking in selfrespect. I should like to ask her whether she thinks any woman who writes letters to the papers in favor of gold or silver is lacking in self-respect? Miss Anthony: I do unquestionably. Miss Blackwell: Do you think Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton is lacking in self-respect?
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Miss Anthony: I think she certainly was, temporarily, when she wrote 5 that letter. Even of my old co-worker, Mrs. Stanton, I must say it. Miss Shaw: I have made only one party speech in my life. That was ten years ago, for the Prohibition party; and if the Lord will forgive me, I will never do it again. In spite of the lively difference of opinion on the question, the meeting adjourned in great good humor, and amid considerable laughter. Y Woman’s Journal, 27 February 1897. 1. Laura Clay (1849–1941) was the last of the Clay daughters to surface as a forceful figure in the suffrage movement. Her older sisters straddled the divided movement for more than a decade, holding office in both the American and National associations, but Laura Clay became active through the American, when she organized the Kentucky Equal Rights Association as its auxiliary in 1888. In the first years of the National-American association, Clay was the most forceful advocate of organizing in the South. In practice, she was a Democrat, for whom nonpartisanship offered a way to limit the power of Republicans. She held office as one of the National-American’s two auditors. (NAW; ANB.) 2. For a similar assessment, see the appeal by ECS and SBA during the presidential campaign of 1884, “Stand by the Republican Party.” There they wrote, “The comparative magnitude of the question of woman’s enfranchisement seems never to have entered into the calculation of Prohibitionists. To make woman suffrage a tail to their kite, is to defy the laws of gravitation. Prohibition could not secure woman suffrage, but woman suffrage is the only power by which prohibition could be made possible.” (Papers, 4:362–63.) 3. James Russell Lowell (1819–1891), American poet. Quoted is the fifth verse of his poem “The Present Crisis.” 4. Alice Stone Blackwell (1857–1950), the daughter of Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, assumed her late mother’s duties as editor of the Woman’s Journal and shared the title with her father. She also served as the National-American association’s recording secretary. (NAW; ANB.) 5. The objectionable letter is unidentified. Above at 20 September 1896, ECS praised W. J. Bryan without discussing silver. However, the New York Journal, 5 October 1896, interviewed ECS about “a vigorous silver campaign” she was waging among “women of the masses.” As announced by a headline, “ ‘Churches Uphold Gold,’ She Says, ‘Just as in the Past They Upheld Slavery.’ ” (Film, 36:12.)
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ECS to SBA 26 West Sixty-first Street, New York, Feb. 13, 1897. 2
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Dear Miss Anthony: For noble Frederick Douglass I have varied memories; sad for all he suffered from cruel prejudices against his race and the insults to his proud nature; and pleasant for the tender love and friendship of his noble soul. I loved him as he loved me, for the indignities we alike endured. I am happy to learn that the people of Rochester, who would never treat him as a social equal when living, purpose to build a monument to his memory at last. On a visit once at Peterboro, Douglass came there, too. Some Southern 3 women guests wrote a note to Mr. Smith to know “if Douglass would sit in the parlor and at the dining table; if so they would remain in their rooms.” My cousin replied: “Certainly he will. I feel honored to have the greatest man that ever graduated from the ‘Southern Institution’ under my roof.” When Douglass arrived, Cousin Gerrit met him with open arms and kissed him on either cheek. He stayed with us two weeks, and all that time the two ladies took their meals in their apartments, while the rest of us walked about the grounds, sat under the trees, played games and sang songs with Douglass, he playing the accompaniments on the guitar. Our ladies, in their solitude, no doubt often regretted that they were voluntary exiles from all our enjoyments. 4 I met Douglass for the last time in Paris, when he and his wife dined with my son Theodore. On parting he said, “You have been denied the rights of an American citizen because of your sex, I because of my color! I hope we shall stand on equal ground with the angels in heaven!” “Alas!” said I, “we better not be too sure of that; earthly prejudices die hard. There may be those who will write Peter a note to know if you and I are to be there—and if so they will take their meals in their own apartments!” How hateful any prejudice looks in retrospection! I am thankful I never had but that one, and that one I have sedulously cultivated year by year. When I reach heaven I shall write a note to Peter to know if there are any religious bigots there—and if so to request them to stay in their own apartments,
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leaving the negroes, women, infidels, Socialists, Jews, Chinese and Indians free to roam whithersoever they will. When in Paris, my son took Douglass to the Chamber of Deputies and introduced him to the member who had banished slavery from all 5 the French colonies. His name I cannot recall. He is always spoken of 6 as the William Lloyd Garrison of the chamber. When he met Douglass, he, too threw his arms about him and kissed him on either cheek. “Ah!” said he, “you are the one American above all others I have longed to see!” Think of such a man born a slave in this republic! A political non-entity, a social pariah! inferior in position to all ignorant white men and women! Then think of seventy-five years in such an atmosphere! It is a depressing thought to estimate his feelings; but infinitely worse to have been one of the number who helped thus to degrade a man. I never felt more deeply this hateful prejudice of color than when witnessing in an Episcopal church the administering of the communion: After a succession of white men and women had knelt at the altar, a splendid black man, who, dressed in new livery, looked like an African prince, so stately was his carriage as he walked up the aisle and knelt alone to receive the communion. A little white child under his care slowly followed and seated herself beside him. When the service ended, hand in hand they walked back to the negro pew! He was a man of unblemished virtue, respected by the whole community, loved and honored by the family he served; yet no Christian could celebrate the last 7 supper in memory of Jesus by his side! I sincerely wish the monument Rochester proposes to build in honor of Douglass might be a schoolhouse or a tenement for the poor. It seems a pity to raise so many useless shafts of marble and granite, while the homes 8 of the poor, the schools and prisons are so overcrowded! With best wishes to all assembled, and for many public honors to Frederick Douglass, an eloquent orator, a faithful friend and a lover of justice, liberty and equality for all mankind! No Parian marble too pure for his monument; no garlands too beautiful for his shrine! With sincere love, U Elizabeth Cady Stanton Y Rochester Herald, 15 February 1897, SBA scrapbook 26, Rare Books, DLC. In Film at 14 February 1987. 1. SBA read this letter aloud on February 14 to “the people of two colors who had gathered” to celebrate the birthday of Frederick Douglass and raise money for a monument. Two local groups called the meeting, the Colored Woman’s Club, led by Hester Jeffrey, and the Douglass Monument Committee, led by John W.
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Thompson and members of an African-American Masonic lodge. Both groups had reached out across the country to advocate similar birthday celebrations, and the National Association of Colored Women made a special request that its member clubs hold like events. The association’s national organizer, Victoria Earle Matthews, joined the celebration in Rochester. (Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 3 January & 15 February 1897, latter in Film, 36:881; J. W. Thompson, An Authentic History of the Douglass Monument [Rochester, 1903], 73–80.) 2. Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), former slave, abolitionist, and early supporter of woman’s rights, moved to Rochester in 1847, and though he left for Washington in 1872, the city regarded him as a native son. He was buried in Rochester’s Mount Hope Cemetery. (DANB; ANB. See also Papers 1–5.) 3. Gerrit Smith (1797–1874), philanthropist, abolitionist, and radical reformer, was ECS’s first cousin and good friend. At his house in Peterboro, New York, he hosted many of the nation’s reformers. On the close connection between Frederick Douglass and Smith, see John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 2002). 4. Helen Pitts Douglass (1838–1903), a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, former teacher of freedmen in the South, and member of suffrage societies and the Moral Education Society in Washington, married Frederick Douglass in 1884, after the death of his first wife. The couple, who sailed from New York in September 1886, were guided by Theodore Stanton during their stay in Paris. (Mount Holyoke College, Alumnae Association, One Hundred Year Biographical Directory of Mount Holyoke College, 1837–1937 [South Hadley, Mass., 1937], 95. See also Papers 4 & 5.) 5. Victor Schoelcher (1804–1893) was a French abolitionist specializing in conditions within the French colonies of the Caribbean. He drafted the decree abolishing slavery in 1848. 6. William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) was the leading voice in the United States for the immediate emancipation of slaves. 7. ECS introduced Peter, her family’s slave and later servant, as the companion of her childhood in “Reminiscences: Ancestors,” published 13 April 1889, Film, 27:162–65, but she did not then tell this story about witnessing discrimination in his church. Here in 1897 neither the African-American man nor the child is named; the tale is local but not familial. Another year later, in Eighty Years, 16–17, the story is told of her own family, with the man named Peter and the young child described as either herself or a sister. Like most of ECS’s anecdotes about her childhood, this one is as likely to be artifice as experience. On the significance of Peter in ECS’s tales, see Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible, 22–28. 8. Introduced to speak after SBA read this letter, Victoria Matthews “took issue with Mrs. Stanton’s suggestion of a utilitarian memorial.” Mothers needed Douglass as an example who could inspire their children, she explained. (Rochester Herald, 15 February 1897, Film, 36:879–80; Thompson, Authentic History of the Douglass Monument, 78–79.)
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Remarks by SBA to the Meeting of the Cuban Hospital Relief Association in Rochester
Editorial note: The Cuban Hospital Relief Association of Monroe County called a mass meeting at Cook Opera House for the evening of 21 February 1897. SBA was given a seat on the stage; the mayor presided; local Republicans criticized Democratic foreign policy with respect to Cuba’s war of independence from Spain; and members of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, or Junta, described Spanish atrocities and Cuba’s importance to the United States. Ostensibly about raising money for relief, the meeting resolved to protest the Red Cross for its inaction in Cuba. When SBA responded to calls for a speech, she echoed the mayor, who drew parallels between the American Revolution and Cuba’s war. Dr. Fidel A. Pierra, speaking after the mayor, thought the tyranny of Spain over Cuba far exceeded anything American colonists faced in the eighteenth century; he stressed his countrymen’s dream of a “free and independent” Cuba. (LaFeber, New Empire, 284–300; Patricia E. Fisler, “Rochester and the Spanish-American War,” Rochester History 13 [April 1951]: 1–24; Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Clara Barton, Professional Angel [Philadelphia, 1987], 296–303; Lillian Guerra, The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba [Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005], 62–82.)
[21 February 1897] 1
At the conclusion of Major Benton’s remarks Miss Susan B. Anthony, who was seated on the platform, was called upon by the audience, which would not cease its applause until she had made a few remarks. Miss Anthony finally advanced to the speaker’s table and said: “I want to say to you that from the report of the first outrage in Cuba down to the present time, there has never been a moment but that its people have had my sympathy. Never since I began to know the meaning of the word ‘freedom’ has anything taken such a hold upon me as this struggle for freedom in Cuba. My name stands for freedom, for liberty for women. Where all men are free all women are not, and I want to say that when you achieve your independence and frame your constitution you will not forget the women who have struggled with and for you, as did our Revolutionary
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fathers the women who struggled by their sides. The men of only four out of the forty-five states of our republic have granted liberty to the women. “I can never sit in a meeting like this without bearing testimony to the cowardice of the men of this nation in refusing to grant freedom to women. I believe in freedom and equality for every human being under every flag, and I hope it will not only come to the men people but to the women people.” Y Rochester Union and Advertiser, 22 February 1897. 1. George Alden Benton (1848–1921) of nearby Spencerport was the Monroe County Surrogate. After graduation from Cornell and Columbia universities, he had a long and distinguished career as a lawyer and judge. It was his activism in the Republican Lincoln Club that brought him to the stage on this occasion. (Fitch, Encyclopedia of Biography of New York, 3:128–29; Cornell Alumni News 24 [29 September 1921]: 6; New York Times, 11 September 1921.) •••••••••
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SBA to Rachel Foster Avery Rochester, February 26, 1897
My dear Rachel: I am just in receipt of a telegram from South Dakota saying that the Legislature has passed the amendment resolution, so now we shall have 1 to turn in and help that State all we possibly can. I also have a letter from Senator Stratton of California, saying he is confident the Legislature will 2 pass the resolution for resubmission. That will make two States; then the 3 4 women are sure it is going to be submitted in Washington and Montana. I have written Mrs. Catt that I feel it will be a great mistake to spend money for organization or agitation in the States that she has named; that since we have settled upon trying to secure the submission of an amendment in Iowa, we will stick to that, and besides help S. Dakota and other States that 5 shall have amendments pending. All our experience proves that it is very difficult to make convention campaigns or organization campaigns pay expenses in States where no amendment is pending, because we cannot make the people feel any necessity for organization; while, on the other hand, we have learned that wherever one is pending, we secure large audiences, liberal contributions and thorough organization. So I most decidedly object to raising money
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for mere educational work and agitation in new States, or States where we do not want to get an amendment submitted. The idea of sending Mrs. 6 7 Bradford and Miss Ella Harrison off to Alabama and Florida seems to me 8 perfectly wild! Let the women in those far-behind States peg away in their own small way as best they can with their own stay-at-home women, but let the National gives its great force only where organization is needed for the practical end of securing a majority vote at the next election. I thought that we settled upon all this so clearly at Des Moines, and I wrote Mrs. Catt that it was surprising to me that she should again propose to scatter fire all over the country. It is the wildest fantasy and the most extravagant financiering that could be devised. So, I hope you will use your influence with Mrs. C. to stick to Iowa and the States in which amendments shall be pending. We cannot say which States will do it, nor which won’t, but we must be ready, as Lincoln said, “to follow the logic of events.” 9 Niece Louise took the Black Diamond train to-day for Philadelphia. We have enjoyed her two weeks’ visit very much. She is a perfect little gem about the house; knows just how to help, and when and where, and she has been doubly helpful to Sister Mary now because our Julia’s father is very 10 ill, so that she is compelled to be at home most of the time, and Sister Mary has everything to do. 11 How do you get on with the report? Can’t you send me the first proof as to give me some idea of what you are doing? With love, Y TL, on NAWSA letterhead, Anthony-Avery Papers, NRU. Signed for SBA by secretary. 1. The telegram, from Anna R. Simmons and Emma A. Cranmer, came late in the evening of February 25. After voters in South Dakota rejected a woman suffrage amendment to the state constitution in 1890, suffragists returned to the legislature in 1893, 1895, and 1897 with bills to submit the measure again. On February 25, the house passed the most recent bill and sent it to the senate; it passed the senate on February 26. An amendment would be submitted to the state’s voters in November 1898. (Minneapolis Journal, 26 February 1897; History, 4:557; George W. Kingsbury, History of Dakota Territory. With South Dakota, Its History and Its People, ed. George Martin Smith [Chicago, 1915], 3:790–91; SBA diary, 25 February 1897, and Report of the Thirtieth Annual Convention, 1898, pp. 110–11, Film, 36:247ff, 38:109ff. See also Papers 5.) 2. Within days of their defeat in the amendment campaign of 1896, at the state suffrage association’s annual meeting, California’s suffragists laid plans for the legislature to resubmit the amendment to the voters. Despite their lobbying and the parliamentary skill of their legislative allies, both houses had defeated the measure by mid-March 1897. At year’s end, the California suffrage association pledged its
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members as campaign workers for all the representatives and senators who had supported the measure. (Film, 36:72–78; San Francisco Call, 9, 11, 13, 14 March, 7 October 1897.) 3. Women in Washington Territory won suffrage and voted until the territorial supreme court ruled two different suffrage laws unconstitutional, and they failed to regain the vote in the state constitution of 1889. They were at work again: on this date, legislators had not yet concluded their debates on whether to submit a woman suffrage amendment to the voters. Matters were complicated by the fact that an amendment to the constitution in 1896 imposed a requirement that voters “be able to read and speak the English language,” and advocates of woman suffrage were divided on whether to repeat that requirement in a new amendment. When the bill reached the governor in March, it called for adding a new section rather than amending the amended section; it would read, “The elective franchise shall never be denied any person on account of sex, notwithstanding anything to the contrary in this constitution.” Voters would decide on this amendment at election in November 1898. (Session Laws of the State of Washington, Session of 1897, chap. 56, An Act providing for the constitutional amendment conferring the elective franchise on women; Washington Const. of 1889, art. VI, sec. 1, as amended November 1896; History, 4:967–72, 1096–98; Marte Jo Sheeran, “The Woman Suffrage Issue in Washington, 1890–1910,” [M.A. thesis, University of Washington, 1977], 30–38.) 4. SBA may have missed the news that a constitutional amendment for woman suffrage in Montana died on 10 February 1897, when it failed of a required two-thirds majority in the state’s House of Representatives. In anticipation of a campaign when an amendment went to the voters, Carrie Catt’s Organization Committee had sent Emma DeVoe into Montana to build up state and local suffrage societies in 1895 and 1896. (T. A. Larson, “Montana Women and the Battle for the Ballot,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 23 [January 1973]: 24–41; Paula Petrik, No Step Backward: Women and Family on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier, Helena, Montana, 1865–1900 [Helena, Mont., 1987], 120–21, 124–26.) 5. At its recent convention, the National-American association adopted Carrie Catt’s plan to concentrate resources in Iowa for as long as it took to amend the state constitution. With money, speakers, and managers from the state and national associations, organizers would make Iowa the best organized state in the union and create conditions favorable to passing a constitutional amendment before the legislature sent one to the voters. The pilot project continued at least into 1901, failing in each attempt to pass an amendment through the legislature. (Report of the Thirtieth Annual Convention, 1898, pp. 31–32, 92–93, and Report of the Thirty-first Annual Convention, 1899, pp. 28, 95–96, and Report of the Thirty-second Annual Convention, 1900, pp. 68–69, and SBA to Clara B. Colby, 7 January 1898, and SBA to J. W. Parmalee, 17 December 1898, and SBA to Olympia Brown, 22 December 1899, all in Film, 37:1009–11, 38:109ff, 1009–10, 39:722ff, 40:326–28, 829ff; C. C. Catt to Ella Harrison, 28 August, 13 October 1897, and Helen Reynolds to Ella Harrison, 4 November 1897, Ella Harrison Papers, MC 388, MCR-S; Des Moines
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Leader, 16 October 1897, SBA scrapbook 34, Rare Books, DLC; History, 4:631–33, 634–35.) 6. Mary Carroll Craig Bradford (?–1938) came to know Carrie Catt during the Colorado campaign of 1893, when she was president of the Colorado Springs Equal Suffrage Association and a valuable lecturer around the state. In 1896, the Colorado state association paid Bradford to work in the Idaho campaign for six weeks, and she continued to be a favored organizer for the National-American association. In 1897, she worked in Delaware and several southern states. She became prominent in the Democratic party and won election as Colorado State Superintendent of Public Instruction for several terms. Statements of her birthdate range from 1856 to 1863. (American Women; Wilbur Fiske Stone, History of Colorado [Chicago, 1918], 2:783–84; New York Times, 16 January 1938; History, 4:279, 282–84, 356, 368, 514, 521, 524, 530, 564, 592, 680, 696, 783, 825–26, 899, 947, 1100.) 7. Ella Harrison (1859–1933) of Carthage, Missouri, became president of the state suffrage association in a disputed election in 1896 and served two years. After graduating from high school and teaching, she spent the year 1893 to 1894 at Stanford University. Back in Missouri, she worked as an organizer for the state temperance union until her election by the suffrage association. Within a year, Carrie Catt singled her out as a national organizer and sent her into a number of states. While helping in Iowa, she enrolled as a member of the class of 1900 at the University of Iowa. It appears that she gave up working for woman suffrage about 1900, though she continued to be a writer, traveler, and reformer and was admitted to the bar. (Carthage Evening Press, 16 December 1933; Certificate of Death, Jasper County, Missouri State Board of Health; Guide to Ella Harrison Papers, MC 388, MCR-S.) 8. If these were real plans for Alabama and Florida, no one pursued them. Catt’s Organization Committee hired Bradford and Harrison in February to begin work in Mississippi and Louisiana on March 1, and they stayed into May. In June Catt announced a stop to organizing in the South for the year because the Business Committee objected to her method of running up debt to fund organizing in new states, and it wanted resources sent to South Dakota and Washington State. In Harrison’s correspondence with Catt and others in the New York office, details about organizing and finances in the South include the expectation that Harrison work without her salary until a distant, unspecified day. (C. C. Catt to E. Harrison, 20 February, 1 April, 1 June 1897; C. C. Catt to M. C. Bradford and E. Harrison, 26 April 1897; and Mary G. Hay to E. Harrison, 23 February 1897, Ella Harrison Papers, MC 388, MCR-S.) 9. Helen Louise Mosher James (1862–?), known as Louise, was the daughter of the late Hannah Anthony Mosher. SBA and Mary Anthony provided her a home after the death of her mother in 1877. When she completed high school in Rochester in 1883, she moved to Philadelphia and trained to be a kindergarten teacher. She married Alvan T. James, a businessman, in 1889. The Black Diamond Express of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, named for the coal that the line previously carried,
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operated between Buffalo, New York, and Jersey City, New Jersey, beginning in 1896. Rochester passengers boarded the train south of the city at Rochester Junction. At Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the road ran a branch line for trains to Philadelphia. (Anthony, Anthony Genealogy, 185; Mildred Mosher Chamberlain and Laura McGaffey Clarenbach, comps., Descendants of Hugh Mosher and Rebecca Maxson through Seven Generations [Warwick, R.I., 1980], 312, 550; city directory, 1889; SBA to Sarah I. Cooper, 10 September 1888, Film, 26:891–94; Friends’ Intelligencer 46 [June 1889]: 408. See also Papers 3–5.) 10. This was Julia Ames, from Churchville, New York, who had worked at 17 Madison Street off and on since 1892. After an unsuccessful trial as SBA’s typist and stenographer, she returned to domestic work until July 1897. If she was the Julia Ames found working as a machine hand in Rochester at the time of the 1900 federal census, she was born about 1872. (SBA diary, 1897, pages of accounts, Film, 36:247ff; city directory, 1897; Federal Census, 1900; Papers, 5:450, 451n, 690.) 11. Avery prepared the report on the recent convention in Des Moines, in Film, 36:744ff. For earlier discussion of Avery’s progress and SBA’s later critical response, see SBA to Avery, 11 February & 7 March 1897, Film, 36:867–70, 935–38. •••••••••
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SBA to Elizabeth Smith Miller Rochester, N.Y., March 12, 1897.
My Dear Friend:— Your lovely note, enclosing some of my scribbles from 1869 up to 1888, 1 is here this morning. Many thanks for them. I have marked the envelope “To be returned to Mrs. Miller,” as you request. 2 As you will probably have seen, I spoke at Auburn Tuesday night. I passed through Geneva both ways, and looked out at the town and longed to stop, but felt I could not possibly take the time. Had I known, however, that the daughters of three grand old liberty men were having a visit under 3 your roof, I certainly would have stopped. I have a letter from Maggie, as well as Mrs. Stanton, talking about where 4 Mrs. Stanton shall spend the summer, and even suggesting Rochester; but I have to tell them that our guest-chamber was occupied by Mrs. Harper, the lady who is writing my biography, and so we could not possibly give her a room. Besides, you know if Mrs. Stanton were here, the summer would have to be spent in catering and visiting. I should be delighted if she could be located at some place near by, where I could talk with her, and where Mrs. Harper could confer with her regarding the book; but now I have gone
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into the garret and made all plans to prosecute this work, I cannot allow myself to be hindered from going ahead, for I hate the whole business so absolutely that I want to be done with it as soon as possible. I hate delving among books and papers of the past quite as much, or more than I did fifty years ago, while I love making history as much as ever. There is so much work waiting for me on every side, that I feel like a caged lion every minute that I am compelled to think and talk and read of the past. If the descendants of the noble Birney and Green are still with you, give to them my kindest regards, and to the descendant of Gerrit Smith the continued love of [in hand of SBA] your affectionate friend & admirer U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Smith Family Papers, Manuscript Division, NN. Inscribed in margin Anthony March ’97. 1. In February, Ida Harper started work on a biography of SBA, using the considerable archives stored at 17 Madison Street for the job. Considerable effort was made to assemble for her use the letters SBA wrote to her friends. For individual letters and notices in the Woman’s Tribune and Woman’s Journal asking that SBA’s letters be returned, see Film, 36:930, 1014–15, 1022, 1025–29, 1034–35, 1038–41, 1049–52. 2. SBA delivered a lecture entitled “The Old and the New Woman” in Auburn’s Central Presbyterian Church under the auspices of the Men’s Club on 9 March 1897. Her hostess, Eliza Osborne, arranged for the Auburn Political Equality Club to meet with SBA in the afternoon before her lecture. (SBA diary, 9 March 1897, Film, 36:247ff; Auburn Bulletin, 10 March 1897, not in Film.) 3. Elizabeth Miller had reconstituted one of her father’s most intimate circles by gathering together the daughters. Beriah Green (1795–1874) and James Gillespie Birney (1792–1857) were colleagues of Gerrit Smith in forming the antislavery Liberty party, of which Birney was the presidential candidate in 1840 and 1844. (ANB.) Miller hosted Florence Birney Jennison (1835–1917) of Bay City, Michigan, the only daughter of Birney alive at this date. (History of the Lake Huron Shore. With Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers [Chicago, 1883], 76; Hyatt Ewald Funeral Home Records, Bay County Genealogical Society of Michigan.) Several daughters of Green were alive; possibly this was his eldest, Maria Deming Green Underwood (1827–1901), a widow who had lived near the Smiths at Peterboro while her husband was alive and settled late in her life with a son in Milwaukee. (Lucien Marcus Underwood, comp., The Underwood Families of America [Lancaster, Pa., 1913], 1:377–78; Federal Census, 1900.) 4. On 8 March 1897, SBA described letters she received that day: “Letters from Maggie & Mrs Stanton proposing to spend the summer vacation with us.” (SBA diary, 1897, Film, 36:247ff.)
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Theodore Tilton1 to ECS 73 avenue Kléber, Paris, March 27th/97
E. C. S. My dear old friend, I breakfasted with your handsome son Ted this morning, & with all his 2 tribe in the rue de Bassano. After our modest carousal was ended, I was solemnized into a religious frame of mind by reading in a Boston newspaper your recent essay on Ruth 3 and Boaz. I have known you for more than 40 years in more than 40 characters— suffragist—journalist—lecturer—historian—traveler—prophetess—materfamilias—housekeeper—patriot—nurse—baby-tender—cook—milliner—lobbyist—parliamentarian—statistician—legislator—philosopher—tea-pourer—story-teller—satirist—kite-flyer—chess-player—and I know not what else—but I now think that, after all, you shine chiefly as a theologian! Go on, O sacred scribe & commentator! I always find a pious satisfaction in reading everything that comes from your biblical pen! If Hattie, Maggie & Bob are at present under your roof, tell them that I send them my friendliest regards. As for yourself, O mother in Israel, I send my humble wish for an interest in your prayers! Ever yours as of old, U T. T. Y ALS, Papers of ECS, NPV. 1. Theodore Tilton (1835–1907) was a respected editor, lecturer, and reformer and a close friend of ECS and SBA during and after the Civil War. His success came to a dramatic end when Henry Ward Beecher prevailed in the hearings and trials that investigated charges of Beecher’s affair with Tilton’s wife. He moved to Europe in 1883 and stayed until his death, making himself a valued member of American society in Paris. At the address on this letter he boarded for more than decade with Kate Fuller, the daughter of his late friend and fellow chess player William J. A. Fuller. (ANB; Richard Wightman Fox, Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal [Chicago, 1999], 12; Mary Bacon Ford, “American Society in Paris,” Cosmopolitan 15 [May 1893]: 72–79. See also Papers 1–5.)
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2. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jr., (1882–1909), Robert, or Robert Livingston, Stanton (1885–1974), and Hélène Stanton (1889–1925). (Genealogical notes of Robert and Francis Stanton, Mazamet, France.) 3. “The Woman’s Bible, Part II: The Book of Ruth,” Boston Investigator, 27 February 1897, Film, 36:906. In this second installment on the Book of Ruth, ECS commented on chapters two and four; emended and shortened, the text became Woman’s Bible, Part II, 40–43. •••••••••
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SBA to Frances E. Willard Rochester, N.Y., April 8, 1897.
My Dear Friend:— Yours of the 6th inst. came duly. You will have seen in yesterday morning’s “Democrat and Chronicle,” or in last night’s “Post Express,” my reply 1 to poor Phoebe’s insane pronunciamento. I think it would be wicked in me to have a public combat with the poor, unjointed body and mind of that once-brilliant girl. As to her advice to young women to marry, they will all do exactly what she would have done—i.e., marry the first man whom they really love and think really loves them. Phoebe never failed to manifest her desire to marry. 2 “Barkis is willin’,” was always written on her face whenever she was with Senators So-and-So, and I don’t think it was her devotion to oratory, to the law, to her home, or to any sort of public work, that held her back from marrying; nor does any such thing hold back any woman, not even F. E. W. or S. B. A. Had either of us, in our young womanhood, made the acquaintance of a man we loved so much that we couldn’t live without him, and made ourselves believe that he loved us so much that he couldn’t live without us, we should have been Willard-Jones and Anthony-Smith all these years, instead of plain little Willard and Anthony. So I don’t think that anything Phoebe, or you, or I, or all the other wise heads put together, can say about girls marrying will have one particle of effect. Human nature, like bird and animal nature, runs in the direction of marrying, and Phoebe might as well attempt to stem the tide as to turn the current of girl-nature from its bent towards marriage. Yes, I shall be at home on May 30th, so far as I know, and I shall be most 3 happy to have you and your dear Anna under my roof. Let me know what
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train you will arrive by, and I will have a corner ready for you. I hope your 4 “springhalt” will pass away in this beautiful, sunny weather. With love to all your family, I remain, Affectionately yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, IEWT, from Temperance and Prohibition Papers. 1. On 5 April 1897, the New York World and the New York Herald carried a wire service report from St. Louis headed “Phoebe Couzins Recants” in the first named and “Phoebe Couzins Deserts” in the second about her turn against woman suffrage. From her invalid’s bed, “racked with pain,” she advised “all young women to marry and become housekeepers.” That, she insisted, was her natural role, and any attempt at public life “will never prove satisfactory.” In the longer Herald version, Couzins also denounced “the Anthony-Shaw ring” in the suffrage movement, “beside which the rankest tyranny of Tammany Hall would pale.” Although someone from among SBA’s friends in Rochester answered Couzins at length, SBA herself said little. Her final words to the reporter were, “It is simply the difference between Phoebe Couzins in her younger days, when she was recognized as one of the most prominent women of the country, and Phoebe Couzins of to-day, in ill-health, disappointed and, I think, irresponsible.” With SBA’s permission, Frances Willard sent the humorous part of SBA’s comments about Couzins in this letter for publication in the Union Signal, 17 June 1897. (Film, 36:1007, 1010.) 2. The phrase comes from Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, wherein the message “Barkis is willin’” indicated a desire to marry. 3. After Frances Willard collapsed in November 1896, she settled into a cottage at the sanitorium of Dr. Cordelia A. Greene in Castile, New York. She and SBA began corresponding about a month after her arrival, and SBA made an overnight visit in early January. Willard had suffered for several years from pernicious anemia, and the disease complicated every cold and flu she caught. (Ruth Bordin, Frances Willard, A Biography [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986], 234; Willard, Writing Out My Heart, 423–24; SBA to F. E. C. Willard, 24, 28, 30 December 1896, after 6 January 1897, and SBA diary, 5–6 January 1897, Film, 36:172–75, 193, 197, 247ff, 666.) Anna Adams Gordon (1853–1931) was Frances Willard’s personal secretary and companion. (Women Building Chicago.) The date for this visit was later changed to earlier in the month, but it seems the visit was canceled. See SBA to Anna A. Gordon, 24 April 1897, Film, 36:1042–43, for more plans. 4. A variant of stringhalt, springhalt refers to lameness in the hind legs of a horse caused by spasms and cramps.
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Article by ECS [2 May 1897]
Recalled by the Grant Pageant. Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Reminiscences of the Last Tribute to Napoleon. The approaching pageant on April 27, in which as a nation we are to 1 pay our last tribute of respect to Gen. Grant, who carried our civil war to a successful termination, recalls to my mind a similar event which took place in Paris fifty-six years ago, when the remains of the great Napoleon arrived 2 there from the island of St. Helena. I was on my wedding trip, having just attended the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London, to which Mr. 3 Stanton was a delegate. A party of Friends from Philadelphia, who also 4 attended the convention, were in Paris at the same time. Together we visited the points of interest day after day, and at our hotel in the evening, 5 with “Galignani’s Guide” in hand, planned work for the morrow. We were much amused with the notice taken of the Quaker gentlemen of our party by the soldiers wherever we went. Their coats being of the military cut of 6 the time of George Fox, the founder of their sect, they were supposed to belong to the army of some country, and uniformly received the military salute, much to their embarrassment. Though opposed to war and all its paraphernalia, they took a deep interest in the national excitement and the pageants that heralded the arrival of Napoleon’s remains to his native land. The hearts of that enthusiastic people were stirred to their very depths. We witnessed the busy preparations in the Hôtel des Invalides for the reception, and the wild excitement of the old soldiers who had so long mourned the sad fate of their chief, and we listened with deep interest to the glowing tributes they paid him, so soon to find his last resting place under 7 the same roof with themselves. At that time each soldier had a little patch of ground to decorate as he pleased, in which many scenes from their great battles were illustrated. One represented Napoleon crossing the Alps—the mountains, the cannon, the army, the General on horseback—all perfect in
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miniature. Another represented Napoleon, flag in hand, leading the wild 8 rush across the bridge at Lodi. A third represented a scene among the pyramids in Egypt: Napoleon, seated on his horse, impassively gazing at the Sphinx, seemingly lost in deep thought over some problem of human destiny. But all these scenes in wood and stone have crumbled away, and the ground is used for more prosaic purposes. The old soldiers, too, are all gone; none remains to repeat the stories of these wonderful campaigns. Of all the members of our party who spent so many happy days together I alone remain, and if I live to April 27 I shall probably be the only person in this city who will have been present on both these occasions. Napoleon, in his will, expressed the wish that his last resting place might be in the land and among the people he loved so well. His wish is gratified. He rests on the bank of the Seine, whose waters wash the shores of the greatest city in the French republic. Gen. Grant’s last wish was that his resting place might be in this me9 tropolis; but wherever it was he wanted room for his wife by his side. In his spacious mausoleum his wish also will be gratified in due time. On the bank of the Hudson, whose waters wash the shores of the greatest city of the American republic, a magnificent monument will point the last resting place of our hero to coming generations who will read the history of our civil war. There is great similarity in some points in these events, as there was 10 in the characters of these silent men. As Gen. Horace Porter has done more than any other one man to push the project for a monument to Gen. Grant to completion, it seems peculiarly fitting that he should be an Ambassador to the French republic just at this time, making him a link, as it were, between two great events in this century. His rare executive ability and persistence in this matter shows a capacity for public responsibilities that may prove serviceable to our Government should any necessity arise for serious international negotiations. U Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Y New York Sun, 2 May 1897. 1. The body of Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885), eighteenth president of the United States and victorious general of the Civil War, was moved from a temporary burial site to Grant’s Tomb on Manhattan’s west side. The pageantry of 27 April 1897, led by President William McKinley and more than a dozen governors,
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included a huge parade of Union and Confederate veterans and a fleet of ships on the Hudson River. 2. Napoléon I, emperor of France (1769–1821) was brought to Paris for reburial on 15 December 1840. Despite the story she tells, ECS was not then in Paris. She visited France in July 1840, and, as her husband recalled, the Stantons observed only preparations for the reburial. (Richard D. E. Burton, Blood in the City: Violence and Revelation in Paris, 1789–1945 [Ithaca, N.Y., 2001], 78–79; Henry B. Stanton, Random Recollections, 1st ed. [Johnstown, N.Y., 1885], 45–46; Stanton, Random Recollections, 3d ed. [New York, 1887], 93–94.) 3. Henry Brewster Stanton (1805–1887), then at the height of his renown as an abolitionist lecturer and organizer, toured the British Isles to speak against slavery after the convention in London closed, and during the side trip to France, he attended two more antislavery conventions. 4. The Stantons were joined on the trip from London to Paris by Sarah Pugh (1800–1884) and Abby Kimber (1804–1871), delegates to the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention from the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, but not by any Quaker men. (James Mott, Three Months in Great Britain [Philadelphia, 1841], 61; Memorial of Sarah Pugh. A Tribute of Respect from Her Cousins [Philadelphia, 1888], 28.) 5. Galignani’s New Paris Guide: Containing an Accurate Statistical and Historical Description of All the Institutions, Public Edifices, Curiosities, Etc., of the Capital, published in English by a firm in Paris, was available in several editions by 1840. 6. George Fox (1624–1691) was founder of the Society of Friends, or Quakers. Holding to the principle that simple clothing is best, Quakers of the nineteenth century fell behind the fashions of their day and dressed pretty much as Fox had done. A common overcoat for men was long and without a collar. See the discussion in Thomas Clarkson, A Portraiture of Quakerism, Taken from a View of the Moral Education, Discipline, Peculiar Customs, Religious Principles, Political and Civil Economy, and Character, of the Society of Friends, 2d American ed. (Philadelphia, 1808), 1:194–95, 204–5. 7. Napoléon’s new tomb was built inside the Hôtel des Invalides, a home for ailing and elderly veterans. 8. Fought in 1796, Napoléon’s victory at Lodi made possible his subsequent takeover of Milan. 9. Julia Dent Grant (1826–1902), a participant in the pageantry of April 27, was later buried beside her husband. 10. Horace Porter (1837–1921), Grant’s aide-de-camp at the end of the Civil War and presidential secretary during his terms in the White House, headed the Grant Monument Association that raised the money for Grant’s Tomb. Earlier in April, President McKinley named him ambassador to France. Writing to congratulate Porter on that appointment, ECS tried out the ideas in this essay. (ANB; ECS to H. Porter, 12 April 1897, Film, 36:1017.)
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SBA to Lydia Avery Coonley Ward
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Rochester, N.Y., May 9 1897. My Dear Mrs Coonley 2 3 I learn from Mrs Greenleaf that you are coming to Mrs Gannetts this week— My sister & I want to put in our claim for a visit from you and nyourp newly chosen one—while you are in the city— I shall go to see you as soon as I know of your arrival—for I do want to see you once more—and learn to adjust myself to your added name & added friendship— I remem4 ber my dear friend Antoinette Brown —when I met her after her marriage to Sam’l Blackwell—said to me—“Susan while I love you just as well as I did before, I feel the need of you far less!!” This I presume is ever true with old friendships— But come and let us see—we are philosophers enough to accept whatever comes— so fix the time—and spend at least a day with us— I want you to sit in judgement on the few chapters of my life that Mrs 5 Harper has made the first writing of— So with nlovep to your dear mother & each & all of your precious girls & boys—I am as ever Lovingly yours U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, SBA Collection, NR. 1. Lydia Arms Avery Coonley Ward (1845–1924), who hosted SBA at her house in Chicago during the Columbian Exposition of 1893, was then the wealthy widow of John Clark Coonley and a leader in cultural and reform activities in the city. She and her mother, Susan Look Avery, spent summers in Wyoming, New York, where they became acquainted with SBA through their suffrage activism. (ANB; Women Building Chicago; Waldo R. Browne, Chronicles of an American Home, Hillside (Wyoming, New York) and Its Family: 1858–1928 [New York, 1930].) On 18 March 1897, Lydia Coonley married Henry Augustus Ward (1834–1906) of Rochester, a scientist and traveler whose courtship of Coonley began in 1893. Their marriage took place at her house in Chicago, but SBA here addresses them at the house in Wyoming County. SBA did not easily accept this marriage; after meeting Ward on May 14, she wrote in her diary, “The Alliance doesnt seem any better to me.” (New York Times, 19 March 1897, 5 July 1906; Roswell Ward, Henry A. Ward: Museum Builder to America [Rochester, 1948], 255–56, 264; SBA diary, 7 March, 14–15 May 1897, Film, 36:247ff.) 2. Jean Frances Brooks Greenleaf (1831–1918), the wife of Rochester business-
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man and congressman Halbert S. Greenleaf and a friend of SBA, was president of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association from 1890 to 1896. After her husband suffered a stroke, she withdrew from many of her leadership positions to take care of him. (American Women; John Devoy, Rochester and the Post Express. A History of the City of Rochester from the Earliest Times: The Pioneers and Their Predecessors, Frontier Life in Genesee Country, Biographical Sketches [Rochester, 1895], 162; “Jean Brooks Greenleaf,” Rochester Regional Library Council website, Western New York Suffragists: Winning the Vote. See also Papers 5.) 3. Mary Thorn Lewis Gannett (1854–1952), wife of William Gannett, was one of Rochester’s leading reformers and organizers, joining the Political Equality Club and the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union and also founding new groups, like the Unitarian church’s Woman’s Alliance. (Pease, “Gannetts of Rochester,” 1–24; New York Times, 27 October 1952.) 4. Antoinette Louisa Brown Blackwell (1825–1921) was the first American woman to be ordained a minister. While living in Henrietta, New York, before her marriage, she worked closely with ECS and SBA in the movement for woman’s rights. She married Samuel Charles Blackwell (1823–1901), a brother of Henry Blackwell and a businessman in New York and New Jersey, in 1856. (NAW; ANB. See also Papers 1–4.) 5. Susan Howes Look Avery (1817–1915), who lived in Louisville, Kentucky, when she was not in Wyoming County, was the widow of Benjamin Franklin Avery, one of the nation’s largest manufacturers of plows. In New York, Avery helped found the Warsaw Political Equality Club in 1891 and presided over countywide meetings of other local clubs for many years. In Louisville, she founded the Woman’s Club, worked with Laura Clay on reform of married women’s property laws, and donated money for the National-American’s work in southern states. (WWW1; Jane Kirk, “Susan Look Avery: A Nineteenth-Century Reformer,” Historical Wyoming 24 [January 1978]: 57–64; Browne, Chronicles of an American Home. See also Papers 5.) •••••••••
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SBA to Daniel R. Anthony Rochester, N.Y., May 26, 1897.
My Dear brother D. R. I am just in receipt of letter from the Berkshire County Historical Soci1 ety —saying they have voted to hold their annual summer meeting—a sort 2 of pic-nic—in the door-yard of our Grand-father Anthony —on Thursday—July 29th— They had a large meeting there two years ago—& tried to get me there—but I couldn’t go—so now they have my pledge to attend—&
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my promise to get as many members of the families of Read—Richard3 son —& Anthony & Lapham—as I possibly can— And I want you to put down that day—July 29—and hold it sacred—for Adams—& the re-union of the families— they will ask you to speak—without doubt— they ask me to suggest—& I have proposed—that the old people—should tell their stories of the olden days—in the forenoon—then dinner in the old 40 or 50 feet long kitchen & in the nunderp the trees—and then in the afternoon have speeches from young people Rev Anna Shaw—Mrs Chapman Catt &c—&c— just where you & I would come in—with the old or young—we will see when the time comes— this is only to ask—to beg you—to make sure & plan so as to be there without fail— I wonder if Merritt would go 4 too— It would do him ever so much good—and I wish too—that Anna 5 & Mary L. could both go— In all human probability it will be the last & only time any number of our different families can ever meet in “The Old Hive”—as Grand-father used to call the old house—in which our dear 6 father was the first born— What do you say? Will you plan to be there?— I can see how very 7 difficult it will be for both you & Anna to leave—without your Maud 8 there—and without your Dan. Jr —to hold the fort—but if you try real hard—things can run for this once all by themselves— Lovingly your sister U Susan B. Anthony p.s. Is Anna home? When does Dan. “jump the broom-stick”? Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead for 1897, SBA Collection, NR. Next to the postscript, Maude Anthony Koehler wrote, “This must mean to be married M. A. K.” 1. The Berkshire Historical and Scientific Society, organized in 1877 with many faculty of Williams College as members, had among its objects “the collection and preservation of facts, documents, and tradition, relating to the history of the County of Berkshire, and of the towns therein.” SBA’s family were eighteenth-century Quaker settlers of the Berkshire County town of Adams. Though her parents left Adams early in SBA’s childhood, other members of the family still resided in the town. (Andrew McFarland Davis, Historical Work in Massachusetts [Cambridge, Mass., 1893], 36–37.) 2. Humphrey Anthony (1770–1866), whose house, known as “The Hive,” was still in family hands. He married Hannah Lapham, from another Quaker family in the town. 3. SBA’s mother was the daughter of Daniel Read and Susannah Richardson, both of whom moved west to the town of Cheshire, Berkshire County, with their parents in the eighteenth century. Baptists, not Quakers, SBA’s Read and Richard-
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son relatives fought with distinction in the American Revolution. SBA lived with members of the Read and Richardson families when she taught at Canajoharie, New York, in the 1840s. (Ellen M. Raynor and Emma L. Petitclerc, History of the Town of Cheshire, Berkshire County, Mass. [Holyoke, Mass., 1885], 30, 56, 151; Read family genealogical notes, SBA Papers, MCR-S.) 4. Anna E. Osborne Anthony (1845–1930) married D. R. Anthony in 1864. (Anthony, Anthony Genealogy, 185–91; biographical files, KHi. See also Papers 1–5.) 5. Mary Almina Luther Anthony (1839–?), wife of Merritt Anthony, was known in the family as Mary L. to distinguish her from SBA’s sister. (Anthony, Anthony Genealogy, 173, 189.) 6. Daniel Anthony was the eldest of nine children. 7. The only surviving daughter of D. R. and Anna Anthony, Maude Anthony Koehler (1865–1950) studied at the Gannett Institute in Boston but resisted SBA’s pleas that she continue her education at the University of Kansas. In 1896, she married Lewis M. Koehler, a graduate of West Point and a cavalry officer; at this date, the couple lived at Fort Duchesne, Utah. (Anthony, Anthony Genealogy, 185, 187; Los Angeles Times, 24 January 1950; SBA to Lucy E. Anthony, 27 August 1883, and SBA to Kate Stephens, 8 June 1884, Film, 23:276–88, 784–88.) 8. Daniel Read Anthony, Jr., (1870–1931) graduated from the Michigan Military Academy in 1887 and the University of Michigan Law School in 1891. On 21 June 1897, he married Elizabeth Havens of Leavenworth. He later succeeded his father as editor of the Leavenworth Times and served in Congress from 1907 to 1929. (BDAC; WWW1; Anthony, Anthony Genealogy, 187–89; New York Times, 5 August 1931.) •••••••••
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Article by ECS [June 1897] Reading the Bible in the Public Schools.
To clearly understand each other in the discussion of questions in re1 gard to religion, writers must have some common ideas as to the ground covered by the science of religion. While some claim that it has nothing to do with theology, and others that it has nothing to do with morality, and still others that it covers both, it would be difficult to reach any conclusion as to where, when, and how it is to be considered. 2 “Morality touched with emotion” is Matthew Arnold’s definition. In his view religion covers the moralities, all our duties in practical life. As
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individuals we are bound to secure the highest self-development, to cultivate pure thoughts and sentiments, lofty ideals, all the cardinal virtues. In our relations to others we have imperative duties to family, neighbors, and country which a religious conscience will awaken and quicken. This religion covers the whole realm of moral and social ethics, our duties in this life rather than our joys to come. Theology covers the realm of the unknowable,—our fears, dreams, superstitions, world of imagination; our fables, mythologies, creeds and canons, dogmas and decretals, forms and ceremonies, prayer-books and bibles, that may prove so many blocks in the way of religion pure and undefiled. We must relegate the Hebrew mythology, with that of the German and Greek, to the poets, soothsayers, and necromancers of the period to which they belong. The time has come to study religion as a science, an essential element in every human being, differing with climate and civilization. It is at least as important in education as astronomy, navigation, and psychology. But this science, covering the whole round of human duties, cannot be learned in our schools by reading the Old Testament, containing as it does a very revolting history of tribes always at war, of arbitrary rulers, and of men and women who violated all the moralities in ordinary life. Dr. Andrew D. White, former President of Cornell University, in his new work, “History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom,” shows that the Bible has been the greatest block in the way of progress. Why then continue to read it in our public schools? Why make a fetish of a book that has thus retarded civilization and has led to the most cruel persecutions of scientists and scholars that the world has ever seen,—a book that makes the supposed Ruler of the Universe a being delighting in war, tempest-tossed with envy, hatred, and malice, alternately blessing and cursing his supposed chosen people? Why frighten women and children with vivid pictures of two terrible forces of evil, one called God, and one called Satan,—the one who with his omniscient eye penetrates our most secret thoughts and actions, who condemns us generally as totally depraved, conceived in sin, and brought forth in iniquity; “the other rejoicing in our vices, and ever at hand to tempt us from the path of rectitude,” “going about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour”? Strong men may rise superior to such visions, but the multitudes of young women in insane asylums, trembling before these imaginary beings, and the ever-present fears of children, appeal to wise people to deliver us from these gloomy
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theologies and to give to women and children an expurgated edition of the “Holy Book.” The stampede of several hundred children from one of our public schools in New York City, a few months since, because some one said the devil was in the house should be a lesson to Bible teachers. All thinkers will agree with Judge Grant that taxation for schools is better than taxation for jails and prisons; that the morals of the schoolhouse are better than those of the street; that the ethics of religion are the most important lessons to be taught in schools, in social life, and in the marts of 3 trade. To this end the text-books in our schools, the editorials in our journals, the sermons from our pulpits, the platforms of our political parties, the decisions of our courts, the secret councils of our financiers, should all glow with the principles of justice, liberty, and equality. If, however, we are to train our children in the moralities of the New Testament rather than the mythologies of the Old Testament, and to follow the example of Jesus and accept his code of social ethics, to love their neighbors as themselves, to share with them all the good things of life, this would wholly unfit them for our present civilization of selfish competition. To teach them that the few had no right to enjoy the luxuries of life while the many were denied its necessities, would educate them for the community idea in social life and for socialism in the general government. Thus, to some thinkers, the philosophy of Jesus would be as objectionable as the mythology of Moses and the Prophets. Again, the reading of the New Testament is forbidden in some of our schools because the Jews object to it as history, and the Catholics object to it because it makes no mention of the Pope or of points of faith which they consider of vital consequence. Millionaires might object because of its denunciations of rich men; and women because it assigns to them a position of subordination in the church and state, and in social life to individual men. Neither in spirit, letter, nor example are children taught in either Book to reverence the mother of the race. In all the revisions of texts and discussions on translations the degraded position of women has thus far had no notice. I doubt whether a theological student ever arose from the study of the Scriptures with a higher respect for women than he found in ordinary life or in the laws and constitutions of the state. Having listened every day, for a dozen years or more, to the terrible denunciations of rich men, Pharisees, and hypocrites, if our children understood what was read,—which, fortunately, they do not,—they would be surprised to find those classes whom God was supposed to hate, in the full
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enjoyment of all the good things of life, while the poor whom he loves are suffering in ignorance, poverty, and vice. When questioning, they are told 4 that “the Lord loveth whom he chasteneth,” and that the joys of heaven will compensate for their misery on earth. If the majority of people really believed in the teachings of Jesus, we should be in a continual revolution until we secured equal rights for all. “In Christ there is neither Jew nor 5 Greek, bond or free, male or female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” But, say the advocates of the Bible in the schools, our teachers are instructed to read the most harmless passages in the Old Testament, such as the stories of Joseph, Jonah, Samson, etc. But the children, if they take notice of what is read, will ask whether or not those stories are true. To tell them they are not, and yet teach them that the Bible is a Holy Book, inspired or written by the great Spirit of the Universe, is to confuse and confound their reason and common sense. The present contention among 6 our clergy about the story of Jonah would not fill columns in our daily press if they had been taught in our schools that a man could no more live in a whale’s belly three days than a bird could for that length of time in an exhausted receiver. To tell them that God can work miracles, that he is not bound by his own laws, is to make the immutable, unchangeable, inexorable One a mere prestidigitator. Parents and teachers are in duty bound to understand the science of religion before they cumber the minds of children with the absurdities of our theologies. Judge Grant speaks approvingly of the Puritan fathers, as illustrating in their lives the moral effect of Bible-reading in the schools, and the obser7 vance of its ordinances in their daily lives. Yet they were the worst type of religious bigots. They persecuted the Baptists and Quakers, tortured and killed alleged witches, and made Sunday a dreary day for the young. A wit, speaking of the blue laws of Connecticut, said, “A man was not al8 lowed on that Holy Day to kiss his wife, nor a hen to lay an egg.” The more rigid saints did not even make their beds on Sunday, nor cook any food; some even fasted until the sun went down. Their descendants were the most cruel persecutors of abolitionists. They stoned and dragged them through the streets of Boston with ropes around their necks, and sent the trembling fugitive slaves back to the house of bondage. They persecuted the advocates of temperance, and made the lives of some clergymen miserable because they protested against deacons of the church carrying on the distillery business and making the cellars of the churches the favorite
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places for storing wines. The celebrated trial of Rev. George B. Cheever for libel, as the author of “Deacon Giles’ Distillery,” is fresh in the memory 10 of many still living. So also is the persecution of Rev. John Pierpont, who protested against the wine cellar under his church, whereupon all the liquor-dealers left the “sacred” edifice and nailed rough boards over their pews, thus defacing the interior of the building; and, by withdrawing their patronage, they broke up the congregation. These were leading people in Boston,—lawyers, bankers, trustees of colleges,—all strong advocates of Bible-reading in the schools and of rigid Sunday laws, and men who prayed in perfunctory manner in their families, morning and evening. Judge Grant evidently thinks that reading the Bible in the schools would quicken the religious emotions of our children and move them later in life to do good works, whereas they take but little note of what is read, and the teacher’s chief care is to avoid all passages unfit for refined ears. But why read the Hebrew mythology rather than the German or the Greek? Why teach the morality and religion of a people inferior to our own? We hear much talk of religion being the cure for all our social and political wrongs. If religion covers the moralities, it certainly has that power, but we must distinguish between religion and the theologies, as already suggested. Instead of the Bible, we should have text-books on morals and religion, comprising the most beautiful sentiments in poetry and prose from the best thinkers of our day. In all the sciences we have new text-books from time to time; why not in the science of religion and morality, which we consider the most important of all? There are no books in English literature more unfit reading for young people than those of the Old Testament. Again, Judge Grant claims that the crowding of our people into the cities 11 is an evidence of the decline of the religious sentiment. Is it not rather an evidence of the growing dislike of the isolation of country life? When farm life is composed of colonies owning large tracts of land together, whose farms branch from a common centre, with their houses, schoolhouses, churches, and halls for amusement in one or two broad streets lined with trees, fountains, and flowers, an increasing number of educated people will leave the cities for rural life, where they can rest their weary nerves and develop their muscles in useful labor. The religious emotions in man, based on reverence, imagination, and worship of something higher than himself, are as much a part of every human soul as the love of music, poetry, and song. The savage worships the sun, the moon, the stars, the grand in nature;
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the civilized man, the ideal intelligence behind all he sees, and feels, and knows; behind the scientific facts on which his own origin and destiny are based. As society grows more complicated from day to day, man’s powers must be more highly developed to meet the exigencies of his generation. Now that the full light of science is being turned on all our fallacies and forms of life, and new discoveries are opening brighter fields of thought and more convenient modes of labor, we see that religion covers a broader and more practical sphere. Instead of being enjoined to have faith in abstractions, we are summoned to consider questions of economics, of domestic life, of education, and of wise legislation on all questions that pertain to this world. Men and women should at least make as holy a preparation of themselves for the duties of parenthood as they do to partake of the sacrament. The religion of humanity centres the duties of the church in this life, and until the poor are sheltered, fed, and clothed, and are given ample opportunities for education and self-support, the first article in their creed should be, “The few have no right to luxuries until the many have the 12 necessities.” Merely to live without hope or joy in the present or future is not life, but a lingering death. Instead of spending so much time and thought over the souls of the multitude and over delusive promises of the joys to come in another life, we should make for them a paradise here. We are not so sure that the next sphere of action differs so widely from this. We may go through many grades before we enjoy “the peace that passeth 13 all understanding.” If the same laws govern all parts of the universe, and are only improved by the higher development of man himself, we must begin to lay the foundation-stones of the new heaven and the new earth here and now. Equal rights for all is the goal towards which the nations of the earth are struggling, and which sooner or later will be reached. Such will be the triumph of true religion, and such the solution of the problem of just government. Y Arena 17 (June 1897): 1033–38. 1. In the first of two articles under the heading “Religious Teaching and the Moral Life,” Charles Rollin Grant (1846–1929), a prominent lawyer and judge of Akron, Ohio, wrote “Fidelity in the Social Contract.” His was a conservative defense of public education: tax-supported schools had the potential to protect the republic if they reconnected moral instruction to religion. Several pages of his argument reviewed the rise of secular humanism as part of the French Revolution. Fidelity, as in his title, depended on religious faith. (Arena 17 [June 1897]: 1024–33;
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Samuel A. Lane, Fifty Years and Over of Akron and Summit County [Akron, Ohio, 1892], 186; Catalogue of Officers, Graduates and Students of Western Reserve College and of Adelbert College, 1826–1916 [Cleveland, 1916], 28; Ohio Death Certificate Index, Ohio Historical Society, on-line.) 2. Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), poet and critic, discussed the unity of religion and ethics in Literature and Dogma: An Essay towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible (1873). In the popular edition of 1883, the quotation falls on page sixteen. 3. Grant opened his essay with a theory about how polities justified taxsupported education. A system of public schools “proceeds upon the hypothesis that it is cheaper and better to employ teachers than to hire policemen, to equip schools than to arm soldiers, to build schoolhouses than infirmaries or prisons; and that so, at last, the people, upon whom the burden of taxation primarily falls, will come to their own again.” (Grant, “Fidelity in the Social Compact,” 1024.) 4. Heb. 12:6. 5. Gal. 3:28. 6. Jon. 1:17. 7. In the nation’s golden past, New England’s schools set the pattern in a system that Grant described as “essentially demo-theocratic. Strict morality was everywhere inculcated, but it was that morality which was referable to their one code of ethics—the Bible.” (Grant, “Fidelity in the Social Compact,” 1025.) 8. The Blue Laws of Connecticut set the standard for absurdity in the enforcement of sabbath observance, though historians doubted that the extremes often cited by ECS were ever enacted. See also Papers, 5:191–94. 9. George Barrell Cheever (1807–1890) was pastor of the Church of the Puritans, Union Square, New York, from 1846 to 1867, and a founder of the Church Anti-Slavery Society. ECS refers to his conviction for libel in 1835, after publishing “Enquire at Amos Giles’ Distillery,” a temperance essay aimed at a popular minister who owned a distillery. (ANB.) 10. John Pierpont (1785–1866) was a Unitarian minister, abolitionist, and poet. ECS recounts events while Pierpont preached at the Hollis Street Church in Boston. The struggle by liquor merchants to oust him became known as a “Seven Years’ War.” (DAB.) 11. This is a far-fetched claim about Grant’s argument. He describes cities as the location of major challenges to self-government and wonders if education can meet the needs of political assimilation. “Our educational panacea is no longer compounded from the pharmacopaeia of religion,” he explains. Disagreements about religion in schools have caused educators “to confine their labors to the domain of mere knowledge, to the acquisition of information as such, to the training of the head and the hand alone.” These are not the objects of true education, of “moral sense, a quickened heart, and an undoubted allegiance to the universal regency of conscience.” (Grant, “Fidelity in the Social Compact,” 1025–26.) 12. ECS is herself given credit for this sentence or motto, even though she sometimes marked it as a quotation. When she repeated the motto in her article “War or Peace. Competition or Co-operation,” below at 21 May 1898, a reader challenged
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its message, arguing that the redistribution of wealth required the use of force. In what amounted to a possible test of ECS’s authorship, her critic assumed ECS was the author, and ECS took responsibility for it when she answered his challenge. See ECS, “The Few Will ‘Gladly Give’ of Their Luxuries,” Film, 38:645, and Allen Henry Smith, “Mrs. Stanton’s Right and Wrong,” Commonwealth 5 (11 June 1898): 10–11. See also DuBois, “Spanning Two Centuries,” 148, where ECS’s granddaughter Nora Blatch described these words as “my Queenmother’s favorite quotation—or was it original with her?” 13. An adaptation of Phil. 4:7. •••••••••
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ECS to Margaret Bryan Shelby1 Geneva, N.Y., June 30, 1897.
Dear Mrs. Shelby:—The first thought that always strikes me in celebrating the Fourth of July is the great work our fathers accomplished in laying the foundation stones of a republic and our duty to see that the principles they enunciated are fully realized. While we glorify their work we must struggle to attain greater heights than they ever reached and thus help the completion of a Government in which all our citizens shall enjoy equal rights. The extremes of riches and poverty should be known nowhere under our flag. I would that the women of this republic might inscribe on their National banner this motto: “The few have no right to the luxuries of life while the many are denied 2 its necessities.” A nation cannot be on a safe and stable basis so long as multitudes of its people are sunk in ignorance, poverty and vice. In the rise and downfall of all the nations of the past we may read the handwriting on the wall: 3 “Weighed in the Balance and found Wanting.” Impoverished Ireland and a Royal Jubilee are pictures in painful contrast, as are our Fourth of July festivities with unhappy Cuba pleading for 4 help, in vain, from American Republic. Sad facts are these for the civilization of the Nineteenth Century. Woman’s voice should ring out loud and clear against these monstrous wrongs of our day and generation. Equal rights for all in the state, church and home, and equal share in all the blessings of life are the demands of a just government and of a Christian religion. With kind regards, U Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
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Y Lexington Leader, 4 July 1897, Scrapbook 1876–1903, SBA Papers, DLC. 1. Margaret Cartwell Bryan Shelby (c. 1862–1898) was regent of the Bryan Station Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Lexington, Kentucky. The Bryan and Lexington chapters joined forces to edit a special Fourth of July edition of the Lexington Leader. SBA also sent a contribution. (American Monthly Magazine 15 [July 1899]: 60–61; Lexington Leader, 23 March 1898; Morning Herald, 24 March 1898; Film, 37:81; with the assistance of Nyota Hawkins.) 2. About this motto, see note above at June 1897. 3. Dan. 5:27. 4. ECS made the same contrast in her article “Jails and Jubilees,” 12 May 1887, Film, 25:447–48, while England celebrated the Jubilee of Queen Victoria’s reign. •••••••••
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Speech by SBA at the Annual Meeting of the Berkshire County Historical and Scientific Society, Adams, Massachusetts
Editorial note: The Berkshire Scientific and Historical Society convened its annual meeting at the pavilion in Forest Park on 29 July 1897 in the afternoon. Torrential rains stopped that morning but not before washing out tracks and roads and blocking the way for some of SBA’s hosts. An audience of six to eight hundred people was made up of townspeople; journalists from western Massachusetts and Rochester; scores of members of the Anthony and Read families, scheduled for a reunion on the next day; leaders of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association, in town for meetings of the Business Committee; and members of the historical society. As told in this speech, SBA’s recollections of her childhood in Adams echo stories Ida Harper had already incorporated into the first chapter of her as yet unpublished Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony. On 19 March 1897, SBA listened to Harper read aloud first drafts of five chapters that treated her first thirty years. “I told her,” SBA wrote at the time, “if she could make so pretty a story out of nothing, I didn’t know what she would be able to do when she came down to the actual working years of my life.” On this occasion SBA gave the storytelling a try herself. (SBA diary, 29 July—2 August 1897, and SBA to Rachel G. F. Avery, 23 March 1897, Film, 36:247ff, 973–80; Anthony, 1:1–15.)
[29 July 1897] Miss Anthony said:— “Good friends, one part of my work a few years ago was in association with Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Mrs. Matilda Joslyn Gage gathering
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up the stories of the work of women, especially of the women of this country and the women of this age and putting them on record in a book entitled ‘The History of Woman Suffrage.’ This is bound in three huge volumes, of nearly 1000 pages each. I brought those three volumes to Adams for the express purpose of presenting them to the Berkshire County Historical society, and I intended to have those volumes on this table, so that all could have seen the large books which it took to record the works of the women of this country, from the foundation of this government in their efforts to secure liberty. But the clerk of the weather here in Adams has behaved so terrifically that, I assure you, when it stopped raining this morning and we could get out of doors and into the carriage to come here, I forgot everything under the sun but that it did not rain, and so the books are not here. But, in imagination, I want you to see those three huge volumes of the history of this Woman Suffrage movement, and I present these to your acting 1 president, Mr. Whipple, that they may be placed in the historical library of Berkshire county, for each and every one of you to call there and obtain the reading of them and to learn what all of the women of this country have done as well as the women who have the honor of having been born in this county.” (Accepted by vice-President Whipple.) Miss Anthony continued. “It seems to me, good friends, that I have said 2 a great deal all the way through and that there is really nothing more. I was 3 but six years old when my father moved to Battenville, but my sister older 4 and the one a little younger used to go to school, over at Bowens’ Corners, out beyond the Walker place to the old school house, and cut across the 5 hills from Grandfather Read’s. I can remember everything in that school house, and how frightened the teacher was by a thunderstorm, and how we went out into the woods where it was springy and marshy and got all sorts of spice roots. But I remember best of all how we children always stopped at Grandmother Read’s on our way up to school and got a little 6 bit of cheese curd out of the old cheese tub and a drink of crust coffee. 7 Nobody can imagine the flavor of that cheese curd, unless it is Aunt Maria, who has made cheese, if she has seen any children come to taste. When we came home from school, we always wanted to stop at Grandmother’s again. She had a great pewter platter—what a platter that was!—filled with a little pork and cornbeef in the center and all around potatoes, cabbage, beets, parsnips, turnips, etc. We were hungry as little wolves and Grandmother 8 would give us to eat from the platter. Mother used to reprove and say ‘You mustn’t bother Grandmother that way, you must come right straight home
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and get something to eat.’ And my sister Guelma would say—‘Why, Mother, Grandmother’s potato peelings are better than your whole potatoes.’ Now my dear friends isn’t that the memory of every one of you, that everything pertaining to your childhood and to the friends of your childhood whom you loved is better than anything else could be? But when I come back, after having seen the old Rocky mountains, after having seen Mt. Shasta and Mt. Tacoma, after traveling over Europe and seeing the mountains of the old world, old Greylock and the Green mountains do not look half so high to me as they did when I was a wee chick of a child here in your 9 midst. When I sit down in the old homestead, it doesn’t look a bit large 10 to me. I said—‘This is not Grandmother Anthony’s old table, is it?’ And when my cousin assured me it was precisely the same, I couldn’t believe it possible. It didn’t seem to me that that table could have been gotten into this hall. When father and mother came with us six children from Battenville to visit, we were quartered at Grandmother Read’s. The morning we started for home we would breakfast at Grandmother Anthony’s and that little black-eyed, black-haired grandmother waited on us. When we were loaded into the wagon to go home, grandmother would come out with her 11 apron full of speckled apples—always speckled apples. The apples were kept picked over and that was why they had apples long after the neighbors’ apples were gone, and grandmother always had apple dumplings on the 4th of July. That is the difference between people who are thrifty and people who are not. Grandfather would come from the old cheese-house and say, ‘I guess I’ll heave in this cheese.’ So we had cheese and apples and doughnuts. “I want to say a word about that Mother Adam—that Mother Adam who supported Adam. I want to say that the women of Adams, we women of Berkshire county, have supported ‘Adam’ ever since. They have done their full quota of the world’s work. The only difficulty is they have not owned and controlled by law the proceeds of that labor. The proceeds of their labor belonged to the male head of the family and this movement of ours is to get the laws so amended that every woman shall be an equal owner and controller of the proceeds of the joint labor of the marriage co-partnership. “Forty years ago—yes, eighty years ago, my father and Uncle Isaac 12 Hoxie owned a little factory on Tophet brook with twenty-six looms. Uncle Isaac lived on the west side of the brook and father on the east, and mother and Aunt Hannah Hoxie boarded the hands. Twenty-two people made up the whole number of employees in the factory. That was in the
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early twenties. Mother did all the work, except with the assistance of one little girl who worked for her board nights and mornings and went to school. “Now, if my mother didn’t do her full quota of the work of that marriage firm that should entitle her to be the equal owner of the proceeds of that household, then there is no use in talking about woman’s work amounting to anything. “Later on, when we lived in Battenville, my grandfather came up to visit us. At that time father’s family consisted of four girls and two boys. The teacher boarded with us and several girls were visiting us, so, when grandfather sat down, he looked up and down the table and finally said, ‘Why, Daniel, thee’s got girls enough to impoverish a nation.’ “What could girls do then? They could work in the factory and do housework, but our mothers and grandmothers did not hire anybody; they did all the work themselves. It was always deemed a misfortune in any household if the majority of the children were girls, because the girls could do nothing but help the mothers about the house and be supported. “Now friends what a revolution has come from a woman being able to teach school at a dollar a week and board around, from being able to work in a factory and earn a dollar and a half a week, as hundreds of girls did in those olden days, and pay a dollar for their board and have a half dollar for expenses. That was the maximum in a great many cases. All of the trades and avocations, all of the professions, every possible business in the world is open to women as to men and women have entered in to occupy the land. They are today everywhere. They are typesetters, editors, publishers, correspondents—why, men and women of Berkshire, the paper from the town in which I live sends one of its best correspondents, a woman, to report this 13 meeting. “Sixty years ago the idea that a woman could edit a newspaper, that a woman could do work equally intellectual to that of a man was never dreamed of except in very rare cases. Down the northern part of this county 14 we had Catherine Sedgwick, who could write a book, but so far as I know there was at that time no one else in Berkshire who could be called a literary woman. Today there are scores and hundreds of women who are educated and cultured, who are doing the very best literary work. Mrs. Harper, my biographer, was editor of a daily paper in Indianapolis, during one of the most important political campaigns. “Women worked in the factory in my early days but now their position is
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very much improved. I remember very well when we lived in Battenville, of my father’s telling of one of the girls who had wonderful skill in caring for 15 the looms. Her name was Sally Ann Hyatt. Her brother was the overseer of the weaving room, but when no one else could untangle the yarn and when the shuttle wouldn’t fly straight or something was wrong, the overseer would tell Sally Ann that he would look after her looms if she would straighten things out. “I was a little chick of a child about 10 years old, when father told this story, and I said ‘well, father, if Sally Ann knows most why don’t you make her the overseer?’ “Father said it would never do to have a woman overseer in the factory. I couldn’t understand why she should not be overseer if she knew more, but it was simply because of the law and custom. Sally Ann belonged to an inferior class—she was a woman. What I have been working for all these years is just this—when Sally Ann does know more and does better work than James, the superintendent, she shall be put in the position of the superintendents and have a superintendent’s salary. That is the whole question. Equal pay for equal work. “There isn’t a woman in the sound of my voice, who does not want this justice. There never was one—there never will be one who does not want justice and equality. But they have not yet learned that equal work and equal wages can come only through the political equality, represented by the ballot. “Women of Berkshire county, there is but one way by which you can get equal rights in the home, equal rights in the factory, equal rights in the school house, equal rights everywhere, and that is by holding in your hand that little bit of white paper, the ballot. “Men and women of Berkshire county, especially the women, if you want to honor me, as having been born here, if you want to do anything in recognition of the services I have performed, then put on your armor and enlist in this great woman suffrage warfare. Do your best to bring about a change in the Massachusetts constitution that shall give to women the right to a voice in government. “It is not necessary for you to be a public speaker or to go on the platform. Every woman in her own home can be a teacher of this great principle of equality. She can instruct her husband and her children in the ways of justice toward all. But for the good and true women in all the homes, but for the loyalty of the home women, who never speak in public, but who in
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a quiet way are teaching this gospel in season and out of season, we, who stand at the front could never have stood here. We would have had no constituency but for this silent, magnificent army of women in the homes throughout the nation. “The pride of my life is to say that I was born in the old Bay State. I love the glories of her scenery, but I would love it more and better if I could say that the men of this state had voted that women should be their peers at the ballot box. That is the thing for you to do. “Mr. President and all the members of the Historical society, I want to thank you for inviting me here on this occasion and giving me an opportunity to bring here my body guard of young women who will carry on the work when the older ones are gone. Mrs. Stanton is 82 and I have passed my 77th birthday and in the natural course of things shall not be here much longer. “Next year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first woman’s rights convention in Washington. We want you all to come. Let us meet there and rejoice over all the gains that have been made in the recognition of woman’s equality in the last half century and make our new resolves to open the 20th century with greater and grander and nobler work than has ever been done.” (Applause). Y Unidentified and undated clipping, “Clippings” scrapbook 2, SBA Memorial Library Collection, Rare Books Department, CSmH. “Reported by Mrs. Emma B. Sweet” appears below headlines. 1. Alden Bradford Whipple (1824–1910) grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and graduated from Williams College in 1852. A teacher and Baptist minister, he traveled widely before returning to his hometown in 1879. (Rollin Hillyer Cooke, ed., Historic Homes and Institutions and Genealogical and Personal Memoirs of Berkshire County, Massachusetts [New York, 1906], 2:130–32; General Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates of Williams College, 1920 [Williamstown, Mass., 1920], 73.) 2. Earlier in the meeting, SBA told a few stories about her family and introduced members of the National-American association’s Business Committee. 3. Daniel Anthony moved his family in 1826 to Battenville, New York, north by northwest from Adams. 4. That is, Guelma McLean and Hannah Mosher joined SBA at school in Adams. 5. The house Daniel Anthony built in 1817 was about one mile east of Adams in a neighborhood known as Bowens Corners. The farm of her grandfather, Daniel Read (1754–1838), was east of that house, placing the school, if SBA recalls correctly, still further away from the center of town. According to the federal census of 1820, the Read farm had Walkers living on all sides.
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6. Also known as toast water, crust coffee was made by steeping dark toast in boiling water and flavoring the drink with cream, sugar, and spices. 7. Elmina Maria Eddy Anthony (1821–1902), known as Aunt Maria, was the widow of Humphrey Anthony, Jr., the youngest of Daniel Anthony’s siblings. (Anthony, Anthony Genealogy, 171, 221, 223; Ruth Story Devereux Eddy, The Eddy Family in America [Boston, 1930], 381.) 8. SBA’s mother, Lucy R. Anthony. 9. SBA contrasts two well-known mountains of the West Coast, Mount Shasta in California and Mount Tacoma (now Mount Ranier) in Washington, with Mount Greylock in Berkshire County, in view of her birthplace, and the Green Mountains, just to the north in Vermont. 10. Daniel Anthony’s mother, Hannah Lapham Anthony (1773–1841). 11. Speckled apples are past their prime but still edible. 12. Isaac Upton Hoxie (1797–1837), who married Daniel Anthony’s younger sister Hannah in 1818, joined his brothers-in-law in building and running mills. Hannah Anthony Hoxie (1797–1869), mother of nine children, was a noted minister in the Society of Friends for many decades. For a time after her husband’s death, she moved with her children to live near Daniel Anthony in Washington County, New York. (Anthony, Anthony Genealogy, 171, 191–92; Leslie R. Hoxie, The Hoxie Family: Three Centuries in America [Ukiah, Ore., 1950], 79–80; Records of Easton Monthly Meeting, PSC-Hi; SBA to Susan Hoxie Richardson, 27 July 1869, Film, 13:612–15.) 13. The Democrat and Chronicle sent Minnette E. Cheshire Hair (1864–1938) to the family reunion in Adams. Hair was a young widow and new journalist. She grew up the daughter of a cabinetmaker and a milliner in Niagara County, married James R. Hair of Rochester, and lived with him in Seneca Falls until his business failed in 1890. They reestablished themselves in Rochester, but James Hair died suddenly in January 1893. Minnette Hair worked at the Democrat and Chronicle for many years, writing about woman suffrage and earning SBA’s admiration. (Federal Census, Niagara County, N.Y., 1880; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records; Rochester city directories, 1890, 1893, 1895 to 1897; Syracuse Daily Standard, 31 July 1887; Auburn Bulletin, 30 January 1893, 20 November 1903; Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 17 May 1938; SBA to Rachel G. F. Avery, 7 November 1897, and SBA to M. C. Hair, 10 May 1904, Film, 37:376–79, 44:204–6.) 14. Catherine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867), a popular author, was born in Berkshire County, in nearby Stockbridge, and used the hills and local history in many of her stories. (NAW; ANB.) 15. Sally Ann Hyatt (c. 1808–?) and her brother James K. Hyatt (c. 1798–1855) were members of a large family in Battenville, whose members worked closely with the Anthony and the McLean families in different enterprises. After the mill closed, James became a blacksmith. Sally Ann also stayed in town, sharing a house with her sister Eliza and working as a tailoress. SBA dined with them when she lectured in Washington County in 1874. (New York State Census, 1855; Federal Census, 1860,
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1880; “Graveyard Inscriptions from the Towns of Easton and Greenwich, N.Y.,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 49 [April 1918]: 121; SBA diary, 24 December 1874, Film, 17:491ff.) •••••••••
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SBA to Elizabeth Smith Miller Rochester, N.Y., Aug 23, 1897.
My Dear Mrs Miller Your Post Card of Saturday came yesterday after church—when my sister Mary called at Post Office on her way home as is her wont— Mari1 etta Holley’s P.O. address is Adams—Jefferson County—N.Y.— I heard a good deal of nher when at the Thousand Islandsp from the wife of Rev 2 Asa Saxe of this city—who had just visited her in her home—where live she & her only sister— I would love dearly to come to you on Wednesday & set dear Mrs Stanton’s heart at ease about not being able to fill the bill at Seneca on Thursday— But that day Wednesday has been set apart to 3 give to my brother Merritt & the Grand Army at Buffalo— And since he hasn’t been home in seventeen years—and says he doesn’t expect to make the journey again—I have felt like devoting myself to him—and, too, since I never saw a grand-parade of the old soldiers—I feel like going to this one—for that reason also— Then, too, just where dear Mrs Stanton shrinks from the task—I have for some time drawn the line—that is that 4 I will not attempt to speak in the open air— I know my voice would break in a very few minutes—and I do not intend to give it a chance to do so! nAnd yetp I am awfully sorry of the conflict of your day with the Old Soldiers’—for notwithstanding all of my solemn & good intentions I fear nthat withp Mrs Stanton's imploring appeal written yesterday & here this a.m. I might be moved to break them!— But you must get the managers to arrange a place in some church or hall—and Mrs Stanton seated in a chair is equal to a good hours talk to the good people easily— I want very much to go to you before Mrs Stanton leaves—& have looked for the day to come—after this G.A.R. gathering—and my brother had left for home—which is to be Thursday or Friday—for I would to have 5 a sit-down with you two—as I did with Mrs Osborn & Mrs Stanton in June— I am awfully sorry to have to say no to any thing Mrs Stanton asks
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of me—but really—I see no other way to do now— Then—I forgot—there 6 is another reason—Anna Besant is to lecture here Thursday evening—and I am importuned to sit on the platform and introduce—and more yet have invited friends from the county to come to hear her & spend the night with us—Thursday night— So you see—it isn’t one only—but quite a number of things to hinder my going to you for Thursday—as Mrs Stanton begs me to— So lovingly though sorrowfully U Susan B. Anthony I will send a little roll of tracts—for Mrs S. to scatter Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead for 1897, Papers of SBA, NPV. 1. Marietta Holley (1836–1926) was a popular writer and humorist whose chief character Josiah Allen’s wife provided a running commentary on the foibles of men and rights of women. She lived with her sister Sylphinia Holley (1825–1915). (ANB; NAW; Federal Census, 1900; Pierrepont Manor Cemetery, Ellisburg, N.Y., on-line records.) 2. Asa Saxe (1827–1908) had preached at Rochester’s Universalist church since 1860. Celestine Holley Saxe (1826–1903), his wife, was probably a cousin of Marietta Holley. SBA was a guest of James and Angelina Sargent in the Thousand Islands on the St. Lawrence River in mid-July while Asa Saxe and his family stayed in a cottage nearby. (Federal Census, Orleans County, N.Y., 1900; Record of the Orleans County Pioneer Association, Original Minutes, 1858 to 1905 [Albion, N.Y., 1939], 244; New York Times, 9 June 1908; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records; SBA diary, 15–21 July 1897, Film, 36:247ff.) 3. The Anthonys returned from Massachusetts on August 3, Daniel took the train for Kansas on August 5, and Merritt stayed with his sisters until August 26. The Grand Army of the Republic opened its thirty-first national encampment in Buffalo on Monday, 23 August 1897, and Merritt Anthony spent the day there to see the soldiers arrive. More than forty-five thousand Union veterans took part, and President William McKinley joined them for a day. As a veteran of the Seventh Kansas Cavalry, Merritt Anthony belonged to the Grand Army’s post in Fort Scott, Kansas, and he benefited from the care that the Grand Army of the Republic brought to individual veterans. He began collecting his military pension in 1882, and at the time of his death, members of his local post ensured that his funeral honored his service to the country. By Wednesday, August 25, Merritt felt too tired and sick to return to Buffalo for the great parade, so, SBA noted in her diary, “I gave up seeing the grand march of the Grand Army of The Republic—and we settled down to visiting.” (Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865–1900 [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992]; List of Pensioners on the Roll January 1, 1883 . . . as Called for by Senate Resolution of December 8, 1882 [Washington, D.C., 1883], 4:600; Fort Scott Daily Tribune, 11 June 1900, and other
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obituaries in Scrapbooks 1892–1901 and 1876–1903, SBA Papers, DLC; SBA diary, August 1897.) 4. ECS spoke at the Harvest Home Festival to farmers in Ontario County in late August 1897. See Woman’s Journal, 18 September 1897, not in Film. 5. While ECS stayed with Eliza Wright Osborne (1830–1911) in Auburn in June 1897, SBA visited for a week. Osborne, a daughter of Martha Coffin Wright, was active in the New York State Woman Suffrage Association, following in the footsteps of her mother who was its first president. (SBA diary, 7–14 June 1897; Wright genealogical files, Garrison Papers, MNS-S; Garrison, Letters, 6:214n; Woman’s Journal, 12 August 1911.) 6. Annie Wood Besant (1847–1933), long one of England’s most prominent radicals but now living most of each year in India, was the international leader of Theosophy. She had arrived in the United States in March 1897 and lectured from coast to coast, in part to counter organizing by an American secessionist group of Theosophists. During her stay in Rochester, as in many other places, Besant organized a band of Theosophists aligned with her branch of the movement. SBA, who met Besant in London in 1883, introduced her in Music Hall, at the first of her Rochester lectures on August 26. (Oxford DNB; Joyce M. Bellamy and John Saville, Dictionary of Labour Biography [London, 1977], 4:21–31; Arthur H. Nethercot, The Last Four Lives of Annie Besant [Chicago, 1963], 56–61; Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 27 August 1897; SBA diary, 26–28 August 1897.) •••••••••
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SBA to ECS Rochester, N.Y., Sept. 7, 1897.
My Dear Mrs Stanton 1 I have rejoiced all day long that the sun had lessened its scorchings— It was so fearfully hot yesterday when I reached home—that I felt like telegraphing not to start for New York this morning—but my first thought this a.m. was how much cooler & how much nicer for Mrs Stanton—& so all day as I have plodded on my old papers I have rejoiced for you—and when at 6.30 Sister Mary & I sat down to supper—I said well—Mrs Stanton is in her flat by this time—& I am very glad the weather is so cool & nice!! Well—I am glad I went to Geneva and that we have had another chat over everything & everybody—not excluding Educated Suffrage— and now— while I plod on until my job is done—I do hope you will give your thought to saying your best word—the first session of the 50th Anniversary—on the
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The first organized demand of woman for liberty— Seneca Falls July 19 1848!! In the State, the church, the home!! I feel sure you will be inspired for this occasion—this rounding out of your half-Century’s magnificent utterances for Woman’s Emancipation—perfect equality of rights in the State, the church, the home!— And I hope, too, that darling Harriot will be inspired to come over & help make the occasion glorious— Lovingly yours—& Margarets & Bobs also U Susan B. Anthony [in margin of first page] It is such a comfort to feel that you haven’t been broiling all day & that you are now at home—cool and comfortable!! Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead for 1897, Smith Family Papers, Manuscript Division, NN. 1. SBA yielded to pleas that she visit ECS at Elizabeth Miller’s house in Geneva on 3 September 1897 and stayed until September 6, during a record-breaking heatwave east of the Rocky Mountains. “Spent day talking about 50th anniversary celebration,” she noted in her diary on September 4, “but her hobby-craze—now is Educated Suffrage—as if all were included in that one qualification I do hope she will get out of it into a view of the whole great half century’s work.” (SBA diary, 3–6 September 1897, Film, 36:247.) •••••••••
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SBA to Anna H. Shaw Rochester, N.Y., Sept. 8, 1897.
My dear Anna,— I found yours of Sept. 3, from Shenandoah, on my arrival home from 1 Geneva, Monday afternoon. I had a good visit with Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Miller. Miss Mills had been there, and Mrs. Miller has invited the New York 2 State Convention to Geneva. So now Miss Mills is after you. She says the constitution requires the convention to be held in the month of November, so if you have a November date open that you can give to Geneva, write her at once. I have told Harriet that she must write Lucy, and that the chances were your time was entirely filled. Well, I hope the cool wave has reached Iowa. Sunday and Monday it was awfully hot here, but yesterday and today the weather is cool. Of course,
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those poor farmers cannot feel the wave of prosperity, unless they get a crop and sell it at good prices. Prosperity cannot come to anybody that has nothing to sell. 3 I wondered how you felt about Mrs. Besant’s lecture. I had quite a little talk with her about it on Friday morning, and then her lecture Friday night 4 on “The Brotherhood of Man,”—Mr. Charles Fitch, the editor, said there was not a word in that lecture that I S. B. A. myself might not have said, and he was greatly disappointed that there was no theosophy. I wish you could have heard the last one. I told her the humiliating part of her theory was that, after a soul had been developed and lived in the heavenly kingdom for fifteen thousand years in glory, in order to get back here to help us poor creatures, it had to resort to the doubtful process of getting born and going through mumps, measles and teething after the same old style, over and over again. I think it is the least attractive speculation of any of them, and it does not matter whether it is Calvinism, Unitarianism, Spiritualism, Christian Science, or Theosophy, they are all mere speculations. So I think you and I had better hang on to this mundane sphere and keep tugging away to make the conditions better for the next generation of women. 5 I received a letter from Burt, and the Philadelphia branch of the Bradstreets have offered him $20 a month, to commence at once. I telegraphed him to accept and work as faithfully and cheerfully as if he were getting $100 a month. Then I wrote him last night a long letter, not telling anything of the things I had heard about him, but talking on general principles of what he must do to so please his employers as to cause them to promote him in position and in wages. So I hope he will find his level and work faithfully. I think it is a marvelous chance for him, and I told him another thing, that he must plan his living so as to keep within his salary. He did not see how he could live on it, and I told him many a boy, and girl too, had lived on less money, and that it was his duty to make ends meet financially on whatever he could earn; so we shall see what will come of it. I wish there would not be quite so much of you left when you get through with the Iowa campaign, but the difficulty is, while you work and sweat, the adipose does not disappear a particle more than it does with Mrs. Stanton. She does not want to move any more, but sits on her chair or lies on her bed nearly the whole day, and I do not want you to humor yourself one single bit, but instead whip yourself into walking and taking ever so much chest and arm, as well as leg exercise, so as to keep the joints and the muscles limber. Of course, neither the spring nor this fall campaign in Iowa would
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have amounted to shucks if it had not been for you, so do not be forever undervaluing yourself, but try to get the big head a little and make yourself believe that the world could not possibly get on without you. That is altogether the happiest frame of mind to be in. Sister Mary says you are going to be at Castile Oct. 8, and Mrs. Cros6 sett is fishing around after you to get you at Warsaw the 7th, and on that very day (Thursday, the 7th) the first meeting of the Rochester Political Equality Club is to be held, and Sister Mary would dearly love to have you here, so that she could advertise you, get the Y.M.C.A. Hall, and make a big blowout to start the ball for the winter. Let us know at once. [in hand of SBA] & “[chirk?] up” [in hand of SBA] p.s. Well it is now 7 p.m— This morning I was at breakfast 7 at 7—Miss Gertrude Blackall came at 8—& I dictated this & four other 8 letters— She left & then I dictated four more to my little new girl —left the 9 house at 10— for Churchville dined at Mrs Stebbins —who paid me $10. and at 2 Oclock—in the Baptist Church I was talking to 200 women from Riga, Bergen, Chili & all about—introduced by Mrs Parish—made a good talk they said—shook hands with everybody & took train back at 5.05—and 10 have had supper—taken off my San Francisco Grendine dress —& correcting this first of the 8 or 10 letters dictated before I left this a.m—& so soon as these are done & the mail box—I shall hie me to my good home bed—and wish you were here to go into the big bed in front room Y TL with signature cut away, on NAWSA letterhead for 1897, SBA Papers, MCR-S. Square brackets surround uncertain reading. 1. Shenandoah, Iowa, is in Fremont and Page counties, in the southwest corner of the state. Anna Shaw aided the Iowa organizing campaign. 2. When Harriet Mills traveled to Geneva to hear ECS lecture on municipal government to the local Hygienic Society on 2 September 1897, plans for the state meeting to come to Geneva were made. For reports of the lecture, see Film, 37:199200. 3. Shaw had joined SBA at the first of Annie Besant’s lectures before heading west the next morning. Ahead of the second lecture on August 27, SBA hosted a dinner party (“with no meat”) for Besant and local Theosophists. She was very impressed by Besant; after the first lecture, she wrote that Besant “is master of best of English & knows how to use it to best advantage— I think all were delighted with her—though like myself—not accepting her theories of the soul.” After the second lecture, she noted, “She impresses me with her learning & knowledge on all lines.” It is reincarnation to which SBA objects in this letter. (SBA diary, 26–28 August 1897, Film, 36:247ff.)
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4. Charles Elliott Fitch (1835–1918) turned to journalism after many years as a lawyer and edited the Democrat and Chronicle from 1873 to 1890. Long active in the Republican party, he served as secretary of the New York Constitutional Convention in 1894. (NCAB, 4:492; WWW1.) 5. Luther Burt Anthony (1876–1955), known as Burt, was the fourth child of SBA’s brother Merritt. Before he came east to work, he trained with his uncle D. R. Anthony on the Leavenworth Times as a writer. Then he wrote for the Bradstreet Company in Philadelphia until he moved to Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1900. He became a playwright, taught theater at several colleges, and founded and edited The Dramatist: A Journal of Dramatic Technology. (WhNAA; Anthony, Anthony Genealogy, 191; SBA diary, 1 July 1896, 14, 15 September 1897, 25 June 1900, Film, 35:1ff, 36:247ff, 40:363ff.) 6. Ella Hawley Crossett (1853–1925) was president of the Warsaw Political Equality Club and Wyoming County Political Equality Club. Although raised in New York, she and her husband, John B. Crossett, lived in Chicago until sometime after the birth of their second daughter in 1882. In 1890, already well-established in Warsaw, she was named a state delegate to the National-American’s convention in Washington. The skills she demonstrated in the campaign of 1894 propelled her into state leadership; she presided over the state association from 1902 to 1910. (Woman’s Who’s Who 1914; “Ella Hawley Crossett,” Rochester Regional Library Council website, Western New York Suffragists: Winning the Vote.) 7. Gertrude C. Blackall (1867–1959), a daughter of SBA’s friend Sarah Colman Blackall and a member of the Political Equality Club, was helping SBA for the first time and apparently volunteered her services to clear up a backlog of letters. She was an accomplished stenographer who had founded her own School of Shorthand in Rochester and worked as a law reporter. (Federal Census, 1880; Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 5 February 1891; city directory 1897, 1898; SBA to G. Blackall, 1 September, 29 December 1897, Film, 37:192–96, 547–49; State of California, California Death Index, 1940–1997, on-line.) 8. Several women appear in SBA’s accounts this month as recipients of wages. 9. SBA’s hostesses in Churchville were leaders of the Political Equality Club of Monroe County. Martha J. Hadley Stebbins (1837–1921), the widow of a Churchville businessman, invited local women to meet SBA over a luncheon at her house. At the church, Lydia Ann Apthorp Parish (c. 1844–1903) introduced SBA to the audience. Stebbins was later credited with many years service to and financial aid for the New York State Woman Suffrage Association. (SBA diary, 8 September 1897, and Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 14 October 1898, in Film, 36:247ff, 38:824; History, 4:847n; Federal Census, 1880; Brockport Republic, 25 April 1861; Churchville Cemetery, Churchville, N.Y., on-line records.) 10. Grenadine (SBA omitted a letter) describes the weave of a cloth, specifically an open weave fabric, probably of silk fibers, that was popular for dresses.
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ECS to Clara Bewick Colby, with Enclosures [New York, c. 21 September 1897]
Dear Clara Dont fail to read this letter & present these resolutions at the Nebraska 1 convention & publish both in The Woman’s Tribune before you go. I have talked to many leading men this summer & find them all in favor of an educational qualification & hope that women will take the lead in the agitation. Y AL possibly incomplete, Clara B. Colby Papers, Archives Division, WHi. Page struck out when enclosure given to typographers.
First Enclosure 26 West 61st N.Y. Sept 21st [1897] Dear Mrs Colby, I send you a copy of the resolutions I shall try to have passed at every state convention & at our fiftieth anniversary if possible The greatest block in the way of woman suffrage to day, is the fear of the ignorant vote. They say to extend suffrage to woman is to double the ignorant vote, already so large that it threatens to swamp our free institutions. The most speedy way to limit the ignorant vote is to require an educational qualification. To this end we should demand that after the dawn of the next century, no one shall be permitted to exercise the right of suffrage unless they can read & write the English language intelligently. This would lengeth the way from the steerage to the polls, as it would take the ordinary foreigner at least five years, to acquire this knowledge, & stimulate our native population to prepare themselves early for citizenship. The boys in the streets would say to each other, you better go to school or you cannot vote when you are twenty one. Those who prize this right would be willing to work, in order to secure it.
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An educational qualification being an attainable one in in no way conflicts with our cherished idea of universal suffrage. We say now the voter must be twenty one before he can exercise this right, it is equally just & logical to say that he must read & write, intelligence is quite as important as years. The women of this nation should take the lead in this important reform. As they have no party ties nor official positions to lose they are in a position free nfreep to advocate vital principles in government. When our fathers made haste to establish free schools, they saw the importance of educated citizens in a republic Moreover as women have no choice in their laws or lawmakers, they have at least the right to demand that their rulers shall be able to read & write What an anomaly it is in a Republic that a large class of citizens, representing the virtue & intelligence, the wealth & position of the nation should be under the heels of the ignorant masses, foreign & native In all national conflicts nit was consideredp the most grievous accident of war, was for the native population should be left under a foreign yoke, yet that is the position of our educated women to day. The teachers in schools Professors in colleges, Lawyers, Doctors, Editors, ordained ministers, all wear a foreign yoke. Our Judges, Jurors, legislators, are foreigners so are our policemen who patrol the streets at night A girl of sixteen running for a physician for a dying father, & a woman accoucher hastening to her patient at midnight were both arrested & kept in the station house all night Although they protested & told the importance of their errands, the npolicemenp laughed in their faces & said “they had heard such excuses before, women had no business to be in the streets at night” It seems these women had very important business. Laws denying women the freedom of the city at night are an insult to the whole 2 Supsex, & the excuse for such laws are isas ridiculous as oppressive pose a disreputable woman assaults a good man, has he not the strength in ordinary cases to push her aside & run home? Why deny freedom to all good women on errands of mercy, at night to protect men, when they are abundantly able to protect themselves. This is one of the penalties of disfranchisement, under a foreign yoke. It is truly lamentable to see the apathy with which women submit to to such indignities. Must each one of us, feel the iron teeth of the law in our own flesh before we can be roused to rebellion. It is absolutely necessary for the safety of the republic as well as ourselves that the educated women
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of the nation should have a voice in making & administering the laws. Our demand for educated rulers would give rise to a new & more heated agitation of our question. yours sincerely U Elizabeth Cady Stanton Y ALS, Clara B. Colby Papers, Archives Division, WHi.
Second Enclosure Resolved, That a Republic based on universal suffrage, in which a large class of educated women, representing the virtue and wealth of the nation are disfranchised, is an anomaly in government, especially when all men, foreign and native, black and white, ignorant and vicious, vote on the laws and rules for this superior class. Resolved, That in convention assembled we demand, that as women have no voice in their rulers, those who administer the laws hereafter shall be required to read and write the English language intelligently, before they are allowed to exercise the right of suffrage. This qualification should be adopted at once in every State in the union. Resolved, That an educational qualification of voters, in no way conflicts with our cherished idea of universal suffrage, as it is an attainable qualification. All are born citizens in a republic, but the boy must be twenty-one before he can exercise the right of suffrage. It is equally just and logical to require that he shall read and write the English language intelligently. Resolved, That laws should be passed at once demanding that at the dawn of the next century, all who exercise the right of suffrage, must be required to read and write the English language. As women have no party ties, they constitute the only independent class to lead in the agitation of this question. Resolved, That as politicians are afraid to advocate suffrage lest they risk their official positions and as some reformers do not see the wisdom of such a measure, it remains for those who do, to create a widespread public 3 sentiment in favor of this important measure. Y Woman’s Tribune, 9 October 1897. 1. The Nebraska Woman Suffrage Association held its annual meeting in Lincoln on 30 September and 1 October 1897. ECS’s letter was read to the gathering on the opening day.
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2. ECS drew attention to conflicts over women’s presence in public, urban spaces and the use of laws against prostitution to limit their mobility. In New York City, women traveling alone on streets in the night were subject to arrest for solicitation and disorderly conduct. As a string of well-publicized trials in police court illustrated, evidence against the women could be weak or nonexistent. When reporters shone a spotlight on Magistrate John O. Mott between December 1895 and January 1897, they discovered at least three women with plausible reasons for being on the street who were not only detained but also sentenced to the workhouse by Mott. In each case, higher courts overturned the sentence, but the practice of police on the beat remained untouched. “The theory that a woman who is found in a public thoroughfare at night,” the New York Tribune, 10 December 1895, editorialized, “is presumably there for an improper purpose is a theory on which no policeman or Magistrate has the slightest warrant for acting.” For a review of Mott’s most egregious decisions, see New York Tribune, 10 January 1897. For a discussion of “contested terrain” in London, see Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992), 41–80. 3. These resolutions were unanimously adopted at the meeting. (Woman’s Tribune, 9 October 1897, Film, 37:242–44.) •••••••••
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Isabel Howland1 to SBA Sherwood, [N.Y.] Sep. 28, 1897.
Dear Aunt Susan: Would it be possible for a colored woman to be given a regular place upon the National program? The wife of the manager of the Tuskegee Institute is a most enthusiastic suffragist and a very bright and capable woman. She wrote to you once, 2 Adella H. Logan. She is the daughter of a Confederate officer and her 3 father used to talk politics to her when she was a little girl. As a result she is unusually up on all public questions. Of course she must call herself colored but she is perfectly white with straight hair. It is her extraordinary interest in woman suffrage that has made me interested in her and I wish she might be at Washington. I asked her if she would ndop it in the possibility of her being illegible invited to do so and she said she would be “only too happy.” I wont bother you with her letter. I suppose we should have to collect her expenses somehow. Money is not made at Tuskegee.
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Hattie will be with you in a few days and will tell you our plans for Geneva. I hope you and Mrs. Harper will both agree to them. We want to have a fine convention. Love to Aunt Mary and yourself, always, U Isabel Howland. Mrs. Logan is a much more able woman than Mrs. Booker Washington, though less widely known, naturally.
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Y ALS, on New York State Woman Suffrage Association letterhead, AnthonyAvery Papers, NRU. 1. Isabel Howland (1859–1942), a niece of Emily Howland and 1881 graduate of Cornell University, lived in the hamlet of Sherwood in Cayuga County, New York. She came to prominence among suffragists during New York’s amendment campaign of 1894 and served as corresponding secretary of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association. (New York Times, 6 December 1942. See also Papers 5.) 2. Adella Hunt Logan (1863–1915), born in Georgia, the daughter of a white planter, trained as a teacher and joined the faculty at Tuskegee Institute in 1883. There she met Warren Logan (1859–1942) who went to work at Tuskegee in 1882 and soon became its treasurer. The two were married in 1888. Although Adella Logan stopped teaching after her marriage, she was a founder and leader of the Tuskegee Woman’s Club in 1895 and a person recognized as a thinker and speaker about African-American life. Her earlier letter to SBA, mentioned here, is not found. (Darlene Clark Hine, ed., Black Women in America, 2d ed. [New York, 2005]; Booker T. Washington, Papers, 2:47n; Adele Logan Alexander, Ambiguous Lives: Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia, 1789–1879 [Fayetteville, Ark., 1991], 3–13.) 3. Henry Alexander Hunt (1826–1889), a slaveholder in Hancock County, Georgia, and Adella Logan’s father, joined the Confederate army as a noncommissioned officer in 1863. (Alexander, Ambiguous Lives, 103, 106, 130–31.) 4. That is, Harriet Mills. 5. Margaret James Murray Washington (c. 1865–1925) was hired as a teacher at Tuskegee Institute in 1889, after her graduation from Fisk University. A year later, she became the school’s Lady Principal, and in 1892, she married Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856?–1915), the founder of Tuskegee and a man fast becoming the country’s most powerful African American. Margaret Washington’s long association with women’s clubs began with her founding of the Tuskegee Woman’s Club in 1895 and gained national notice when she presided over the National Conference of Colored Women in Boston that summer. For more than two decades she edited National Notes, the newsletter of the National Association of Colored Women. (Hine, Black Women in America, 2d ed., s.v. “Washington, Margaret Murray”; ANB, s.v. “Washington, Booker T.”)
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SBA to Isabel Howland Rochester, N.Y., October 5th, 1897.
My dear;— To yours of the 28th let me say, I would be delighted to have a representative of the colored race of the South speak at our Fiftieth Anniversary celebration and also before the Congressional committee. I remember Miss Logan’s letter and was very much pleased with it and if I knew she was a splendid speaker and would just make every one of the full Anglo-Saxon women feel ashamed of their race, I would hold up both hands for her to come to Washington next February. I would not on any account bring on our platform a woman who had a ten-thousandth part of a drop of African blood in her veins, who should prove an inferior speaker either as to matter or manner, because it would so militate against 1 the colored race. Of course we have women in our society, the Clays, Mrs. 2 Young and lots of others who will come up from the south and the Congressmen and their wives in Washington who would be hopping mad if we brought colored women on our platform. We have always had Frederick 3 Douglass and our Mrs. Harper but to bring right from the south a woman who would almost be an ex-slave, would vex them more than either of these they are accustomed to seeing. So I want to leave it to your judgment and knowledge, if you know she can write a speech strong in argument, beautiful in rhetoric, and can deliver it in a splendid fashion, then let me know, and bring her to Washington. You see I do not in the slightest shrink from having a colored woman on the platform, but I do very much shrink from having an incompetent one, so unless you really know that Miss Logan is one who would astonish the natives, just let her wait until she is more cultured and can do the colored race the greatest possible credit. There is another point from which I shrink and that is, it will take just 4 so much more money out of your aunt Emily’s pocket and just at this time when it seems impossible for us to get enough to pay our ordinary expenses we cannot promise to pay them and if somebody has to pay her expenses,
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that somebody will be aunt Emily, but again I say if you and aunt Emily say Mrs. Logan is the woman and this convention is the time, let me know at your earliest convenience and we will give her a place on the programme. I talked this over with Harriet and told her to tell you. 5 I am to be at the “May” celebration and maybe you, Aunt Emily, your 6 father and mother will be down there so we can all talk this over to our hearts content. Yours lovingly, Y TL, on NAWSA letterhead for 1897, Isabel Howland Papers, MNS-S. Signed for SBA by secretary. 1. SBA refers to Laura Clay and her sisters. Although Mary Barr Clay (1839– 1924), once president of the American association while retaining her membership in the National association, was no longer conspicuous on the national scene, Sarah Lewis Clay Bennett (1841–1935), known as Sallie, was a strong proponent in the National-American of federal legislation to permit women to vote for congressmen. (American Women, s.v. “Clay, Mary Barr”; H. Edward Richardson, Cassius Marcellus Clay: Firebrand of Freedom [Lexington, Ky., 1976], 31n, with assistance of the Filson Club, Lexington, Ky. See also Papers 3–5.) 2. Virginia Durant Covington Young (1842–1906), a writer and newspaperwoman, presided over the South Carolina Equal Rights Association from its founding in 1890 until her death and led efforts to obtain woman suffrage from the state’s constitutional convention of 1895. An advocate in her home state of suffrage restricted by either educational or property qualifications, Young brought those ideas to the National-American’s annual conventions too. (A. Elizabeth Taylor, “South Carolina and the Enfranchisement of Women: The Early Years,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 77 [April 1976]: 115–26; Monica Maria Tetzlaff, Cultivating a New South: Abbie Holmes Christensen and the Politics of Race and Gender, 1852–1938 [Columbia, S.C., 2002], 109–13; Senate, Committee on Woman Suffrage, Report of Hearing before the Committee on Woman Suffrage, January 28, 1896, 54th Cong., 1st sess., S. Doc. 157, Serial 3353, pp. 19–20.) 3. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911), a writer and lecturer, was a notable abolitionist before the war and a speaker on race relations and freedmen’s needs in the postwar period. Favoring woman suffrage and active in the American Equal Rights Association, she nonetheless gave precedence in Reconstruction to equal manhood suffrage. She became active in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and she helped to found the National Association of Colored Women. (NAW; ANB; Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 [Bloomington, Ind., 1998], passim.) 4. Emily Howland (1827–1929), aunt of Isabel Howland, was a philanthropist, abolitionist, founder of schools, businesswoman, and woman suffragist, who lived in her family home in Sherwood, New York. She and SBA grew closer as they grew older, visiting and conferring on politics and the past. (NAW; ANB.)
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5. Events were planned in Syracuse to mark the centennial of the birth of Samuel Joseph May. SBA spoke on his views of woman suffrage. See Film, 37:302–9. 6. Isabel Howland was the daughter of William Howland (1823–1905) and Hannah Letchworth Howland (1829–1902). William Howland, who succeeded his father as a merchant at Sherwood, was a reformer and former member of the state assembly. (Judith Colucci Breault, The World of Emily Howland: Odyssey of a Humanitarian [Milbrae, Calif., 1976], 144; Syracuse Post-Standard, 25 February 1905.) •••••••••
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Isabel Howland to SBA Sherwood, [N.Y.] Oct. 10, 1897.
Dear Aunt Susan: I can see how you feel about Mrs. Logan and I suppose it is so. She had a paper at the Atlanta Colored Conference which took very well indeed, but not having heard her speak I cannot vouch for her. As Aunt Emily says, we know she is a gifted woman but we do not know that she would be all that you would want. I did not think so much of the necessity of having a gifted nbrilliantp orator as I did of the fact that she represented a class not 1 generally brought to notice, the colored women of the Black Belt. For that reason I thought she would be heard with interest. I only looked at one side of it. You realise, as I didnt, the extreme prejudice that creeps even into reform work. How cruel it is! Thank you for taking the trouble of answering me at such length. We shall see you in Geneva, if not in Syracuse but I hope we shall meet there too. Love to Aunt Mary and much to yourself always, U Isabel Howland. Y ALS, on New York State Woman Suffrage Association letterhead, AnthonyAvery Papers, NRU. 1. When SBA sent this letter to Rachel Avery, she explained why Avery should find room on the program for Logan. “So far as I am concerned, I would love to have a woman from the real black-belt of Alabama—educated—cultured—so bleached out by nslavery’sp almalgamation—at our 50th anniversary— Nothing could be anything like it—for an object lesson—to this generation—a transformation from a chattel to a citizen—from property to personality—nothing could show the complete revolution of— Can’t you make it seem best to invite her— But as I
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said before—I want the finest specimen—that the ex-slave women can furnish—” In the end, Adella Logan said she was not yet ready to speak in Washington among such distinguished people, but she sent a donation to the National-American association. Avery arranged that the topic of “The Progress of Colored Women” was addressed by Mary Church Terrell. (SBA to R. G. F. Avery, 13 October 1897; R. G. F. Avery to SBA, 31 December 1897; and A. H. Logan to SBA, 24 January 1898; all in Film, 37:280–85, 575–78, 38:30–33.) •••••••••
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Verse by ECS for Margaret Stanton Lawrence [20 October 1897] Maggie’s Birthday. By Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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As the ticking of the clock Marks the passing of the hours, just so These birthdays of my little flock Mark the years that come and go. II. As I near the setting sun, Having reached four score and one, With surprise I hear the pack, Crowding close upon my track. III. Though fleet of foot all may be, My little flock you can’t catch me, Though Madge has crossed the half way-line, I’m still too far ahead in time. IV. So I’ll cross Jordan quite alone, And long through paradise may roam, Before you all will reach the gates— Voters from the United States. Y Ms, in hand of Margaret Lawrence, Papers of ECS, NPV.
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ECS to Harriot Stanton Blatch New York, October 29, 1897.
Dear Hattie: As I date this letter I am impressed with the idea of the swift running of time. I wrote some rhymes for Maggie’s forty-fifth birthday. At that age, I had seven children, all life’s hard experiences upon me, my home on the outskirts of the town, no sidewalks, mud up to the hub, poor servants, older chicks to fit out every morning with lunches for school, younger ones to be amused and cared for all day; and, in addition, the woman suffrage work,—appeals, speeches, conventions, hearings; for Susan and I carried 1 that on our shoulders too. But I had Amelia, and would have given up the ghost without her. Delightful reminiscences! All well this side. Adieu, U Mother. Y Typed transcript, ECS Papers, NjR. 1. Amelia Willard (c. 1825–c. 1920) went to work for the Stantons at a young age in Seneca Falls and became the family’s housekeeper, moving with them to New York and Tenafly. She died in Ypsilanti, Michigan, at age ninety-six. (History, 3:477n; Eighty Years, 203–5; G. Smith Stanton, “How Aged Housekeeper Gave Her All to Cause of Woman Suffrage,” unidentified and undated clipping, Seneca Falls Historical Society; Federal Census, Tenafly, 1880. See also Papers 1–5.) •••••••••
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Article by ECS [November 1897] Two Valuable Gifts. 1
Miss Julia McClintock of Philadelphia has just sent me the table on which the Woman’s Declaration of Rights and the resolutions were written which were presented at the convention in Seneca Falls, July 19, 1848. This was the first organized protest made by women against their civil and 2 political disabilities.
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With the table came the scrap-book, kept by her mother, Mary Ann Mc3 Clintock, of all that was done, and of what the journals said of that first convention. It is very amusing reading. Mrs. McClintock was one of the six 4 married women who called and conducted the convention. The papers said: “Six sour old maids met together to berate men, because they were born women.” There was not an old maid in the number. Susan B. Anthony did not materialize on the platform until four years after. The table and book will attend the Washington convention in February, 1898, when we shall celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of this great movement for woman’s emancipation. All our suffrage daughters will then have an opportunity of seeing these valuable mementos of that eventful occa5 sion. Y True Republic 7 (November 1897): 208. 1. Julia McClintock (1831–1905) was the youngest daughter of Thomas and Mary Ann McClintock. She taught art in Friends’ schools in Philadelphia. (Friends’ Intelligencer 62 [1905]: 108, 124.) 2. The table is now in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. 3. Mary Ann Wilson McClintock (1800–1884). Her scrapbook makes up a part of the ECS Papers at the Library of Congress. (Quaker Genealogy, 2:240, 274, 807; History, 3:454; Friends’ Intelligencer 41 [1885]: 250.) 4. ECS could not count: five married women shared credit for organizing the Seneca Falls convention—herself, Martha Wright, Lucretia Mott, Mary Ann McClintock, and Jane Hunt. Two single daughters of Mary Ann McClintock joined them. 5. A note by the editor at the end of this article says, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Woman’s Journal.” Close readings of the Journal turned up no such article. In the Woman’s Tribune, 6 November 1897, the editor paraphrased this text or something similar as news from ECS.
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Mary S. Anthony to SBA Rochester, N.Y., Tuesday— nNov 16—p 1897.
Dear Sister 1 Your letter from Wendell’s office here yesterday— I send you this lam2 entation from Mrs Howell, that if there yet be time, & a scarcity of speakers as Mrs Harper thinks, you may still soothe the sorrow of the writer— Mrs Harper seems to think she has just cause to complain, for when she has heard Mrs Howell she has thought she did so beautifully, that she can see no reason for not putting her on program every time—so I have heard others say— But I should want to make her promise not to give the story 3 of John Brown or Fred Douglass or Susan B Anthony— It is a great pity to have so much disaffection in the ranks, but it is difficult to steer clear of it many times— It is rather absurd for any human being to gulp down all the flattery & compliments given by the press, or persons, for they are from so many different standpoints, that they cannot nalwaysp be relied upon as “hitting the nail on the head”— The idea of either you or Annie Shaw being jealous, is too rich! She does do very nicely many times, & is as good looking as need be, but to plume oneself on the facts is too silly for any thing— But give her as nearly a rightful place as possible, even if you & the Rev Anna are eclipsed entirely! 9oc Tuesday Morning— Another mail, addressed to Mrs Stanton, but directed to you, to forward— She would, & will, doubtless make any amount of trouble, & bring great censure upon you, if not given a place in the Convention— How all this proves the faithfulness or unfaithfulness of our friends in repeating all, said & written nto them being repeatedp to their & our friends— It is too bad, but I think you will have to conciliate 4 in some way. I hope this will hit you at Madison, Wis. U M. S. Anthony Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead for 1897, Anthony-Avery Papers, NRU. 1. Wendell Phillips Mosher (1858–1946), the third son of SBA’s late sister Hannah Mosher, lived in Duluth, Minnesota. SBA visited him while in the state to participate in the first of five national conferences organized by the National-
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American and state suffrage associations to raise money for the Organization Committee. For coverage of the event in Minneapolis on November 15, see Film, 37:389–91. Wendell, after working with his older brother Arthur in the insurance business in St. Louis, became an agent in Philadelphia and settled in Duluth as district agent of the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Trust Company, the Employers’ Liability Company, and Travelers Life and Accident Insurance Company. (Aldridge, Laphams in America, 156, 223; St. Louis city directories, 1879, 1880; Duluth city directories, 1890, 1891; Papers, 4:286–88; SBA diary, 17 April 1890, and Report of the Thirtieth Annual Convention, 1898, pp. 9, 32, Film, 27:679ff, 38:109ff. See also Papers 3.) 2. Enclosure missing. Mary Catherine Seymour Howell (1844?–1913) of Albany, New York, wanted a place on the program for the upcoming convention of the National-American association. Howell was a lobbyist and lecturer whose abilities were put to use by state and national suffrage associations as well as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. In New York, where her husband’s job as state librarian enlarged her political connections, legislators consulted her about bills affecting women. As a national lecturer, she joined the campaign in South Dakota in 1890 and assisted the Kansas Equal Suffrage Association in its canvasses leading up to the amendment campaign of 1894. Three different birthdates for Howell circulated in her lifetime (1844, 1848, and 1850), and none appears on her gravestone. An obituary described her as born “sixty odd years ago.” (American Women; WWW1; “Mary Seymour Howell,” Rochester Regional Library Council website, Western New York Suffragists: Winning the Vote; History, 4:839–73; with assistance of Terry Mistretta, Mount Morris, N.Y. See also Papers 5.) 3. John Brown (1800–1859) was hanged for treason in 1859, after his raid against the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry to start a revolt among slaves. 4. Madison, Wisconsin, was the site for the next conference, to open on November 17. From there the troupe headed to Chicago (November 19), Grand Rapids (November 22), and Toledo (November 26). For coverage of the events, see Film, 37:398–400, 407–13, 425–30, 440. •••••••••
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ECS to Elizabeth Root
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26 W. 61st St., New York, Nov. 26, 1897. My Dear Miss Root: It gives me great pleasure to hear that the women of Geneva are forming a club for political study, and thus preparing themselves for their duties as citizens of a Republic. We have heard much of the rights of women as citizens; it is equally important to consider their duties.
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Rev. Samuel J. May used to say: “The State is suffering a condition of half orphanage, as the mothers take no interest in its affairs, and the family is also in a condition of half-orphanage, as the fathers take so little interest 2 in the care and education of the children.” The innumerable wards of the State, in our jails, prisons, in charitable institutions, swarming in tenement houses in poverty and ignorance and vice, in their dumb appeals, summon the mothers of the race to the consideration of all this misery, and the remedy in better laws and more generous public action. Women are equally responsible with men for all the wrongs of society; that they are awakening to this fact is one of the most promising signs of the times. The study of the State and municipal laws, in their political equality clubs, is the first step in the coming revolution for equal rights to all. With best wishes for the success of your club. Sincerely yours, U Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Y Woman’s Journal, 1 January 1898. 1. Elizabeth Root (1845–?) lived in Geneva, New York, with a brother and her widowed mother, all of them friends of Elizabeth and Anne Miller. Root was a signer of the invitation to meet on 30 November 1897 for the purpose of organizing the Geneva Political Equality Club, and she served as corresponding secretary during the club’s first year. (Federal Census, 1900 and 1910; Embers from Fossenvue Backlogs, 1875–1900 [New York, 1901]; Scrapbooks of Elizabeth Smith Miller and Anne Fitzhugh Miller, vol. 3, pp. 14, 34, NAWSA Collection, Rare Books, DLC.) 2. The idea of states in a condition of half-orphanage recurs in Samuel J. May’s writings about woman’s rights. See his early sermon The Rights and Condition of Women; A Sermon, Preached in Syracuse, Nov., 1845, reprinted as Woman’s Rights Tract, No. 1 (Syracuse, N.Y., n.d.), 8–9; his letter in Proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Convention, Held at Worcester, October 23d & 24th, 1850 (Boston, 1851), 55; and his remarks to the Women’s Temperance Meeting in Albany in January 1852, History, 1:479.
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SBA to ECS Rochester, N.Y. Dec. 1, 1897
My dear Mrs Stanton: I am just home. I went through the five conferences Minneapolis, Madison, Chicago, Grand Rapids and Toledo—all of which might be called successful, but Minneapolis overtopped the others. I was gone sixteen nights, and spent six of them in sleeping cars, and now I am at home again, alive and hard at work, and bound not to be tempted away again until you and I start for Washington the very first of February. I want you to plan to go with me then without fail, and just settle down there for the whole three weeks—or four if you can—for I think we shall both want to stay at least one week after the celebration. We have always been obliged to rush home or off at lecturing work the moment a convention was over, and this time we want to take things deliberately, both before and after the meeting. I am writing to a number of our representative women to be there and spend the whole month of February at the Riggs 1 2 House. I think Mrs Osborne and Mrs Southworth are sure to be there. 3 Mrs Senator Palmer and Mrs Senator Stanford would never have given 4 those magnificent receptions to us ten years ago had not Mrs Spofford and I done up the social part prior to the Council. Of course, you will not make any calls in person, but you will send your cards by any of us that do go out to make the calls, and that will bring the wives of the Senators, M.C’s and Judges out in return calls. I have just written Hattie that she must certainly come over in time to go 5 with us to Washington the first of February, and also to Mrs Jacob Bright. Wouldn’t it be splendid if she and dear Jacob would come over and spend the whole month in Washington? I hope you are concentrating your every thought on the addresses which you wish to make to go down to history as your final and most complete utterances on the question of the enfranchisement of women. I wish it were possible for me to be in two places and to do two things at once. If it were, I should certainly be with you and keep you stirred up to do this one thing of getting your best thoughts arranged in your best sentences for this
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great celebration of the great principle you declared fifty years ago, and the great work that all women together have done during the last half-century to bring about its realization. I tell you, my dear, the summing up of the momentous achievements of women in the past fifty years is a big job, and one that you alone are equal to, so don’t let anybody or anything divert you from getting your papers written, one for the Judiciary Committee of the House, another for the Suffrage Committee of the Senate, another for the opening of the Jubilee Celebration, and yet another for its closing session. Then, of course, there will be times when, if your spirit moves you, you can speak in accordance with its promptings. It will be an awful pity almost a crime—if you should fail to make these last words before Congress and before the people, both in your audiences and in that greater audience which the press reports will give you, combine the very best thoughts you have ever had and the very best words you have ever uttered on this whole question. If possible, you should overtop and surpass anything and everything you have ever written or spoken before. Now my dear, this is positively the last time I am ever going to put you on the rack and torture you to make the speech or the speeches of your life. So let “Jimmy grind” as of yore and all will be well. Lovingly yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y Typed transcript, ECS Papers, DLC. 1. That is, Eliza Osborne. 2. Louisa Stark Southworth (1831–1905), known in Cleveland for her philanthropic and woman’s rights work, became active in the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1885 and later served as Ohio superintendent of the franchise for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. ECS and SBA were her guests on many occasions. (Mrs. W. A. Ingham, Women of Cleveland and Their Work: Philanthropic, Educational, Literary, Medical, and Artistic [Cleveland, Ohio, 1893], 338–42; Cleveland Necrology File, Cleveland Public Library. See also Papers 4 & 5.) 3. Lizzie Pitts Merrill Palmer (1838–1916), the daughter of a Michigan lumber baron, was the wife of Michigan Senator Thomas W. Palmer. During the International Council of Women’s founding meeting in 1888, the Palmers gave a huge reception for the foreign delegates to which they invited members of the foreign legations in Washington. On the next night, Jane Stanford and her husband, Senator Leland Stanford, held a smaller reception with hundreds of guests to honor pioneers of woman suffrage in attendance at the council meeting. (ANB; Report of the International Council of Women, 1888, p. 458, Film, 26:154ff.)
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4. Jane H. Snow Spofford (1828–1905) was the National association’s treasurer and an active member of suffrage societies in the District of Columbia for many years, until she returned to Maine to care for her aged mother. She and her husband ran the Riggs House and provided SBA with a room and an introduction into the social networks of Washington. (Jeremiah Spofford, A Genealogical Record, Including Two Generations in Female Lines of Families Spelling Their Name Spofford, Spafford, Spafard, and Spaford [Boston, 1888], 247; research by Katherine W. Trickey, Bangor, Me.; Woman’s Journal, 6 January 1906. See also Papers 3–5.) 5. That is, Ursula Bright. •••••••••
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ECS to Lucinda Hinsdale Stone
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26 West 61 N.Y. Dec 27 [1897]. Dear Mrs Stone— I was very glad to get a line from you after so many years of separation But I have not forgotten the pleasant days I passed under your roof & our exciting campaign in Michigan. It would be a great satisfaction to me to talk over the situation with you, & what seems to be our next step in progress. Educated suffrage should now be our demand The patent objection our opponents make to woman suffrage is “doubling the ignorant vote.” I should like to have every state so amend its constitution as to forbid all those who cannot read & write the English language, to exercise the suffrage. This in no way conflicts with our cherished theory of universal suffrage, as it is an attainable qualification. This would hold this immense foreign vote, increasing year by year, at bay for at least five years, & lengthen the distance from the steerage to the polls. See what care is taken to educate the prospective heirs to the throne in the old world, surely we should take equal pains in the education of our people who are prospective heirs to the highest offices under our government. An educational qualification would stimulate our native population to seek education as the only way to the polls. Educated suffrage is as important for the stability of the government as for the safety of the individual If you read The Woman’s Journal, you 2 will see there is quite a difference of opinion on this point. I am well have no pains or aches, can hear as well as ever but cannot see to read though I write without spectacles. my hand has not lost its cunning, nor my mind its strength, but failing eyes, handicapp me at every point. With the best
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wishes of the season, health & happiness & that peace that passeth all understanding sincerely yours U Elizabeth Cady Stanton Y ALS, Papers of Lucinda Hinsdale Stone, MiK. 1. Lucinda Hinsdale Stone (1814–1900) of Kalamazoo, Michigan, was noted for her work in women’s education and the club movement as well as woman suffrage. ECS recalls the Michigan amendment campaign of 1874; she spoke in Kalamazoo on 17 May 1874. (NAW; ANB; Film, 18:21.) 2. See ECS’s contributions to a series in Woman’s Journal, 23 October, 13 November 1897, Film, 37:313, 383. •••••••••
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John Swinton to ECS 48 West 93d St. New York December 29, 1897
My dear Mrs. Stanton— I dreamed of you last night,—dreamed that I saw you standing upon a huge rock, in a boundless desert, discoursing upon righteousness and the judgment to come,—dreamed that you were in the prime of life, and spoke loftily,—dreamed that, as I had dropped all my [clo’?] in the farthest corner of the vast Esplanade, you approached and covered me with a red horse blanket,—dreamed that your daughter told me that, as I had not paid attention to your discourse, she would furnish me with a stenographic report of it,—dreamed that a dancing girl in short skirts had manifested the Spanish bolero just before you stood on the end of the shivering rock,—oh, how I dreamed about you! This makes me think that I ought to try to find out where you live, and make you a call on New Year’s. 1 If I can find out, I, or we, shall, at least, rap on your door, In admiration U John Swinton Y ALS, ECS Papers, DLC. 1. With his use of the first person plural, Swinton may anticipate a visit in the company of his wife, Orsena Fowler Smith Swinton (c. 1839–1918), a daughter of ECS’s old acquaintance and publisher Orson Squire Fowler of Fowler and Wells. (New York City Death Index, Italian Genealogical Group, on-line.)
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ECS to SBA A New Year’s gift. Jan 1st, 1898. 1
Enclosed find a beautiful steel engraving of the Father of your Country. That calm complacent smile indicative of repose, so marked a characteristic of the immortal Washington seems to welcome your look of admiration This is the most valuable New Year gift you will receive It is a potent factor in our postal service, & national affairs political, religious & social, carrying important messages for all classes without distinction from the Klondye to the Gulf from the Atlantic to the Pacific Day & night ever on the wing it carries the last farewell of the dying soldier to his mother far away,: words of cheer from loved ones to the lonely prisoner in his cell,: the lovers offer of hand & heart to the maiden he loves, & her prompt acceptance back,: good news to the chosen candidate in a heated election, from the brave explorer nailing the stars & stripes on the North Pole Swift & sure this representative of our immortal Washington out rivals Andrèe’s 2 carrier pigeon, who lost his way in the northern seas, & was probably like 3 Jonah sequestered in some fish until Fate brought him ashore. And now this faithful messenger will take your forthcoming mighty volumns to the ends of the earth & the isles of the sea, & your readers will in memory hold us together as we have been in life. So farewell to the Old year & welcome & welcome the New that finds us still stirring together, for the emancipation of woman. U Elizabeth Cady Stanton Y ALS, ECS Papers, DLC. 1. At the top of her paper, ECS affixed a postage stamp worth two cents that depicted George Washington (1732–1799), first president of the United States. For a similar gift, see ECS to Clara Colby, Film, 37:993. 2. Salomon August Andrée (1854–1897), a Swedish explorer, died while trying to reach the North Pole by balloon. He carried homing pigeons aloft to deliver messages about his trip. Remains of the expedition were not discovered until 1930. 3. Jon. 1:17 recounts that Jonah spent three days and nights in the belly of a fish.
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SBA to Rachel Foster Avery Rochester, N.Y., Jan. 18, 1898.
My dear;— Here is another blast from Mrs. Blake. I have not answered it because I 1 did not feel like it this morning. I wish she thought more about helping to make the Convention a grand success than about getting herself properly represented among the men in Congress. Between the women who tell me I am nothing but a piece of putty in your hands, and those who feel that you are simply a little Jack-in-the-box to obey my bidding, I am a good deal puzzled to know just who I am and what I am worth. I am sure I do not know what to say or do with her and so will leave her in your hands. Of course if she chooses to ask for a special hearing, for herself, at any other time, neither you nor anybody else can help it, she has just as good a right to do so as any individual. It would seem from this letter of hers that the “important new thing” is something relating to law. Lovingly yours, U Susan B. Anthony [in hand of SBA] p.s—I shall not reply to this from Mrs Blake— I am sick & tired of the scramble—so, since this is to be your last blessed opportunity 2 of settling the Fair Lillie—I leave her to your tender mercies— Your reply to her is good—& ought to have settled her Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Anthony-Avery Papers, NRU. 1. Enclosure missing. From earlier letters, topics of Lillie Blake’s “blast” can be identified. She made very precise demands about her role at the upcoming Washington convention and explained why her wishes should be met. “You know that I have given more time to our work than any other woman that will be there,” she wrote SBA in November 1897, “I am in fact the ranking veteran of the movement, next after yourself, having come into active work in 1869 and I think that on this occasion I should be treated with especial consideration.” SBA approved her request to give a talk on municipalities but would not endorse Blake’s ambition to speak at a congressional hearing on a new topic she would not specify. Differences then arose over Blake’s duties as chair of the Committee on Legislation. Blake’s chief
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activity in Washington, as SBA understood the job, would be to teach delegates to the National-American convention how to visit their home-state congressional delegations and make social calls on the wives of members and senators. (L. D. Blake to SBA, 19 November 1897, SBA to L. D. Blake, 13 January 1898, SBA to R. F. Avery, 21 January 1898, Film, 37:404–6, 1030–32, 38:7–11; Sarah C. Bennett to L. D. Blake, 25 January 1898, Lillie D. Blake Papers, MoSHi.) 2. On 8 January 1898, SBA received a letter from Rachel Avery announcing her intention to retire from office as corresponding secretary of the NationalAmerican, and she wrote a four-page reply. Neither letter survives. “It made almost ill!!” SBA noted in her diary. (SBA diary, 8 January 1898, Film, 37:604ff.) •••••••••
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ECS to Theodore W. Stanton New York, January 26, 1898.
Dear Theodore:— Paris appears to be in such a state of upheaval that I fear you may be kidnapped! What ails your people? We get most startling accounts of fights 1 in the Chamber of Deputies. What are you doing, thinking, preparing? 2 The printers promise “Eighty years and More” next week. Orders are coming in every day but as yet no book. It takes these lazy men so long to do any thing! If we only had Eve’s daughters in all these publishing companies, they would make things fly. The women are making great preparations for our fiftieth anniversary to be held in Washington on February 14th. I shall not go as my eyes grow 3 dimmer and legs weaker from month to month. With love and kisses for you and the children. U Mother. Y Typed transcript, ECS Papers, NjR. 1. ECS took note of a moment in France’s Dreyfus affair. Captain Alfred Dreyfus was in prison for treason, the army had just acquitted the actual perpetrator, and antisemitic demonstrations were erupting across France. On 13 January 1898, Emile Zola published his famous letter to the French president, J’Accuse, in which he charged the government and army with a long list of crimes and cover-ups in the case. Then, in the Chamber of Deputies on 22 January 1898, a scuffle broke out as reactionaries pressed the government to act more decisively in defense of the army and socialists accused the prime minister of lies. Headlines in some of New York’s newspapers on 23 January 1898 read “French Deputies in a Riot” (New York
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Times) and “Riot in France’s Chamber” (New York Tribune). (George R. Whyte, The Dreyfus Affair: A Chronological History [Basingstoke, U.K., 2005], 147–57.) 2. Bob Stanton obtained a copyright for ECS’s reminiscences in August 1897 and published it in February 1898 with the title Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815–1897. A year later ECS told a story about how Bob Stanton came to be her publisher. “When I said in my ‘Reminscences,’” she told Carlos Martyn, “that William J. Bryan’s vote of 6,000,000 represented the discontent of the country, my chosen publisher asked me to cut that out. When I declined to do so, he refused the manuscript, and my son brought out the book.” (ECS to Theodore W. Stanton, 15 January 1895, and ECS to Andrew D. White, 19 April 1896, and New Voice, 7 January 1899, Film, 33:532, 35:705–6, 39:444–45.) 3. On the considerable discussion about whether ECS would indeed attend the Washington convention, see Rachel F. Avery to SBA, 14 December 1897, SBA to Rachel F. Avery, 17 & 29 December 1897, 7 January 1898, all in Film, 37:485–98, 541–46, 1003–8. •••••••••
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Frances E. Willard to SBA 1
Hotel Empire New York City 26 January 1898 Dearest Susan: Nan and I think you wrote us an exceedingly nice letter. We look upon you as a true friend, and we “tie up to you” correspondingly. 2 I am rejoiced that you are going to take account of the press. Until we can get its falsities amended little will be achieved beyond the present status. Men rule the press; they set forth women in it under the two qualities of good looks and good clothes, both for the purpose of pleasing the men. They are I fear beginning to be alarmed by the immeasurable superiority of women. Men have made a dead failure of municipal government, just about as they would of housekeeping, and government is only housekeeping on the broadest scale. It looks also as if they had made an equally outrageous failure of Republican government. Boodle and politics are the occupation of the “successful,” the only sin is to be found out. The Editor of the 3 “Ladies Home Journal,” the largest woman’s paper in the world, does not hesitate to say when a silly girl writes to ask him, if she had better respond in the affirmative to the word obey in the marriage service, “Oh, yes, a thousand times yes.” I think Susan dear some of these points ought to be brought out in your great convention. How I should rejoice to be there if
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I were strong as I was when we both enjoyed the Women’s First Council 4 together. I wish I could see you when you are in New York, and I want to go and see Mrs. Stanton as soon as possible. 5 I ask it of you dearie as a personal favor to leave Lady Henry’s name out of your convention; let them pass any resolutions they like standing by the purity cause, but for pity sake when the poor child is shut away with a trained nurse, and has been for two months, do not pursue her with personal allusions. If you all knew the jealous animus that is back of the women that are doing this in England how careful you would be not to fall into their trap. I think it would be exceedingly nice to send her a resolution of affectionate remembrance on account of her devoted work for the suffrage cause through all these long and difficult years. It has no abler, more eloquent, more loyal advocate than she. Now Susan dear all this is confidential. Of course I would let Anna Shaw see it and Rachel and your closest counsellors. For instance Sissy Catt, that bright, sweet woman whom I had the pleasure of meeting in Chicago. You do not know how “put upon” I am that I cannot go. Anna sends lots of love. She is greatly over-done with the weight of correspondence that I cannot tackle. Believe me, Ever yours with tender affection, U Frances Y TLS, on World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union letterhead, HM 10648, Ida Harper Collection, CSmH. 1. Willard arrived in New York City earlier this month with a plan to travel to England, but she contracted influenza. She and Anna Gordon moved into the Hotel Empire, where SBA visited them on her way to Washington. (Bordin, Frances Willard, A Biography, 225–39; Mary Earhart, Frances Willard, From Prayers to Politics [Chicago, 1944], 367–68; SBA diary, 26 January, 5 February 1898, Film, 37:604ff.) 2. Willard responds to SBA’s plan for a Press Bureau affiliated with the National-American association. SBA had a proposal by the end of November 1897, and in December, she mailed out appeals for the three thousand dollars she thought needed. With public sentiment for woman suffrage rising, she wrote in her form letter, “[t]here is no difficulty in securing ample space for its respectful consideration in the leading newspapers throughout the country. The only hindrance in the way of reaching millions of readers, every week, is the lack of a central office for collecting and distributing arguments and practical illustrations in its favor.” The bureau, “in charge of an experienced newspaper woman,” would be located either in New York or Washington. At the Washington convention, the National-
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American’s Business Committee established the bureau with Ida Harper as its chair. (SBA to Rachel F. Avery, 30 November 1897, and SBA to Friend, 22 December 1897, and Report of the Thirtieth Annual Convention, 1898, p. 67, Film, 37:441–44, 522, 38:109ff.) 3. Edward William Bok (1863–1930), editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal from 1889 to 1919, opined that objections to “obey” in wedding ceremonies evinced the woman’s movement’s failed logic. “And it was not strange that these unhappy women should have assailed the marriage ceremony,” he wrote. “It was the only thing which they had not assailed. Every earthly law, which, with their strange minds, they could convert into a subservience of woman, they attacked.” (ANB; Ladies’ Home Journal 14 [October 1897]: 14.) 4. The founding meeting in 1888 of the International Council of Women and the National Council of Women. 5. Lady Isabella Caroline Somers-Cocks Somerset (1851–1921), known as Lady Henry Somerset, was Willard’s close friend, president of the British Women’s Temperance Association, and vice president of the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. She suffered this winter from heart ailments that prevented her travel to North America. Willard feared that an international uprising against Somerset’s leadership might surface at the National-American’s convention as it had at major meetings of temperance unions in October and November 1897. At issue was an attempt to revive the Contagious Diseases Act for India, after it was discovered that syphilis was widespread among British troops stationed there. Somerset expressed a willingness to compromise with the government, provided that men were subjected to the same inspections and restrictions as women. Her stance was anathema to social purity activists who countenanced no compromise with state regulation of vice and also to veterans of British women’s historic campaign to put an end to the acts. Somerset withdrew her proposals in a letter to the government dated 27 January 1898. (Oxford DNB; Olwen Claire Niessen, Aristocracy, Temperance and Social Reform: The Life of Lady Henry Somerset [London, 2007], 201–15; Woman’s Signal 7 [20 May & 17 June 1897]: 313, 378–79, and 8 [29 July, 12 August, 25 November, & 16 December 1897]: 72–73, 104–6, 342, 390, and 9 [17 February 1898]: 102–3.) •••••••••
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Remarks by SBA to the National-American Woman Suffrage Association
Editorial note: For the first evening session of the thirtieth annual convention of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association, SBA welcomed the overflow crowd drawn into the Columbia Theatre at Twelfth and F streets, Washington. The Woman’s Journal described this account as what she said “in part.”
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[14 February 1898] One of the most gratifying things to me is to meet friends whom I have not seen for thirty or forty years, and have them say, “You don’t look a day older!” When I was young I looked very old, and so I cannot change. I feel very young to-night, because I am not a pioneer. I was not at that first convention in Seneca Falls, nor at the one held in Rochester two weeks later. I was teaching in a little Dutch town at some distance. During the latter part of August in that year I visited my home, and found my father, 1 mother, and sister full of the glories of the Woman’s Rights Convention. They kept talking about the beauty of Lucretia Mott with her white cap and Quaker shawl, and the beauty of Mrs. Stanton with her black curls, etc., etc. I grew impatient, and said, “Don’t talk about woman’s rights all the time!” So if any of you here to-night do not believe in woman suffrage, I can sympathize with you. I did not come into the work till 1852, at the Syracuse Convention. Then I was made assistant secretary, with Martha C. 2 Wright as secretary; and, having a good deal of throat to spare, I was put at once to reading letters and resolutions. I have been very busy ever since. At that time women who could either write speeches or make them were extremely rare. One young woman who had studied law thought that she could give a speech if any one would write it. Mrs. Stanton wrote it for her, and she gave it from one end of the State to the other. Years after, by 3 accident, Mrs. Stanton recovered the manuscript. You cannot imagine, young women, the entire revolution that has taken place since that time in women’s condition in all the departments of life. Then no woman thought of speaking in the churches, except some Quaker preacher, or a Methodist woman telling her experience in class meeting. If we got a minister to pray for us, he did not dare to tell the Lord that he thought we were right. Now there is hardly a pulpit that is not glad to welcome evangelical women speakers—Lady Henry Somerset, Frances E. Willard, Rev. Anna H. Shaw. The same state of conservatism existed in regard to women’s education, in social life, and everywhere. At marriage all a woman’s property became her husband’s. Ernestine L. Rose carried a petition for the property rights of married women for weeks and months in New York, and got only five signatures. Miss Anthony said, in closing: “Elizabeth Cady Stanton is not here in person, but she will be with us in spirit, as she has been for forty years.” Y Woman’s Journal, 26 February 1898.
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1. On the Anthony family in 1848, see SBA’s interview with Nellie Bly at 31 January 1896 above. 2. Martha Coffin Pelham Wright (1806–1875) lived in Auburn, New York. She was a close friend of both ECS and SBA as well as a political ally. She served as the National Woman Suffrage Association’s president at the time of her death. (NAW; ANB.) 3. The original story, scrambled a bit either by SBA or a reporter, was noted by SBA on the manuscript of ECS’s speech from 1848. Emma Robinson Coe (1815–1902), later Still, borrowed it, probably when she visited ECS in the fall of 1851. Theodore Tilton attested to its return to ECS before 1866, when he described the “old and tattered” manuscript. Coe, whose first husband, Phineas Coe, died in California in 1851, was a prominent lecturer in the woman’s rights movement from 1850 to 1855. Late in 1854 she became a law student in the office of William T. Peirce of Philadelphia. A widow then, with a young daughter, she had by 1858 remarried. As Mrs. Emma R. Still, she graduated from the New York Homeopathic Medical College in 1867, and thereafter combined the practice of medicine with speaking, in Boston and New York City. By 1900, she was housed in the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum in White Plains. (Fannie Cooley Williams Barbour, Spelman Genealogy: The English Ancestry and American Descendats of Richard Spelman of Middletown, Connecticut, 1700 [New York, 1910], 222; J. Gardner Bartlett, Robert Coe, Puritan: His Ancestors and Descendants, 1340–1910 [Boston, 1911], 258; Federal Census, Milwaukee, Wis., and Placerville, Calif., 1850, White Plains, N.Y., 1900; Boston city directory, 1870; New York City directory, 1877; Medical and Surgical Directory of the United States [Detroit, Mich., 1886], 694; New York Times, 25 January 1880; History, 3:372; Garrison, Letters, 4:324n; Carol Lasser and Marlene Deahl Merrill, eds., Friends and Sisters: Letters between Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 1846–93 [Urbana, Ill., 1987], 109, 115, 121; M. C. Wright to SBA, 9 July 1858, Film, 9:25–27. See also Papers 1.) •••••••••
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Address by ECS: “Our Defeats and Our Triumphs”
Editorial note: Next in the evening, SBA introduced Clara Colby to read ECS’s speech for the occasion, “Our Defeats and Our Triumphs.” This text is the one published by Colby in the Woman’s Tribune. When the Boston Investigator republished the speech a year later in its series of ECS’s addresses, there were minor changes throughout, a few substantive amendments, and a different conclusion. The most significant of these changes are described in the notes. (Film, 38:217–19.)
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[14 February 1898] It is both a pleasant and painful task to review fifty years of one’s life devoted to a great reform with its varied defeats and triumphs, while the main object is not yet attained. In moments of depression, that at times we all suffer, this long struggle seems to me like an agonizing dream in which one strives to flee from some impending danger, and yet stands still. Verily, hope deferred does indeed make the heart sick and the mind weary with memories of all the efforts put forth; the petitions and appeals circulated, of all the arguments laid before eyes that would not see; rehearsed in ears that would not hear; which in their selfish indifference to the wrongs of others they could neither feel nor 1 understand. The tyrant custom reconciles even the best men to the cruelties of their own day and generation. Thus youth passed with no adequate response to our protests; the meridian of our lives reached, and no fitting answer to our arguments; and in the twilight of age sphinx-like the powers in state and church with sealed lips looked mockingly at us, while most of our co2 adjutors, Frances D. Gage, Clarina H. Nichols, Josephine Griffing passed from the scene of action without one glimpse of the triumph for which they had so long and so faithfully labored. At that time the college doors, the trades and professions, the world of profitable work were all closed to women, with no rights, civil or political, of person or property, inheritance or wages: the shelter over their heads, the clothes they wore, their ornaments, their wigs, false teeth and cork legs, if bald, toothless and lame, all belonged to their husbands, and genius, if they had any, was also subsidized; as actors, artists and authors, they glorified the names of their husbands, and at their feet laid the fruits of their accomplishments. The only earthly possession they had, that no man claimed, was their illegitimate children, so called by our law makers. History, sacred and profane, classical and Biblical literature, and the periodicals and journals of that time, all alike taught the divinely ordained headship of man and the subordination of woman; and this idea is not one of the lost arts yet. I saw a statement a few days since, by a recent traveller in France, that before a woman could join a club there she must show a written permission from her husband! Such was woman’s position under the old common law of England, on which the system of American jurisprudence was founded. We have been
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trying to weed out, root and branch, all these odious statutes and decisions so oppressive and degrading to woman and yet the work is not wholly accomplished. Dark as are these pictures of our watching and waiting fifty years for the consummation of all the rights, privileges and immunities that belong to every citizen of a Republic, a few rays of sunshine did at last penetrate the dark clouds of a barbarous past, and suddenly a new day dawned upon us, its sunrise gilding the wild mountain tops of Wyoming and the venerable dome of St. Paul’s, heralding woman’s emancipation in Great 3 Britain and the United States. A star in the West this time led the wise men where to find the young child and her mother, and to worship liberty in the form of woman. Battling for justice, the young child has grown strong in spite of persecution, fleeing for life from State to State, its prophets and apostles carrying the gospel of freedom for the mothers of the race to the ends of the earth and the isles of the sea. Then the decree went forth that woman might have the crumbs that fell from the master’s table. Then the college doors, here and there, began to revolve on their hinges, and in possession of the elements of learning woman had the open sesame to a new world of thought and action. Then she made her way into the trades and professions, filled the editorial chair and the pulpit, walked the wards of the hospital as trained nurse and physi4 cian, plead her own case in the courts, and filled many official positions. These are the women who to-day are close upon the heels of man in art, science, literature and government. With telescopic vision they explore the starry firmament and bring back the history of the planetary world. With chart and compass they pilot ships across the seas, and with skillful fingers send electric messages around the world. In galleries of art, nature and humanity are immortalized on canvas, and by their inspired touch, dull blocks of marble are transformed into angels of light. In music, they speak 5 again the language of Mendelsohn, Beethoven, Chopin and Schumann, and are worthy interpreters of their great thoughts. The poetry and novels of the century are theirs; they too have touched the key note of reform in religion, politics and social life. Such is the type of womanhood that enlightened public sentiment welcomes to-day. Such is the triumph over the folly, ignorance and degradation of the past. All this achieved gives promise 6 of larger freedom yet to come. Leaving our younger coadjutors to note the triumphs and defeats they have seen, I will briefly note a few individual experiences that moved me 7 to action. Looking backward seventy-two years, I see myself sitting in my father’s
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office surrounded with students and law books, listening with indignation to the complaints of women robbed under the Common Law on which our statute laws were based. When other light hearted children were at play, I conned these odious statutes by day and dreamed of them at night. The students, for their amusement, rehearsed to me each day the laws they found in their reading that were unjust to women. These young fellows little dreamed that they were training me to overturn their pretensions to hold the reins of government. They laughed at my wrath and tears and mockingly asked me what I could do about it. This was now the ever present thought in my mind. This was the foundation of my life work laid in grief that no one about me pitied nor understood. This was the primary school where I learned the a, b, c, of human rights and wrongs, where I had 8 the first glimpse of an inferior and superior sex. I learned my next lesson as one of an inferior sex at the grave of an only brother, deeply impressed with my father’s grief and his oft expressed wish that I had been a boy. But my earnest endeavors to excel in studies and games to prove myself the equal of any boy were all in vain. I soon saw, as 9 a girl, I could not fill the void in his heart. At sixteen, with surprise and indignation I learned the third lesson in the humiliation of the sex. Having studied with a class of boys five years in our academy, striven with them for prizes in Greek, Latin and mathematics, and been successful, I now desired to enter college with them, to continue the exciting race and rivalship I had enjoyed. But alas! that door was closed, not that I lacked preparation, but the insurmountable qualification of sex was 10 the barrier. This disappointment shadowed the hopes of my girlhood. The next lesson in the school of experience that roused me to rebellion, I learned in the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention held in London, June, 1840, to which societies from all countries were invited to send delegates. As American women had taken an active part in the anti-slavery struggle and belonged to all Associations, some of them were sent as delegates but they were denied seats in the convention. As silent listeners to masculine logic and assumption the women passed through a trying ordeal, during that discussion, lasting one entire day. Insulted and indignant they accepted the enforced silence never to be forgotten by those who understood the depths of their degradation. There sat women who were leaders in society, literature and reform. Lady Byron, Mrs. Hugo Reid, Mary Howitt, 11 12 Amelia Opie, Elizabeth Fry, the wife of Wendell Phillips, Lucretia Mott and many other highly educated women, compelled to listen to the old 13 platitudes on woman’s sphere.
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The opposition was led chiefly by dissenting ministers. Those in favor of the admission of women were George Thompson, Henry B. Stanton, Wendell Phillips, Joseph Sturge, George Bradburn, Daniel O’Connell and 14 William Lloyd Garrison. O’Connell was not present at the discussion but expressed himself strongly a few days later. Mr. Garrison was detained at sea, but on learning that women were rejected, he refused to take his seat and remained in the gallery a silent spectator of the proceedings to participate in which he had come three thousand miles. I never felt more disappointed in my life. I was not a delegate, but I was a woman and appreciated the injustice to those who came with reliable credentials. The argument with which the clergy, Bible in hand, claimed divine authority for the exclusion of women, was a pretension as insulting to Deity as exasperating to woman. This was my graduation in the silent school of experience. I now began active, aggressive work. Returning to America, I found “The Married Woman’s Property Bill” under discussion in the New York Legislature. The Dutch aristocracy, then powerful in New York, strongly favored the bill. They objected to their life long accumulations going into the hands of spendthrift husbands, instead of providing for the support of their daughters and grandchildren. Thus, thrift and family pride on the 15 one side and the spirit of reform on the other combined to carry this bill. New York was the first State to secure this measure of justice for women in 1848, and also the first in the great act of injustice in 1778 introducing the 16 word “male” in our constitution. 17 Meeting Ernestine L. Rose and Paulina Wright, by chance in Albany, in 1844, we decided to address the committee that had the bill in charge, and circulate petitions throughout the State, which we continued until 1848, when the bill was carried. This was before the call issued for the Convention held July 20, the same year in Seneca Falls, where we had recently moved. As Mrs. Mott was visiting her sister, Mrs. Martha C. Wright, in Auburn, 18 we met at a “Friend’s” home in Waterloo and there with other progressive women, we talked over the situation and resolved to call a convention at 19 once. The next day we met at the house of Thomas McClintock, a high seat Quaker, and there made our plans and prepared our documents. The seven women who inaugurated this movement were Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martha C. Wright, Jane Hunt, Mary Ann McClintock, and her two daughters. The latter though young read very creditable papers in the convention, and this in every way was satisfactory. James Mott, a large, fine looking gentleman, presided. Lucretia Mott and Frederick
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Douglass, extemporaneous speakers, were the chief lights of the occasion. 20 Ansel Bascom, a member of the Constitutional Convention of 1847, took an active part in the proceedings. The journals, from Maine to Louisiana, ridiculed the convention, as they do every step in progress. They said “seven old maids” met together 21 to express their discontent that the Lord had created them women. The fact is there were no old maids there. Susan B. Anthony did not materialize on our platform until four years later, and at that time she was still in her twenties. With the exception of Mrs. McClintock’s young daughters, those who organized this movement were all happy women with good husbands and families of children. The Declaration of Rights and Resolutions were all readily accepted, save the one demanding the right of suffrage which I prized above all others and which I pressed on the committee, and after prolonged discussion carried in the Convention, aided by Frederick Douglass who had learned by personal experience what I had by observation, 22 the disabilities of disfranchisement. Wifehood and motherhood with their sunshine and shadows, their grave responsibilities, taught me the necessity of individual conscience and judgment in the emergencies of life, and prompt action when there was no one at hand to consult. The duties of actors in the drama of life require that they shall understand and play well their own parts. Although “The Married Woman’s Property Bill” was a benediction to wives and children, securing comfortable homes to many, who might otherwise be without shelter to-day, yet its value was somewhat impaired for the want of civil rights. A married woman could not do business in her own name, make a contract, sue or be sued, or make a will, and to secure these civil rights we labored thirteen years. Susan B. Anthony entering the lists in 1852, soon took up the laboring oar, joined by Ernestine L. Rose, Rev. 23 Antoinette Brown, the first woman minister, and Amelia Bloomer. They held conventions and circulated petitions throughout the State. Through summer and winter, rain and snow, in sleigh and old stage coach, our brave Susan B. Anthony toiled year after year, going from county to county, petition in hand trying to rouse women from their apathy and indifference, to demand their civil rights. As she went from door to door some said they had all the rights they wanted, others slammed the door in her face and but few comparatively asked her to walk in willing to discuss the question 24 and give their signatures. The most depressing work reformers ever did was circulating petitions. Rudeness was the rule, courtesy the exception.
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Men were more gracious than women though the petitions were wholly in their interest. So we soon dropped the petition work and made our appeals in the halls of legislation, striving year by year for many civil rights 25 now conceded. In 1852, Elizabeth Oakes Smith and Matilda Joslyn Gage made their debut on our platform at the Syracuse convention. Lucy Stone, Frances D. Gage, Clarina Howard Nichols at this time were speaking in Massachusetts, Vermont, and Ohio; holding from year to year enthusiastic conventions. The next step was a demand for national protection. The war and reconstruction taught us that lesson. Seeing the speedy emancipation and enfranchisement of the slaves by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, we made bold to ask for a Sixteenth Amendment to the National Constitution, that we might stand on an even platform with the black man who had been the only decent compeer we had in the State 26 Constitution. Some able judges and lawyers claimed that woman was enfranchised by the Fourteenth Amendment, but the Supreme Court de27 cided otherwise. Over a quarter of a century ago, we began our demand for national protection, holding conventions in Washington, with hearings before the Judiciary Committees of the Senate and House. Our appeals have been printed in the Congressional Record and sent broad cast over the United States. Our rights to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment and to practice law have been argued by able statesmen in the Supreme Court. Not waiting for Supreme Court decisions, women voted under the Fourteenth Amendment. Susan B. Anthony, as an example to warn others, 28 was arrested, tried and sentenced. All that is possible has been said and done by the women who inaugurated this movement. Another generation has now enlisted for other longer or shorter campaigns. What, say they, shall we do to hasten the work? I answer, the pioneers have brought you through the wilderness in sight of the promised land; now, with active, aggressive warfare, take possession. Instead of rehearsing the old arguments that have done duty fifty years, make a brave attack on every obstacle that stands in your way. Do not like Poe’s raven sit on the door post, safe from harm, and sing suffrage “evermore”; everybody is used to that harmless song, it has become so familiar that it 29 30 attracts attention no longer. Lord Brougham said the laws for women (in England and America) are a disgrace to the civilization of the 19th century. The women in every State should watch their lawmakers, and any bill invidious to their interests should be promptly denounced, and with such vehemence and indignation as to agitate the whole community. A quiet
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convention once in three or four years, with a set of tame resolutions, the members all bent on being popular and respectable, fearing to antagonize a political party, liquor dealers and friends with wealth, position and influence, are inadequate. Such innocent warfare will not create a ripple on the surface of our daily life. 31 Charles Kingsley said, this will never be a good world for women until every remnant of the canon law is swept from the face of the earth. The canon laws and all that grow out of them make a most formidable block in woman’s way to freedom. It is a short-sighted policy of this Association to try to placate religious bigots and to accept without protest the dogmas and discipline of the church that degrade women. Your protests against invidious legislation and church action should ring out in speeches and resolutions that would rouse a more bitter opposition than even the pioneers in this movement created. There is no merit in simply occupying the ground others have conquered. There are new fields for conquest and more hostile enemies to meet. Whatever affects woman’s freedom, growth and development affords legitimate subjects for discussion here. While members of this Association all agree on woman’s right to the suffrage, they disagree as to the means to attain it. Some of our opponents think woman would be a dangerous element in politics and destroy the secular nature of our government. I would have a resolution on that point discussed freely, and show liberal thinkers that we have a larger number in our Association as desirous to preserve the secular nature of our government as they can possibly be. I would have a resolution demanding for women the same civil rights vouchsafed to the black man, to public vehicles, hotels and restaurants and places of amusement, going alone by day and night as pleasure 32 or duty call her. When a young girl of sixteen running at midnight for a physician for her dying father, and a physician hastening to her patient in the perils of childbirth, can be arrested and kept in the station house until morning, this Association, the only organization of women supposed to look after the natural rights of their sex, should express some opinion. When educated women teachers in all our schools, professors in our colleges, are governed by rulers, foreign and native, who can neither read nor write, I would have this Association discuss and pass a resolution in favor 33 of “educated suffrage” for their rulers. The fact that we differ on all these points is the very reason we should discuss them. If to question the divine authority of any teaching or Scripture that degrades woman is heresy in 34 this Association, the sooner it is rent in twain the better. Our object is to secure equality and freedom for woman:
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1st. In the State, which is denied when she is not permitted to exercise the right of suffrage. 2nd. In the church, which is denied when she has no voice in its councils, creeds and discipline, or in the choice of its ministers, elders and deacons. 3rd. In the home, where the State makes the husband’s authority absolute, the wife a subject, and the mother is robbed of her own child. Is it not as legitimate to discuss woman’s position in the home and the church as in the State, to demand a revision of Scripture texts and social customs as 35 well as statute laws? The suffrage question is practically conceded. With full suffrage in four States, municipal suffrage in another, and school suffrage in half the States of the Union; with municipal suffrage in Great Britain and her colonies, and full suffrage in New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere, the two leading nations in civilization have conceded the principle. The opposition with their flimsy protests and platitudes are wandering in fields where long ago 36 the harvests were gathered and garnered. 37 With a Queen on the English throne, why not a daughter of Jefferson or Adams in the Executive Mansion as President of the United States. There is no law or constitution to prevent women from holding the highest offices in the gift of the people. We now have political equality in four States in the Union and in the near future shall have women to represent us in the Capitol and in State legislatures, hence consistency must soon place the ballot in the hands of every educated woman. In closing the review of fifty years of defeats and triumphs, every woman must have a new sense of dignity and self-respect as she learns by what efforts of earnest men and women have been achieved the opportunities she enjoys. Let this generation pay its debt to the past by continuing the work until the last vestige of woman’s subjection shall be erased from Statutes and Constitutions. Then the united thought of man and woman will inaugurate a just government, a pure religion, a happy home and a civilization in which ignorance, poverty and crime will exist no more. They who watch behold already the dawn of a new day. Y Woman’s Tribune, 19 February 1898. 1. In a favorite expression, ECS adapted Isa. 42:20: “Seeing many things, thou observest not; opening the ears, but he heareth not.” 2. Not previously identified are the abolitionists and woman’s rights activists Frances Dana Barker Gage (1808–1884) and Josephine Sophia White Griffing
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(1814–1872). (NAW; ANB.) ECS omitted the names of pioneers from the text in the Boston Investigator. 3. Although women voted in Wyoming’s territorial elections from 1870 onward, statehood for Wyoming in 1890 set a new standard for the United States—women voting in state and federal elections. At the time, ECS thought this “great event in the history of the race” placed the United States ahead of Great Britain in progress for women. Using the same emblems for each country, she wrote, “As England and America have thus far kept pace, step by step, on the question of women’s emancipation, I venture to prophesy that the sunlight now shining on the wild mountain-tops of Wyoming will soon gild the venerable dome of St. Paul.” This more generous assessment of British progress, written eight years later, reflected the fact that women exercised the franchise in Britain to extents unimaginable in most of the United States. Parliamentary suffrage was the one, notable exception, where men continued to hold a monopoly. (Papers, 5:317. See also Papers, 4:246–60.) 4. ECS took this and the next paragraph with slight revision from her speech “Solitude of Self.” See Papers, 5:432. 5. The German composers Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847), Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), and Robert Alexander Schumann (1810–1856), and the Polish composer Frédéric-François Chopin (1810–1849). 6. Next in the Investigator falls the paragraph about Queen Victoria and a woman for president of the United States, below in this version as the penultimate paragraph. 7. Eighty Years and More was a memoir crafted as a history of woman’s rights agitation. A few chapters appeared first in the History of Woman Suffrage, and many others were published in the Woman’s Tribune from April 1889 to July 1892. Rarely did ECS retell stories from her life in the same way twice, and this occasion was no different. The notes below point to earlier versions of the stories told in this speech. See also Ann D. Gordon, “Afterword,” in Eighty Years, 467–83. 8. On the story about her father’s law books, see Eighty Years, 31–32, and three variants of the story from 1889, 1891, and 1895 in Film, 27:181–84, 29:334, 34:467. 9. The only son of Daniel and Margaret Cady to survive past his first years, Eleazer Livingston Cady was born in 1806, graduated from Union College in 1826, and died a few months later. (Orrin Peer Allen, Descendants of Nicholas Cady of Watertown, Mass., 1645–1910 [Palmer, Mass., 1910], 174.) On the impact of his death, see Eighty Years, 20–24, and variants of the story from 1889 and 1895 in Film, 27:168–70, 34:467. 10. On her dream of a college education, see Eighty Years, 33–34, and variants from 1889 and 1895 in Film, 27:181–84, 34:467. 11. Although not delegates to the convention, these English abolitionists befriended the American women in London. They were Anna Isabella Milbanke, Lady Byron (1792–1860), philanthropist and reformer; Mary Botham Howitt (1799–1888), a Quaker and writer; Amelia Alderson Opie (1769–1853), a Quaker poet; and Elizabeth Gurney Fry (1780–1845), a distinguished prison reformer. ECS met Elizabeth Jesser Reid (1789–1866), a close friend of Harriet Martineau
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and a pioneer in women’s education, not Mrs. Hugo Reid. See Papers, 4:261n. 12. Ann Terry Greene Phillips (1813–1886) was sent to London as a delegate by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Lucretia Mott was a delegate from the American Anti-Slavery Society. (Garrison and Garrison, Life, 2:353.) 13. On the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, see Eighty Years, 79–83; History, 1:53–62; and variants from 1858, 1883, and 1889 in Papers, 1:361–69, 4:246–48, and Film, 27:346–48. 14. The British and Irish delegates in this list are reformer and orator George Thompson (1804–1878), Quaker philanthropist Joseph Sturge (1793–1859), and Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847). The American delegates, in addition to Henry B. Stanton, are Unitarian minister George Bradburn (1806–1880) and antislavery editor William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879). 15. On winning the Married Women’s Property Act of 1848, see Eighty Years, 150–51, and three variants from 1889, 1896, and 1897 in Film, 27:502–4, 35:664, 37:468. 16. New York Const. of 1777, art. VII. Setting qualifications for electing members of the state assembly, it referred to “every male inhabitant of full age.” This language was not repeated in articles providing for the election of governor, lieutenant governor, or state senators, where possession of a freehold qualified electors regardless of sex. In describing this article and placing it in the history of state constitutions, ECS relied on Charles B. Waite, “Who Were Voters in the Early History of This Country?” Chicago Law Times 2 (October 1888): 400–401. 17. Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis (1813–1876) was married at the time to a merchant in Utica, New York. After his death in 1845, she married Thomas Davis of Providence, Rhode Island. (NAW; ANB.) 18. They met the first time in Waterloo at the home of Richard Pell Hunt (1797– 1856), a wealthy Quaker, and Jane C. Master Hunt (1812–1889), his fourth wife. (Friends’ Intelligencer 13 [1857]: 569, 46 [1889]: 777; John E. Becker, A History of the Village of Waterloo, New York, and Thesaurus of Related Facts [Waterloo, N.Y., 1949], 136, 151–52; research by Judith Wellman.) 19. Thomas McClintock (c. 1792–1876) led a separation from the Genesee Yearly Meeting and wrote the Basis of Religious Association, the rationale for establishing the Congregational Friends. His daughters, also participants in the convention, were Elizabeth Wilson McClintock (1821–1896), later Phillips, and Mary Ann McClintock (c. 1823–1880), sometimes designated “Jr.,” later Truman. (Quaker Genealogy, 2:240, 274, 815, 824, 941; Friends’ Intelligencer 33 [1877]: 89; Becker, History of the Village of Waterloo, N.Y., 135–36; Ruth Ketring Nuermberger, The Free Produce Movement: A Quaker Protest against Slavery [Durham, N.C., 1942], 14–15; NCAB, 24:299–300; ECS, “In Memoriam,” Woman’s Journal, 21 November 1896, Film, 36:85; research by Judith Wellman.) 20. Ansel Bascom (1802–1862), a lawyer, reformer, and local political leader, was the Free Soil party’s candidate for Congress. He represented Seneca County in the constitutional convention of 1846, where he urged equal suffrage for blacks, and propounded a radical view of the laws of marriage and property. Bascom was
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also a member of the legislature that passed the Married Women’s Property Act of 1848. (Edward Doubleday Harris, A Genealogical Record of Thomas Bascom and His Descendants [Boston, 1870], 61–62; Judith Wellman, “The Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention: A Study of Social Networks,” Journal of Women’s History 3 [Spring 1991]: 18.) 21. For a sampling of newspaper reaction, see History, 1:802–5, and the scrapbook in ECS Papers, DLC, described above at November 1897. 22. Nothing in the contemporary record assigns this role to Frederick Douglass at the Seneca Falls Convention. ECS told this story first in her speech at the third decade celebration in July 1878, in Papers, 3:389, 396n. It then remained part of her story in the National Citizen and Ballot Box, April 1879, Film, 20:752, and two years later in History, 1:73. 23. Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1818–1894) published the first issue of the Lily, a temperance paper, in January 1849 in Seneca Falls; moved it to Mount Vernon, Ohio, in 1853; and sold it in 1855, when she moved to Council Bluffs, Iowa. (NAW; ANB.) 24. For three earlier accounts of SBA’s start as a reformer, see History, 1:456–62; Eighty Years, 192; and from 1889, Film, 27:524–27. 25. Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith (1806–1893), a writer and one of the first American women to earn a living as a lecturer, was active in the woman’s rights movement in the early 1850s. The Third National Woman’s Rights Convention met in Syracuse in 1852. (NAW; ANB. See also Papers 1 & 2.) 26. ECS alludes to the language common to most state constitutions before the Civil War that limited voting rights to white males. In the postwar era, most states removed the white but left male in place. A sixteenth amendment to the United States Constitution, such as proposed by the National-American Woman Suffrage Association, would override that language in state constitutions. 27. In Minor v. Happersett (1875), the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that states retained their right to bar citizens from voting regardless of the Fourteenth Amendment. 28. On SBA’s vote, arrest, and criminal conviction, see Papers 2 & 3. 29. ECS adapts the popular poem “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe (1809– 1849), in which the bird repeatedly says “Nevermore.” 30. Henry Peter Brougham, baron Brougham and Vaux (1778–1868), a champion of law reform in the House of Lords, introduced the married women’s property bill of 1857 (rejected by Parliament) and argued in debate on the divorce act of 1857 (passed by Parliament) for granting women more causes to obtain a divorce. The source of this quotation has not been found. (DNB; Lee Holcombe, Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth Century England, 1850–1895 [Toronto, Canada, 1983], 62–63, 88–89; Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895 [Princeton, N.J., 1989], 35–48.) 31. Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) wrote this sentence in a letter to John Stuart Mill in 1870, explaining why he had withdrawn from the woman suffrage movement.
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Canon law, in his mind, rendered women unfit to lead their own emancipation. (Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life, ed. Frances Grenfell Kingsley [New York, 1877], 416–19.) 32. On the matter of safe access to the streets at night, see note at 21 September 1897 above. Civil rights laws were state laws in the wake of the decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in Civil Rights Cases (1883) that overturned federal civil rights law. In New York State, an act of 1895 expanded the reach of law to cover more kinds of public facilities. Businesses contested the limits imposed on racial discrimination by the law, but the law provided a framework for African Americans to fight back. Section one of the law of 1895 held out the promise of protection for all: “That all persons within the jurisdiction of this state shall be entitled to the full and equal accommodations . . . subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law and applicable alike to all citizens.” But in fact, the law did not guarantee full and equal access to women of any race. In 1897, attorney Clara Foltz ran afoul of a rule in some city restaurants that unescorted women would not be served after nine in the evening. When she and her daughter were denied service, Foltz sued the restaurant for damages. In 1900, Rebecca Israel sued another restaurant in the city, specifically citing section one of the civil rights law, but her case was dismissed in 1903 by a justice of the state supreme court. (David McBride, “Fourteenth Amendment Idealism: The New York State Civil Rights Law, 1873–1918,” New York History 71 [April 1990]: 207–33; New York Laws of 1895, chap. 1042; New York Herald, 28 February 1897, in SBA scrapbook 26, Rare Books, DLC; Albany Law Journal 55 [13 March 1897]: 13; Chicago Legal News 29 [13 March 1897]: 243; Barbara Babcock, Woman Lawyer: The Trials of Clara Foltz [Stanford, Calif., 2011], 199–200; New York Sun, 17 May 1903; New York Times, 17 May 1903; New York World, May 18, 1903.) 33. To make certain that the National-American’s convention discussed this topic, ECS sent a resolution for the meeting and a speech for a congressional hearing. For her careful planning, see ECS to Clara B. Colby, 17, 24, 25, 28 January 1898, Film, 37:1067–74, 38:16–29, 43–48, 62–67. 34. In the Investigator, this sentence reads: “If to question the divine inspiration of a book that degrades woman on every page is heresy in this Association, the sooner it is rent in twain the better.” 35. The third point in the Investigator reads: “Equality is denied in the home when the State makes the husband’s authority absolute and the wife a subject. When the church says as ‘Christ is the head of man, so is man the head of woman,’ it denies equality. Is it not as legitimate to discuss woman’s position in the home and the church, as in the State to demand a revision of scripture texts as well as statute laws?” 36. This paragraph continues in the Investigator and concludes the essay. “Ever and anon some weak man or woman, thinking themselves possessed of a ‘calm, judicial mind,’ puts forth a little book, or an article in a periodical, to show the danger of what the two leading nations have conceded, but their facts and logic being equally at fault no one deigns to answer.” 37. Victoria, queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and Empress of India (1819–1901) came to the throne in 1837.
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Helen Appo Cook1 to SBA [Washington, D.C. 17? February 1898]
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My Dear Miss Anthony: I was born to an inheritance of appreciation and 3 sympathy for the cause of woman’s rights, my mother before me being so ardent a supporter of its doctrines that I felt myself, in a measure, identified with it. Among my earliest recollections are the Sunday afternoon meetings, held at the home of Lucretia Mott, on Arch street, in Philadelphia. How long ago it was you will understand when I say that it was on one of those occasions that I heard that eloquent advocate of human freedom, the 4 English abolitionist, George Thompson. Though too young to enter fully into the subject matter of the discourses, I was quite old enough to receive an impression, which was deep and lasting, of the noble character and lofty aims of the men and women there assembled. It was, therefore, with the welcome accorded an old friend that I hastened to attend the first session of the first suffrage convention held in 5 Washington. I can scarcely express the revulsion of feeling that followed when I found that the argument most relied upon was the inconsistency of conferring the right to vote—given by Congress as a means of protection—upon the newly-emancipated slaves and denying it to the cultivated white women. It was an appeal to prejudice as unexpected as it was disappointing; it was like falling from a great height, where the atmosphere was pure and serene to a lower level; with ideals like Lucretia Mott and Lucy Stone, it was like worshiping an idol and finding it clay. 6 My husband was a delegate from the District of Columbia to the 7 convention that nominated Gen. Garfield, and was a member of the com8 mittee on resolutions. Mr. Edwards Pierrepont, of New York, was the chairman of the committee, which included several colored men from the South. While they were in session there came from you a request that you and your friends might be heard in favor of introducing into the platform a resolution indorsing woman suffrage. The white men on the committee were so nearly evenly divided that the votes of the colored men would decide the question. It was not surprising that those from the South had at that time but little interest and sympathy with “woman’s rights,” but Mr.
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Cook pleaded with them, showing how illogical and illiberal it was for men so recently enfranchised to deny to others a right so valued by themselves. He won them. The vote was taken, and the ladies were no sooner admitted than, to his mortification and embarrassment, the time-worn argument was brought forward—“the ignorant negroes of the South,” &c.—an argument that I sincerely believe has never won a single vote for woman suffrage. The men who are narrow enough to be influenced by it are not broad enough to 9 concede to women the privileges they claim. While on a visit to my son at his home in Idaho I accompanied him and his wife when they went together to the polls, and I believe that the men I saw there, the same men that the year before had voted for woman suffrage, were actuated solely by a belief in republican principles and a true respect for women. In view of the suggestions in the paper of Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 10 read at the convention on Monday night last, that women should adopt new methods and keep in the front ranks of progress, it was with pained surprise that I read in The Washington Post of Wednesday, the following words: “Miss Anthony . . . spoke of the amendment giving negroes suffrage, and drew comparison between many of the ex-slaves and the large number of women of high intellectual rank compelled to acknowledge their politi11 cal inferiority to them.” Would it not be well to signalize the end of the first half century of effort, and the beginning of a new and brighter era by leaving behind the old formula and basing the claims of women wholly on right and justice? It seems an ungracious task to question the methods of a woman crowned with years and with honors, unselfishly devoted to a lofty idea, but it is because of your great influence with other women, your power to direct their thoughts and endeavors that I ask you in the name of universal womanhood to rely for the ultimate success of a good cause on appeals to the higher nature—to those qualities of heart and mind that belong to a noble manhood. With great respect, U Helen A. Cook. Y Washington Post, 19 February 1898. Ellipses in original. 1. Helen Elizabeth Appo Cook (1837–1913), the daughter of a distinguished musician who taught and performed in New York City and Philadelphia, married into a prominent Washington family about 1863. There she raised her five children. Cook was president of Washington’s Colored Women’s League and a national leader in the organizing of African-American women’s clubs. (Jessie Carney Smith, ed., Notable Black American Women, Book II [Detroit, Mich., 1996].) 2. The date is an estimate: Cook reacted to news in the Washington Post, 16
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February 1898, and the Post published her letter on February 19 while SBA was still in Washington. 3. Elizabeth Brady Appo (c. 1818–1863) was a milliner. (Federal Census, Philadelphia, 1850; Lee Manchester, ed., The Plains of Abraham: A History of North Elba & Lake Placid. The Collected Historical Writings of Mary MacKenzie [2007; reprint, Lake Placid Library Edition, 2010], 131.) 4. George Thompson arrived for his second trip to the United States at the end of October 1850 and sailed from Boston back to England in late June 1851. Philadelphia, where he arrived about June 2, was one of his last stops. Thompson greeted a gathering of local abolitionists at the home of Lucretia and James Mott at 333 Arch Street before he traveled to towns outside the city. (Garrison, Letters, 4:44n, 61–64; Liberator, 13, 20 June 1851; New York Daily Tribune, 9 June 1851; Anna Davis Hallowell, ed., James and Lucretia Mott. Life and Letters [Boston, 1884], 326–27.) 5. This was the convention organized by the Universal Franchise Association in Washington in January 1869. See Papers, 2:204–11, and Film, 13:280–88. 6. John Francis Cook, Jr., (1833–1910) was among Washington’s wealthiest African Americans and prominent in civic life and philanthropic institutions. Appointed a trustee of Howard University in 1875, he served until his death. (ANB; Lamb, Howard University Medical Department, 98.) Helen Cook’s account of suffragists at the Republican National Convention in 1880 is unique. It resembles hearsay that Matilda Gage reported at the time. Describing a platform committee meeting that no women attended, Gage wrote in the National Citizen and Ballot Box, “Senator Farr of Michigan, a colored man, as we learn, was the only member of the platform committee who suggested the insertion of a woman suffrage plank.” There was a flaw: George A. Farr was a white man; Gage included the same report in the History of Woman Suffrage. Like Helen Cook, however, Gage heard that an African-American man was the suffragists’ ally. As a member of the resolutions committee, John Cook had limited opportunities to hear woman suffragists say anything at all. National protection for citizens’ right to vote was the association’s stated objective. An alternative explanation for what John Cook heard is that he joined other delegates at the National association’s mass meeting that coincided with the Republican convention. The mass meeting provided a platform for suffragists from across the country who expressed a wide range of opinion. (Chicago Daily Tribune, 2, 3 June 1880, and Chicago Inter-Ocean, 3 June 1880, all in Film, 248, 267–69; National Citizen and Ballot Box, June 1880; History, 3:175–79; Papers, 3:539–40; New York Times, 3 June 1880; “Woman’s Kingdom,” Chicago InterOcean, 12 June 1880; William Livingstone, Livingstone’s History of the Republican Party. A History of the Republican Party from Its Foundation to the Close of the Campaign of 1900, Including Incidents of Michigan Campaigns and Biographical Sketches [Detroit, Mich., 1900], 2:166–67.) 7. James Abram Garfield (1831–1881) was elected twentieth president of the United States in 1880. 8. Edwards Pierrepont (1817–1892), a New York lawyer and former attorney general in the administration of Ulysses Grant, chaired the resolutions committee
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of the Republican National Convention in 1880. Suffragists depicted him as resenting every minute wasted on their claims. (ANB.) 9. John Francis Cook, III, (1866?–1932), known as Frank, moved to Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho, after completing his degree in pharmacy at Howard University in 1888. He pursued his profession there and invested in land. In about 1895, he married Elizabeth Rebecca Abele (1870–?), the daughter of a family as distinguished in Philadelphia as was his in Washington. After a decade living in Idaho and giving birth to four children, Elizabeth Cook returned to Philadelphia with her children, took up residence with her brother, the architect Julian Abele, and divorced Cook. Frank Cook died in Idaho. (Lamb, Howard University Medical Department, 159; Federal Census, Idaho, 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, and Philadelphia, 1910, 1920; Susan E. Tifft, “Out of the Shadows,” Smithsonian 35 [February 2005]: 100–106; Certificate of Death, No. 79314, Boundary County, State of Idaho, Department of Public Welfare, in IdHi.) 10. See above at 14 February 1898. 11. Washington Post, 16 February 1898, not in Film. The Post reported not the convention but SBA’s remarks at the hearing before the House Judiciary Committee on February 15. Similar language to the same effect appeared in the New York Tribune, 16 February 1898, Film, 38:269. •••••••••
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ECS to the Editors, WOMAN’S JOURNAL New York, Feb. 28, 1898.
Editors Woman’s Journal: There is nothing more sacred than the memories of a great soul, that 1 has just passed into the unknown. One pauses for language more refined and reverent than that in daily use, while the companion of angels may be watching and waiting to see what the mortal hand may pen. To speak in ordinary language of the earthly career while the spirit is lingering on the threshold of the eternal future with all its promised glories, seems unworthy the occasion. But viewed as the primary school, or nursery of the infant soul, it may be of some importance to mention the humble home, Rest Cottage, in the little village of Evanston, where I first 2 met Frances E. Willard and her mother; each remarkable in her own way. Frances had just been installed as president of a girls’ college; her gifts and graces were extolled on all sides. As I was their guest I had the opportunity to appreciate their domestic as well as public virtues, though the interests 3 of neither were bounded by the home sphere.
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As I was invited there to lecture, Frances introduced me to the audience with marked dignity, in a few well chosen words. We sat up till a late hour discussing all the vital questions of the day, science, government, industrial economics, the education of girls, political equality and social order; on all these points we agreed. We avoided the theologies, knowing that there we might have broad differences of opinion. Though twenty-five years her senior, I felt I was talking with a woman of mature judgment, clear intellect and well digested ideas. The revelation of such a character in one so young gave me new hope in the possibilities of all women. Some years later she spent a few days with me on the blue hills of New 4 Jersey. As she appreciated fine scenery, we took several drives on the Palisades. It was in the leafy month of June, when nature was at her best. Starting out one morning, I said: “Now, Frances, we will drive where there is one of the most magnificent views we have yet seen.” But nearing the point, lo! a tree had fallen across the road, and as it was too narrow a place in which to turn, for a moment we were in a quandary. Frances promptly jumped out, saying, “Wait till I look at the tree.” I could not see what good her looking at the tree would do, but I soon discovered. She seized the top branches and slowly pulled it round, until we had a safe pathway. She came laughing back and said, “The tree was of light wood and not as large as it seemed; many of our blocks in life could be as easily conquered if we would only go at them with a will.” This little incident illustrates in a measure the energy and perseverance that made her life a success. The last time I saw Miss Willard, she called on me, with Lady Henry 5 Somerset, on the eve of their departure for England. We had a very pleasant interview, talking over the comparative merits of woman’s position in England and America. Her friendship for Lady Somerset illustrates one of the beautiful traits of her character, and the truth of the motto: “The good 6 only have the capacity for an enduring friendship.” When the critics in two nations were railing at Lady Somerset, Frances Willard, though differing from her friend on the question at issue, nobly defended her right to express her own opinions, and recalled her many generous acts of devotion to the poor and suffering, her virtues, graces, and gifts, urging the public to remember all her brave words and deeds and forgive one error in judgment, on a question in which there is an honest difference of opinion, even among 7 thoughtful people. Though in her last days we were near each other, we were unable to meet; yet as I heard from her daily, I knew the sands of life were slowly
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running down. When the morning papers announced the death of Frances Willard, I felt the loss to womankind. All nature seemed to sympathize in the sad event; dark clouds hung over the horizon; the rain poured in torrents; the wind blew fiercely during the funeral rites; but as the pageant 9 moved westward crowds followed to her last resting-place. Thus one of the greatest women of this generation has passed away in the prime of life, a woman of rare gifts as a writer and speaker, with great executive ability and a sweet, gentle nature. The occasion of the death of Frances E. Willard has been one of national observance; no other woman has ever been so honored and adored. U Elizabeth Cady Stanton
U Woman’s Journal, 5 March 1898. 1. Frances Willard died in New York on 17 February 1898. 2. Mary Thompson Hill Willard (1805–1892) had lived with her daughter Frances at Rest Cottage, their home in Evanston, Illinois. (American Women.) 3. No sources on this visit have been found. It could have occurred in 1871, when Frances Willard became president of the Evanston College for Ladies, or in 1873, when she became dean of the Woman’s College of Northwestern University. ECS was in Chicago and Cook County in both years. (With assistance of Janet C. Olson, Northwestern University Archives.) 4. Although ECS says it was June, Willard likely visited ECS in Tenafly in October or November 1876 while SBA boarded there. SBA extended an invitation at the end of September, and at the end of October, Willard attended the national convention of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union nearby in Newark. (SBA to F. E. Willard, 28 September 1876, Film, 18:1047–51; Earhart, Frances Willard, 154.) 5. This was a meeting at ECS’s apartment on 3 March 1895 to introduce her to Lady Somerset and discuss collaboration on the Woman’s Bible. See Papers, 5:681–82, 694–95. 6. ECS described this quotation as an “old Latin motto” when she used it in her remarks at SBA’s birthday celebration in 1890. See Papers, 5:240. 7. ECS refers to the troubles facing Lady Henry Somerset recounted in note at 26 January 1898 above. 8. Evidence of their communication in this period is ECS’s inscription in Willard’s copy of Eighty Years, dated 14 February 1898, at IEWT and not in Film. “It is interesting,” ECS wrote, “to see the manner in which the circumstances of life impell each soul to the work designed for her to do.” With thanks to Carolyn De Swarte Gifford for this lead. 9. After a funeral service in New York on February 20, Willard’s body was taken by train in a special car to Chicago on a route that included a stop at her birthplace in Churchville, New York. Nearly twenty thousand mourners paid their respects at her casket in the temperance union’s Woman’s Temple, and the procession continued to her home in Evanston. (Earhart, Frances Willard, 369–71.)
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ECS to Olivia Bigelow Hall1 26 West 61 N.Y. March 8 1898
Mrs Israel Hall Dear Friend, Have you read my Book “Eighty years & more”? If so will you not push its sale in your state, by notices in your papers. I am asking my rich friends to take five or ten copies & give them to their impecunious relatives & 2 neighbors. You can get them direct from me, at $2.00 a copy. The reviews have been thus far very favorable & the sales moderately 3 good. You might place one copy in your college library It is many years since we met but I have occasionally heard of you through Miss Anthony who reports you as wide awake as ever on the woman question. I think my book will stir women up to new thought on many questions & desire it to reach as many as possible I am publishing it myself & cannot afford to give it away, which I should be glad to do With kind regards sincerely yours U Elizabeth Cady Stanton
U ALS, Olivia Bigelow Hall Papers, DLC. 1. Olivia Bigelow Hall (1822–1908) lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she was active in local and statewide suffrage associations and had frequently hosted ECS and SBA. (Clark Waggoner, ed., History of the City of Toledo and Lucas County, Ohio [New York, 1888], 712; Samuel W. Beakes, Past and Present of Washtenaw County, Michigan, Together with Biographical Sketches [Chicago, 1906], 458; Patricia Bigelow, The Bigelow Family Genealogy, vol. 2, Seventh and Eighth Generations of John Biglo (1617–1703) of Watertown, Massachusetts [Flint, Mich., 1993], 77. See also Papers 2 & 5.) 2. As soon as her book was available, ECS wrote to a number of friends with similar requests that they sell and publicize Eighty Years and help her recover the costs of its publication. See ECS to Benjamin F. Underwood, 17 February 1898, to Emily Howland, 18 February 1898, to Martha Mott Lord, 19 February 1898, to M. Louise Palmer Thomas, 19 February 1898, to Clara B. Colby, 23 February 1898, and to Madam, 3 March 1898, Film, 38:273–75, 279—81, 287–90, 298–301, 316–17. 3. Early reviews for Eighty Years appeared in the New York Journal and Advertiser, 30 January 1898; Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 6 February 1898; Woman’s Journal, 12 February 1898; New York Times, 12 February 1898; and New York Sun, 13 February 1898.
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SBA to Jane Lathrop Stanford Rochester, N.Y., April 25, 1898.
My Dear Friend,— 1 Your letter containing the autograph of your dear husband came duly, and not only Mr. Stanford’s but yours also will go into my book. The nicely typewritten copy of the entire fifty chapters, together with the preface, were snugly packed in a box last Friday night and started on their way to the publisher, who says that it will take fully four months for me to see the end 2 of the proof reading of the entire work, which as you see by the enclosed, is to be in two volumes of nearly 500 pages each, and yet, the most severe task of the whole year’s work has been the cutting down of the incidents and the cutting out of every superfluous word in order to condense the story. I do hope the contents will be of some good to somebody, for both Mrs. Harper and myself have given one of the best years of our lives to the gathering and compiling of the contents. We have had two nice visits from San Francisco women this spring— 3 Mrs. John F. Swift, the president of your State Suffrage Society and Mrs. Austin Sperry, its treasurer, and next week I am expecting Mrs. Sargent and her daughter, Doctor Elizabeth, who have been spending the last year in Europe. They are to be with us during the celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Woman’s Rights movement, which is to be held in this city 4 April 28th and 29th. I hope the women in the different cities of California will celebrate this Fiftieth Anniversary. It will do us all good to speak a moment upon the progress that woman has made in every direction during the last fifty years. 5 Tell President Jordan it would be a nice thing for him to give the students a talk on this question, to make both the boys and the girls see and realize the great advantages of to-day as compared with those of half a century ago. I hope the next time you come east, you will pass through Rochester and make me a nice visit. It would do you good just to stop a little while in our humble home. You will see by the enclosed circular a scheme I have for the establishment of a press bureau, to help further the educational work for the
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elevation of woman. Another and larger scheme I have is that of raising a standing fund, the interest of which shall be used in carrying forward our 7 work. This fund, which I hope will reach $100,000 or more, I propose to have placed in the hands of trustees, fifteen or twenty good business women, to invest, take care of, and appropriate it as in their judgment is best. You have doubtless read the report of the trustees of the George 8 Peabody fund, which was made last year, showing that the interest on Mr. Peabody’s million in the thirty years had amounted to $1,200,000, all of which had been expended in the schools of the South; mainly for colored children, and with all of that good work done the committee still have the interest of the million to continue to appropriate as best they may. I am perfectly willing to bequeath to the young women who are today taking up the suffrage work all of the labor, but I am not willing that they shall have to do the begging to pay for that work, which I have been compelled to do for the last fifty years. I verily believe that more than half of my spiritual, intellectual and physical strength has been expended in the anxiety over getting the money to pay for the Herculean work that has been done in our movement. The strain, of course, has not been so perfectly intense and immense as was your strain while the suit against your estate was pending, but nevertheless it has been so great that I am not willing that 9 the next generation of women shall be compelled to endure it. I tell you this not because I expect you to put $50,000 into the standing fund, because I know that your estate, every bit of it, is bound to go to make that University continue a power to the end, but I tell it to you simply that you may know what I want to do and in case you meet any women who can put a thousand or ten thousand into this woman suffrage fund, that you may urge them to do so, and I tell it to you also because I want you to feel interested in everything that I am trying to do, as I know you always have been and as your good husband always was. I am grateful that you live and are able to work for the success of that grand University—that you have a noble purpose in life and are bound to carry it to the best of your ability, is cause for gratitude, and rejoices my heart, so my dear Mrs. Stanford, I am ever and always, Gratefully and admiringly yours, U Susan B. Anthony
U TLS, Jane Lathrop Stanford Papers, Archives, CSt. 1. Leland Stanford (1824–1893) had been governor of California from 1861 to 1863 and United States senator from 1885 until his death, while amassing a fortune
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by investments in railroads. The autograph acknowledged here by SBA appears in Anthony, 2:851. (BDAC.) 2. Enclosure omitted. It is an advertisement for Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony in two volumes, issued by the Bowen-Merrill Company of Indianapolis. 3. Mary A. Wood Swift (1841–1927) became president of the California Woman Suffrage Association late in 1896, after the election, and stayed in office until 1900. During the amendment campaign, in addition to providing money for the work, Swift had seats on the State Central Committee and the Joint Campaign Committee. After 1900, while she stayed active as a suffragist in state and nation, Swift turn her attention to the National Council of Women; she became its acting president in 1902 and president in 1903. Born in New York, she came west with her parents in the Gold Rush; during the amendment campaign, her mother, Emily Morrell Wood, attracted national attention as the state’s oldest suffragist and a schoolmate of ECS, probably at the Johnstown Academy. Mary Wood married John Franklin Swift, a state Republican politician and lawyer, in 1859 and was with him in Tokyo when he died in 1891 while serving as the American ambassador. (NCAB, 18:405; Lyons, Who’s Who among the Women of California, 125; San Francisco Call, 7 September 1896; History, 4:478–94, 501, 5:40, 48, 76–77, 110, 6:28, 39; California Tombstone Project, Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland, on-line transcriptions.) 4. The new series of national conferences included this fiftieth anniversary of the woman’s rights convention in Rochester. See Film, 38:453–73. 5. David Starr Jordan (1851–1931) became president of Stanford University at the invitation of Leland and Jane Stanford in 1891, and held the office until 1913. (ANB.) 6. Enclosure omitted. It is the form letter SBA first sent out in 1897 to raise money for the Press Bureau, here dated 23 April 1898. 7. Hopeful that “the younger workers will not have the begging bequeathed to them” when she retired, SBA set about raising money for an endowment of one hundred thousand dollars from which earned interest would support the work of the National-American association. She talked about this permanent or standing fund as early as January 1897, but five months later, occupied with the demands of her biography, she had appealed to only two or three people. She began to concentrate on the fund-raising later in 1898. (Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 8 January 1897, and SBA to Olivia B. Hall, 24 May 1897, both in Film, 36:668, 37:3–4.) 8. George Peabody (1795–1869), banker and philanthropist, created the Peabody Education Fund in 1867. His terms for the fund stipulated that after thirty years a decision be made whether to continue its distributions of income. Those discussions drew public attention to the fund and its finances. SBA’s numbers are off: Peabody put two million in the fund, and the trustees had given away 2.4 million by 1897. (ANB.) 9. Just weeks before SBA called on Jane Stanford when she reached California in 1896, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that Leland Stanford’s estate could not be held liable for a federal loan of fifteen million dollars to the
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Central Pacific Railroad. The decision made it possible for Jane Stanford to fulfill the terms of her husband’s will by endowing Stanford University. (U.S. v. Stanford, 161 United States Reports 412 [1896]; Gunther W. Nagel, Iron Will: The Life and Letters of Jane Stanford, rev. ed. [Stanford, Calif., 1985], 85–103.) •••••••••
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ECS to Marietta Holley 26 West 61st st New York May 9th [1898]
Dear Miss Holley, I send you my book “Eighty years & more” just published. I see you are about to publish a book on the rights of children. What I suffered in childhood from fear of parents teachers God & the Devil may give you some hints. Read my chapters on Babies & Divorce & show that the first right 1 every baby has is to be well borne. Here is a broad field for thought. Could you do me the favor to review my books & if you have any advertisements appended to yours add a brief notice of mine. With kind regards yours sincerely U Elizabeth Cady Stanton p.s. I have read all your b[ooks] with profit & pleasure
U ALS, Marietta Holley Letters, NWattJHi. Letters in square brackets faded away.
1. Marietta Holley published Samantha on Children’s Rights in 1909. For possible evidence that she followed ECS’s suggestions, compare Eighty Years, 229–30, and Samantha on Children’s Rights, 53–56. On Holley’s earlier use of material supplied by SBA, see Papers, 4:471–72. •••••••••
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SBA to Members of the Business Committee1 #17 Madison St., Rochester, N.Y., May 11, 1898.
Dear Member of the Business Committee:— I have just read and re-read the consensus of opinion of the different members of the committee sent me by the Corresponding Secretary, to which I will say:
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First. That for the same reason we threw up the New England conferences—the war—we cannot see into next year and decide wisely when and 2 where to hold our convention outside of Washington. What looks best now may be the very worst thing when the war is over, so I say let the decision wait, at least until after the November elections. This is for a double reason: Michigan and California are to vote on the question of holding 3 constitutional conventions. If both States should vote yes, then we would want to carry our propaganda conventions into both; if only California, then I should vote to carry our annual meeting there in February, 1899, or just as soon as the Legislature had enacted the law regulating the election of the delegates and fixing the date of the constitutional convention. If only Michigan should carry the proposition, then I should vote to hold our convention in that State, not in Grand Rapids, but in the metropolis, Detroit. Neither of these horns of the dilemma can be chosen until after the elections are over in November next. Putting the constitutional conventions out of the question, I should vote against Minneapolis and Grand Rapids because of our having so recently held great National conferences in both, and I should vote against Cincinnati because of our recent very 4 small National conference there. I do not at all believe in the policy of taking our National annual meeting into the city which offers the best financial conditions, without consideration of the need of our help to some practical end. I believe that either New Orleans or Memphis would invite us and offer hospitality too if the friends knew we would like to carry the convention there. So I beg that a decision may not be hurried, but that it shall at least be postponed until we get the election reports from both Michigan and California. Second. I object totally to moving our officer-electing, delegate convention forward to spring, or back into autumn. What I hope to see the friends in all the States settle upon is that our regular annual meeting shall be held in Washington each year, the last of January or the first of February, for national work with Congress; that is, that instead of throwing up our efforts to secure a Federal Constitutional Amendment we shall double them, if possible. In the past four years, by taking our convention away from the capital, we surely have lost very much of the prestige and power we formerly had with Congress. And I fear very many of the delegates have either lost sight or were never possessed of the primal end and aim of our National organization, viz., that of securing from Congress the passage of
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a resolution submitting to the Legislatures of the several States a proposition to so amend the Federal Constitution as to prohibit the States from disfranchising United States citizens on account of sex. To do this we must get a two-thirds vote of both Houses of Congress; and our only hope of getting this vote is to keep “pegging away on that line” if it takes another half century, not once in two years, but every year, and that with renewed earnestness of purpose and increased numbers of delegates from all the States to importune their representatives in person. Then for State propaganda we should hold several National conferences each spring and autumn in such States as have suffrage amendments or constitutional conventions pending, thus throwing the weight of our national body’s influence where it will be of most immediate practical benefit. To illustrate: This year I would have given National conferences to the largest cities of South Dakota and Washington, instead of to Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio (twice over), Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and each of the New England States had the proposed sweep been carried out; and next year I would hold National conferences in the State or States which should then have precipitated the question before the people for immediate action, as Michigan and California, should they vote for constitutional conventions. After we have done all we can to influence Congress and the States in which practical action is pending, then let us carry our propaganda to the other States where we feel we can do most toward preparing the way for a hopeful precipitation of amendments. This policy, it seems to me, will most surely and speedily bring to the women of the nation their citizen’s right to have their opinions counted at the ballot-box. I do not want the States to do less in and for themselves, but I do want all of them to combine their powers and concentrate them upon Congress. There can be efficient State societies without a national association, but there can be no efficient national organization except through and by the combination of those societies in the several States. [in hand of SBA] Sincerely yours U Susan B. Anthony
U TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Laura Clay Papers, Special Collections and Archives, KyU. 1. Round-robin letters like this one were a new technique of the Business Committee as its members tried to make decisions in the intervals between their
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infrequent meetings. Only scattered examples are known to survive. Laura Clay retained this copy of SBA’s letter. 2. What came to be known as the Spanish-American War began officially with a declaration of war on 25 April 1898; terms of victory for the United States were set by 10 December 1898 in the Treaty of Paris and ratified by the Senate on 6 February 1899. Within this new context, the Business Committee continued a debate begun at the recent Washington convention. There discussion about annual meetings stood in for disagreement about the relative importance of lobbying federal and state governments. To strengthen the association’s commitment to meeting in Washington during the first session of each Congress, favored by proponents of a federal amendment, a committee on constitutional revision proposed that the by-law about meeting in Washington be made part of the constitution itself. Recognizing that a constitution was harder to change than a by-law, Laura Clay, never an advocate of a federal amendment, challenged the change, and she won. As the Woman’s Journal explained, “there is a strong and growing sentiment in favor of holding the convention in a new place each year.” A further proposal, favored by Clay and Lillie Blake, would move the meeting, wherever held, into October or November. The convention left the Business Committee to decide about that change. (Evening Star, 19 February 1898, and Woman’s Journal, 12 March 1898, Film, 38:199, 207–13.) 3. Beginning in 1866 and continuing “in each sixteenth year thereafter,” Michigan voters were to decide whether to call a constitutional convention. If a convention were called in this instance, the Michigan Equal Rights Association would campaign to strike “male” from the qualifications for suffrage. But, in November 1898, voters did not meet the constitutional requirement that a majority of all eligible voters approve the measure to call a constitutional convention, though a simple majority approved it. In California in March 1897, the legislature initiated a referendum on whether to call a constitutional convention. Voters defeated the proposal at the election of November 1898. (Michigan Const. of 1850, Art. XX, sec. 2, as amended in 1862; Report of the Thirty-first Annual Convention, 1899, p. 103, Film, 39:722ff; San Francisco Call, 22 March 1897, 15 December 1898.) 4. The Organization Committee held a national conference at Cincinnati on 11 April 1898. (Woman’s Journal, 7 May 1898.) •••••••••
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ECS to Wendell P. Garrison1 New York, May 17, 1898.
To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: While thanking you for the space you have given in your columns to a review of my book “Eighty Years and More,” and for your comments, so
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fair in the main, I ask still more space to correct a statement misleading to 2 your readers and unjust to me. You accuse me of saying, “The State has nothing to do with either marriage or divorce.” On careful reading you will not find such a statement in any of my writings. My speech on “Marriage and Divorce” delivered before our Legislature in 1861, with a careful digest of the laws, under my father’s supervision, was published by the thousands and scattered all over the 3 State. My strictures on Wendell Phillips’s position on this question, pub4 lished in the New York Tribune in 1861; my answer to Judge Noah Davis, 5 on the same point, in the North American Review, in 1882; an article in 6 the Arena in 1890; many others on the same subject published in newspapers; my speeches in debates in conventions; the chapter on Marriage 7 and Divorce in my book recently published, all these alike show that I not only have recognized the wisdom of laws governing the marriage relation, but desired that, so far as they relate to the entering into the contract, they should be more restrictive. To my mind, parties to the marriage contract should be over eighteen years of age, and it should be entered into only with the consent of their parents. Any person of common sense must see the necessity of laws regulating the duties of parents to their children and to each other, the right of property, inheritance, support, alimony, etc., all important for the welfare of the State as well as the family. The only point in this relation where I have claimed individual sovereignty is the right of choice, and of “separation” when the parties are wholly incompatible and antagonistic. If they desire “divorce” in order to marry again, then the State reasserts itself. I have always asked for more liberal laws than unhappy husbands and wives enjoy in the State of New York. This is the extent of my heresy on the question of marriage and divorce. Having been true to one relation over fifty years, by example as well as precept, I have been a law-abiding citizen and rendered due honor to the State. U Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
U Nation 66 (26 May 1898): 403. In Film in error as to Edwin L. Godkin. 1. Wendell Phillips Garrison (1840–1907), the third son of William Lloyd Garrison, was editor of the Nation and literary editor of the New York Evening Post. (WWW1; J. H. McDaniels, Letters and Memorials of Wendell Phillips Garrison, Literary Editor of “The Nation,” 1865–1906 [Cambridge, Mass., 1908].) 2. “Mrs. Stanton’s Memoirs,” Nation 66 (5 May 1898): 347–48. Garrison had not reviewed ECS’s book but chosen John White Chadwick to write the anonymous
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article. The offending passage read, “In a chapter upon marriage and divorce she makes a frank avowal of her sentiments. They will be shocking to the ecclesiastical and conventional moralist, and few, we hope, will range themselves beside her in her contention that the state has nothing to do with either marriage or divorce, and that if only ‘divorce were made respectable and recognized by society as a duty,’ there would be no further trouble.” Although his review was “not entirely to your satisfaction,” Chadwick later wrote ECS, Garrison gave her an unusual opportunity to right the situation by publishing this letter. “I didn’t not mean to misrepresent you & am sorry that I did,” Chadwick continued in a double negative. As ECS observes here, nothing in her chapter supported Chadwick’s charge that she wanted the state removed from matters of marriage and divorce; nearly the entire chapter argued for legal reform. Nevertheless, Garrison also assigned Chadwick to review Ida Harper’s biography of SBA. (J. W. Chadwick to ECS, 7 April 1899, Film, 39:688–90.) 3. Address of Elizabeth Cady Stanton on the Divorce Bill, before the Judiciary Committee of the New York Senate, in the Assembly Chamber, Feb. 6, 1861 (Albany, N.Y., 1861), Film, 9:1101–9. Daniel Cady assisted ECS with legal citations for an earlier address to the legislature in 1854, but this is the only place where she claims he helped her with the address of 1861. Cady died in 1859. 4. She wrote the letter in 1860, not 1861. ECS to Editor, New York Daily Tribune, 30 May 1860, Film, 9:685. 5. Noah Davis (1818–1902) was at the time a justice of New York’s supreme court. (DAB.) Their debate on divorce in the pages of the North American Review apppeared in 1884, not 1882. ECS, “The Need of Liberal Divorce Laws,” Film, 23:951–62. 6. ECS, “Divorce vs. Domestic Warfare,” Film, 28:324–33. 7. In chapter fourteen entitled “Views on Marriage and Divorce,” ECS grouped the debates of 1860 and 1861 about divorce with the McFarland-Richardson case of 1869 and 1870. (Eighty Years, 215–33.) •••••••••
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Article by ECS [21 May 1898] War or Peace. Competition or Co-operation.
Many women feel aggrieved just now that they have had no voice in declaring war with Spain, or in effectively protesting against it as those in 1 authority. They seem to think that if they had the right of suffrage they could exert an influence in favor of arbitration and still further attempts at
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diplomacy. The men who are opposed to the war all have the suffrage, but what avails it when the popular enthusiasm of the few is at white heat and carries all before them? I do not share in this feeling, seeing that our civilization is still wholly on the war basis. Some good people talk peace and hold national and international conventions to promote it, but until we have justice, liberty and equality between man and man we can never realize “that peace that 2 passeth all understanding!” We are still struggling in the competitive stage of human development, governed by the law, “Each man for himself, starva3 tion and death take the hindmost.” There is no love and pity, no peace and prosperity for all, under this law. Our government, religion, industrial and social life, are all based on the competitive system. The war with Spain is but a pictorial representation in the panorama of human experience. Why feel a greater interest in an event that may happen once in a lifetime, in the horrors of war, than in the prolonged cruelties and outrages under the system of wage slavery? Our boys in blue are sheltered, fed and clothed in camp and hospital, stimulated with the virtue of patriotism, with prospective deeds of glory, a name on the page of history, trained as soldiers with martial music day by day, and gathered round their watch-fires at night in cheerful talk of victories won and others yet to be achieved. They voluntarily left their homes and loved ones, enlisting for the war, knowing that the struggle would be but for a few months or years at the most. But what of the boys in rags, working ten hours a day in mines where the sun never penetrates; in crowded factories, keeping time, not with martial music in varied manoeuvres, but in one monotonous round with pitiless machinery, forced to enlist for life in the war of competition? What of our boys in all the marts of trade, vainly pleading for some profitable work to do, half clothed, half fed, with no sure abiding place; tempted to steal for life’s necessities, in lonely prison cells they weep at the mercy of brutal keepers? Such is the fate of our boys in rags, enlisted for life. And what of the mothers of this multitude? Their hearts are wrung with no hope of brighter days for their boys, and when in this social struggle they fall, no marble shaft will mark their resting-place, no flowers on “decoration day” will beautify their graves. What is death on the field of battle to lifelong want and misery? Our present war with Spain is the first one on the page of history based on purely humanitarian grounds. It is not a war of conquest, but one for
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justice to an oppressed people; for liberty to the outraged multitude; to rescue women and children from the brutalities of a military despotism that has violated all the laws of warfare among civilized nations. I have no sympathy with all the sentimental outpouring about our boys in blue, when I consider the wrongs going on everywhere in our industrial system. A lady from England, recently visiting some of our large manufactories, found our operatives in a far worse condition than in the mother country. There are more laws for the protection of laborers in England than we have here. For example, in the bleaching department boys are stripped naked, oiled from head to foot and put in great vats of water strong with chemicals, to tramp pieces of shirting and sheeting until they are bleached. 4 In time it affects the eyes and lungs of the operatives. In England they have machinery for this purpose, but boys are cheaper in the land of the Puritans, in the chief manufacturing towns of Massachusetts. The visitor said the houses of the operatives were sadly bare and dingy, utterly destitute of all the comforts and conveniences of life. The sullen discontent of the masses, the wide-spread suffering and misery, strikes and mobs, are so many declarations of war between capital and labor, rich and poor, far more dangerous to our republic than war with Spain. The latter war, in the nature of things, will be short, sharp and decisive; but the war of competition has been waging for centuries, and the time has come to end that system forever and try a new experiment in industrial economics. The message I give my coadjutors on the suffrage platform today is that to make suffrage of any value, to either men or women, we must now educate our people into the higher idea of co-operation. At the end of fifty years of faithful service to one idea, we must now broaden our platform and demand co-operation. Women are working earnestly all over the country in many fragmentary reforms, each believing that any one achieved would usher in a new day of peace and plenty. If woman suffrage, temperance, social purity, peace, rigid Sunday laws, physical culture and higher education—could any one be achieved, the devotee of that particular reform thinks the millennium might be realized. But it takes all these and many more steps in progress to realize in co-operation the true principle in government, religion, industrial and social life. To those who have eyes to see, the period for all these fragmentary reforms has ended. The agitation for the broader questions of philosophical socialism is now in order.
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The startling ideas of our seers and prophets from Mazzini, St. Simon, 5 Fourier, Thomas Paine, down to Carey, John Stuart Mill, Bellamy and 6 Henry George, are now commanding the attention of our wisest thinkers, in all civilized countries. The co-operative idea will remodel political platforms, church creeds, state constitutions, social ethics, and make life worth living for all. Then the few will gladly give up the luxuries of life 7 that the many may enjoy its necessities. When the State inscribes on its banner, “Equal rights to all,” and our statute laws and constitutions are based on that idea, we shall have no need of suffrage associations. When the Church inscribes on its banner, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” all other 8 creeds will sink into insignificance. When the masses are well sheltered, fed, clothed and educated, there will be no need of temperance societies, as the vice of intemperance and many other evils are the outgrowth of the despair of poverty. When we substitute co-operation for competition, all our fragmentary reforms will be united in one general movement. 9 “Progress is the victory of a new thought over old superstitions.”
U Commonwealth 5 (21 May 1898): 3–7. 1. This essay expands the letter ECS sent to the national conference and fiftieth anniversary celebration in Rochester on 28 April 1898, Film, 38:462–73. 2. Phil. 4:7. 3. ECS adapts the proverb, “Every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost.” 4. Harriot Blatch investigated conditions of the workingclass in Fall River, Massachusetts. This description borrowed by ECS was later published in Harriot Stanton Blatch, “A Typical New England Factory Town,” Humanitarian: A Monthly Review of Sociological Science 14 (1899): 253–62. ECS’s use of the passage set off an argument in the Investigator. Susan Wixon, a well-known freethinker and suffragist from Fall River, called the description “totally and absolutely false.” She also suspected she knew the source, a woman “who traversed this city about a year ago in search of abuses in our industrial system.” Blatch then came forward to vouch for her mother’s statement as correct in every detail and urge Wixon to join forces with reformers in her state. “And now one word as to my ‘searching for abuses,’” she added. “I frankly admit I do, and having inherited plenty of pugnacity from Mrs. Stanton, no amount of aspersion can make me yield my point.” (Boston Investigator, 18 June, 13 August 1898.) 5. Guiseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) was the champion of the unification of Italy under a republican government. Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), known as Saint-Simon, was a French social reformer and socialist. Charles Fourier (1772–1837), a French theorist, developed the cooperative model for American antebellum utopian communities. Thomas Paine (1737–1809), an
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Englishmen with republican ideas, aided the American Revolution and defended the French Revolution. 6. Possibly she named Henry Charles Carey (1793–1879), an American political economist, but she knew Samuel Fenton Cary (1814–1900), a labor reformer, Greenbacker, and member of Congress from Ohio who worked closely with the National Labor Union after the Civil War. John Stuart Mill (1896–1873) was an English philosopher, politician, and distinguished supporter of woman suffrage in the United States and his home country. Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) published his utopian novel Looking Backward in 1888 and inspired a Nationalist movement to realize the book’s vision of a cooperative commonwealth. Henry George (1839–1897), reformer and advocate of a single tax imposed on land, ran for mayor of New York City in 1886 and secretary of state of New York in 1887. 7. On this quotation, see note above at 30 June 1897. 8. The idea is found in the Old and New Testaments. See Lev. 19:18, Matt. 19:19, 22:39, Mark 12:31, Rom. 13:9, Gal. 5:14, and James 2:8. 9. This quotation is widely attributed to ECS, though its point of origin in her work is not known. As a concise summation of nineteenth-century ideas about progress, any intellectual of her generation might be its parent. •••••••••
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Florence Kelley1 to ECS Chicago May 24th. 1898
My dear Mrs. Stanton, I was very sorry, indeed, not to be able to avail myself of Mrs. Lawrence’s kind invitation to call upon you during my brief stay in New York. I was 2 leaving the next day, after the Consumers’ League meeting and was only 3 able to go with my mother, who is very lame, to her train for Philadelphia, and then catch my own train for Chicago. It would have been a great pleasure to see you; and I have always remembered with pleasure a little visit which I made to you several years ago. I have read with great interest your 4 expression of my own opinion about the war. It is most extraordinary how melo-dramatic the good people do get over this episode in our history! 5 Although my young brother has undergone some acute hardships with his battery already, they do not seem to me to compare with the strain of effort for even a little amelioration of our social conditions. That long, steady, disappointing effort which we all have to make for civil improvements has none of the charm and excitement of the war; but how infinitely more vital
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it is! I think my brother stated the just attitude as to the war when he wrote to a friend who was begging him not to go with the battery: “I understand that there is, down below Tampa, a nuisance which must be abated at once. When it is abated, I’ll come home and talk it over with you.” When I next come to New York, I shall hope to stay longer than four days, and shall count upon seeing you then. Yours sincerely U Florence Kelley 6
[in hand of ECS] I send my my article that grew out of my letter to you. If you had not suggested to me to write on the war, the world would not have had this letter so highly complimented. Read & return enclosed letter. in haste U E. C. S.
U TLS, on letterhead of Hull-House, ECS Papers, DLC. 1. Florence Kelley (1859–1932), who grew up in Philadelphia, lived at HullHouse in Chicago, where she had already established her reputation as one of the country’s leading researchers into the working and living conditions of urban immigrants. Kelley’s father was well-known to both ECS and SBA, but she also had her own connections to the suffrage movement. In 1882, she was appointed assistant corresponding secretary of the National Woman Suffrage Association, and in the winter of 1898, she took part in the National-American’s convention in Washington. In 1899, Kelley left Chicago to become secretary of the National Consumers’ League in New York. (NAW; ANB; Papers, 4:136.) 2. Called by the eight-year old Consumers’ League of New York, this was a conference to organize the National Consumers’ League, to coordinate local efforts to improve conditions for people working in stores and for those making the goods sold in those stores. At a mass meeting when the conference concluded, Kelley spoke about sweatshops in Chicago. (New York Times, 15, 18 May 1898.) 3. Caroline Bartram Bonsall Kelley (1829–1903) was the widow of Congressman William Darrah Kelley of Philadelphia and mother of Florence Kelley. (Guide to Florence Kelley Papers, MssCol 6303, Manuscripts and Archives Division, NN.) 4. Kelley referred to some one of several articles in print about women, the war, and cooperation. The Woman’s Journal, 14 May 1898, published the message ECS sent to the suffrage conference in Rochester in April. At the date of May 21, the Commonwealth published an expanded version of that message, above at its date. And at the date of May 28, the Boston Investigator published essentially the same article. See Film, 38:462, 593. 5. Albert Bartram Kelley (1870–1932), a non-graduating member of the class of 1892 at the University of Pennsylvania, enlisted on 27 April 1898 in the Pennsylvania National Guard, Battery A, with the rank of Quartermaster Sergeant. Early
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in May, the battery was sent to guard the shipyards at Newport News, Virginia. Still assigned there, Kelley was discharged on 29 July 1898 by order of the War Department. (General Alumni Catalogue of the University of Pennsylvania, 1922 [Philadelphia, 1922], 79; Logan Howard-Smith and J. F. Reynolds Scott, eds., The History of Battery A (Formerly Known as the Keystone Battery) and Troop A, N.G.P. [Philadelphia, 1912], 169; Philadelphia Inquirer, 20 September 1932.) 6. ECS probably addressed SBA in this note. Her message to the Rochester conference, the first in her series of articles about the war, was sent in the form of a letter addressed to SBA. See Film, 38:463–73. •••••••••
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SBA to Members of the Business Committee #17 Madison St., Rochester, N.Y., May [27], 1898.
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Dear Member of the Business Committee:— Since sending out my letter of May 11 to the committee, expressing my opinion as to time and place of holding our next convention, moving it over to the spring and taking it permanently away from the capital of the nation, I have received letters touching upon these and other points from every member except Miss Laura Clay, and after having waited thus long I have made up my mind that she has left these matters to the rest of us to decide. 2 Federation of Clubs. A person not a member of our committee wrote me suggesting the appointment of Mrs. Catt as a fraternal delegate to the meeting of the Federation of Clubs to be held in Denver in June. I have made no such appointment because the Federation has not, to my knowledge, officially invited our National body to send delegates and has always given it to be understood that it did not include suffrage organizations, and I think it would be a piece of impertinence for us to send fraternal delegates to a body which does not invite our fellowship. Neither has any member of our Business Committee been officially invited to represent our association at Denver. But if the rest of you differ from me and feel that we ought to send delegates, I would suggest the names of such as are members of the Federation, 3 Mrs. Blankenburgh, of Philadelphia, Alice Stone Blackwell, of Boston, 4 and Mrs. McCulloch, of Chicago. If I knew a San Francisco woman who
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was to be in Denver, would add her name. I think it would be well to put one of the Denver women on, say the president of our club there, Mrs. 5 T. M. Patterson. Neither Mrs. Catt nor any of our Business Committee would feel able to pay her own expenses there, and surely it would not be wise for the association to run in debt to pay them for anyone. Though I am sure that a great deal of good work for suffrage could be done by having Mrs. Catt or, indeed, any of our official board in Denver, I think our association’s dignity should be consulted and we should wait for an invitation. 6 At Nashville, last November, Mrs. Henrotin told me that she was going to invite me to Denver, and that she was bound to make this last gathering under her presidency a most telling one in the line of suffrage. I have not heard from her since. The newspapers advertise Miss Shaw to preach in one of their largest opera houses on Sunday, but as I understand it, she has not been invited to Denver, and she would feel no more like making the long and expensive journey to preach one sermon than the rest of us. So if none of us, or the society, have received official invitation to go or to send fraternal delegates, it seems to me that the self-respecting thing for us to do is not to appear there as representatives of our organization. Of course Mrs. Henrotin and all their leaders know that we are exceedingly interested in the Federation, and would gladly be reckoned as worthy of fraternal and of full representation in it. In Answer to Mrs. Upton’s of May 13 and One Later. 7
Neblett Bonds. We voted that one-half of the $500 should be appropriated to the Organization Committee, to go toward paying the deficit of 8 the Southern campaign, and she thinks that the bonds ought to be sold to make the division. I think the first thing is for the treasurer to ascertain if the bonds are really worth the $500. If they are, then anyone of the committee or any friend of the cause who has money to invest would be willing to buy them at that price. Neither she nor the lawyer, Mr. Sirine, gives the amount of the premium, but he says that he enclosed $2 in cash to fill out the balance, so the information I have received leaves me in the dark as to whether we have paid a premium of ten or twenty per cent. You see that unless the interest on these bonds is very high no one will care to give more than their face value for them, since interest is not paid on the premium, only on the original value. Of course there may be people in Augusta who would be willing to pay the premium price on them, but neither you nor I would like to do so. My advice is that the treasurer shall ascertain the facts
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in the case, and not sell the bonds at anything less than $500 and get more if she can. Rather than to sacrifice the bonds, I would let the debt of the 9 society stand as it is. In Answer to Mrs. Catt’s Bombshell of May 14. 11
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Cost of Washington Convention. The fact that the Washington convention failed to pay expenses should no more be counted against holding our meetings in that city, than the fact that the Southern campaign and that 12 in Iowa, in 1897, failed to pay expenses should cause us to throw up all work in that line. Of course, we hoped as much to meet expenses in the one case as in the other, and we failed as badly in both. Mrs. Catt talks about the policy of the association as if somebody were responsible for it. So far as your president is concerned, she has endeavored to leave the decision of all matters to the seven young women of the board. The only thing in which she took a decided stand last year was that the Fiftieth Anniversary of the suffrage movement should not be degraded into a fifth-rate affair by going into an unpopular church or a fifth-rate hotel. The failure to get good audiences in Washington this year was largely owing to the war excitement and 13 the blowing-up of the Maine at the very beginning of the anniversary. Mrs. Catt says the results of our convention in Washington are most intangible. They are somewhat so when we have no first-class headquarters there for a month or six weeks prior to the meetings, and all responsible officers and managers flee out of the city the minute the convention is ended. So far as propaganda all over the country is concerned, had a good committee of even one remained in Washington and worked with the Special Committee of the Senate to secure the publication of their hearing’s speeches, and then had ten or twenty thousand copies struck off and as many of the House hearing and placed in envelopes by the government, franked by the Senators and Representatives and directed to suffragists throughout the entire nation, we should have scattered through the House hearing the best records given from actual experience of school, municipal and full suffrage ever formulated, and through the Senate hearing the best collection of the 14 philosophy of the movement ever made. To barely go to Washington and hold a convention, and hurry out of it immediately afterwards, does not and cannot accomplish much. Of course, as all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and all play and no work makes him a mere toy, so all work before Congress and none in the States, or all work in the States and none before Congress, would result poorly. Mrs. Catt says, “It is very plain to me that whatever means the associa-
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tion decides on to influence Congress, it will never again be through an annual Washington convention. If such a decision is ever made, I prophesy there will be a break in the association. The feeling on this subject is far more intense than some of our Business Committee may be aware of. I learn that a caucus was held in Washington to discuss the advisability of a division of the association even as it is.” That looks exceedingly threatening, as if somebody were proposing the rule or ruin policy. The people who kick and bolt are not generally those who are studying the best interest of the National or the wishes of their constituency, nor are they those who propose to abide by the opinions and votes of the 15 majority! The prime movers in the Federal Association seceded from the National-American because they would not abide by the decision of the majority. I don’t like this talk about division, secret caucuses, etc. I know from experience that whoever the parties are, they have probably never given personally of their time and money, nor has their State ever paid in auxiliary dues to the National, enough to be weighed or measured in the balance as against expenses of the most economical order. The one cause of complaint against the Washington conventions, so far as my knowledge goes—and I think probably I have had as much experience as any one—has been on the part of individual speakers, or of States on behalf of their pet speakers, because they could not have the most conspicuous places on the 16 program with the most liberal allowance of time. Take Mrs. Duniway for instance, who has written for years of the difficulty she has had in keeping the State of Oregon auxiliary to the National because the Program Committee did not put the president of that State on as an evening speaker, etc. Oregon, in the last ten years, has not put money enough in the treasury of the National to pay for the postage stamps of the Business Committee for one month. It is similar contributors who talk most about the extravagance of the Washington conventions. Extra Expenses, Program, Meals Served in Room, Stenographer, etc. I have no doubt but what Mrs. Avery, with her large experience for twenty years in managing the program, has learned to do the best possible, and that she commissioned Lucy Anthony to do what she considered for the best. As has been explained over and over to the Business Committee every year, the extra expense of holding the type over from the first edition to 17 the last is very small. At any rate, the best way in the world to change the order of things in that department would be to appoint a new chairman of the Program Committee. Mrs. Avery has borne the brunt of it and taken the curses, as well as the criticisms, for a score of years, and if there is any
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member of the Business Committee who feels she can do better, I, as president, want to see her made the chairman. As to the extra meals at the hotel, I ordered them myself. For a whole week two or three girls of the District worked in my room (much to my discomfort, I admit, but I had them there to save the expense of hiring another), and it seemed to me that the least the association could do was to give them their luncheons at the hotel, which put down the price to thirtyfive cents or thereabouts!! Whether myself or any of the other officers had shorthand work done by the hotel-girl, it is presumable that she used her best judgment in so doing. I must say this whole series of criticisms of what was done by the different members, according to the best judgment and ability of each, seems to me pitiful. I want to feel that I have the confidence of the other members that whatever expense I incur I do it in the most economical way, for, as a rule, I am more economical for the association than I am for myself. And I am sure that whenever one of you girls makes an expense for the association, you are more economical and more exacting in its interests than you would be for any personal matter of your own. Then as to criticism from the delegates of the different States. When they come up to the annual convention, if they consider the Business Committee, or any member of it, reckless, extravagant or ill-advised in methods, they have ample opportunity, in their informal ballots, to bear their testimony against any or all of the members, and it does seem to me that if there had been this discontent, bordering on secession, it would have manifested itself at the ballot-box. Instead of this, Mrs. Catt herself, who had the handling of one-half or two-thirds of all the money contributed, received, if I remember rightly, the unanimous endorsement of every delegate; and Mrs. Upton, who had 18 received and paid out every dollar of it was endorsed unanimously too. Your president, who had nothing to do with the money except to beg all she could and put it into the treasury, and to sign the vouchers—often after the treasurer had paid out the money—received unanimous endorsement, as did the recording secretary. Then our corresponding secretary received the unanimous approbation of the two hundred delegates, more or less, while our vice-president-at-large, who had had comparatively nothing to do or say about expending the money, but who had probably done quite as much as any other member of the board to induce others to contribute, did have a few votes against her. As to the two auditors, they were almost unanimously endorsed. So you see the growlers either were not delegates,
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or if they were, they were so small in number as to make no showing at the 19 election or else too modest to let their discontent appear in their votes!! The Conferences. Miss Blackwell, in a letter to Miss Anthony on May 16, says: “I don’t think there is any danger of a split in the association. There are always a few malcontents, but they are fewer than ever before, and I don’t think they could organize a bolt of respectable size enough to induce anybody to join it. If such a thing should occur, you can rely upon all the fighting forces of my father and myself in opposing it, but I don’t think it will be tried.” After expressing herself as always having been in favor of moveable conventions every year, she very philosophically says that she thinks Mrs. Catt overlooks the facts that the last Washington convention was exceptional and that an exceedingly large hall was taken because it was the Fiftieth Anniversary, and closes by saying which I think is very level-headed, that “instead of retrenching on the work it would be better to increase our income. I don’t wish to be a perpetual harper on one string, but the only reasonably sure way that I know of to bring in large sums is by bazaars. Since it has seemed necessary to give up the National bazaar let us urge the different States to hold the State bazaars and give half or better still, the whole of the proceeds to the National.” Then she speaks of California, Rochester and Brooklyn as good places. She thinks Boston would not be good, as they had one there last year. This letter makes me 20 feel that the next Bulletin should recommend local societies not only to celebrate the Fiftieth Anniversary, but also, if they possibly can, to get up local bazaars. To Mrs. Upton’s of May 18. Extra Expense. I agree with all she says about this, and can testify to the association that she and Mrs. Avery held their nightly vigils altogether too early in the morning for my comfort, and that I don’t think Mrs. Upton will be extravagant in any direction any more than Mrs. Catt or Mrs. Avery will. You may all of you criticise my economy as much as you please. It will not trouble me an iota; for when I have given my life to the work, without one penny of salary, if anybody growl because I take a carriage or have an extra meal, or do this or that, I am willing they should, for it does not hurt me a particle. But I am very sensitive over any criticism made on any of the young women who are just beginning to give their lives and services to help the cause, and it hurts me that anyone of you should be made to feel it necessary to explain about the spending of every dime in every possible direction, when you are giving yourselves without money and without price.
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Nicolas and Elizabeth. I am very glad that all of you have come to see that they should not be taken away from their legitimate places. Each should be left to assist the officer whose clerk she is, and now that Mrs. Catt has a clerk for her committee I should think it was a very poor use to make of her to put her in a lobby to sell pictures or tend post-office, so I am glad that we all agree we will find some other young women in Washington or other places for our clerical work at a convention. The three or four officers who must take the personal responsibility in getting up and running a convention must have their confidential clerks to help them through the entire days and nights of the convention as well as before and after it. Mrs. Upton says of the expenses of conventions that when held in Washington we have larger local and hotel bills, and when held in Des Moines we have larger traveling expenses, while the contributions and pledges in Washington are much larger than when held in places outside the capital of the nation. The Future of the Association. Of course we all knew that the organization of a few small societies in new States, whether South, East or West, if not kept up by visits from the National officers from year to year would be exceedingly transient. There is nothing the matter with our policy, except that it is an utter impossibility, with the small number of speakers we have, to carry on campaigns in every State throughout the best part of each year. How to develop more first-class speakers is the great question. It certainly is not encouraging for young women just graduated from our colleges to enlist with us when we have not money enough to pay them comfortable salaries while they practice speaking to small audiences, as they must until they have made reputations to enable them to draw the people together. Our friends who have the money have not the far-sighted faith to invest largely in paying for the support of young women thus to work, and we, as an association, cannot compel the people to go out and listen to one without a national reputation. So if any of you can devise a way by which young women may practice oratory and have their expenses paid meantime I shall be very glad. In Answer to Mrs. McCulloch’s Letter of May 16. As Mrs. Catt in her letter of May 24 has answered each of Mrs. McCulloch’s points, I will run through it. Business Committee Meetings. It is of vital importance that we should hold these more frequently. Can you not all manage to meet here at our
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home during the summer? Each of you will be taking an outing somewhere, and you might just as well all pass through this city and stop for two or three days. I propose to spend the entire summer at home. Expenses Again. “As Miss Anthony did not succeed in raising money to pay for that expensive hall.” You all of you know that the last has been an exceptional year of the fifty with me, and that had I been in my usual state of freedom I should have taken the bits in my teeth, gone to Washington and at least tried to not only raise the money but to work up the convention myself, for the Washington convention requires very different manipulation from one held in a rural city. So there is no one to blame but just your president, and she is not one particle sorry that she insisted on going with the meeting into a first-class opera house. The Bulletin. I don’t recommend giving it up, but I would like it to be made a great deal more practical, and in its next number I hope there will be something to stir up the local and State clubs throughout the country to feel that instead of stopping their home work they should redouble their energies and get up celebrations, bazaars, etc. I don’t agree with Mrs. Catt about trying to avoid letting the anti-suffrage folks know what we are doing. They have their spies out as well as Spain, but I believe in having one little, practical document sent to our workers all over the country every month. Somehow or other, it does seem to me that the locals ought to contribute enough to pay for the little Bulletin. I think it is marvelous that the leaflets have come so near paying their own way, and if they do not sink us in debt any deeper than $30, each year, I should surely continue them; for there is scarcely a week when there does not come up some new incident in regard to suffrage, which should be put in a permanent leaflet. Organization. Mrs. Catt’s statement of her plan of managing this work seem to me satisfactory. I don’t think, however, that in the financial statement money paid for hall-rent, posters, etc. should be charged to the name of Miss Hay or any other organizer. And then in the statement of the expenses of the convention which Mrs. Upton sent, it seemed to me petty to say by whose orders posters, pens and ink and paper pads were bought. It is quite enough if the money has been paid out and the committee approved of it, without saying which individual transacted the business. There, I believe I have touched on every point which has been under discussion by the different members of the committee. So let us have trust in each other, and all study how to get the best results. Affectionately yours, U Susan B. Anthony
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[in hand of SBA] p.s—I now have a $1,000— in bank for the Press 22 Bureau —but I agree with Mrs Harper that it will not be wise to open her work until this war is ended & may that be soon, for I feel sure Mrs H. will give our movement a new & strong impetus with the newspaper world—S. B A Y TLS, Anthony-Avery Papers, NRU. 1. The typist misdated this letter 11 May 1898. On a postcard to Rachel Avery postmarked May 27, SBA wrote, “Have dictated answer to you & the rest of B.C.’s round letters—but it may not get off to night.” A separate letter dictated to Avery is also dated May 27. (Film, 38:579–84.) 2. Organized in March 1890, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs held its fourth biennial meeting from June 21 to 27 in Denver. Suffrage societies were prohibited from joining the federation, but many suffragists attended its meetings as delegates of their clubs. (Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914 [New York, 1980], 94–97.) 3. Lucretia Longshore Blankenburg (1845–1937), a second-generation suffragist, became president of the Pennsylvania suffrage association in 1892. (NAW; ANB.) 4. Catharine Gouger Waugh McCulloch (1862–1945) was a lawyer practicing in Chicago with her husband. She chaired the Legislative Committee of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association and served briefly as an auditor of the NationalAmerican association. (NAW; ANB; Women Building Chicago.) 5. Katherine Grafton Patterson (1839–1902), wife of the owner of the Rocky Mountain News, knew SBA from the amendment campaign of 1877, when she was an officer of the Colorado Woman Suffrage Association. She contributed the Colorado chapter to the History of Woman Suffrage with her sister, and she and her daughters worked in the campaign of 1893. (Sybil Downing and Robert E. Smith, Tom Patterson: Colorado Crusader for Change [Niwot, Colo., 1995]; History, 3:712–25.) 6. Ellen Martin Henrotin (1847–1922), club leader and reformer of Chicago, served as president of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs from 1894 to 1898. She and SBA talked while in Nashville for the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition late in October 1897. (NAW; ANB; SBA diary, 27–29 October 1897, Film, 36:247ff.) 7. Ann Viola Wright Neblett (1842–1897) of South Carolina bequeathed five hundred dollars to the National-American Woman Suffrage Association, and George William Sirrine (1847–1927), her executor, paid the sum in bonds from Neblett’s estate. Sirrine, a businessman and friend of Neblett’s in Greenville, later found himself in a legal quagmire that required three appeals to the state supreme court, when a relative challenged the will he attempted to execute, but the bequest to the association survived the challenge. (American Women; Woman’s Journal, 5 June 1897; Will of A. Viola Neblett, Book H, pp. 54–57, Probate Court of Green-
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ville County, S.C.; Turnipseed v. Sirrine et al., 35 Southeastern Reporter 757, 1035 [1900], and Turnipseed v. Sirrine et al., 38 Southeastern Reporter 423 [1901]; J. C. Garlington, Men of the Time, Sketches of Living Notables: A Biographical Encyclopedia of Contemporaneous South Carolina Leaders [Spartanburg, S.C., 1902], 387; Archie Vernon Huff, Jr., Greenville: The History of the City and County in the South Carolina Piedmont [Columbia, S.C., 1995], 253–54.) 8. As of 1 January 1898, the Organization Committee had bills of $1,457 to pay, four hundred dollars of which were owed to seven of its organizers and eight hundred dollars were due SBA on a personal loan to the committee. Debts specific to the southern campaign were not broken out. (“Statement of the Organization Committee” and “Statement of Organization Office Account,” typescripts, prepared January 1898, NAWSA Papers, DLC.) 9. The bonds yielded $502.50 that the association divided between the general treasury and the Organization Committee. (Report of the Thirty-first Annual Convention, 1899, pp. 132, 146, Film, 39:722ff.) 10. On 15 May 1898, SBA was surprised by a letter to the Business Committee from Carrie Catt, “Showing under the ink & between the lines dissatisfaction pitiful!! with Mrs Foster Avery—Lucy E. & my own management of Wash. Con.” (SBA diary, 15 May 1898, Film, 37:604ff.) 11. Expenses for the Washington convention of 1898 totaled $1,891.03 and included $1,200 rent for the Columbia Theatre. At Des Moines in 1897, the association paid only $120 to rent the Central Christian Church and spent a total of $450.06 on the meeting. (Report of the Thirtieth Annual Convention, 1898, p. 157, and Report of the Thirty-first Annual Convention, 1899, pp. 147–48, Film, 38:109ff, 39:722ff.) 12. At the Washington convention, the National-American renewed its campaign in Iowa to win passage of a constitutional amendment. Antisuffragists from New York State took that as a signal to launch their own campaign in opposition. Suffragists submitted petitions bearing fifty thousand names to legislators, they opened an office near the state capital to keep an eye on lawmakers, and a joint hearing before the committees on suffrage of the house and senate was held early in February. But later that month, the senate defeated woman suffrage by a vote of forty to forty-seven. (Woman’s Journal, 19 February 1898; History, 4:634.) 13. On the evening of 15 February 1898, the United States battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbor, killing two hundred and sixty-six Americans. Though later shown to be accidental, the explosion, in the hands of people pressing for war with Spain, became a reason to start the war. 14. At hearings before congressional committees on 15 February 1898, suffragists were assigned topics: the House Committee on the Judiciary heard evidence about the impact of woman suffrage and the Senate Select Committee on Woman Suffrage heard philosophical arguments for the rights of women. For coverage of the hearings, see Film, 38:243–70. 15. The Federal Suffrage Association was in part born of disagreement with the decision to unite the American and National suffrage associations in 1890. At
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its founding in 1892, SBA worried that the departure of well-known leaders like Olympia Brown of Wisconsin, Sarah Perkins of Ohio, and Miles Castle of Illinois would resemble the division among suffragists that occurred in 1869. See Papers, 5:403, 404n, 461, 462n, 463, 488. 16. Abigail Jane Scott Duniway (1834–1915) of Portland, Oregon, was the preeminent advocate of woman suffrage in the Pacific Northwest from 1871 until her death and usually at odds with eastern leaders. (NAW; ANB.) 17. Carrie Catt may have objected to the cost of printing multiple editions of the convention program, as Rachel Avery did in advance of the anniversary meeting. SBA kept two editions, a fifth edition in Scrapbook 1876–1903, SBA Papers, DLC, and a second edition in SBA scrapbook 27, Rare Books, DLC. 18. In fiscal year 1898, the association’s general treasury took in $7,261.79, including a loan of $1,500 from Mary Anthony; its expenditures of $6,986.17 included a repayment of $500 to Mary Anthony. The Organization Committee took in $6,759.17 and spent $6,481.36, including $800 paid to SBA toward settling an earlier loan. (Report of the Thirty-first Annual Convention, 1899, pp. 132, 146, 148.) 19. All officers won reelection in February by large majorities. SBA, Alice Blackwell (recording secretary), and Carrie Catt (chair of Organization Committee) ran uncontested; Anna Shaw (vice president at large) drew the most rivals and lowest total vote but still won by a margin of one hundred and fifty votes. Clara Colby vied for several offices: when she lost to Shaw, she stood against Rachel Avery (corresponding secretary); losing that contest, she ran against Harriet Upton (treasurer); and finally she stood for second auditor against Catharine McCulloch. Laura Clay won first auditor in a contest with McCulloch. (Report of the Thirtieth Annual Convention, 1898, p. 62.) 20. The National Suffrage Bulletin, edited and published monthly by Carrie Catt from September 1895 to July 1901, was sent free to presidents of local suffrage clubs. “It is not designed to keep the reader informed upon the ethics of woman suffrage,” Catt explained, “but to inspire her to do practical work to bring the reality.” (“Report Organization Committee of National-American Woman Suffrage Association Annual Convention, January Twenty-third to Twenty-ninth, 1896,” Supplement to National Suffrage Bulletin, February 1896, p. 10, in SBA scrapbook 25, Rare Books, DLC.) 21. These were Nicolas M. Shaw (c. 1867–?), later Fraser, and Elizabeth J. Hauser (1873–1958). Shaw, a niece of Anna Shaw, lived for many years with her aunt in Philadelphia. When she first took up suffrage work, she was known as Mattie A. N. Shaw; Nicolas was her grandmother’s given name. After her marriage to Samuel Fraser in 1903, she lived in Geneseo, New York, and worked in the state suffrage association. (SBA diary, 11 February 1897, Film, 36:247ff; Anna Howard Shaw and Elizabeth Jordan, The Story of a Pioneer [New York, 1915], 267; Federal Census, Big Rapids, Mich., 1880, and Geneseo, N.Y., 1910; WWW3, s.v. “Fraser, Samuel”; History, 6:448; Papers, 5:414, 419–20n.) Hauser, the daughter of German immigrants in Girard, Ohio, became a bookkeeper and journalist while still a teenager, and about 1895, she became Harriet Upton’s personal secretary in nearby War-
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ren. When the National-American’s headquarters were moved to Warren in 1904, Hauser was the principal staff member. An active suffragist until 1920, Hauser went on to work with the League of Women Voters. (David D. Van Tassel and John J. Grabowski, eds., The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History [Bloomington, Ind., 1987]; Joseph G. Butler, Jr., History of Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley, Ohio [Chicago and New York, 1921], 2:191–92.) 22. SBA created accounts for the Press Bureau at the back of her diary for 1898. By this date in May, she had raised $875 from forty donors. At year’s end, she transferred $1,416 to the account for 1899. (SBA diary, 1898, memoranda pages, Film, 37:604ff.) •••••••••
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SBA to Elizabeth Smith Miller Rochester, N.Y. May 30, 1898.
My Dear Friend:— ¶1 Yours of May 25th, enclosing the speech made by your father on 1 Cuba, a quarter of a century ago, came duly. I read every word of that appeal, and was made to feel ashamed that I knew so little of the ten years war on the part of those liberty-loving Cubans. I hope that you have sent a copy with one of your beautiful letters to Charles Fitch, editor of the Post-Express of this city, and to ever so many other editors. A personal letter accompanying your father’s speech will be apt to call attention to its importance and secure its publication. I fully agree with you that the only excuse for this war is that through it another people may be able to secure their liberty. It was a splendid thought of yours to revive that characteristic appeal of your father’s, and I hope that it will be printed all over the country. 2 ¶2 I have read the comments of Miss Putnam on my failure to call out the descendants of Frederick Douglass at the Pioneers’ Session 3 in Washington. We had had his grandson playing the violin for us and he had received a most cordial encore, and if I failed to call out the descendants of Frederick on that evening it was because my eyes failed to discern any of them on the platform or in the audience. I had especially asked the children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews of all pioneers, to come to the platform, but very few of them did so, hence I was obliged to depend on my short sight to catch those whom I knew, scattered through the audience. As I began reading Miss Putnam,
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I supposed she was going to criticise me because I did not give my consent for Mrs. Douglass to have an hour at the evening session to 4 present the horrors of the chain-gangs of the South. I refused her request because I felt that we were not assembled to right the wrongs of the negroes South, or the white boys and girls of the North, and most of all because no person on the program had over thirty minutes. I told her that it was impossible to give her even thirty minutes without taking time from some one to whom it had already been allotted. ¶3 Miss Putnam, like so many of the women interested in all the different reforms, makes the blunder of supposing that our suffrage associations are to take up and protest against everything which we believe to be wrong in the country and the world, whereas our one business is to demand of our government, State and national, the right for women to have their opinions counted at the ballot-box on everyone of the different questions brought there. I was at the Spiritualistic jubilee meeting 5 here yesterday evening, and at its close one woman upbraided me for not declaring that I was a Spiritualist and giving to that cause the weight of my influence, saying that Spiritualism and woman suffrage both had their birth here in Rochester the same year, and that they were twins and ought always to be associated together. So I had to tell her, as I told Mrs. Douglass, that while I rejoiced in every good work and word for women by any and every society, yet I could not feel that the objects of the different societies were questions to be discussed on our platform. But it is very difficult for people to understand this position. ¶4 I hear that Miss Putnam is visiting Miss Howland at Sherwood. I shall write and tell her that I am very sorry that on that evening when I was calling on the descendants of the pioneers I failed to especially ask for those who belonged to the Douglass family, if there were any in the hall. Nobody was in fault except myself and themselves, for if anyone of them, or anybody else in the hall or on the platform, had sent me up 6 the name or whispered one to me, I certainly should have called it. ¶5 Tell Nannie I meant to have written a little word for her entertainment, but the time slipped away and I failed to do so. I hope it was a nice gathering. Very sincerely yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Loan Collection of SBA Memorial, NRU. Directed to Geneva, N.Y.
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1. Let Crushed Cuba Arise! Substance of the Speech of Gerrit Smith, in Syracuse, July 4th 1873, originally published as a broadside in 1873. SBA read it that summer after her federal criminal conviction and complained that Smith forgot to worry about equality for women. (Papers, 2:621.) 2. Caroline F. Putnam (1826–1917), a graduate of Oberlin College, had worked at the Holley School in Lottsburg, Virginia, with her companion Sallie Holley since 1870. Emily Howland and Elizabeth Miller were major funders of this school for African Americans. Many letters in Putnam’s year-long crusade against SBA are lost, including the one forwarded by Elizabeth Miller, but SBA answers charges Putnam listed earlier for Samuel May. She charged that SBA failed to include the Douglass family in a “Roll Call” of pioneers, and her omission “was a sop to Cerberus—the Caste-spirit—” (Patricia Harland Gaffney, The Emily Howland Papers at Cornell University: A Guide to the Microfilm Publication [Ithaca, N.Y., 1975], 14–15; New York Evening Post, 27 January 1917; C. F. Putnam to Samuel May, 7 March 1898, Samuel May Papers, MHi.) 3. Joseph Henry Douglass (1871–1935), grandson of Frederick Douglass, was a noted violinist who played for woman suffragists on this and a number of other occasions. He later headed the violin department at Howard University’s School of Music. (Eileen Southern, Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African Musicians [Westport, Conn., 1982].) 4. According to Caroline Putnam’s letter to Samuel May, she and Helen Douglass approached SBA at a reception in Washington before the annual convention opened for permission to address the association about women’s lot in the convict labor camps of the South. (C. F. Putnam to Samuel May, 7 March 1898, Samuel May Papers, MHi.) 5. This was Rochester’s second celebration since January marking the fiftieth anniversary of modern spiritualism. On the fifth day, SBA chose to hear speeches by old friends Fred L. H. Willis, Elizabeth Lowe Watson, and Cora L. V. Richmond. (Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 30 May 1898.) 6. When Emily Howland visited SBA in September, she sent ahead her copy of Caroline Putnam’s charges. Summing up the subsequent conversation she had with SBA, Howland told Putnam, “It seems to me that she is about as far from cringing or pandering to prejudice, as anyone I ever saw. If she ever has, evidently that occasion was not one of those lapses from her heroic attitude.” (E. Howland to C. F. Putnam, 14 September 1898, Emily Howland Papers, PSC-Hi.)
¶2
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Textual Notes nieces and nephews nof all pioneers,p to come
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Robert K. Beach1 to SBA Rochester, N.Y., June 14, 1898.
My dear Miss Anthony: Possibly I may be the first to bring to you the news that the University of Rochester Trustees at their annual meeting this afternoon adopted a resolution opening the doors of the college to young women students. I have not yet received text of the resolution, but understand that this action 2 permits young women to pursue all courses open to young men. I learned this fact after the reporters had left the office on their evening assignments. I was very anxious to get your opinion of the action of the Trustees, and not wishing to disturb you at a late hour of the night, I take the liberty of asking you to write out a brief statement to be used in the form of an interview. I know that it will be read with keen interest not only by all friends of Woman Suffrage, but by the “antis” as well. It would be especially significant appearing in the same columns with the report of the Trustees’ action. Hoping that you can oblige me, I remain [in hand of Robert Beach] Very truly yours U Robert K. Beach City Editor Herald [in hand of SBA] 10—or 10.30—at night S. B. A. was in bed & just going off into her first sleep—when she was roused by Sister Mary—Mrs & Miss 3 Harper coming to her room— She talked it—& Winifred wrote it out—& signed S B A’s name!! Y TLS, on Rochester Herald letterhead, SBA scrapbook 27, Rare Books, DLC. 1. Robert K. Beach (c. 1866–1937) was a printer and reporter, working at this time as city editor of the Rochester Herald. He left Rochester in 1899 and settled two years later in Jamestown, New York, where he helped to found the Jamestown Post. (New York Times, 22 June 1937; Herman W. Knox, ed. Who’s Who in New York: A Biographical Dictionary of Prominent Citizens of New York City and State, 7th ed. [New York, 1918].) 2. The Board of Trustees voted ten to three. Without the final wording, SBA responded to the gist of their resolution’s first part, “Resolved, that it is the sense of the Board of Trustees of the University of Rochester, that women should be
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admitted to this Institution upon the same terms and under the same conditions as men.” She sent back a hymn of praise. “Glory Hallelujah! This is better news to me than victory over Spain. It is a peace-victory, achieved only by the death of prejudice and precedents,” she began. Her statement reminded readers that twenty-five years of agitation changed the trustees’ minds, applauded the trustees for their “act of justice,” and encouraged young girls to begin preparing for university work. Neither she nor Beach yet knew the second part, “Resolved, that this policy be put into effect when the women of Rochester shall raise the necessary funds for the use of the University, estimated at $100,000, and under such conditions as may be decided upon by the Executive Committee of this Board.” When that condition was known, the Democrat and Chronicle pointed out that the second part undercut the first part as the terms and conditions for money were not required of men. “The separation of women into a class and selling them privileges is not just the thing.” Within the next few days, while alumni gathered in Rochester for reunions, Helen Montgomery pledged to them that Rochester’s Women’s Educational and Industrial Union would raise the money. (Minutes, Board of Trustees, University of Rochester, 14 June 1898, vol. 3, p. 25, NRU; Jesse Leonard Rosenberger, Rochester, The Making of a University [Rochester, 1927], 264; Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 16, 17 June 1898, SBA scrapbook 27, Rare Books, DLC; Rochester Herald, 15 June 1898, Film, 38:615.) 3. Winnifred Harper (1874–1968?), later Cooley, graduated from May Sewall’s Girls’ Classical School in Indianapolis and from Stanford University. After her graduation in May 1896, she followed her mother into journalism for the amendment campaign and later made a career out of lecturing and writing. In 1899, she married George Eliot Cooley, a Universalist minister. Her date of death often appears as October 1967, but the Social Security Administration records November 1968. (Sarah Comstock, ed., Stanford ‘96: An Accounting in 1926 [New York, 1926], 127–29, courtesy of the Stanford Archives; Stanford University, Alumni Directory and Ten-Year Book, 1891–1931 [Stanford University, Calif., 1932], 252; Woman’s Who’s Who 1914; WhNAA.) •••••••••
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Article by ECS [9 July 1898]
What Would You Substitute for the Bible as a Moral Guide? The influence of the Bible as a moral guide. Philosophers have always differed as to whether the moral sense was 1 innate, or depended wholly upon education and environment. I think that the rudiments of all our powers, perceptions, sentiments and emotions
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are all parts of our original organization. As all books have emanated from the brain of man, and each one gives to us the highest idea of the writer, they must have been the best guides for their time. Thus the Bible has served its purpose as in their time all other books have done. I do not see that it has any special claims, above all other books, for the truth of its historical records, its science, its philosophy, the beauty of its style, or its principles of justice. In its laws it is not equal to the American system of jurisprudence, nor to our National Constitution, with its fifteen amendments. Its poetry, in sublimity and beauty, does not equal Milton, Dante, 2 Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Tennyson, Longfellow or Whittier. The drama 3 of Job is inferior to many of Shakespeare’s tragedies. The sensual songs of Solomon and the pessimistic psalms of David do not lift the reader into 4 as high an atmosphere as Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Browning. Isaiah and Jeremiah will not compare with such essayists as Macauley, 5 Matthew Arnold and Emerson , nor the women of the Bible with those of Shakespeare and some of the leading novelists. Hence there is no reason for claiming any special inspiration for this book above all other books. The fables in its mythological writings are more extravagant than are those of the Egyptian, the Assyrian, the Grecian or the Roman, and the Hebrew God of thunder and of vengeance does not hold a higher moral 6 plane than does Osiris, Rimnon, Zeus or Jove. The devotees of the book claim for it wonderful wisdom and beauty in its symbols and hidden meanings, as expressed in the Hebrew and Greek language; but all this is hidden from the common people. It seems to me a great mistake that our linguists and revising committees of learned men, familiar with ecclesiastical history, do not turn on the light and illumine these pages, that common mortals might behold the glorious and wonderful revelation of what has been, is now, and will be forever. These biblical scholars have concealed their discoveries from us, and talked to us in hieroglyphics, long enough, quieting our doubts with claims of false translations, interpolations, and hidden mysteries that we should not try to penetrate. But if the book was given to us for a moral guide through this earthly life, and our salvation depends upon it in the heavenly life to come, surely our religious teachers should tell us in plain English what the writers intended to say as to the character of God, and the duties of men to him and to each other. Y Boston Investigator, 9 July 1898.
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1. Introducing ECS’s contribution to a symposium of “leading Liberal men and women of the country,” the editor of the Boston Investigator credited a reader with asking what might substitute for the Bible “as a teacher of moral truth and as a guide to righteousness.” 2. John Milton (1608–1674), English poet; Dante (1265–1321), Italian poet; Homer, 9th or 8th century b.c. Greek poet; Virgil (70–19 b.c.), Roman poet; Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1342–1400) and Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), English poets; and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) and John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892), American poets. 3. The Old Testament book of Job is here compared to the plays of William Shakespeare (1564–1616), English author. 4. The Old Testament Song of Solomon and Psalms of King David are compared to works of the English poets Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), William Wordsworth (1770–1850), and Robert Browning (1812–1889). 5. Two more books of the Old Testament are named: the Book of the Prophet Isaiah and the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah. Of her modern writers, those not already identified are Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), English essayist and historian, and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), American essayist. 6. Lords of creation and gods of the sky in other mythologies, these were the Egyptian god Osiris, the Assyrian god Rimmon, the Greek god Zeus, and the Roman god Jove. •••••••••
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ECS to Clara Bewick Colby 1
Washington Conn care of Mrs Carhart July 30th [1898] Dear Mrs Colby I am spending the summer up on the Connecticut hills nand my address post-office is Washingtonp I came here early in June & shall stay until the middle of September. I will try & send you something nfor the 2 Tribunep from to time. Check received & sent to Robert. I hope you will 3 not go to Cuba this hot weather. The heat even here is fearful. As I had left the city I did not see Mrs [Stearns?]. Let my letters lie until we meet I 4 think your idea about Frances Ellen Burr’s article a good one. Whatever she writes is always worth saving I wish I could see you for a long talk. I trust we may meet in the autumn. I am always well & hope to live many years Life has been & still is very sweet to me; & I see so much yet to be done before Justice, Liberty
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& Equality are secured for all mankind that nI feelp much work remains for me. to do. Socialism industrial economics, cooperation open to me broader field for thought & effort, than woman suffrage. Our laboring men have the suffrage but what does it avail under the competitive system The strong & crafty make the laws & outwit them every time I am interested in the present war & do not desire any negotiations for peace until Spain is driven out of all her islands & thorghouily thrashed, & taught to govern herself before she presumes to govern others. All this sentimental talk about our boys in blue, mothers bleeding 5 hearts, the Monroe doctrine, & Washingtons farewell address have no significance in the present emergency. It is our duty to kindle the fires of liberty on both continents & all the islands of the sea. I know war involves great suffering & so does what we call peace under the competitive system for the mass of makind. My sympathies go out to the boys in rags, in our mines, manufactories jails & prisons & the despairing mothers who can give them neither food clothes nor a sure abying place. Let the fight go on until every tyrant learns that by divine right every man & woman has a title deed to enough of this green earth for a permanent home from which no person can eject him. When laws & constitutions, creeds & codes do this, the State & Church will have a new value. We see the sighns on all sides of the new day dawning when the competitive system will give place to the new gospel of cooperation With kind regards yours sincerely U Elizabeth Cady Stanton I have a cataract on both eyes, & my sight is slowly growing dimmer. The cunning of my hand does my writing that is nkeepingp the lines straight but I cannot punctuate or reread or make any corrections so you must guess 6 at what I [sideways in margin] I would say. Y ALS, Clara B. Colby Papers, Archives Division, WHi. Square brackets surround uncertain reading. 1. ECS spent much of the summer in this Litchfield County town, boarding in the summer house of the late illustrator William Hamilton Gibson. Her hostess was Fannie E. Carhart (c. 1851–?), a young widow who recently became the second wife of Lyman Beecher Carhart (1828–1911), an appraiser in the New York Custom House. ECS also spent a month with the Carharts at their home in Peekskill, New York, in 1899. (Woman’s Journal, 16 June 1898; Woman’s Tribune, 6 August 1898; Mary E. Carhart Dusenbury, A Genealogical Record of the Descendants of Thomas Carhart, of Cornwall, England [New York, 1880], 49; Federal Census, Peekskill, N.Y., 1880, and Washington, Conn., 1910; New York State Census, Manhattan, 1905; New York Times, 14 October 1911.)
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2. Probably payment for Colby’s sales of one of ECS’s books. 3. Clara Colby had planned to accompany her estranged husband to war in Cuba and acquired a press pass from the War Department for the purpose. In the event, Leonard and Clara Colby came no closer to battle in this war than a training camp in Chickamaugua, Georgia. (Flood, Lost Bird of Wounded Knee, 187–93.) 4. Frances Ellen Burr (1831–1923), Connecticut’s senior advocate of woman suffrage, founder of the Hartford Equal Rights Club, and journalist, was an admirer of ECS and a contributor to the Woman’s Bible. (Charles Burr Todd, A General History of the Burr Family, 4th ed. [New York, 1902], 305; New York Times, 10 February 1923; History, 2:538–43. See also Papers 2–5.) 5. Both foundational documents of American foreign policy put a premium on differentiating and disentangling the United States from Europe. 6. Clara Colby published most of this letter in Woman’s Tribune, 6 August 1898. See Film, 38:694. •••••••••
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Article by ECS [10 September 1898] Woman’s Position in the Bible. “Woman’s Bible” Excluded.
St. Louis, Aug. 26.—A special to The Post Dispatch from Topeka, Kan., says: After a discussion lasting a week, the Board of Censors of the Topeka Federation of Women’s Clubs, has excluded the “Woman’s Bible” from its library on the ground that it is 1 “written in a flippant, coarse and inelegant style.” The commentators have done the best they could, considering the character of the text. Many passages, relating to woman in the Pentateuch, were found too coarse and obscene, even, for mention, and if those referred to in the Woman’s Bible are coarse and inelegant, the text is responsible; also if the Woman’s Bible is to be abolished from the woman’s library and schools of Topeka, the Jewish mythology should go also. 2 I recommend these elegant, fastidious ladies to read Numbers xxxi, vs. 3 4 17–18, to see the fate of the women and the child-women of the Midianites. U E. C. S. Y Boston Investigator, 10 September 1898.
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1. The trouble began when a woman in Topeka contributed the Woman’s Bible to a new circulating library being formed by the city’s federation of women’s clubs. A decision about accepting the gift was referred to a censor committee. Though ECS’s source indicates that censors excluded the book, another source says that the committee “after a sharp contest, decided they had no right to throw it out.” (Topeka Daily Capital, 23 August 1898, SBA scrapbook 27, Rare Books, DLC; Kansas Suffrage Reveille, December 1898.) 2. When published in the Free Thought Magazine 16 (October 1898): 433, this sentence began “I recommend these elegant, fastidious bigots.” 3. The passage reads, “Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.” 4. After the editor of the Free Thought Magazine, Horace L. Green, read this comment by ECS, he reported, “we felt very indignant, and thought we would write an editorial on it, but after considering the subject we concluded we could not do it justice, and we could think of no man in the Liberal ranks better qualified for the task than Charles C. Moore, editor of the ‘Blue Grass Blade.’ ” Green challenged Moore to take on the women in Topeka and promised to publish what he wrote. According to Green’s account, the Blue Grass Blade, 9 October 1898, contained Moore’s three-column response, but it contained such obscene passages from the Bible, Green feared arrest if he reprinted it. No copy of that issue of the Blue Grass Blade has been located. (Free Thought Magazine 16 [December 1898]: 514–16.) •••••••••
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ECS to Victoria Woodhull Martin1 250 West 94th St., New York, U.S.A., Oct. 4 [1898]
Dear Mrs. Woodhull Martin; My daughter Mrs. Stanton Blatch meant to have submitted the accompanying article to you before leaving England, but unavoidable circum2 3 stances prevented her doing so. Her friend Mrs. Jane Brownlow has undertaken to see you. I trust you will be able to insert the article in the Humanitarian, as these industrial questions call for our best thought. The article if it appeared soon would tend to spread your magazine here, for the press is much aggitated on Fall River topics. In my old age—you know I am eighty-three—my mind is more & more occupied with the conditions of the poor, & Miss Anthony complains that
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I give less time to the Woman Suffrage movement. But surely I have served that cause sufficiently long. I begin to feel discouraged as to the old line of attack. Your grand Con4 stitutional argument, which has stood unanswered for over twenty years, and all my fifty years’ work seem to have borne little fruit. The trouble is with women themselves. If you & your sister are ever in America, I hope you will call & see me. I have not been in London since we met there, and I doubt if I shall ever cross the wide ocean again. With pleasantest memories of our past meetings, I am, Yours ever sincerely, U Elizabeth Cady Stanton Y LS, in hand of Harriot Blatch and signed by ECS, Victoria Woodhull Martin Papers, Special Collections, ICarbS. Marked “Dictated.” 1. Victoria Claflin Woodhull Martin (1838–1927) and her sister Tennessee Celeste Claflin Cook (1845–1923), Americans now living in England, were allies of ECS and SBA in the early 1870s, but public reaction to their advocacy of free love and personal experience with their misuse of information to threaten critics made the sisters more liability than asset. After leaving the United States, both women married wealthy gentlemen. Martin was now a very wealthy widow. ECS stayed in touch with her and read the journal she launched in the summer of 1892, The Humanitarian: A Monthly Review of Sociological Science. (NAW; ANB. See also Papers 2, 3, & 5.) 2. Enclosure missing. It became Harriot Stanton Blatch, “A Typical New England Factory Town,” Humanitarian: A Monthly Review of Sociological Science 14 (1899): 253–62. It recounted Blatch’s investigations in the homes and factories of Fall River, Massachusetts. 3. Jane Macnaughton Egerton Morgan Brownlow (1854?–1928) was an English friend and political ally of Harriot Blatch, who combined advocacy of woman suffrage with studies of women at work. (Oxford DNB.) 4. ECS refers to Victoria Woodhull’s Memorial to Congress, submitted to the House and Senate on 21 December 1870, asking for legislation to “carry into execution the right vested by the Constitution in the Citizens of the United States to vote, without regard to sex.” After it was referred to the judiciary committees in both houses, Congressman Benjamin Butler arranged a hearing for Woodhull on 11 January 1871. The idea that the Constitution of the United States already acknowledged women’s right to vote based on their citizenship influenced the strategy of woman suffragists for the next five years. (Congressional Record, 41st Cong., 3d sess., 218, 272; History, 2:443–82.)
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Remarks by SBA to Meeting about Coeducation at the University of Rochester
Editorial note: Summer proved to be a poor season for fund raising, and female students were not admitted to the freshman class at the University of Rochester in September. A new effort began in the week of October 6, “solid with parlor & public meetings,” to raise the money required by the trustees in advance of admitting women. This meeting of sixty or seventy women was held on Granger Place in “the new & elegant home” of Mrs. George C. Hollister, wife of a university trustee and granddaughter of Thurlow Weed. Helen Montgomery and George M. Forbes of the faculty preceded SBA. (SBA diary, 19 September, 6, 7, 10 October 1898, Film, 37:604ff; Rochester Union and Advertiser, 2 July 1898, and Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 31 July, 11 September 1898, all in SBA scrapbook 27, Rare Books, DLC.)
[7 October 1898] Susan B. Anthony spoke on the subject in her usual forcible, witty and pointed manner. “I do not know how it happened,” she said, “that the Baptists, always so liberal to women, shut out women from their colleges. They allow women liberty in prayer meetings and to vote at church meetings. I think it is just an accident that they did not open Rochester University to her. “It has been the work of my life to bring to the women of this country the right of full-fledged citizenship. I want them to be well equipped for that day that is surely to come. “When,” continued Miss Anthony, “it comes to Rochester, my own city, whenever they have asked me about our facilities for the higher education of the daughters of our city, I have been sorry to say that our college doors are closed against her. To me this is the opportunity for every man and woman with money to realize the need of using it here. It is a cruel thing that the girls of Rochester cannot get a college education unless their fathers are rich enough to send them away. Daughters of well-to-do parents go all over the country to college. I am glad that they can go, but the number of
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girls anxious to go whose fathers are rich are small in comparison to the number of girls whose fathers cannot send them away to school. “Fifty young women from the Free Academy are qualified to enter the university this year; fully twenty-five of them have called at our home and registered their names who want to enter college, but cannot leave home 1 to do so.” Miss Anthony told of the progress she had seen regarding the women of to-day and those of when she first began her public life, and in conclusion said: “There is no female literature or no female art; no female mathematics or science; there is no different kind of soil for the rose, that is to say, different kind of education for women, one little pint cup.” Y Rochester Union and Advertiser, 8 October 1898. 1. The existence of a group of local girls qualified to enter the University of Rochester caught SBA’s attention early in the campaign to achieve coeducation. Speaking at a large public meeting in June, she said she “had heard there are now seventy-five girls in the Free Academy ready to enter the university.” Later in June, she met with girls at the Free Academy’s graduation, and in July, at another meeting, “she ask[ed] all girls who wish to go to college, and are prepared, to attend her ‘at home’ next Monday evening, and talk with her about it.” (Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 24 June, 13 July 1898, and SBA diary, 30 June 1898, all in Film, 37:604ff, 38:622, 652.) •••••••••
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Marietta Holley to ECS Adams, New York. October 14th 1898.
My Dear Mrs. Stanton: I saw by the paper last night that you have returned to New York, so I write you at once. I did not know your summer address. I have wanted to tell you what I think of “Eighty Years and More.” It is glorious; full and running over from beginning to end with wit, wisdom and fun. You know you told me to give one book away to some one who could not afford to buy one, I am doing better than that, I loan it to people far and near whom I want to bring in to the Suffrage fold, and the universal verdict is that it is one of the best and brightest books they ever read.
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A Methodist clergyman was here yesterday, to whom I loaned it some time ago, and he said that he wanted to borrow it again, he said that he was perfectly fascinated with it. Go on, dear Mrs. Stanton, writing books that make the world better and brighter and happier and hasten forward the golden day of justice to all. I expect to go to New York for a short visit soon and then I hope to see you again. I will bring you one of my books. With much love and admiration, Yours Most Sincerely, U Marietta Holley Y TLS, on stationery imprinted with address, ECS Papers, DLC. Marked “Dictated.”
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Robert G. Ingersoll1 to ECS Dobbs Ferry, [N.Y.] Oct 14—98
My Dear Mrs Stanton We have been moving—working day and night and Mondays— Of course we are going to see you in your new home where the whole world 2 and a part of New Jersey are visible. We all want to see Mrs Blatch and all are glad that she is with you. I hope that now you are going to rest. You have earned the right to enjoy yourself while the Gods do the work. This winter we are to be at 117 East 21st street—Gramercy Park, and possibly you can come and see us and we can read the “Woman’s Bible” together— In a few centuries the women may claim that you were inspired by Mrs God. Let us hope that they will be right. We are just going to Chicago to preach on Superstition—a good reli3 gious subject. With love from all to all, Yours always U R G. Ingersoll Y ALS, on stationery imprinted with address, ECS Papers, NjR. 1. Robert Green Ingersoll (1833–1899), orator and lawyer, was an agnostic, whose lectures against the Bible and fundamentalism were enormously popular. He, his wife, and his daughters had been friends with ECS and her family for many years. (ANB.)
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2. While ECS vacationed outside New York City in the summer of 1898, her children completed a move from the apartment on Sixty-first Street to a new one on Ninety-fourth Street. 3. See Chicago Daily Tribune, 17 October 1898, and The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll (New York, 1929), 4:295–349. •••••••••
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SBA to Emmeline Woodward Wells1 Omaha, Neb., Oct. 30, 1898.
I wish I could get my word to every loyal woman suffrage woman in 2 Utah, begging her not to cast her vote for Roberts —not because he is a Republican, Democrat or Populist—but because he is an opponent of political equality for women! No true woman should be instrumental in sending to Congress a man who will not represent genuine Democracy, and who will speak and vote against our Sixteenth amendment proposition to prohibit the several States from disfranchising United States citizens on account of sex. Your women should cast their ballots for true and loyal woman suffrage men for all offices—city, State and national. The best interests of the family cannot be well served by men not willing to grant perfect equality of rights for women in the home, the church, the State and the Nation. Respectfully, U Susan B. Anthony. Y Salt Lake Semi-Weekly Tribune, 4 November 1898. Not in Film. 1. Emmeline Blanche Woodward Wells (1828–1921), editor of the Salt Lake City Woman’s Exponent, had been active in the National and National-American suffrage associations for two decades. At this date, she and SBA were together in Omaha, Nebraska, for meetings of the National Council of Women. Wells also sought SBA’s political advice for her readers in advance of the election of 1896. (NAW; ANB; Film, 35:912–13. See also Papers 3.) 2. Brigham Henry Roberts (1857–1933), a polygamous Mormon, was the Democratic candidate for Congress from Utah. In a state where women voted, Roberts took pride in his antisuffrage leadership at the territorial constitutional convention of 1895, and it is to that record SBA objects. (ANB; The Autobiography of B. H. Roberts, ed. Gary James Bergera [Salt Lake City, Utah, 1990], 184–94; Jean Bickmore White, “Woman’s Place Is in the Constitution: The Struggle for Equal Rights in Utah in 1895,” in Battle for the Ballot: Essays on Woman Suffrage in Utah, 1870–1896, ed. Carol Cornwall Madsen [Logan, Utah, 1997], 221–43.)
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SBA to ECS Rochester, N.Y., Dec. 2, 1898—
My Dear Mrs Stanton This day—Dec 2d—is made historic—because of the burning down of 1 dear old Corinthian Hall—in which Phillips & Curtis, Theodore Parker & Henry Ward Beecher—Emerson & Starr King—Chapin & Cheever— 2 3 Garrison & G. W. Thompson Douglass & Pillsbury —Mrs Rose & Mrs Stanton—Mrs Nichols & Aunt Fanny Gage—Lucy Stone & Antoi4 nette and all of our heroic Anti-slavery and Woman’s Rights Champions spoke their glowing words for freedom and equality— In which you were crowned President of the N.Y. State Temperance Society one year—and 5 discrowned the next because of your Anti religious proclivities!— So you see your views decapitated from the first by the majority who set sail with 6 us— And as for Mrs Rose—none save you nand Ip & Lucretia among the women but would have gladly remembered to forget to invite her to our conventions— So when Lucretia is dead & you are at your own quiet home & I in the far west—who is there left to stand for freedom for your most radical word— I have read over your letter & cannot for the life of me see anything in it other or more radical than what you have said over 7 & over from the very beginning! At our Club yesterday a report of the Hudson Con. was read and it said your letter was read in the morning session— Had I been there I should have strained every point & myself read it in the time given me for a speech—and that no other or young woman could conscienciously do—give up her own precious to read a letter from any body—the angeless Gabriel even!!— Lucy Stone & Co. did throw overboard P. Ps resolutions, Mrs Rose & you & me—in nthep 1860 Con8 vention— Do tell me what is the one or more points that the W.J. refuses to print— no don’t go to the Investigator—that would be “carrying coals to New Castle”— Content yourself with the open columns of the New York Sun— What you send to that paper goes to tens, if not hundreds of thousands—instead of a paltry 5,000!! Every days npapersp brings something that I want my “Jimmy Grind” to put into her hopper—for criticism—not in a specially W.S. paper—but in
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the very great Daily that brings to me the false thing— In to days It is the organization of “The National Society of the Spanish American War”—its 9 object to [“]Foster True Patriotism and honor Heroes of the War”— In its second paragraph it says—“Membership in the society is open to all patriotic white citizens Americans. Applications must be approved by the Executive Council— Men & Women”—(that is white men & women)— [“]share equally in the honors & duties of citizenship”— Now this seems to me the false religion of this day— The old Slave Ocrats are bound to push out every man & woman of color from the enjoyment of civil rights— Did you see that South Carolina has asked if not demanded that 10 the Pullmans shall put negro sleepers—on Southern Rail Roads— up to this—Frederick Douglass, Booker Washington & other cultivated negroes could escape the Jim Crow Cars in the South—by purchasing a through sleeping car ticket from Chicago Boston, New York &c—to New Orleans or Tampa— all of the poorer colored people are compelled to travel in the negro Cars which little better than pig-pens— On every hand American civilization—which we are introducing into Isles of the Atlantic & Pacific— is putting its heel on the head of the negro race— Now this barbarism does not grow out of ancient Jewish Bibles—but out of our own sordid meanness!! and the like of you ought to stop hitting poor old St Paul—and give your heaviest raps on the head of every nabob—man & woman—who does injustice to humanity—black a human being—for the crime! of color or sex!! Nobody does right or wrong because Saint Paul them to—but because of their own black “true inwardness”— The trouble is in ourselves to day—not in men or books of thousands of years ago— I do wish you could centre your big brain on nthep crimes we ourselves as a people are responsible for—to charge our offenses to false books or false interpretations—is but a way of seeking a “refuge of lies”— We know nit hurtsp when we are pricked to the quick—& we know just as well when we prick another to the quick—that it hurts them— We don't any St Paul to tell nusp it doesn't— Now—dearie—do let “Jimmy Grind” out against nthep Colorphobia & sexphobia men & women of to day— Lovingly yours U Susan B. Anthony The War & the Negro Society article was in the Tribune a week or ten days ago— Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, AF 24(5), Anthony Family Collection, CSmH.
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1. Built for speaking rather than theater, Rochester's Corinthian Hall opened in 1849 on the third floor of a building with stores at street level. As SBA indicates, most of the great lecturers of the century and many of the leading reformers spoke from its platform. After the war, the hall was enlarged to have a stage and facilities for drama. At one o'clock in the morning of 2 December 1898, fire broke out in the hall and destroyed the building. Her list begins with Wendell Phillips and George William Curtis (1824–1892), a prominent essayist and lecturer. Curtis led the efforts to gain woman suffrage at New York's constitutional convention of 1867 to which he was a delegate-at-large. (Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 2 December 1898; ANB. See also Papers 2.) 2. Others in the list not previously identified are Theodore Parker (1810–1860), Transcendentalist clergyman, author, and lecturer, and Edwin Hubbell Chapin (1814–1880), Universalist clergyman, thought by some in the 1850s to be the nation’s most eloquent man. (DAB.) 3. Parker Pillsbury (1809–1898), an early abolitionist, edited the National AntiSlavery Standard before joining ECS as coeditor of the Revolution in 1868. (DAB. See also Papers 1, 2, & 5.) 4. That is, Antoinette Blackwell. 5. On these events of April 1852 and June 1853, see History, 1:480–85, 493–98. 6. That is, Lucretia Mott. 7. Neither SBA nor ECS attended the New York State Woman Suffrage Association meetings in Hudson from 8 to 10 November 1898, but ECS sent a long letter about politics, empire, and the canon law. Somehow she decided that the delegates brushed it off and would not hear her, but newspapers heard it read by none other than Harriot Blatch. The Woman’s Journal might object to her familiar passages about “the evil influence of the church” and the imperative “to rescue woman from the domination of the church.” When SBA wrote this letter, ECS’s letter had been published in full in the Boston Investigator, 19 November 1898, and the Geneva Courier, 23 November 1898, both in Film, 38:917–18. 8. At the Tenth National Woman’s Rights Convention where differences over divorce led to bitter disagreements and vicious editorials in the press. See History, 1:688–737. 9. New York Tribune, 10 November 1898. SBA retained a copy of the article from an unidentified newspaper that reprinted from the Tribune. Rather than making the radical claim of equal citizenship, as SBA would have it, the article remarked that men and women shared equally in membership. Seeing Clara Barton named as president of the society, SBA scolded her in a letter written this same day, in Film, 38:949–50. 10. In South Carolina, a law to segregate passengers on trains went into effect on 1 September 1898. The law exempted “through vestibule trains,” a term used by the Pullman and Wagner car companies for their best interstate travel. By that exemption, South Carolina avoided the sticky question of a state’s right to set conditions for interstate commerce. If SBA in fact saw news of a request made from South Carolina to the Pullman Car Company, nothing came of it in the near term. She might, however, have mistaken the state: Georgia’s legislature began in
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November 1898 to debate a bill requiring that sleeping car companies segregate passengers into separate cars. (Acts and Joint Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of South Carolina Passed at the Regular Session of 1898 [Columbia, S.C., 1898], 777–78; Gilbert Thomas Stephenson, Race Distinctions in American Law [New York, 1910], 216–20; Linda M. Matthews, “Keeping Down Jim Crow: The Railroads and the Separate Coach Bills in South Carolina,” South Atlantic Quarterly 73 [Winter 1974]: 117–29; Washington Post, 13 November 1898.) •••••••••
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ECS to SBA [New York, c. 4 December 1898]
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Bob Hattie & I read last night until after eleven. I feared it might be prosey, but it is fresh & breezy. Miss nMrsp H. has done well & so [in margin] have you Y AN, Ida Harper Woman Suffrage Scrapbook 3, Rare Books, DLC. 1. This note probably falls after 3 December 1898. On that date, SBA remarked in a letter to ECS, “You do not report receiving the Advance sheets,” meaning pages of Ida Harper’s biography of SBA. This seems to be a response. See Film, 38:963–64. •••••••••
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SBA to Ida Husted Harper Rochester, N.Y., Dec. 7, 1898—
My Dear Mrs Harper Your letter of last Saturday came yesterday—and I read & re-read it— and was going to argue the question of newspaper work—but this mornings despatches of the Hawaian Commissions report for nthep provisional government of that new U.S. territory to be based on sex regardless of intelligence—instead of on intelligence regardless of sex—so roused me that I said if Mrs Harper can hold her pen from pitching into such a brutal proposal—at the close of this war—at the nveryp opening of the 20th cen1 tury— If her soul is not so fired that all other work—in Mexico or Europe fades out of sight with her—it is of no use for me to talk—she must choose
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her own place!— There never was a time when that ncouldp be called the crucial moment in woman’s chances for freedom like the present—with all of these provisional government schemes to nbep brought before Congress this very session—and a male oligarchy fastened upon every one of the ne[w] possessions of this nation—instead of the nanp enlightened democracy—that wipes out the sex line!!— I have just thanke[d] Mrs Westover2 Alden for her full page on our book in last Sundays Tribune— The 3 nN.Y.p Herald of last Sunday had a full illustrated page also —and I asked her if she thought any of the other N.Y. Dalies would give a page to a brainy woman!— But then—she could not pitch in & criticise this damnable proposition to perpetuate male superiority—and female inferiority in our new possessions— that would antagonize & run counter to the poli[tical] policy of the Tribune,—& the powers that be there now—will no more allow any woman[’s] demands beyond or different from the Republi[can] party than would they when Greeley was the ruling power— No—not a political or religious paper will give a woman full freedom on a page—to intelligence to put there what is counter to its political policy or religious creed— If you got a page or column of the Sun you could n’t put into it your deepest and truest ideas—only surface things—that wouldn’t run a tilt with the interests of the counting room— I have asked Mrs Alden point blank—if she would be allowed to scarify this proposal for the male supremacy in Hawaii? I know she would not—unless the Editor in chief had decided to kill the proposal— A woman would be there as a subordinate—and that is not the position you seek— If you wish to espouse the politics & policy of any one of the papers—& cut & trim your articles to them—that is your privilege—but I know that is not what you wish— Oh if I only could say this minute—“Jimmy Grind”—what an article would go out over the Associated Press wires this very night—but alas I have no “Jimmy Grind” now—so I can only fret & fume and scold to one & another with this old scratchy steel pen— No—I should not feel at liber[ty] to appropriate the money I have raised for newspaper work—such as you did in California—to any sort of fugitive articles— Of course—if you had a page in N.Y. Sun—with perfect freedom to pitch into everything & everybody t[hat] trod woman under foot!—that would be another thing—but you haven’t caught that hare yet!!— I see what a nice thing it will be for you to go to Mexico—& write booming letters for a big land speculation and to Europe for pleasure—but whi[le] both or either would be luscious fruit to yo[u] they wouldnt either or both of them
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do [the] job with the papers of this country nthis very winterp that I want this money to pay for doing— I cannot touch any other point tonig[ht—] There is room for no other thing in my brain— I don't wish even to advise—m[uch] less urge you— but I do wish to have the work [done] that we have talked—by you—if you feel it your best us[e] of yourself—if not—then by some one—though I kno[w] not half equal to your own wonderful self— Affectionately & Sincerely yours U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, Ida Harper Woman Suffrage Scrapbook 1, Rare Books, DLC. Endorsed by Harper, “Written when I was objecting to undertaking a suffrage department in a newspaper.” Letters in square brackets obscured by mounting in scrapbook but supplied by Harper. 1. SBA saw news accounts of the report transmitted to Congress by the president on 6 December 1898, in which the Hawaiian Commission offered bills for the creation of a government in the island territory. On the article she clipped from the Democrat and Chronicle, SBA underlined some of the commission’s unusual propositions about office holding and voting as well as its remarkable construction of whiteness. United States citizenship would be bestowed, the report advised, on “[a]ll white persons, including Portuguese and persons of African descent, and all persons descended from the Hawaiian race.” Voters would need to be male, literate, and in some instances, owners of property, and only men could serve in the territorial legislature. Commission members in the Senate and the House introduced bills prepared by the commission on 6 December 1898; Senate 4893 was referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations, while House Resolution 10990 went to the Committee on Territories. (Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 7 December 1898, in SBA scrapbook 28, Rare Books, DLC; Congressional Record, 55th Cong., 3d sess., 6 December 1898, pp. 20, 27; Senate, Hawaiian Commission, Message from the President of the United States, Transmitting the Report of the Hawaiian Commission, 55th Cong., 3rd sess., S. Doc. 16, Serial 3727; Eric T. L. Love, Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900 [Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004], 115–58.) 2. Cynthia May Westover Alden (1862–1931) was editor of the woman’s department of the New York Tribune from 1897 to 1899, when she joined the staff of the Ladies’ Home Journal. Her review has not been found. (DAB, Supplement 1.) 3. New York Herald, 4 December 1898. The review is unsigned.
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SBA to Clara Bewick Colby Rochester, N.Y., Dec. 17, 1898
My Dear Mrs Colby Yours of late from Washington is here— I wonder if when I am under the sod—or cremated & floating in the air—I shall have stir you & others up— How can you not be on fire—when the Senate Foreign or Territorial Com—are considering the Hawaiian Commissions damnable proposition 1 to restrict the right to vote & hold office to “male citizens”?— Ever since Dec. 6, when their report was presented to Congress—I have been trying to rouse Mrs Harper to open fire through the papers—but I see nothing—and your poor little Trib—once in four or two weeks—and Alices Journal once a week—going just to friends—cannot touch the people as with a coal from 2 off the Altar!! that must be done through the ndailyp papers—associated press—&c— I really believe I shall explode if some of you young women dont wake up—and raise your voices in protest against the impending crime of this nation upon the new Islands it has clutched from other folks— Do come into the living present & work to save us from any more barbaric male governments— U S. B A 3
[sideways in margins] I have written Senators Cannon & Warren— Mrs Harper is at 4 B. Street N.E. Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, Clara B. Colby Collection, CSmH. Second sheet recycled from a typed letter to Elnora Babcock. 1. While the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs debated and amended the Hawaii bill, items leaked from their deliberations and kept the topic in the news. SBA’s frustration flowed from suffragists’ silence about the bill as well as the committee’s consistency. When the committee reported an amended bill back to the Senate on 21 December 1898, the racial language of citizenship (see note above at 7 December 1898) was removed, but voting and office holding were still reserved to males. (Washington Post, 9, 15, 17, 20, 21, 22 December 1898; 55th Cong., 3d sess., A Bill to provide a government for the Territory of Hawaii, amended, S. 4893; Congressional Record, 55th Cong., 3d sess., 21 December 1898, p. 358.)
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2. Isa. 6:6–7. After live coals were taken from the altar and placed in the sinner’s mouth, a seraphim said “thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.” 3. SBA here selected senators from states where women voted. Frank Jenne Cannon (1859–1933), Republican of Utah, served in the Senate from 1896 to 1899, after serving a year as territorial delegate to the House of Representatives in 1895. Francis Emory Warren (1844–1929), Republican of Wyoming, served in the Senate from 1890 to 1893 and 1895 until his death. (BDAC.) •••••••••
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SBA to Anna H. Shaw [Rochester, c. 23 December 1898]
1
I want—also—a full understanding as to what Rachel is to do about her office & salary next year—what Mrs Catt intends to do— you see it is of no use to plan Press Bureau nHead Quartersp—or anything—unless we know who are to man our ship of state— Now—this is to you & Lucy—Rachel & Nicolas—only— Brother D. R. & Sister Mary are most emphatic in their feeling that I should no longer allow myself to stand the responsible head of the Association— And I have been growing more & more strongly in the same feeling— 1st I want the young women to start into the 20th Century in full control of the Association—& for that—the officers must be elected at our Con. in 1899—and tried their hand at running things their way—nso as to report at the Con of 1900—p Not that I wish to work less—but only that it will be a relief to me not to feel responsible for the things done or not done—especially the things not done—or thought of—for instance not one of our B.C. has written me of her thinking of—much less of her feeling a worry because of the tendency shown all round of a reactionary senti2 3 ment—action—as the Federation of Labor —the North Western R.R. the 4 Hawaiian government—Porto Rico —South Carolina & lastly President Harpers pronunciamento against women’s holding official position over 5 men— Our souls ought all to be on fire—& yet no one seems awake to the threatening signs of the times— Well—I know you have seen & shouted to your audiences about them— But our organization Com—nor Cor. Secy. have nneverp asked me to say or do a thing—or hinted that there was anything to be done Lovingly yours— U Susan B Anthony
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Y ALS incomplete, on NAWSA letterhead, SBA Papers, MCR-S. 1. On this fragment of a letter, someone other than SBA wrote “Dec. '98.” Most events listed in the letter were reported in the press by 20 December 1898, and the ideas in the first paragraph match a letter written on 23 December. See SBA to Rachel F. Avery, 23 December 1898, Film, 38:1020–22. 2. For another use of this list of outrages, see SBA’s article in New York Herald, 15 January 1899, Film, 39:467. During its convention on 13 December 1898, the American Federation of Labor heard a resolution asking Congress to remove all women from government employment and set a precedent for the wider removal of women from public life, but it was not endorsed or adopted by the delegates. (Gompers, Papers, 5:35–39.) 3. On 17 December 1898, the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad dismissed all female employees who had been with the company for less than two years, effective 1 January 1899. One official told the Washington Post that the company wanted “to advance its employees from low positions to offices of trust. Can you imagine a woman as General Superintendent or General Manager of the affairs of this great railway system?” (Chicago Daily Tribune, 18 December 1898; Washington Post, 18 December 1898.) 4. Puerto Rico came under American control when the Spanish left the island in October 1898, in advance of Senate ratification of the Treaty of Paris. At the instruction of the military governor, mayors across the island sent delegates to San Juan for a meeting on 19 December 1898 to advise him about local needs. On more than one occasion, SBA took offense at their advice on voting rights. “The convention, which was politically harmonious,” according to a wire service report, “pronounced in favor of commercial and religious liberty, and the future limitation of the suffrage to males over twenty-one years of age who pay taxes and are able to read and write.” (New York Times, 10, 20 December 1898; Washington Post, 20 December 1898; César J. Ayala and Rafael Bernabe, Puerto Rico in the American Century: A History since 1898 [Chapel Hill, N.C., 2007], 14–32; Woman’s Weekly, 27 January 1899, Film, 39:494.) 5. SBA reacted to proposals emanating from a commission studying Chicago’s public schools, headed by William Rainey Harper (1856–1906), president of the University of Chicago. Harper took aim from several directions at the schools’ unionized and overwhelmingly female work force. His report criticized recent raises won by the Chicago Federation of Teachers as unearned and unaffordable, argued that paying higher salaries to men was “not an unjust discrimination” because men exhibited “superior physical endurance,” and offered “a rational plan of promotion” and hiring to place men in the better paid jobs in upper elementary and high school classes. Although the commission only released its full report in mid-January 1899, city newspapers published the recommendations on 29 December 1898. (Chicago Educational Commission, Report of the Educational Commission of the City of Chicago, Appointed by the Mayor, Hon. Carter H. Harrison, January 19th, 1898 [Chicago, 1899]; Chicago Daily Tribune, 29 December 1898,
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6 January 1899; Julia Wrigley, Class Politics and Public Schools: Chicago 1900–1950 [New Brunswick, N.J., 1982], 92–98; Kate Rousmaniere, Citizen Teacher: The Life and Leadership of Margaret Haley [Albany, N.Y., 2005], 49–52; Thomas R. Pegram, Partisans and Progressives: Private Interest and Public Policy in Illinois, 1870–1922 [Urbana, Ill., 1992], 121–30.) •••••••••
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From the Diary of SBA [1 January 1899]
Sun., Jan. 1, 1899. Arrived in New York at 10 a.m. Train three hours 1 late— Went cousin S. V. Laphams—found Mr G. W. Catt waiting for me there— met warm welcome— took cup of coffee & light breakfast—then went with Mr Catt to their home—Bensonhurst—taking fully two hours Found Miss Blackwell & Mrs Upton there—soon Miss Shaw came without Rachel—so we now had—Anthony, Shaw Blackwell, Upton, Catt—a quorum of our B.C.— Mrs C. had a very nice dinner with regulation four courses— just after dark Rachel came—making all of the Com. save the two auditors—Clay & M’Culloch All together talked over all branches of the work 1. George William Catt (1860–1905), the second husband of Carrie Catt, was a civil engineer and, at this time, president of the New York Dredging Company. (WWW1.) Y Excelsior Diary 1899, n.p., SBA Papers, DLC.
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SBA et al. to the House Committee on Elections1 [New York, c. 2 January 1899]
2
Honorable Sirs: At a meeting of the General Officers of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, held January 2d, 1899, the following resolution was passed unanimously:
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6 January 1899; Julia Wrigley, Class Politics and Public Schools: Chicago 1900–1950 [New Brunswick, N.J., 1982], 92–98; Kate Rousmaniere, Citizen Teacher: The Life and Leadership of Margaret Haley [Albany, N.Y., 2005], 49–52; Thomas R. Pegram, Partisans and Progressives: Private Interest and Public Policy in Illinois, 1870–1922 [Urbana, Ill., 1992], 121–30.) •••••••••
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From the Diary of SBA [1 January 1899]
Sun., Jan. 1, 1899. Arrived in New York at 10 a.m. Train three hours 1 late— Went cousin S. V. Laphams—found Mr G. W. Catt waiting for me there— met warm welcome— took cup of coffee & light breakfast—then went with Mr Catt to their home—Bensonhurst—taking fully two hours Found Miss Blackwell & Mrs Upton there—soon Miss Shaw came without Rachel—so we now had—Anthony, Shaw Blackwell, Upton, Catt—a quorum of our B.C.— Mrs C. had a very nice dinner with regulation four courses— just after dark Rachel came—making all of the Com. save the two auditors—Clay & M’Culloch All together talked over all branches of the work 1. George William Catt (1860–1905), the second husband of Carrie Catt, was a civil engineer and, at this time, president of the New York Dredging Company. (WWW1.) Y Excelsior Diary 1899, n.p., SBA Papers, DLC.
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SBA et al. to the House Committee on Elections1 [New York, c. 2 January 1899]
2
Honorable Sirs: At a meeting of the General Officers of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, held January 2d, 1899, the following resolution was passed unanimously:
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Whereas, Brigham H. Roberts, the Congressman-elect from Utah, is avowedly living in polygamy contrary to law, and is credibly reported to have taken another wife since the admission of Utah, contrary to the pledges made by his State to the Nation; and 3 Whereas, Polygamy is unjust and degrading to womanhood; and Whereas, Mr. Roberts was a conspicuous opponent of woman suffrage in the Constitutional Convention of Utah; therefore Resolved, That Mr. Roberts is obnoxious to the National American Woman Suffrage Association, both as a representative of Anti-Suffrage and as a representative of polygamy, and that, if any constitutional means of excluding him can be found, we hope a self-confessed law-breaker will not be permitted to form part of the law-making body of the United States. U Susan B. Anthony, President. U Anna H. Shaw, Vice-President. U Harriet Taylor Upton, Treasurer. U Alice Stone Blackwell, Recording Secretary. U Rachel Foster Avery, Corresponding Secretary. U Carrie Chapman Catt, Chairman Organization Committee. Y National Suffrage Bulletin 4 (December 1898): 2–3. 1. Antipolygamists in Utah and the nation mobilized to stop Congress from seating Roberts. Local Protestant ministers launched their drive with a large meeting on December 6. By month’s end, vast numbers of women in church-based associations had taken up the cause. For the National-American to enter the conversation about Roberts at this early date gave it the dubious distinction of being among the first secular bodies to join a crusade led by religious conservatives. Resolutions from state legislatures started to flow a week later. For accounts of this crusade, see Autobiography of B. H. Roberts, 212–19; Davis Bitton, The Ritualization of Mormon History and Other Essays (Urbana, Ill., 1994), 150–70; and Joan Smyth Iversen, The Antipolygamy Controversy in U.S. Women’s Movements, 1880–1925: A Debate on the American Home (New York, 1997), 185–211. Who received this letter is not evident: the House of Representatives maintained three Committees on Elections, but the sitting committees were set to expire at the end of the Fifty-fifth Congress in March 1899. Challenges to the election of Brigham Roberts would come before the next, Fifty-sixth Congress. 2. This date corresponds to the day on which the National-American’s Business Committee agreed to the resolution, but it is doubtful that it was released to the public so early. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 16 January 1899, is the earliest known publication; reporters received the resolution a day earlier, apparently while calling on SBA after her return from New York City. (Film, 39:470.) 3. In the minutes published later in the report of the annual meeting, this clause
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reads, “Polygamy is an institution unjust and degrading” without the reference to womanhood. (Report of the Thirty-first Convention, 1899, pp. 15–16, Film, 39:722ff.) •••••••••
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From the Diary of SBA [2–6 January 1899]
Mon. Jan. 2, 1899. At Bensonhurst— Business Com. began work in real earnest this a.m. & kept it going until dinner, then until supper, then until 10 p.m— Rachel & Harriet as usual slept or lay awake together—hence were sleepy all the day— Mr Catt went to Office in New York—& returned full of aches—which grew worse until at 7.30 Mrs Catt walked a mile to call his doctor—who came gave him big dose of Quinine—then Blue Mass—then 1 a Setlitz Powder—all of which he vomited up strait way —so that Mrs Catt just out of a severe gripp siege was up with Mr C. all the night— 1. Quinine was used to reduce fever. Pharmacists formulated blue mass pills according to their own recipes, but all of them contained mercury. Seidlitz Powder was used for its laxative powers.
Tues. Jan. 3, 1899. At Bensonhurst Mr C. worse—& kept in bed all the day— Mrs Upton began feeling Grippy—so we had a lame feeling in our Com. meeting— At noon Mrs Marianna W. Chapman of Brooklyn came & lunched with us—& invited all to Luncheon with her tomorrow—but it proved that not one—save Alice Blackwell could accept— Rachel & Shaw were to leave in morning—Mrs Upton’s Grip had developed so that she would stay over with Mrs Catt— In p.m. Mrs Ida H. Harper came—so we had her to talk Press work—& there was much talking but very little actually decided Wed. Jan. 4, 1899. Left Bensonhurst 2 p.m Shaw—Foster Avery & Blackwell left in forenoon—Mrs Harper & self after Lunch— we called at Sun 1 Office—Mr Paul Dana came out to see us—and seemed ready & willing to grant us space in the Sunday Sun—for expression of sentiments from stand point of woman—and had Mrs Harper prepare an article such as we desire for the Sun of Sunday Jan 15th so we felt we had gained a splendid page for our cause
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Then we called on Mrs Westover Alden—of the Tribune— there found 2 that my old clerk on Revolution in 1869 —who had been on Tribune ever since had married several years ago a foreigner some 28 years her junior oh! oh!— 1. Paul Dana (1852–1930) succeeded his father as editor of the New York Sun in 1897 and held that position until July 1903. His office was at 170 Nassau Street. (WWW1; NCAB, 8:253.) 2. Nelly, or Ellen, Mackay Hutchinson Cortissoz (c. 1849–1933), once a clerk in the offices of SBA’s newspaper, moved rapidly into journalism in 1869, first as New York correspondent of the Cincinnati Commercial and then as a reporter for the New York Tribune. She stayed at the Tribune, working for many years in the book review department, while also publishing poetry. SBA remarks on her marriage in 1897 to the Tribune’s young art critic Royal Cortissoz (1869–1948). (Rev., 22 July, 18 November 1869, 28 September 1870, Film, 2:22, 154, 519; Federal Census, Caledonia, N.Y., 1860, and New York, 1880; Woman’s Who’s Who 1914; WWW1; Papers, 2:299–300.)
Thur. Jan. 5, 1899. In New York—at Cousin S. V. L. Mrs Harper came to my cousin S. V. Laphams with me last night—& met a cordial welcome— This a.m. Cousin sent us in carriage to Mrs E. Cady Stanton’s—250 West 94th st— Mrs H. remained to Lunch—had a nice talk with Mrs S. & her charming younger daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch—& left about 4 p.m. for 1 Washington— Cousin Carrie Vail Ladd came for me about 6—and I went th back to cousins No 10 East 68 street— 1. Caroline Ruth Elizabeth Vail Ladd (1836–1913), or Carrie Vail Ladd, as SBA referred to her, was Semantha Lapham’s niece. Before the death of her husband in 1882, Ladd lived in East Orange, New Jersey, but thereafter she divided her time between her aunt’s house in New York and her native Vermont. (Albridge, Laphams in America, 183; SBA to Emilie Van Biel, 19 December 1894, Film, 33:44–45; Vail, Moses Vail, 222; Federal Census, 1880.)
Fri. Jan. 6, 1899. In New York— Cousin Semantha sent me over to Mrs Stantons again n439—West 88th streetp where I spent the day—with Mrs 1 Martha Brown Mosher—Nephew Arthur A. Mosher's wife— no this day was with Mrs Stanton— 1. SBA mistook the house number for her nephew Arthur Anthony Mosher (1851–1932), who lived at 339. After learning the insurance business with D. R. Anthony in Leavenworth, Mosher was sent to St. Louis by the Travelers Insurance Company and headed the firm’s southwest regional business. After five years in Kansas City, Missouri, he moved to New York City in 1896 and worked
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in the insurance business there until his death. Martha Beatrice Brown Mosher (1857–1926) was his wife and mother of their three sons. In 1898, she published a well-regarded book, Child Culture in the Home, A Book for Mothers. (Anthony, Anthony Genealogy, 183; Insurance Times, February 1891, SBA scrapbook 17, Rare Books, DLC; WhNAA; New York Times, 11 July 1926, 20 May 1932.) Y Excelsior Diary 1899, n.p., SBA Papers, DLC.
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SBA to Robert R. Hitt1 10— East 68th street New York Jan. 7, 1899.
My Dear Friend 2 This morning’s Tribune says your Com. is to report on the Hawaii 3 Constitution early in the week —and talks about the danger of establishing bad precedents on matters of commerce—all very well—but I want to beg of you not to make the fatal precedent of a sex-line for voting & holding office— All I ask for womans rights is that you will strike noutp the little adjective “male” wherever it occurs—that is male citizens &c—may hold the office of senator or representative—male citizens &c may vote!— In presenting a form of government to any of our newly acquired territories—it surely should be based on the most advanced principles—so far as the recognition of political equality for women— I do hope you will see & avoid the cruelty of putting intelligent women, native born & others—in political subjection to men—where a vast majority of them are not intelligent! Draw your voting and office holding line as high as you please—on educational, property or intellectual or moral qualifications—but do not I pray you draw it on the lin that of caste, class, or sex!!— Hoping that you & your Committee will see the injustice proposed in the bill as reported to the Senate—and will strike out “male” as I have indicated—from your report—and thereby do your part toward founding a true “republican form of government” in Hawaii— I am—very sincerely— U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, Robert Roberts Hitt Papers, DLC. 1. Robert Roberts Hitt (1834–1906), Republican of Illinois, served in the House of Representatives from November 1882 until his death. He also served on the
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Hawaiian Commission, and it fell to him on 6 December 1898 to introduce House Resolution 10990, to provide a government for Hawaii. Though he managed the bill in the House, Hitt was not, as SBA assumed, on the committee considering it. (BDAC; Congressional Record, 55th Cong., 3d sess., 27.) 2. New York Tribune, 7 January 1899. The article referred to an anxiety that “no provisions should be embodied in the Hawaiian act which might be cited and urged as precedents in future legislation concerning territorial acquisitions . . . as a result of the war with Spain.” 3. The Committee on Territories reported to the House of Representatives on 23 January 1899. (Congressional Record, 55th Cong., 3d sess., 953; 55th Cong., 3d sess., A Bill to provide a government for the Territory of Hawaii, 23 January 1899, H.R. 10990, amended.) •••••••••
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From the Diary of SBA [7–13 January 1899]
Sat. Jan. 7, 1899. In New York—and this one with Mattie & niece Guel1 2 ma —& Arthur Jr’s wife —at nephew A. A. Moshers— Guelma left about 3 4 p.m. to go to Orange—Geo. A. Vails— She sings in Cong. church 4 there— Nephew Harry A. Baker did not get home to dinner— Miss Powell—cousin S’s companion & house-keeper came for me—at 8 Oclock 1. Guelma Lawrence Baker (1875–1923), later Lyons, was Margaret Baker’s only daughter and a talented singer and actress making her career on the East Coast, mainly in light opera. Her voice was described as “a clear, true soprano voice.” She also toured with the great actress of tragedy Helena Modjeska. In 1910, she married Edwin Jacques Lyons, a theater director with whom she had worked. They returned to live in San Diego. (Baker Genealogical Ms., SBA Papers, MCR-S; Hearst’s Chicago Evening American, 10 March 1903; Johnson Briscoe, The Actors’ Birthday Book, 2d series [New York, 1908], 223; New York Times, 17 April 1910; Malcolm H. Stern, First American Jewish Families: 600 Genealogies, 1654–1988, 3d ed. [Baltimore, 1991], 182, on-line at American Jewish Archives; Certificate of Death, County of San Diego, California State Board of Health.) 2. Mattie Mosher and Guelma Baker were with Laura Bodine Mosher (1879– 1946), the wife of Arthur Byron Mosher (1876–?). Young Arthur, the eldest child of Mattie and Arthur A. Mosher, studied at Washington University in St. Louis, married the daughter of a Democratic congressman from Missouri, and joined his father in the insurance business in New York City. The young couple lived with the senior Moshers. After they divorced about 1930, Laura Mosher remarried and took the name of Parsons. (Anthony, Anthony Genealogy, 183; city directory, 1899;
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research by Phyllis C. Stehm, genealogist for the Susan B. Anthony House, Inc., Rochester.) 3. George Aaron Vail (1839–1908), who lived in East Orange, New Jersey, was a son of SBA’s cousin and childhood friend Aaron R. Vail and a brother of Carrie Ladd. Like other members of his family, he was in the leather business, having gotten his start with his uncle Henry G. Lapham. (Vail, Moses Vail, 222; New York Times, 14, 15 February 1908.) 4. Harry Baker moved from the West Coast to New York City.
Sun. Jan. 8, 1899. In New York at Cousin S. V. Laphams went to Episcopal 1 Church Cor. 66th st & Madison Ave to see & hear Rev Heber Newton — with cousin Carrie Ladd— sat in pew with Cousin Louis Lapham’s wife & 2 little Eleanor— after the ceremonials were all through—& the Rev Newton took his place to give his sermon it was delightfully progressive—on the “Flowerings of Christianity”—but it seemed so incongruous with all the “Tom Foolery” of the performances before it— Nephew Harry Baker called this evening—told of his wonderful power now gained—to last!! 1. Richard Heber Newton (1840–1914), an Episcopal clergyman, was rector of All Souls Protestant Episcopal Church. (ANB.) 2. Antoinette Dearborn Lapham (1861–1956) married Lewis Henry Lapham (1858–1934) in 1882. Elinor Lapham (1889–1983), later Ford, was the third of their four children. Lewis, a son of SBA’s cousin and friend Semantha Lapham, worked in the leather firm founded by his late father. In 1899, he added steamships to his business interests and became a founder of the American-Hawaiian Steamship Company. In 1902, he was a founder of the Texas Company, later known as Texaco. (Aldrige, Laphams in America, 182–83, 256–57; NCAB, 52:390; New York Times, 18 June 1915, 11 June 1934, 17 May 1956; State of California Death Index, 1940–1997, on-line, s.v. “Lapham, Antoinette Dearborn”; Connecticut Death Index, 1949– 2001, on-line, s.v. “Ford, Elinor Lapham.”)
Mon. Jan. 9, 1899. In New York—at Cousin Semantha’s— After dinner—the carriage came round & Cousin Carrie Ladd & I first called at 41 1 East 10th st Cousin Emily Clark Griggs —but found her gone to Poland Her[kimer] Co[unty] for a change— there she supports her only brother Lemuel—who has never been self-supporting— Then I just called at Mrs Stantons—where I found Antoinette Brown 2 Blackwell waiting to see me & tell me her grievance over my book & the incident at Gerritt Smiths in 1859—felt it gave wrong impression—but I could not see how it was so— Then Carrie drove me out to Riverside—& Grants monument—it is
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very imposing— then back to no 10, where we played Desperation all the 3 evening— I really got so I could see the game— 1. Emily Clark Griggs (c. 1836–1912) was the daughter of SBA’s first cousin through her mother’s family Nancy Howe Clark. The daughter of a Presbyterian minister, Emily Griggs attended Brockport College, married Arthur Irving Griggs from her hometown of Westford, New York, and with him moved to New York City during the Civil War. Irving Griggs was a very successful businessman, who consolidated his company into the American Stove-Board Company in 1893, and Emily Griggs earned a reputation as a philanthropist. (Daniel Wait Howe, Howe Genealogies [Boston, 1929], 200; ApCAB, s.v. “Griggs, Arthur Irving” and “Griggs, Emily Clark”.) Lemuel H. Clark (c. 1849–?), her brother, was a clerk in Westford, New York, in 1880, living with his wife, two young sons, and his widowed mother. (Federal Census, 1880, 1910, 1920.) 2. Anthony, 1:179–80. In the story, while Antoinette Blackwell preached in Gerrit Smith’s Free Church in Peterboro, New York, Smith fell asleep and snored. A distraught Blackwell sent SBA away when she arrived to console her but later told SBA, according to Harper’s rendition, “Henceforth she would enjoy what solace there was in her religious faith for herself but would expect no other soul to share it with her.” Turning attention to the lesson SBA took from this encounter, Harper wrote, “ ‘This was to me a wonderful revelation,’ said Miss Anthony, ‘and I realized, as never before, that in our most sacred hours we dwell indeed in a world of solitude.’ ” 3. SBA first played this card game on a visit to Semantha Lapham in 1896. Desperation required six decks of cards and an even number of players who played as partners. Players built foundations of cards from the lowest aces to the highest kings. See The Official Rules of Card Games. Hoyle Up-to-Date. Publishers’ Fourteenth Edition of Rules of Popular Games (Cincinnati, Ohio, 1909), 163–64.
Tues. Jan. 10, 1899. In New York— Mrs Lapham sent me over to Mrs Stantons—and we talked & she wrote or began to—a form of petition to Congress—but chatting consumed most of the day—so that Mrs Stanton 1 begged me to come over one day more— But while her mind is bright as ever—she is so handi-capped— She cannot dictate to a Stenographer—a bit better than she used to speak extempore— she can write—but cannot read it after written—nor can she hold the sentences in mind to make them right— she always must see her words to improve her sentences— It is too bad!! 1. Below at 15 January 1899.
Wed. Jan. 11, 1899. In New York From Mrs Stanton’s earnest appeal I gave her this one more day and at night—when Hattie read over the petition &
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appeal her mother had sent to be mailed to Mr Dana—she said—& is this all that Mother has done after urging you to stay over? Well it is very sad to see her so nearly blind—that she cannot even read over what she writes— Thur. Jan. 12, 1899. and yet another day— and this nWednesdayp p.m.— she mailed to Mr Paul Dana the joint product of petition nto Congressp & appeal to women to circulate it This a.m. at 11 I took day train for home Fri. Jan. 13, 1899. Left New York on 11 a.m. train & reached home at 9— [something?]— was met at door by a nurse—& learned that both my 1 sister Mary & little girl Annie had been under her care a week—with La Grippe— both were better—however— no this was Thursday—so yesterday— All of this day—Friday—I was at home—looking over the letters that had come during my twelve days absence & the nurse—did the house-work— with some help from all of us— 1. Anna Elizabeth Dann (1878–1965), later Mason, left Canada for Rochester in 1897, and before the year was out, found work at 17 Madison Street as a housekeeper. She was a daughter of an English-born Baptist minister in Sarnia, Ontario, and various of her sisters also spent time in Rochester. Dann had a social life among young, single working women in the city that spilled into the Anthony house. In 1899, Dann’s work changed as SBA encouraged her to aspire to more than domestic work. Still living at the house, her hours were reduced to make time for classes in typography and stenography. By the middle of 1900, she was identified in the census as a private secretary, though she still helped with housework. Dann worked for SBA until her marriage in 1902, and thereafter, she and her husband often provided assistance to the Anthony sisters. (SBA diaries, account pages for 1897, 1898, 1899, 1900, and 1901, and 17 & 25 September 1899, 1 January & 21 April & 16 November 1900, and Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 10 October 1902, all in Film, 36:247ff, 37:604ff, 39:13ff, 40:363ff, 41:649ff, 42:770; Federal Census, Rochester, 1900; Census of Canada, Sarnia, 1901; Santa Barbara News-Press, 5 October 1952; Mt. Albion Cemetery, Town of Albion, N.Y., on-line transcriptions of gravestones and cemetery records, by Sharon A. Kerridge, 1997.) Y Excelsior Diary 1899, n.p., SBA Papers, DLC. Square brackets surround uncertain readings and expanded abbreviations.
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Open Letter to Thomas B. Reed1 [14 January 1899]
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Honored Sir:—We notice with keen interest a bill before Congress to regulate the political status of the inhabitants of Hawaii. In our opinion it is a grave blunder, at this stage of civilization, as a new century dawns upon us, to establish a “male oligarchy” in any of the new territories that have lately come into our possession. The marked feature in the legislation of the present century has been the growing liberality of our laws for women, until in four States they have been crowned with all the rights of American citizens. The women of Hawaii should be accorded the highest position occupied by any in the United States. But the bill before Congress proposes more restrictive legislation for women than any yet tried in the United States. By limiting all official positions to “male” citizens there is a new depth to women’s degradation 3 we of the States have not yet experienced. Our women can hold every official position from President down to school trustee, but the women of Hawaii would be denied all official positions of dignity and power should this bill pass Congress. If the men of our Republic have not the justice and wisdom to establish a government of equality in all their possessions, they should at least avoid giving woman an inferior position to that already attained here, especially as a most important step to a higher civilization is the education and elevation of the mothers of the race. It would be a grave mistake to begin the new century with retrogressive legislation for women naturally looking to our flag as a new protection for all their inalienable rights. Your sentiments, Honored Sir, in favor of the enfranchisement of women have been so freely expressed on many public occasions that we appeal to you with confidence to use your official position to prevent, if possible, this proposed legislation, perpetuating, as it will, in other latitudes these invidious distinctions of sex. U Elizabeth Cady Stanton, U Susan B. Anthony.
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Y Woman’s Tribune, 14 January 1899. 1. Thomas Brackett Reed (1839–1902), Republican of Maine and Speaker of the House, served in the House of Representatives from 1877 to 1899. He had often provided congressional leadership for woman suffragists. In the House, the Committee on Territories did not report its amendments to the Hawaii bill until January 23. (BDAC. See also Papers 5.) 2. This is the date of earliest known publication. However, when publishing the same letter on 27 January 1899, the Hawaiian Gazette indicated that ECS and SBA dated it 5 January 1899. That is a possible date, as evident from the diary entries above. 3. The Hawaiian Commission’s text listed among qualifications for office being “a male citizen of the United States.” Neither Senate nor House committees removed that language. (55th Cong., 3d sess., A Bill to provide a government for the Territory of Hawaii, 21 December 1898, S. 4893, amended; 55th Cong., 3d sess., A Bill to provide a government for the Territory of Hawaii, 23 January 1899, H.R. 10990, amended.) •••••••••
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From the Diary of SBA [14 January 1899]
Sat. Jan. 14, 1899. At home Sister Mary & Annie both up this a.m—& Sister Mary discharged the nurse— all wrong—but that is her way—and it costs me too much feeling to insist against it— So we are left with two convalescents & one good-for-nothing to look on!! Y Excelsior Diary 1899, n.p., SBA Papers, DLC.
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Appeal by ECS and SBA [15 January 1899] Petition for the Women of Hawaii 1
To the Editor of The Sun —Sir: The following petition should be circulated by every organized society of women throughout the United States, and promptly forwarded to their respective Representatives: To the Senate and House of Representatives in Congress Assembled. The undersigned earnestly pray your honorable body that in the proposed government for our newly acquired territories you recognize for women the highest position of citizenship yet attained in this republic. As in four States of the Union women now enjoy civil and political equality, to create a male oligarchy, by restricting the right to vote and hold office to men, would be to ignore all the steps of progress made during the last fifty years and reestablish at the very dawn of the new century a government based upon the invidious distinctions of sex, which have ever 2 blocked the way to a higher civilization. When the emancipation of black men was under discussion the Women’s Loyal League sent 400,000 petitions to Congress in favor of that mea3 sure. Shall we do less for the political freedom of the women of Hawaii? On the contrary, let us of the several States vie with each other in our efforts to roll up the largest petition ever presented in Congress against any form of class legislation. U Elizabeth Cady Stanton. U Susan B. Anthony. Y “The Cause of Woman,” New York Sun, 15 January 1899. 1. That is, Paul Dana.
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2. Some versions of this petition continue: “Therefore we earnestly beg of you to strike from the pending Hawaiian bill the word ‘male’ as a qualification for voting and holding office.” The Sun’s shorter version is also found in the Woman’s Journal. (Film, 39:468; Woman’s Journal, 21 January 1899; Kansas Suffrage Reveille, March 1899.) For an antisuffragist’s critique of the petition and ECS’s response, see “The Women of Hawaii,” 28 January 1899, Film, 39:500. Although the response bears the names of ECS and SBA, SBA left New York City for Rochester before the critic wrote to the Evening Post and was not on hand to collaborate with ECS. 3. On the work of the Women’s Loyal National League to outlaw slavery in 1863 and 1864, see Papers 1. •••••••••
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From the Diary of SBA [15 January 1899]
Sun. Jan. 15, 1899. At home— Went to Church— Had calls in p.m. so did not get down town for the N.Y. Sun until 8 p.m— then bought 5 copies 1 at The Powers Hotel —& found Mrs Harper’s article—but Mrs Stanton’s & my petition & appeal before it—with the heading “The Cause of Woman”—very good—but too weak!! Sent copies at once to Woman’s Journal & Tribune Mrs Harpers good but lacked well sharpened points to the items—so 2 it seemed— Still I scribbled & took to letter box—“Well done Jimmy Grind”— It will be splendid if the Sun will let her give our patriotic woman’s thought of things every Sunday!! 1. The Powers Hotel, open since 1883, occupied the corner of West Main and Fitzhugh streets in the city center. 2. Ida Harper began her new assignment to fill one and one-half columns of the Sunday Sun with “Various Items of Interest to Its Friends and Foes.” (New York Sun, 15 January 1899.) Y Excelsior Diary 1899, n.p., SBA Papers, DLC.
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ECS to the Editor, New York SUN [New York, before 13 February 1899]
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To the Editor of The Sun—Sir: It is asked why women should be exempt from capital punishment. Because they have no voice in the laws, no representation in the Government. This is a “male oligarchy.” Men make the laws and compel women to abide by them. Men decide what deeds are criminal, drag women into their courts to be tried by juries of men, advocates men, Judges men, imprisoned and watched by men, their heads shaved, dress adjusted, strapped in the chair for electrocution by men, in the presence of men, without a word to say as to the law or its execution. I am opposed to the death penalty in any form, for men or women, but the fact that woman has no voice in the laws, no representation in the government, makes her as helpless as dogs or cats in the hands of vivisectionists, outside the realm of justice and mercy. What a picture is presented us at this time for contemplation. The great State of New York on one side and an ignorant, unbalanced and half crazy woman on the other, about to suffer the death penalty for a horrible crime which no sane person could 2 possibly perpetrate. For the protection of society she must be punished, but let her sentence be commuted to lifelong imprisonment. Such criminals as Mrs. Place, now doomed to death, must be deprived of their liberty, but capital punishment is a barbarism unworthy this stage of our development and a disgrace to the Christianity and civilization of the nineteenth century. The paraphernalia of death by electricity is more harrowing in its details than the gallows, and both are revolting to the moral sense of the community. There is a sentiment of tenderness and compassion in the soul of every man that revolts at the crucifixion of a mother of the race, even in the form of the most ignorant and degraded woman. The time has come for New York, the great leader in the sisterhood of States, to abolish this relic of barbarism and give the criminals, by useful labor for years, the opportunity to atone in a measure for their crimes, and benefit society by their patient industry.
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By making our prisons what they should be, schools of reformation, where the best elements in the human mind can be awakened and developed, men and women might graduate as skilled laborers, scholars in the rudiments of learning, with clearer moral perceptions and with new hopes and ambitions, a blessing to themselves, the family and the State. U Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Y New York Sun, 13 February 1899. 1. Dated with reference to the date of publication. 2. Martha M. Garretson Savacool Place (c. 1854–1899) was slated for execution in the electric chair, New York State’s first female victim of the new technology of death. A New Jersey widow supporting herself and her son by sewing in New Brunswick, she accepted the offer of the widower William Place to be his housekeeper in Brooklyn. He soon married her because, Martha Place told the court, wives worked without wages. In February 1898, she killed her stepdaughter, and in November of that year, in Kings County Court, she was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. An appeal delayed her execution, but on 10 January 1899, the New York Court of Appeals upheld her conviction, and on March 15, Governor Theodore Roosevelt refused to intervene. Martha Place was electrocuted at Sing Sing on 20 March 1899. (People v. Place, 157 New York Reports 584 [1899]; New York Times, 9 & 13 July 1898, 23 March 1899; Marlin Shipman, “The Penalty Is Death”: U.S. Newspaper Coverage of Women’s Executions [Columbia, Mo., 2002], 225–30; Harold Schechter, The Devil’s Gentleman: Privilege, Poison, and the Trial that Ushered in the Twentieth Century [New York, 2007], 263–65.) •••••••••
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Interview with ECS in New York [c. 4 March 1899]
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Besides criticising the politics of the later-day suffragists, Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton is bitter against them for taking up the Roberts matter at the 2 National Council in Washington two weeks ago. “They had no right to do it,” she declared in an interview on the subject. “It was in poor taste and it showed poorer judgment. Miss Anthony knew it was wrong, and she tried to keep them from it, but it was no use. They’re headstrong and ill-advised, those women, and they took pleasure in meddling with the private affairs of a public man. What right had they to consider the relations of a United States congressman to women? That’s the mistake the women of England 3 made with Parnell, and they gave the cause of Ireland such a blow as it
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will not recover from for years. Roberts is doing legally what many another Congressman, as we all know, does without warrant. He is bound by his religion to support those three women, and it is nothing to his discredit to do so openly and honestly. I am not afraid of Mormonism being encouraged by his household being removed to Washington. It is a religion now upon the decline, and with the advance of woman’s suffrage it must ultimately become extinct. It is from women that we must look for good laws and the execution of those laws. I don’t believe in men deciding what is best for women. The idea of all these prelates sitting in solemn conclave in Washington not long ago and discussing divorce laws without a single 4 voice from the woman’s auxiliary being heard. We may need new divorce laws in many parts of the country, but not until women may be allowed to have a say in the changing.” Y Unidentified and undated clipping, SBA scrapbook 29, Rare Books, DLC. In Film at February? 1899. 1. The date is estimated with reference to the passage of two weeks since the National Council of Women took action on Brigham Roberts. 2. At its triennial meeting, the National Council of Women debated rival resolutions about Brigham Roberts. Newspapers quoted SBA only for her questions: “if we should go up to Congress would we not find men there” who broke “the laws of monogamic marriage” in the states? “Why, then, should we go away out to Utah to seek out a man to punish?” The number and seniority of Mormon women in the council tempered the ardor of social purity crusaders and produced the rather tame resolution that “no person should be allowed to hold a place in any law-making body of the nation who is not a law-abiding citizen.” (Washington Post, 19 February 1899, Film, 39:537–38.) 3. Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–1891), Irish nationalist leader, was hounded out of politics by social purity advocates when William O’Shea named him as corespondent in a filing for divorce. In England at the time, ECS took the unpopular view “that patriotism and chastity belong to different spheres of action.” (Oxford DNB; Papers, 5:336–43.) 4. As she would many times, ECS referred to the general convention of the Protestant Episcopal church in October 1898, where the agenda included schemes to discourage divorce by state laws and by restricting access to sacraments. The fact that the bishops, clergy, and male laity who debated divorce never consulted the large assembly of women meeting next door as the Woman’s Auxiliary to the Board of Missions underscored ECS’s recurring objection to masculine control of the laws of marriage and divorce. Neither the House of Bishops nor the House of Deputies agreed to proposals brought to the convention in 1898, but the body created a special committee to issue a report in 1900 for consideration at the convention of 1901. (Journal of the Proceedings of the Bishops Clergy and Laity
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of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, Assembled in a General Convention, Held in the City of Washington from October 5 to October 25 Inclusive, In the Year of Our Lord 1898 [N.p., 1899], 88–90, 214, 215, 273–74, 280–81, 357, 388–89, 555–56, 586–87; Pamela W. Darling, New Wine: The Story of Women Transforming Leadership and Power in the Episcopal Church [Cambridge, Mass., 1994], 18–28.) •••••••••
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Henry B. Blackwell to SBA Boston, March 6, 1899
Dear Miss Anthony Next week’s Woman’s Journal will contain my review of Mrs. Harper’s 1 memoir of yourself and your work for the Woman Suffrage cause. In making it, I have felt it due to the truth of history to state briefly, but distinctly, the causes of the division between the National and American societies. I have tried to do so in a spirit of candor and with avoidance of personalities. As the facts must sooner or later be stated, I have thought it fairer to all concerned, that it should be done now during the lifetime of many of the principal participants, rather than later when we all have passed away. I need not add that if any corrections or explanations or counter-statements are desired by yourself or Mrs. Stanton, the columns of the Woman’s Journal are as free to yourselves as to me. If mistakes have been made in the past, they will serve as guides to the future action of those who are to take up the work when we lay it down, for we can hardly hope or expect to see its consummation. Hoping you will feel that my statement is made with a cordial appreciation of the great work you have done for women, I am, Yours truly, U Henry B. Blackwell Y Transcript in hand of Ida P. Boyer, Blackwell Papers, DLC. 1. Copies of the family’s letters by Ida P. Boyer, such as this one, were apparently made while Alice Blackwell prepared her biography of her mother, when donations allowed her to hire Boyer to assist in “collecting and arranging the material.” What then happened to the originals Boyer copied is not known. (Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Woman’s Rights [1930; reprint, Charlottesville, Va., 2001], xxx.)
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William F. Channing to ECS Pasadena, Calif. March 9, ’99.
My dear Mrs. Stanton, I received with much pleasure the copy of the Investigator which you 1 sent me, containing your paper on “Homogeneous divorce.” (Is Divorce ever homogeneous?) I agree, of course, with all that you say so well. I have just completed my seventy ninth, & entered my eightieth year. I think we can both say that nage,p instead of narrowing our sphere, broadens it. The spirit grows young as the body grows old. I think we both agree with Lord Brougham that the world waits for “a 2 total reconstruction of the whole marriage system.” We refrain from demanding its immediate reconstruction, because the time is not ripe for the reconstruction of the whole social system, of which the present marriage is the subtlest & strongest bond. The natural form of marriage can only be established & exist in a freely & perfectly organized social body, in which all parts work together. As a preliminary to this, woman must have at least an equal part & voice in human affairs & especially in social reconstruction. The real marriage will be the nworld’sp great teacher of religion. We love and therefore are immortal. The church and state have done well to clutch marriage as their strongest hold on the struggling nsubjectp masses. In nrealp marriage womans voice must be the potential one. I have just read, chapter by chapter, as it was turned into English, a most 3 extraordinary work on the Psychology of Woman by Frau Mahrholm, of whom you probably know something, as she has referred to you in one of her previous works, (which I have not seen). She placed this book, with her English & American copyright, in the hands of an American lady, long 4 resident in Germany, but now in Los Angeles, Miss Etchison. This lady made a fine transl an excellent translation of the book, but so full of German idiom & structure that it required complete recasting. She brought it to my daughter Grace who converted it into a very fine English typewritten draft ntranslationp which is now in the hands of an excellent nwell knownp publishers All in this country & England. As all of this & what follows is at
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present a trade-secret, I write it to you as interesting information, for your own delectation, & not for the public or the booksellers until the book is safely published. Barring accidents it ought to be out in a very few weeks. All who have read the book agree that it will make a great sensation. I have seen no book on the subject of Woman and all related problems so profound & suggestive. It is of the nfirst amongp books written by women, most suggestive revealing the mysteries of her nature. As a literary work it is brilliant,—& it is astonishingly frank. It will give new impetus to the great discussion,—all the more so that it opposes the “Woman’s movement” in its present form. It is the strongest plea for motherhood that I have ever seen. Frau Mahrholm laments the loss of the nappealing figure of thep Virgin Mary, with the Christ child in her arms from Protestant streets & churches. Frau M. shows her sympathy from time to time with the best so5 cialistic feeling nideasp though criticising Herr Bebel non woman.p This is a bald description of a book crowded with ideas, which while conservative & profoundly womanly, are nisp also revolutionary. 6 It is, in some respects the antithesis of Charlotte’s book, but also strikes deep chords of common sympathy. You and Hattie will soon I hope be able to see the book and form your own judgement upon it. We have had a semi-tropical winter. Our normal “winter” is really a long Spring beginning at Christmas, but this winter has been more like summer. I have felt guilty in enjoying the perpetual sunshine & watching the developement of leaf & blossom, while you were suffering from terrible storm & cold. One day last week when the thermometer in Washington City was 15q below zero it was 85q above, here, a difference of exactly 100q. The air has been exceedingly dry here, as a consequence of drought, & therefore the heat is insensible,—or rather we do not suffer from a temperature of 85q any more than you at the East suffer from 65q or 70q. That is the charm of our summers here, which is our most beautiful season. Last week I counted fourteen varieties of fruit tree in blossom in our grounds. Among them were peach, apricot, nectarine, plum, almond, apple, pear, quince, orange, lemon, lime, pomegranite, & the Japanese Loquat. We have picked nchoicep roses every day this winter. I send you a few petals of Duchess of 7 Brabant, & also Marechal Niel if I can reach them on their lofty perch. Love as you know is infinite. So I send boundless love to Hattie, & still have illimitable love for you, without impairing the world’s supply. Affectionately & tenderly, Your friend ever, U Wm. F. Channing—
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Y ALS, Scrapbook 2, Papers of ECS, NPV. 1. Channing responded to ECS’s article “Are Homogeneous Divorce Laws in All the States Desirable?” Boston Investigator, 17 December 1898, Film, 38:1011– 12. This was essentially the same article as published in this volume, below at March 1900. 2. Others who attributed this idea to Lord Brougham described him as speaking about all laws regarding women, not just those about marriage. See Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Woman and Her Wishes; An Essay (Boston, 1853), 20, and Lucretia C. Mott to Lydia Mott, 30 April 1861, in History, 1:746. 3. Laura Marholm (1854–1928) was the penname of Laura Katarina Mohr Hansson, a writer born in Latvia, with roots in Scandinavia, who wrote in German. Zur Psychologie der Frau (1897) was described in the American Journal of Psychology as “the first book by a woman on the psychology of her sex.” In it, Marholm found fault with modern women’s tendency to stray from the roles assigned to them by nature. Happiness and social harmony required that women accept their womanliness and with that, their submission to manliness. Translated as Studies in the Psychology of Woman, Marholm’s book was soon published in the United States. (Marilyn Scott, “Laura Marholm (1854–1928): Germany’s Ambivalent Feminist,” Women’s Studies 7 [March 1980]: 87–96; Susan Brantly, The Life and Writings of Laura Marholm [Basel, Germany, 1991]; Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History [Stanford, Calif., 2000], 190; American Journal of Psychology 9 [January 1898]: 247.) 4. Georgia A. Etchison (c. 1864–?) is the acknowledged translator of Marholm’s book. She audited lectures in political science at the University of Berlin in the winter of 1897 to 1898 and returned to the United States with this translation project. Records in Berlin indicate she audited classes at Wellesley College and the University of California, Berkeley, before traveling abroad. Georgia Etchison lived in Los Angeles in 1900 and taught music. (Federal Census, Liberty, Mo., 1870, Wellington, Kan., 1880, and Los Angeles and Berkeley, Calif., 1900; Sandra L. Singer, Adventures Abroad: North American Women at German-Speaking Universities, 1868–1915 [Westport, Conn., 2003], 190, 193; Register of the War Department, January 1, 1887 [Washington, D.C., 1887], 57; U.S. Bureau of Land Management Records, on-line; research assistance of Kathryn M. Neal, University Archives, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, and additional assistance of Sandra L. Singer, Alfred University.) 5. August Bebel (1840–1913), a German socialist leader, wrote Women under Socialism, published first in German in 1883. 6. Channing refers to Charlotte Perkins Stetson, Women and Economics (1898), a book opposed to biological explanations of women’s condition. As her title suggests, Stetson looked to women’s economic dependency for an explanation of their subordination and discontent. Differences between the sexes, she opined, were likely to be inconsequential once women were emancipated. 7. Maréchal Niel, a yellow shrub rose, and Duchesse de Brabant, a pink tea rose, were popular and vigorous plants bred in the middle of the nineteenth century.
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SBA to Mary Hutcheson Page1 Rochester, N.Y., March 15, 1899.
My Dear Mrs Page Our National treasurer—Mrs Upton—has just written me that you & your Committee have contributed $500— and more to help our Organizer Mrs C. C. Catt work with the Legislatures of Oklahoma & Arizona to 2 secure the suffrage for their women this winter— It was splendid of you to thus specify the place & way for your money to be used—and it is most cruel that both of those bodies should come so near to giving the desired right, and yet fail to do so! Still—though Antis will reckon two more defeats—we shall count them as almost victories! We have only to go again two years hence—and do over again with their next Legislature—and then we surely must win the necessary vote in both Houses of both Legislatures! At any rate—we must & surely will “keep pegging away on this line”—if it takes a whole decade of years to gain the law!! But for the coming eight months—I propose to propose to all of our women of all of our States & territories to give their attention—their time & labor to saving our nation from thrusting a male oligarchy upon the people of nthep Hawaiian Islands—as the bills in both Houses of the 55th 3 Congress, just closed, proposed to do. Their failure to become law is a god-send to our cause—because it gives us time to roll up a mammoth petition to the 56th Congress—praying that in whatever form of government we give to Hawaii—or to any of our newly acquired possessions it shall be based upon the principle of equal rights to women—civil and political— That whatever the nvotingp qualification shall be—whether of property or education or both—it shall not be one of sex—or any other insurmountable qualification— Do you & your Committee believe that the women of this nation can be roused to this work? It seems to me we could in no way do so much good educational work—as by all of us setting about rolling up two or three or more millions of signatures to such a petition— Again thanking you for your good help to our good cause—I am very sincerely & gratefully U Susan B. Anthony
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Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead for 1899, Women’s Rights Collection, MCR-S. 1. Mary Hutcheson Page (1860–1940), educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lived in Brookline, Massachusetts, with her husband and children. Through her Committee of Work, she created an alternative to the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association in order to raise money for national suffrage work and organize new local constituencies. The Committee of Work sent money to the Colorado amendment campaign of 1893, and its donations continued. In 1901, the committee gave birth to the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government, one of the state’s most important twentieth-century suffrage groups. (Guide to Mary Hutcheson Page Papers, Women’s Rights Collection, MCR-S; New York Times, 11 February 1940; Sharon Hartman Strom, “Leadership and Tactics in the American Woman Suffrage Movement: A New Perspective from Massachusetts,” JAH 62 [September 1975]: 300–303; Joan C. Tonn, Mary P. Follett: Creating Democracy, Transforming Management [New Haven, Conn., 2003], 129–30; Report of the Thirty-first Annual Convention, 1899, p. 140, and Report of the Thirty-second Annual Convention, 1900, p. 44, Film, 39:722ff, 40:829ff.) 2. The Organization Committee undertook lobbying in Oklahoma and Arizona territories at the start of 1899. Carrie Catt addressed joint sessions of the territorial legislatures. In Oklahoma, where Mary Hay spent several months, the house passed House Bill 41 for woman suffrage on 3 March 1899, but the council buried it in committee on 10 March. Five days later, a local newspaper ran the headline, “Did Bribes Kill It? Defeat of the Woman’s Suffrage Bill Said to Have Been Caused by Money.” In Arizona, legislators followed a similar course. The house passed House Bill 35 on 10 February 1899, but in the council, the bill never emerged from committee. (Report of the Thirty-first Annual Convention, 1899, pp. 29–34; Guthrie Daily Leader, 14, 17, 24, 25 January, 1 February, 3, 7, 10, 15 March 1899; Phoenix Weekly Herald, 9, 16 February, 16, 23 March 1899.) 3. The Fifty-fifth Congress ended on 3 March 1899. Neither the Senate nor the House of Representatives took action on their Hawaii bills before adjournment. •••••••••
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SBA to Clara Bewick Colby Rochester, N.Y., March 17— 1899.
Yes—Blackwell has done what the old adage declared a foul thing he 1 illegible his for a hen—even—dirtied his own wife’s nest— But dont—I beg of you say one word about him in your paper—let him have all the fun by himself— neither Mrs Stanton nor Mrs Harper is going to say a word back— Let him alone— Lovingly U S. B A
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Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead for 1899, Clara B. Colby Collection, CSmH. 1. After three paragraphs of praise, most of it for SBA’s person rather than Ida Harper’s book, Henry Blackwell, writing in Woman’s Journal, 11 March 1899, turned to one of his favorite subjects: “Valuable and delightful as Miss Anthony’s biography is, it has one conspicuous lack. It does not explain the causes that led to the division between the ‘National’ and ‘American’ wings of the woman suffrage movement.” He proceeded to fill nine columns of the paper with his familiar list of misbehavior and misjudgment on the parts of ECS and SBA, by which “[t]he cause had been hopelessly blackened in the eyes of the public.” Lucy Stone, who died in 1893, had refused to state the facts of division, Blackwell explained. “If she were living, it is not unlikely that she would still take this view.” But he would not follow her example: “Let it be repeated and emphasized that only a small fraction of the suffragists ever advocated making easy divorce a part of the program of the Suffrage Association, or favored the alliances with Mr. Train or with Mrs. Woodhull.” On Blackwell as his own historian, see also Papers, 5:213n, 297–98, 308, 371. •••••••••
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Speech by SBA to the NationalAmerican Woman Suffrage Association
Editorial note: SBA called the National-American’s thirty-first annual convention to order and made her opening speech at the St. Cecilia Club House in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the afternoon of 27 April 1899. According to another report, she prefaced this speech by explaining that suffrage associations only counted their annual meetings back to the postwar period, not to 1848, “as the suffrage work was dropped during the civil war, [and] the continuity was broken.” (Woman’s Tribune, 6 May 1899, Film, 39:827–29.)
[27 April 1899] Since our last Convention, the area of disfranchisement in the possessions of the United States has been greatly enlarged; the Government has undertaken to furnish provisional governments for Hawaii and the Philippine Islands, Cuba and Porto Rico. Hitherto settlers in new Territories were permitted to frame their own provisional governments, which were ratified by Congress, but today Congress itself assumes the prerogative of framing the laws for the newly acquired territories. When the governments for the Southern and Western territories were
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organized there had been no practical example of universal suffrage in any of the older states, hence it might be pardonable for their settlers to ignore the rights of the women associated with them to a voice in their government. But to-day, after the continuous agitation of the right of women to vote, and the demand having been conceded in over one half the States in the managements of the public schools, in one State added to that of the schools the management of the government of its cities, and in four states the full vote accorded, in Wyoming for thirty years, in Colorado six years and in Utah and Idaho three years; while in England, Scotland and Ireland, with Canada and nearly all the colonies of Great Britain, the different votes are conceded to women, except the one vote for Members of Parliament, and in New Zealand for the last five years and in South Australia for three years the women have had full suffrage. The universal reports from the old world and the new go to show that the exercise of the right to vote by women has added to their influence, increased the respect of men for women and elevated the moral, social and political conditions of their respective commonwealths. There has never been a protest against women possessing this power from any, save the lowest orders of men. On the other hand, the universal testimony from the respectable citizens, men and women alike, of all the professions and avocations, from the day the women of Wyoming were enfranchised, in 1869, to the present has been that the result of woman’s taking part in the administration of the government has been good and only good. With these object lessons before Congress it would seem that no Member is so blind as not to see it the duty of that Body to base provisional government of our new possessions on the principle of equality of rights, privileges and immunities for all people, woman included. I hope this Convention will devise plans for securing a strong expression of public sentiment on this question, to be presented to the 56th Congress which is to convene on the first Monday of December next. Our constitutions and laws do more to educate the rank and file of the present generation than all the agitation of all the reformers of the country. The unjust laws on the statute books, with regard to married women; their right to their person, their wages and their children, influence the majority of both men and women of the United States to think that such deprivation of personal rights is the proper thing for legal wives and mothers. It has
(Pearson’s Magazine (American Edition) 9 (December 1902): 1285, courtesy of Princeton University Library and Rutgers University Photographer Nick Romanenko.)
Fannie Rosenberg Bigelow (1861– 1937). The daughter of GermanJewish immigrants and the wife of a New England Protestant, Bigelow personified a cross-cultural and interfaith current in Rochester’s woman’s movement. (American Red Cross, Rare Books Special Collections and Preservation Department, University of Rochester.)
Hester C. Jeffrey (c. 1842–1934). This friend and co-worker in Rochester delivered a eulogy for Susan B. Anthony at the funeral in 1906, speaking, as she phrased it, on behalf of “the colored people of Rochester.” (From J. W. Thompson, An Authentic History of the Douglass Monument [Rochester, 1903], facing p. 176. From the Collection of the Rochester Public Library Local History Division.)
Mary Stafford Anthony (1827–1907), in a detail from a dual portrait with older sister Susan B. Anthony, taken by John Howe Kent in 1897 in his Rochester studio. (From the Collection of the Rochester Public Library Local History Division.)
“What Shall We Do with Our Ex-Presidents?—Susan B. Anthony Knows,” by Charles Lewis Bartholomew, or Bart, Minneapolis Journal, 26 April 1905. Many cartoonists enjoyed the aggravation Grover Cleveland caused himself when he wrote in the Ladies’ Home Journal that women’s clubs are “harmful in a way that directly menaces the integrity of our homes and the benign disposition and character of our wifehood and motherhood.” This was Bart’s second cartoon on the topic (Scrapbook 1905–1906, Susan B. Anthony Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.)
Susan B. Anthony’s view of students at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama when she addressed them 29 March 1903 in the school’s chapel, a few months after the photograph was taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston. “All of the girls were required to march across the platform single file and the opportunity provided for them to shake hands with Miss Anthony,” Emmett Scott reported to Booker T. Washington. “I think that she and they both enjoyed it very much indeed.” (Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection, Division of Prints and Photographs, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmscd-00083.)
On a platform for dignitaries, Edna Woodhams Snook (1865–1941), of Coquille, Oregon, holds a parasol over Susan B. Anthony, while Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919) looks at the camera, during ceremonies to present a statue of Sacajawea to the city of Portland on 6 July 1905. (Oregon Historical Society #bb003335.)
Elizabeth Smith Miller (1822-1911), Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony on the porch at Lochland, Geneva, New York, Miller’s home. The photograph was likely taken in 1897 or 1899. In both years Anthony joined Stanton in Geneva for a visit at the end of August. (Image courtesy of the St. Cloud State University Archives.)
Front row, from left: Harriet Taylor Upton (1853–1945), Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919), Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Clinton Lane Chapman Catt (1859–1947). Back row, from left: Kate M. Gordon (1861–1932), Alice Stone Blackwell (1857–1950), Laura Clay (1849–1941), Cora Smith Eaton (1867–1939). (Courtesy of the University of Kentucky Archives.)
The Business Committee of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association at National Headquarters in Warren, Ohio. This is one of a remarkable collection of snapshots kept by Laura Clay, which were taken outdoors on the paths, steps, and lawn of the former Warren Packard residence on High Street, during a meeting in late September 1904. Headquarters moved into the Packard house when space grew tight in Harriet Upton’s house.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton left her New York City apartment for cooler locations each summer right through that of 1902, usually in the company of one or two of her children. They stayed on Long Island, in the Hudson River Valley, in the hills of western Connecticut, or in Geneva, New York, with her cousin Elizabeth Smith Miller. The lay of the land and size of the house in this picture could be Geneva or Milton-on-Hudson. (Courtesy of Coline Jenkins/Elizabeth Cady Stanton Trust.)
Three generations of the Anthony family. Marked as taken in 1896, this picture shows Susan B. Anthony, seated, her niece Margaret McLean Baker (1843–1912), standing by her side, and her great-niece Guelma Lawrence Baker (1875–1923) on the ground. It was likely taken during Anthony’s visit to the Bakers in San Diego when she reached the West Coast on 11 March 1896. (Susan Brownell Anthony Papers, Rare Books Special Collections and Preservation Department, University of Rochester.)
Three generations of the Stanton family. This souvenir, sold nationally for Elizabeth Cady Stanton birthday celebrations in 1903, shows Nora Stanton Blatch (1883–1971), Stanton, and Harriot Stanton Blatch (1856–1940). (Women’s Rights Collection, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.)
The children and grandchildren of Susan B. Anthony’s late friend Clarina Nichols hosted her in California during the amendment campaign of 1896. Here she is a guest in the house of son Aurelius O. Carpenter in Ukiah on 6 September 1896, posing for a photograph taken by his daughter, Grace Carpenter Hudson. It is believed that Anthony holds a drawing of Nichols made by Grace Carpenter as a teenager. (Accession #18149e, Courtesy of the Grace Hudson Museum and Sun House, Ukiah, California.)
Ellen Wright Garrison (1840–1931) and William Lloyd Garrison, Jr. (1838–1909). The children of friends of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the Garrisons grew up to be friends in their own right. This snapshot was taken at Lexington, Massachusetts, April 1908. (Garrison Family Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.)
The women of the class of 1903 at the University of Rochester, the first women to be admitted as freshman. In alphabetical order, they were Ruth Hogarth Dennis, Eleanor Gleason, Ida Frances Glen, Johanna Margaret Hopeman, Evelyn O’Connor, Kate Eleanor Otis, Eleanor Marion Sarle, and Julia Frederika Seligman. Their admission crowned a decade-long campaign by the city’s women to change the minds of trustees and raise money to pay for coeducation themselves. Elizabeth Cady Stanton aided the start of that campaign, and Susan B. Anthony played a key, late role in finding money. (University of Rochester Photographs, Rare Books Special Collections and Preservation Department, University of Rochester.)
(Division of Prints and Photographs, Library of Congress.)
Frances Benjamin Johnston visited the home of Mary and Susan Anthony in October 1900 to take photographs for a calendar to be sold by the National-American Woman Suffrage Association. She took at least two poses of Anthony seated at her desk, facing an array of friends and allies. Two volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage are visible in the case behind her.
(Harper’s Bazar 33 [1 December 1900]: 1974, courtesy of New York State Historical Association Research Library, Cooperstown.)
One of eleven photographs of Elizabeth Cady Stanton inside in her “delightful apartment overlooking Riverside Drive and the Hudson beyond,” taken for Margaret Hamilton Welch, “With Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An Illustrated Interview.” The caption beneath this picture quoted Stanton saying, “Not a day goes by but I pen something to help along the ‘woman’s cause.’”
Funeral for Elizabeth Cady Stanton on 29 October 1902 in the apartment on West Ninety-fourth Street in New York City that she shared with two of her adult children. A larger group gathered later that day for services at the grave in Woodlawn Cemetery. “The whole casket was completely covered and embedded with flowers,” Susan B. Anthony wrote to a friend, “then there were lovely palms in the back of the room, and my picture was exactly over the coffin. The scene was beautiful.” (Theodore Stanton Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries.)
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taken over fifty years of patient and persevering appeal to our several State legislatures to annul a portion of these barbaric laws. And since it is clearly the duty of our government to start the education of these semi-barbaric islands on the plane of the highest civilization it clearly becomes our duty as a Suffrage Association to do all in our power to influence Congress to embody in their provisional form of government the practical application of the immutable principle of the Declaration of Independence of all the people of those islands, women included. If we do fail to do this, and build their governments upon the pernicious doctrine, that men may govern women without their consent, there surely will be inaugurated “A war of the sexes.” Intelligent, self-respecting women will at once be compelled to protest against the outrage, and perchance a whole century of agitation will be required to establish the justice and equality that should have been from the beginning. The basis of representation. During the reconstruction period and the 1 discussion of the negro’s possession of the right to vote, Senator Blaine, and others, opposed counting of all of the negroes in the basis of representation, instead of the old time three fifths, because they saw that to do so would greatly increase the power of the white men of the South on the floor of Congress. Therefore the republican leaders insisted upon the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, and the enactment of 1870 to secure the enforcement 2 of the laws giving to the negroes the right to vote, and a whole generation is now passed and nearly all of the old slave States have by one device or another succeeded in excluding from the ballot box very nearly the entire population openly and defiantly declaring their intentions to secure the absolute supremacy of the white race, and yet there is not a suggestion on their part of counting out from the basis of representation the citizens to whom they deny the right of suffrage. Some of the Northern newspapers have been talking upon the subject. 3 The New York Sun of February 19th descants upon it, declaring that a vote in South Carolina counted more than two votes in New York so far as the election of the President and the Legislation of the House of Representatives were concerned. It is very evident that this decision to count the disfranchised class in the basis of representation, gives to the States guilty of this crime a very undue power in the Legislation of the country, and it seems to me that the still greater violation of the principle of “The consent of the governed,” is practiced in all the States of the Union where
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women though disfranchised, are yet counted in the basis of representation, and I think the time has come when this Association shall make a most strenuous demand for an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, forbidding any State to count disfranchised citizens in its basis of representation. This under the present condition would lessen the power of all the Northern States, by the number of women disfranchised therein, and in the Southern States, the basis would be lessened not only by the disfranchised women, black and white, but, also by all disfranchised black men. From time to time this demand has been made, but it seems to me now that we should begin anew and make a most persistent effort, not to be relinquished until the representation of every state in the Union is based upon the actual voters. In my opinion nothing would so soon convert the vast majority of the men of this country to a belief of the practical application of the fundamental principles of the government, as would the accomplishment of this measure. For instance: If the members of the Legislatures of Oklahoma and Arizona at the recent sessions, had known that by passing their bills for the enfranchisement of their women, they would have doubled their representation in the electoral college and on the floor of the House of Representatives, when admitted into the Union, it would have been impossible for the liquor men’s organization to purchase a man of either party to resort to all the manoeuvres possible to defeat these bills. If the politicians of New York knew that by enfranchising the women of the Empire State they would double its national power we should not have to plead another half century to secure the ballot. If in the four States in which women are enfranchised, their national representation was doubled thereby, even Nevada’s legislature would move to increase her infinitesimal powers, by enfranchising the handful of women who reside within her borders. The Press. The increased discussion of the enfranchisement of women in the newspapers throughout the country evidences the larger demand of the public for information on this line; one can hardly realize the amount of educational work that is being done in this way. We are apt to feel that it is only through the specifically woman suffrage papers that the agitation is being carried on. The time was when this was true, but, to-day there is scarcely a large newspaper or good magazine in the country that will not publish carefully prepared articles upon the ques-
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tion, so that we get its merits before the vast mass of people who never see a special suffrage journal. Then too, the secular press is more than generous in reporting all the conventions and all the work really done by us. I would in no wise have the special papers discontinued but I would have them more especially devoted to the practical work of carrying forward the agitation; they should be the medium of communication among those who are taking part in the management of the organizations. Not one of us can afford to dispense with the weekly visits of the National and State papers, yet, each one of us should do all in her respective power to get facts and arguments published in secular papers in our respective localities. The presentation of the woman suffrage question in the New York Sun since January 15th by Mrs. Harper, together with the articles it has elicited from the opposition has been of incalculable value, and when you add to the numbers of people who read the Sun the vast numbers who read the copies of the articles in the many papers between the two oceans, we can all see what an immense reading audience is gained by getting our phase of thought into that one of the best New York dailies. And we must remember that these papers would never have copied Mrs. Harper or any other literary woman’s productions had they been first published in one of our special papers, therefore, it seems to me that one very important branch of press work lies in this direction. Then there is the immense work done 4 by Mrs. Babcock for the State of New York and by the chairman of the different state press committees as well as the work done by our national organizer from the headquarters. We have never kept the press of the entire nation so alive with discussions upon the woman suffrage question as during the past year, and my hope is that we may get upon every one of the great papers of the great cities of this Nation, a good, strong educated suffrage woman, as editor of a woman’s page or better still as editor of articles for the paper from the standpoint of woman, to be inserted in different parts of the paper, without a special heading that would advertise to the general reader that the article was about women. The Organization Work. Though we have not really secured suffrage in any of the States where we had hoped to, the failures have been by very small majorities, or by most unfortunate accidents we might say. In South Dakota, where eight years before, a woman suffrage amendment was lost by a majority of over 5 23,000, at the election of 1898 the majority was reduced to 3,000. While in
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Washington, where the question was submitted for the second time it was 6 lost by a majority one half as large as that of nine years ago. In California both Houses of the Legislature passed the school suffrage bill, which the Governor “Remembered to forget to sign,” repeating the action of 1894, 7 when the legislature enacted a similar law. The suffrage bills in the territorial Legislatures of Oklahoma and Arizona were carried by very fine majorities through both Houses, but to be lost in both Senates through, (as will be stated by our national organizer who led our suffrage hosts in both cases), a shameful surrender to the temptation of bribery from the open and avowed enemy of Woman’s enfranchisement, the liquor organizations of the country. None of these so called defeats ought to discourage us in the slightest. Our enemies, the Antis, may comfort themselves that the liquor interest has done their bidding but we surely can comfort ourselves in the knowledge of the fact that the very best men voted in favor of giving women their right to a voice in the control of all the social conditions of the home and the state. So we have nothing to fear but everything to gain by going forward with renewed faith to agitate and educate the public, until the vast majority of men are so thoroughly grounded in the great principle of political equality, that they will speak and vote to protect women in the exercise of their right to a voice in the making and un-making of every law and law-maker. Y Woman’s Tribune, 6 May 1899. 1. James Gillespie Blaine (1830–1893), Republican of Maine, served in the House of Representatives from 1863 to 1876 and in the Senate from 1876 to 1881. He got the attention of ECS and SBA when he urged Congress to investigate the election of 1878 and challenge the congressional representation of southern states that denied voting rights to African-American men but counted them in the basis of their representation. SBA confused the sequence: Blaine was invoking the Fourteenth Amendment as Reconstruction collapsed, not anticipating the amendments. (BDAC; Congressional Record, 45th Cong., 3d sess., 11 December 1878, pp. 85–86; Papers, 3:427–28.) 2. “An Act to enforce the Right of Citizens of the United States to vote in the several States of this Union,” 31 May 1870, U.S. Statutes at Large 16 (1870): 140–46, known as the Enforcement Act of 1870, brought voter registration and balloting under federal enforcement. SBA was held in criminal violation of one provision in this act when she cast her ballot for members of Congress in 1872. 3. An editorial, “The ‘Consent of the Governed’ Humbug,” New York Sun, 19 February 1899, described disfranchisement in the southern states and the resulting imbalance in representation, but it did so to mock southern Democrats who objected to empire on the grounds that Filipinos never consented to their conquest.
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4. Elnora E. Monroe Babcock (1852–1934) lived in Dunkirk, Chautauqua County, where she organized the town’s Political Equality Club in 1889 and soon served as president of the county club. State suffragists also tapped her in 1891 to served on their legislative committee and later their press committee. Her success in the latter role, placing suffrage material in local newspapers, led to her appointment by the National-American to organize and direct a national press committee along similar lines. Her husband, John W. Babcock, a graduate of Cornell University, was superintendent of the Dunkirk schools from 1881 to 1899. (American Women; The Centennial History of Chautauqua County: A Detailed and Entertaining Story of One Hundred Years of Development [Jamestown, N.Y., 1904], 2:473–74; New York Times, 30 December 1934.) 5. SBA’s tally of votes to amend South Dakota’s constitution to enfranchise women in 1890 and 1898 is approximate. In 1890, the amendment lost 22,972 to 45,682—a margin of 22,710. In 1898, the amendment lost 19,698 to 22,983—a margin of 3,285. (McPherson, Hand-Book of Politics for 1892, 144; Fourth Biennial Report of the Secretary of State of the State of South Dakota, December 1, A.D. 1898 [Pierre, S.D., 1898], 143, with the assistance of Sara Wylie, South Dakota State Library.) 6. The official totals for the poll in Washington in November 1898 on an amendment conferring suffrage on women were 20,658 votes in favor and 30,540 against. The measure lost in every county. SBA compares that defeat to one in November 1889, when an amendment for woman suffrage was submitted to Washington Territory’s voters along with a new state constitution and defeated. (State of Washington, Fifth Report of the Secretary of State, 1898 [Olympia, Wash., 1899], 20, with assistance from Crystal Lentz, Reference Librarian, Washington State Library; History, 4:969–70, 1096–98.) 7. A school suffrage bill, for which the California Woman’s Christian Temperance Union led a strong campaign, won legislative approval on 8 March 1899, but later that month, Governor Henry Tifft Gage (1852–1924) exercised a pocket veto to kill the bill. Gage explained that the measure was unconstitutional and “could result in great financial harm to the various school districts” by raising doubts about the legality of their bonds. SBA misdates the temperance union’s earlier, successful effort to win passage of a school suffrage bill in 1893; on that occasion, the governor vetoed the bill. (Gullett, Becoming Citizens, 80, 143–44; San Francisco Call, 26 March 1893, 30 March and 24 May 1899; Woman’s Journal, 8 April 1893, 23 September 1899; History, 4:486; BDGov.)
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Resolution by ECS for the NationalAmerican Woman Suffrage Association [3 May 1899]
Whereas: During the period of reconstruction, the popular cry was “this is the negro’s hour,” when Republicans and Abolitionists alike insisted that woman’s claim to the suffrage must be held in abeyance until the negro was 1 safe beyond peradventure. Although distinguished politicians, lawyers and congressmen declared that woman as well as the negro was enfranchised by the Fourteenth Amendment, reformers and politicians denounced those women who would not keep silent, while the republican and anti-slavery press ignored their demands altogether. In this dark hour of woman’s struggle, forsaken by all those who once recognized her civil and political rights, two noble men steadfastly maintained that it was not only woman’s right but her duty to push her claims while the constitutional door was open, and the rights of citizens in a republic were under discussion, Therefore, Resolved: That women owe a debt of gratitude to Robert 2 3 Purvis and Parker Pillsbury for their fearless advocacy of our cause, when to do so was considered to be treason to a great party measure, involving life and liberty for the colored race. Resolved: That in the death of men of such exalted virtue, so true to principle under most trying circumstances, sacrificing the ties of friendship, and the respect of their compeers, they are conspicuous as the moral heroes of the 19th century. Y Proceedings of the Thirty-first Annual Convention of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association, At the St. Cecilia Club House, Grand Rapids, Mich., April 27, 28, 29, 30, and May 1, 2, 3, 1899, ed. Rachel Foster Avery (Warren, Ohio, n.d.), 70. 1. While rejecting calls in 1865 that he advocate universal rather than manhood suffrage, Wendell Phillips famously decreed, “One question at a time. This hour belongs to the negro.” ECS’s evocation of the controversies of Reconstruction kept her memorial resolution from blending anonymously into the convention’s other tributes. (Lib., 19 May 1865.)
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2. Robert Purvis (1810–1898) died on April 15. A prominent African-American abolitionist, he was one of the very few who argued that the rights of his daughters were as important as those of his sons. He was a member of the Citizens’ Suffrage Association of Philadelphia for many years and active in the National association. (DANB; ANB. See also Papers 1–5.) 3. Parker Pillsbury, who died 7 July 1898, sided with advocates of universal suffrage during Reconstruction, committing his oratorical and editorial talents to the cause. See Papers 2. •••••••••
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Interview with ECS in New York [3 May 1899]
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, grand and stately and womanly in her eightyfourth year, was found writing at her desk in her new home, the Stuart, Ninety-fourth street and Broadway, by an Evening World reporter. Like 1 Abou Ben Adhem, the reporter asked “What writest thou?” “A letter to Miss Susan B. Anthony, President of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association, now in session at Grand Rapids, Mich., to ask her if she is quite sure she is doing her duty,” replied the veteran publicist and champion of her sex, severely. “My indignation is at white heat, for I read in the despatches that when a delegate in that convention, a colored woman from Michigan, offered a resolution rebuking Southern women for making an effort to exclude colored people from the street cars used by white women, it was actually 2 tabled. “Tabled! Tabled in a convention of the Woman’s Suffrage Association, which had its birth with anti-slavery! “I think if the Northern women can ride with colored people they can at the South, especially as the three amendments to the Constitution and the Civil Rights bill declare and guarantee the equality of whites and blacks all 3 over the land. “We tabled it! and the excuse is that they were afraid it would create factional feeling, engender discord and split up the association. “What is a little suffrage association with its five hundred or six hundred members compared with the eternal principles of right? If I had been in the chair I would have given the gavel to some one else and talked till all
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was blue but I’d have that resolution passed. It ought to have passed unanimously. 4 “But I see that it was Cassius M. Clay’s daughter Laura Clay, of Kentucky, who got it tabled. She always bullies our conventions and our Northern women just shrink before her. “But peace is bought too dearly when it is at the sacrifice of all eternal principle. I’m just writing to Miss Anthony asking her if she had done her duty.” Y New York Evening World, 4 May 1899. 1. “Abou Ben Adhem,” by Leigh Hunt. In the poem, the Sufi mystic asks the question of an angel. 2. ECS misunderstood the brief restatement of the resolution that appeared in most newspapers the next day, “demanding that colored women in the South be permitted to ride in the same cars with white women.” As reported later in the proceedings of the convention, the resolution about trains rather than street cars read, “That colored women ought not to be compelled to ride in smoking cars, and that suitable accommodations should be provided for them.” Eastern newspapers carried the news that “it was thrown out as tending to create factional feeling.” (Boston Evening Transcript, 3 May 1899; New York Tribune, 3 May 1899; Report of the Thirty-first Annual Meeting, 1899, p. 58, Film, 39:722.) Charlotte, or Lottie, Wilson Huggart Jackson (1854–1914), later Moss, a delegate from Michigan’s Bay City Suffrage Society, introduced the resolution. She explained that she knew the railroad conditions first hand from her travel in the South for the National Association of Colored Women. Later in 1899, she reported her experience at the suffrage convention to the meeting of that association, and delegates there voted to “endorse the work of Mrs. Jackson in connection with the separate coach law and that we give her our hearty support.” Jackson, an artist who studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, grew up in Niles, Michigan, married James M. Huggart of Indiana in 1872, returned home after his death, and married John B. Jackson of Bay City in 1885. That marriage ended in divorce and brought her back to Niles, where she married a much younger farmer named Daniel Moss. (Berrien County, Michigan, Marriage Records, 1870–1879; Certificate of Death, Berrien County, Division of Vital Statistics, State of Michigan; Federal Census, South Bend, Ind., 1880; family genealogy, Southwest Michigan Black Heritage Society, on-line; Minutes of the Second Convention of the National Association of Colored Women, Held at Quinn Chapel, 24th Street and Wabash Avenue, Chicago, Ill., August 14th, 15th, and 16th, 1899 [N.p., 1899], 22; Frederic H. Robb, ed., The Negro in Chicago, 1879–1927 [Chicago, 1927], 83.) 3. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments. ECS frequently lauded the Civil Rights acts long after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled them essentially unconstitutional in 1883. 4. Laura Clay’s father, Cassius Marcellus Clay (1810–1903), was renowned for
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being a southerner with strong antislavery views. Laura Clay was reported to have “warmly attacked the resolution as an insult to Southern white women.” Even while defending herself and protesting ECS’s statement, Clay repeated her view that the resolution “was an injudicious introduction of the race question into a woman suffrage convention.” She explained to the press further “that Mrs. Stanton and I have differed upon the propriety of introducing extraneous subjects in the woman suffrage conventions. I suppose it is my firm stand on such points that has offended her.” (ANB; Woman’s Journal, 20 May 1899; New York Tribune, 3, 9 May 1899. See also Papers 5.) •••••••••
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SBA to Rachel Foster Avery Rochester, N.Y., May 12th, 1899.
My dear Rachel: Here is a letter just received from London, from which you will see that it is a fixed fact that the great Woman Suffrage meeting has been abandoned, and that I am simply to speak in a sectional meeting, handed over to the 1 Suffrage Societies to manage. I have received no other notice about it; quite likely letters are on the way. It seems settled that I am desired to speak on the historical aspect of Woman Suffrage; can you not give me what you think would be the points for such a story, for it will simply be a story of our work from the beginning. Please return the letter. 2 I have seen quite a number of the friends here about Mrs. Sewall’s Woman’s Peace Meeting on Monday, and find it will be an impossible thing 3 to accomplish the feat. The time is too short and in addition to that all the Ministers of our city several weeks ago preached sermons upon the Czar’s Proclamation and took rising votes of their congregations in favor of Peace and the Arbitration Conference at the head, so that the job seems to have 4 been pretty well executed here before hand. Sister Mary went to New York yesterday so as to be ready to sail to5 morrow morning. Miss Shaw came home with me from Chicago; we arrived Wednesday morning at three o’clock, and she left yesterday afternoon to speak last 6 night and to-night and return to Philadelphia to-morrow. 7 I have Harriet’s letter to the members of the business committee. The one vital point of holding our Convention in Washington is not mentioned,
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and that is the securing of Hearings before the Congressional Committees, and having before them in person women representing the several different States of the Union. If we did not desire to secure Congressional action in the adoption of a constitutional amendment resolution, we might consider, as she seems to do, nothing but the difference in the expenses of the delegates, of the halls, hotels, and the numbers attending our meetings. But I suppose it will be impossible to make any considerable number of our young women comprehend the far reaching importance of our Hearings before the committees, of the publication of the speeches by the Government, and the sending out of the speeches under the frank of the Members to the friends in the several States of the Union. I have always believed, and never more strongly than now, that the educational work done by those Hearings was farther reaching and did quite as much good work in the rural districts as the holding of meetings in each, and whatever is the value and extent of such education, it is vastly less expensive than paying the traveling expenses and salaries of 5th rate speakers to carry the word to the people there. At any rate I hope you will plan to make the convention of 1900 a splendid old time object lesson to the present generation of workers. Converting a few people in a given locality is good for a little circle, but when we can send out a hundred thousand copies of the Hearing Speeches, such as were made in 1898 and will be made in 1900 to hundreds of thousand people all over the United States, under the frank of Senators and Congressmen, in Governmental envelopes, and with the headings above the Speeches showing that they were made before Congressional Committees composed of the ablest men in the House and Senate they certainly carry with the good word the political weight of Governmental recognition. I know you appreciate this method of education and agitation, therefore, I am full of hope and expectation that you will do all in your power to make our leaders, not only of our business committee but throughout all the States, understand its value. It is only by so doing that we shall save even meeting biennially in Washington. There was no session during our whole week of meetings in Grand Rapids to compare with the two evening sessions of the National 8 Conference we held there in the Autumn of 1897, hence so far as the meetings were concerned, we did not reach nearly as many Grand Rapids people; on the other hand when you take into consideration the number of our splendid officers and delegates from the twenty two different States entertained in the Grand Rapids homes, there was a great deal of good work
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done in such families as were lucky enough to entertain delegates making a favorable impression upon them. It produced, however, in no sense what I should call the largest kind of National influence, and I believe more than ever that the annual meetings of our National Association should be made to concentrate the influence of all the States upon Congress, and as we got full Suffrage in another and yet another State, added to the four we already have, we shall be able to extort from Congressional Committees not only good reports, but also to secure discussions and votes on bills for amendment resolutions, and if we could bring about the result of a discussion and a vote of both Houses during every Congress, we should do more to stir up the whole nation than with all the money to pay all the speakers and organizers we could possibly send out! Our experience in holding the three Conventions—Atlanta, Des Moines and Grand Rapids—outside of Washington has only intensified my feelings as well as strengthened my judgment in the direction of holding all of our Delegate Conventions in the city of Washington. It is our only possible method of securing representatives from all the States to go before the Committees and our only possible way of bringing our influence to bear upon the new men who are sent to Congress every two years. So I do hope you will bend all your energies to trying to educate our women to see that while we should hold from four to twenty or thirty National Conferences in the different States of the Union every year, the one Delegate Convention at which our officers are elected and Association business transacted, should be held in Washington. This is my parting word to the Committee and to the Presidents and Delegates from the different States of the Union who shall assemble in Washington in 1900. Very sincerely yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead for 1899, SBA Papers, DLC. 1. Enclosure missing. Difficulties arose over rules of the International Council of Women that required that advocacy of a controversial subject like woman suffrage in its International Congress of Women be balanced by hearing from antisuffragists too. Such a concession did not suit British and European suffragists, and a confusion of plans and later private meetings ensued. To SBA discussion of woman suffrage at the meetings attracted delegates to the Council who otherwise avoided the topic. SBA learned of further plans in a (missing) letter she received on May 19 inviting her to speak at a “Great Meeting” convened by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies at Queen’s Hall on 29 June 1899. Seeing that no official sessions of the Council or Congress were scheduled at the same time, she leapt to a hypothesis: “I imagine after all there is a compromise between the two.”
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Instead, there were two meetings, one within the Council and Congress framework and one without. A cryptic invitation from Anita Augspurg to a “Private Meeting of Delegates” on 3 July 1899 may indicate SBA’s presence at a discussion about forming an international suffrage alliance. (SBA to Clara B. Colby, 19 May 1899; and A. Augspurg to SBA, c. 3 July 1899; and Women in Politics, Being the Political Section of the International Congress of Women, pp. 115–16, all in Film, 39:879–80, 1069ff, 40:7; Aletta Jacobs, Memories: My Life as an International Leader in Health, Suffrage, and Peace, trans. Annie Wright [New York, 1996], 58–59; Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement [Princeton, N.J., 1997], 21–22.) 2. May Eliza Wright Thompson Sewall (1844–1920) was principal of the Girls’ Classical School in Indianapolis. A cofounder of the Indianapolis Equal Suffrage Society in 1878 and active in the National association since 1880, she chaired the National’s executive committee at the time of negotiations to merge the rival suffrage associations. She then redirected her energy to the International and National Councils of Women. (NAW; ANB. See also Papers 4 & 5.) 3. Czar Nicholas II (1868–1918) had invited governments to convene at the Hague to discuss disarmament, arbitration, and ways to establish lasting peace. What came to be known as the First Hague Conference was scheduled to open on 18 May 1899. In Europe and the United States, pacifists pressed their governments to send delegates and take the plan seriously. As part of this effort, a group of European women, organized as the International Peace and Arbitration Committee, chose May Sewall to be their American organizer. She had just announced her plans for American women to join a women’s international peace day on 15 May 1899. (Washington Post, 26 April 1899; Report of Transactions of the International Council of Women, 1899, 1:232–34; Merze Tate, The Disarmament Illusion: The Movement for a Limitation of Armaments to 1907 [New York, 1942], 197–216; Sandi E. Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815–1914 [New York, 1991], 68–69, 97–103, 221–22.) 4. Nearly every Protestant congregation in the city of Rochester heard a sermon on peace, disarmament, and the Hague Conference on 19 February 1899. In other cities, Palm Sunday was chosen for the purpose. May Sewall later estimated that fifteen hundred American churches heard sermons supporting the peace conference by mid-May. (Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 7, 13, 20 February 1899; Report of the Transactions of the International Council of Women, 1899, 1:237.) 5. Making her first trip abroad, Mary Anthony sailed on the Marquette from New York to London on 13 May 1899, in the company of John and Mary Sanford, their daughter Madeleine, and Helen and Gertrude Anthony. Possibly Daniel M. Anthony joined the group. (SBA diary, 13 May 1899, Film, 39:13ff.) 6. SBA spent several days in Chicago after the convention in Grand Rapids, visiting Lydia Coonley Ward, Albert Dickinson, and Emily Gross. See SBA diary, 5–9 May 1899, Film, 39:13ff. 7. That is, Harriet Upton. 8. 22–23 November 1897. See Film, 37:425–31.
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SBA to Herbert S. Stone and Company1 Rochester, N.Y., May 13th, 1899.
My dear Sirs: Thanks for the volume entitled “Studies in the Psychology of Woman” by Laura Marholm. Her very first words destroy the value of her philosophy; when she says that woman’s true thinking is done through the brain of man my only conclusion is that what she has produced in this book is simply the filtered thoughts of a man’s brain, therefore it is not woman’s philosophy or psychology but entirely man’s after all, and we have had the masculine interpretation of woman since the first story of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Nevertheless the book is very interesting because it is a rehash of the mas2 culine idea of the feminine. My friend Rev. Anna Shaw traveled with me from Chicago and spent two days in our home. She read the book through and I have no doubt but that she will make a lecture on Laura’s “Psychology” as filtered through Man’s masculine brain. It surely is a most remarkable thing if God created every other living creature for its own sake, ending with man for his own, and then that His very last creation, woman, should not have been for her own happiness and developement but simply to be a reflection and addenda to man. As you suggest Miss Shaw found a great deal in the book to interest as well as amuse her. Its philosophy is most decidedly from the German standpoint, not at all based on the American idea of individual sovereignty for woman as well as man. Again thanking you for the book, I am, Very respectfully yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead for 1899, Stone and Kimball Archives, ICN. Directed to Eldridge Court, Chicago, Ill. 1. This Chicago firm had just published Laura Marholm, Studies in the Psychology of Woman. 2. SBA points to a contradiction in Marholm’s claims that continues to draw critical attention. Marholm opened the preface to her book with a boast: “This is
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the first attempt at a Psychological Study of Woman which has been laid before the public by a woman” (7). Yet she avows that women cannot be original thinkers; “I start from the premises that the woman never, nowhere and in nothing, can make or mark a starting point; that all that she does, performs or suggests, represents always but a deviation, a connection with or continuation of something already produced, existing, done” (279). See also Brantly, Life and Writings of Laura Marholm, 140–43. •••••••••
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ECS to Lillie Devereux Blake 250 West 94th Street New York City June 14th 1899
Dear Mrs Blake, Since our last conversation my thoughts have often dwelt on you. I feel 1 moved to write you what in my opinion is the best thing for you to do. You have not been treated by our young coadjutors with less consideration than I have been. They refused to read my letters and resolutions to the conventions. They have denounced the “Woman’s Bible[”] unspareingly; not one of them has ever reviewed or expressed the least appreciation of “Eighty Years and More.” Not one of my suffrage friends has ever thought it worth a complimentary notice in any of the metropolitan Journals, or even in the woman’s papers. A criticism on the Grand Rapids Convention 2 neither the Woman’s Journal, nor the Woman’s Tribune would publish. For all this I make no public protest, I propose no revenge. Because of this hostile feeling I renounced the Presidency and quietly accept the situation, 3 and publish what I have to say in the liberal papers. I do not cultivate any feelings of revenge or hostility, but quietly do my work in other ways that open to me. I have outgrown the Suffrage association, as the ultimatum of human endeavor, and no longer belong in that fold, with its limitations. Now you must do the same, do not cultivate any hostile feelings, nor try to revenge what you deem your wrongs, but use what talents you have in ways that are open to you Prepare able articles for our leading periodicals, and brilliant speeches for your various clubs. You can write and say your say in many ways, and at other times than in suffrage conventions. Feelings of discontent, anger, and revenge have a worse effect on ourselves than others. Let us make a fair estimate of ourselves, and do the best we can with our own possibilities, adopting the motto of the good abbé de Lammenais
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“Let the weal and woe of humanity be all to us, their praise and their blame 4 of no effect.” Every good deed we do and every true word we utter, will tell on the eternities, though denounced by our coadjutors. Do not let your thoughts dwell on the indignity offered you in the Grand Rapids Convention, use your powers as a free lance, you can do better work with your pen than as an officer in an association with restricted limits, and so can I. I saw how deeply you were wounded, and felt after you had gone that I did not say the right word at the time. You have certainly done a good work in this city, as well as the state, for a quarter of a century, which many of your friends appreciate. If now some one has arizen, feeling that she can do a better work, and wishes to seize your crown and scepter, lay them at her feet, knowing there are broader fields for you to cultivate [in ECS hand] yours sincerely U Elizabeth Cady Stanton Y LS, in hand of E. L. White, Lillie D. Blake Papers, MoSHi. 1. Lillie Blake sought consolation after she learned that the National-American’s Business Committee removed her as chair of the Legislative Committee and named Laura Johns in her place. The depth of her pain might be gauged by the anger her daughter expressed forty years later when recounting the incident, and Blake, ignoring the advice ECS offered in this letter, spent the year mobilizing protests against her removal. The decision to replace Blake from an appointed position on a special, not standing committee was not mentioned in minutes of the Business Committee; Blake claimed to know that SBA was directly responsible for her fall, but criticism of her leadership of the committee since its creation in 1895 came from state officers, the Plan of Work Committee, and the Organization Committee. (Annual Report of the Twenty-seventh Annual Meeting, 1895, pp. 50, 97–98, 114; Annual Report of the Twenty-eighth Annual Meeting, 1896, pp. 73–74, 168; Annual Report of the Twenty-ninth Annual Meeting, 1897, pp. 45–46, 126; Annual Report of the Thirtieth Annual Meeting, 1898, pp. 49–52; and Annual Report of the Thirty-first Annual Meeting, 1899, pp. 41, 45–52, 63, 160; all in Film, 33:552ff, 35:304ff, 36:744ff, 38:109ff, 39:722ff; Rachel F. Avery to L. D. Blake, 20 February 1896, Lillie D. Blake Papers, MoSHi; Blake and Wallace, Champion of Women, 194–201; Farrell, Lillie Devereux Blake, 167–70, 221–22.) 2. ECS published her criticism in the Boston Investigator, below at 22 July 1899. 3. ECS described her decision to resign from the presidency of the NationalAmerican association differently to friends and allies at the time. See Papers, 5:465. 4. This motto of Hugues Félicité Robert de Lamennais (1782–1854) was also attributed by ECS to the French historian Jules Michelet in Eighty Years, 465.
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From the Diary of SBA [14–22 June 1899]
Wed. June 14, 1899. On Steamer Menominee—passed through Straits of Dover—& made longest detour to get into the Thames River—then got aground in the mud—& passengers & baggage had to be transferred to tugs to be taken to some place—& thence train to Liverpool landing & 1 station thence carriages to Hotels— found Mr Blatch at landing—so felt sure of company for Nora— he took nap four wheeler with trunks to Waterloo Station—we a cab with satchels to Temple Hotel to find no room—so we drove to Waterloo—& then waited a long time before Mr B. came with trunks—then to York Road Hotel—where they had one room with two beds—so Mr B. had to sleep on sofa—with chairs in front— it 2 was near midnight before we were settled & in bed— A most tedious day—though bright & sunny—a fearfully cold penetrating wind— 1. SBA left Rochester on 29 May 1899 and sailed on 3 June from New York City on the Menominee of the Atlantic Transport Line, sharing her stateroom with Nora Blatch. 2. The “some place” of SBA’s tale was likely Fenchurch Street Station, the usual place for ships of the Atlantic Transport Line to drop their passengers. Harry Blatch took the trunks to Waterloo Station, where the party would catch the South Western Railway to Basingstoke the next day. The Temple Hotel on Arundel Street was on the route between the two stations. The party continued in the same direction to get a room at the York Hotel, near Waterloo Station.
Thur. June 15, 1899. Left York Road hotel at 9 a.m. for Basingstoke— with Mr B. & Nora Stanton Blatch— found Harriot at station— a bright 1 sunny day—but cool in the shade— Found letters from Mrs Margaret P. 2 3 4 Tanner —Bristol—Mrs Fenwick Miller —Mrs Garrett Fawcett —& Mrs 5 Bremner— feel lost apart from our U S. party— Took a nice drive in the country in the p.m— 1. The trip to Basingstoke took a little over an hour. 2. Margaret Priestman Wheeler Tanner (1817–1905) was a member of the extended family of John Bright and his sisters. Twice widowed, she often lived with
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her single sisters in Bristol. Tanner worked closely with Josephine Butler in the Ladies National Association, holding the post of treasurer from 1871 to 1881, and she was active in the Liberal party. (Oxford DNB; “Dictionary of Quaker Biography,” typescript, UkLQ; Mills, John Bright and the Quakers, 1:384–85, 392–96. See also Papers 4.) 3. Florence Fenwick Miller (1854–1935), an English journalist and suffragist, was another friend from SBA’s trip to England in 1883. Like SBA, she joined the discussion of the franchise held under the auspices of the International Congress of Women on 27 June 1899. In July, when the council had concluded, SBA spent two days visiting Miller and her daughters in Reigate. (Oxford DNB; Rosemary T. Van Arsdel, Florence Fenwick Miller: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, and Educator [Aldershot, England, 2001]; Women in Politics, Being the Political Section of the International Congress of Women, London, July 1899 [London, 1900], 62; SBA diary, 8–9 July 1899, Film, 39:13ff.) 4. Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929) was one of England’s senior suffragists and the author of the essay on England’s suffrage movement for Theodore Stanton’s book, Woman Question in Europe (1884). In previous encounters, SBA had disagreed with her about voting rights for married women. She presided over the suffrage meeting at Queen’s Hall on 29 June 1899. (Oxford DNB.) 5. Christina Sinclair Bremner (1856?–1916), a Scot, taught school in York and published her first book in 1891 after an adventurous trip to India to see her younger brother, a civil engineer. Back in Britain, in October 1892, she was made editor of the Woman’s Herald: A Liberal Paper for Women, succeeding Henrietta Müller, but lost her post when Lady Henry Somerset and the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union took over. While SBA was in London for the International Council, someone presented her with a copy of Bremner’s Education of Girls and Women in Great Britain (1897). (Census of Britain, 1881; John A. Brebner, “Family of James Bremner and Janet Bremner, Wick, Caithness,” October 2009, on-line Brebner/Bremner Genealogical Project; John Theakstone, Victorian and Edwardian Women Travellers: A Bibliography of Books Published in English [Mansfield Centre, Conn., 2006], 34; SBA to C. S. Bremner, 26 July 1900, Film, 41:435–36.)
Fri. June 16, 1899. At Basingstoke Trying to write letters got of a half dozzen—and took a drive with Hattie & her new horse Sat. June 17, 1899. At Basingstoke Mrs Millicent Garrett Fawcett came at 12.30— to Luncheon—& returned to London at 3— She seemes not to take in the Council idea—or if she does—not to like it—and not willing to cooperate with it— Sun. June 18, 1899. At Basingstoke a gray windy day— Package from Cousin Semantha Lapham—via American Express— first direct word from Mrs Sweet—all is well there at Rochester—
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wrote several letters one to dear Mrs Stanford on her limiting numbers of girls in University—to five hundred—while giving no limit to the boys— the alumni fear College will not hold its own in athletic contests 1 because of [so many?] girls—the male alumni—quite likely— [no entries for 19–21 June] 1. In her letter to Jane Stanford, SBA quoted an article in the New York Tribune, 4 June 1899. Four hundred and fifty women were enrolled in the university, making them forty-one percent of the student body, the article explained. “Many of the alumni believe that the college spirit is hurt by this preponderance of women, and that the steady increase must be checked if the university is to hold its own in athletic and oratorical contests.” (SBA to J. E. L. Stanford, 18 June 1899, Film, 39:915; Orrin Leslie Elliott, Stanford University: The First Twenty-five Years [Stanford University, Calif., 1937], 132–36.)
Thur. June 22, 1899. Left Basinstoke—11.20—reached London—St Ermins 1 Hotel—Westminster S.W—12.30—Rev Anna H. Shaw—Niece Lucy E. 1. St. Ermin’s Hotel, on Caxton Street, housed a number of the American women in attendance at the council. Y Excelsior Diary 1899, n.p., SBA Papers, DLC. Square brackets surround uncertain readings.
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Article by ECS [24 June 1899] A Trailing Dress and No Pocket.
Behold the fashionably dressed woman hastening down the street to catch a car! In one hand she has her umbrella, pocket-book, card-case, fan, and pocket-handkerchief, and, with the other hand resting on her spine, she holds up her trail. Reaching the car, she drops her skirt, seizes the iron railing, and endeavors to step on; but just then the car starts, and she falls to the ground, scattering her possessions, and spraining her ankle. The ever-courteous sons of Adam pick up her and her belongings, and bear them for repairs to an adjoining drug store. This is a real picture of what happened to one of my unhappy acquaintances, who has been lame ever since.
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The present dress of woman is inconvenient, ridiculous, and inartistic. When fashion decided that the skirt was to be perfectly smooth in front, the pocket was necessarily sequestered in the gathers at the back; but when the decree went forth that the skirt was to be smooth all around, the deathknell of the pocket was heard throughout the land. Behold the hats towering up a foot or more above the head, with laces, bows of ribbon, flowers and feathers pointing in every direction, looking more like the headgear of an Indian chief than that of a daughter of a modest Puritan! If fashionable women had any sense of the comical, on meeting each other, they would burst into a roar of laughter. The worst of this is that all classes of women follow this example. Professional women, teachers, those in the various industries, and even those in domestic service, all sacrifice comfort and convenience to be like their supposed superiors. And, more surprising still, women demanding the right of suffrage go before committees of Congress and State Legislatures and Conventions in the same absurd attire. I rejoice that the senior editor of the Woman’s Journal has made his pro1 test against the trailing skirt. What should we think of our sires and sons if they were such slaves to the behests of fashion? Suppose some French 2 Beau Brummell should send forth a decree that they should have trailing ruffles on their trousers, and the upper gear should be as smooth as the skin, banishing the fourteen pockets from their usual hiding places; with all their appendages, pocket-book, knife, pencil, letters, and cigars stuffed in the crowns of their hats, or the tops of the trousers. Imagine our beloved lords of creation rushing to and fro in the busy marts of trade, with their hands behind them holding up their ruffled trousers, their heads decorated with feathers and flags! We may laugh at the picture, but our women look quite as ridiculous. The men could no longer offer an arm in an emergency to a feeble sister, but at the risk of trailing their ruffles in the dust. Thus, as citizens of a republic, and in the good time coming, we should be obliged to go single file to the polls on election day; and, still worse, with these restricted attitudes in both sexes, the next generation of children would probably be ushered into the world with withered arms. I tremble to think what I have done to get the suffrage for women, fearing all the foolish fashions they might by law cause to appear among us. U Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Y Woman’s Journal, 24 June 1899.
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1. Woman’s Journal, 10 June 1899. Henry Blackwell described how a woman came to halt in front of him: “I discovered, to my chagrin, that my foot was on her dress. I promptly removed it. Still she remained motionless. Then I found that my other foot was also on her dress. Now, there is no sense in a woman sweeping Boston streets without pay!” 2. This nickname of the English dandy George Bryan Brummell (1778–1840) became synonymous with extreme fashion. •••••••••
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ECS to William Lloyd Garrison, Jr. Peekskill N.Y.
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July 21 [1899]
Dear Mr Garrison 2 Your speech & sonnets on our present war were duly received I have read, marked & inwardly digested & still think that the isles of th[e] sea are better in our hand[s] than in Spain’s or any other nation’s. What would this continent have been if left to the Indians? would they ever nhavep attained our present civilization? How much farther advanced the Chinese nwould havep been developed had Anglo-Saxon blood been infused there. War is not an unmixed evil. Every step in progress has been has been thus achieved. The emancipation of the southern slaves is a case in point. It would have cost less blood & treasure, to buy their freedom but southern aristocrats would not have listened to such a proposition. all you say of the hypocracy & corruption of our nation may be true, our moral achievements do not keep pace with our material, but there are other causes than war for that, the repression of the feminine element in humanity is one: the undue love of money & power another: religious superstitions another: but I shall always give due consideration to the clarion notes of a Garrison, to the second & third generation. With kind regards for Nellie & yourself, as ever sincerely yours U Elizabeth Cady Stanton Y ALS, Garrison Papers, MNS-S. 1. ECS spent July boarding in the “lovely old fashioned house” of Lyman and Fannie Carhart, a mile outside of this town in the Hudson Valley. On the first of August, she moved to Elizabeth Miller’s house in Geneva, New York. (Woman’s Journal, 24 June 1899; ECS to Theodore W. Stanton, 27 June 1899, Film, 39:1067.)
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2. Garrison sent her two pamphlets he published this year, Imperialism: Address of William Lloyd Garrison at the Annual Meeting of the Progressive Friends, Longwood, Pa., June 10, 1899 and The Nation’s Shame, Sonnets by William Lloyd Garrison. •••••••••
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Article by ECS [22 July 1899] The Woman’s Suffrage Association.
The success of the late Convention in Grand Rapids was, in my opinion, grievously compromised by the rejection of Mrs. Jackson’s resolution of protest against the treatment of the colored race in parts of the South, practically requiring the re-establishment of separate cars for whites and blacks. The following resolution, presented by Mrs. Jackson, a colored woman, 1 called out a lively debate: Resolved, That colored women ought not to be compelled to ride in smoking cars, and that suitable accommodations should be provided for them. She said that in some parts of the South it was almost impossible for respectable colored women to travel, because of the filthy state of the cars and the insults to which they were exposed from the rough company into which they were thrown. The Pullman cars had been their only refuge from such conditions, and it was now proposed to exclude them from these. There was a great work to be done among the ignorant colored women which could only be done for them by more intelligent women of their own race, and it was important that educated colored women should not be hindered from working for the improvement and moral elevation of their less fortunate sisters. In traveling for the association of colored women to which she belonged, she had found the condition of the cars in some parts of the country almost intolerable. Miss Laura Clay of Kentucky objected to the resolution. She said it was not fair to the Southern delegates, who had come to attend a convention on woman suffrage, to pass a resolution on an entirely different question.
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Miss Blackwell said she did not think the resolution was in any sense an insult either to Southern law-makers, or to the Southern people. It was not claimed that these things were done under sanction of law. The criticism was directed solely against certain railroad companies, which, it was alleged, were violating the law. The conditions complained of did not exist all over the South, but that they existed in some parts of the South was a matter of public notoriety. We had also Mrs. Jackson’s personal testimony to her own experience. If an injustice was being done to any women anywhere, it was not beyond the scope of this Association to enter a protest against it. Miss Anthony, in closing the discussion, said in substance: We women are a helpless, disfranchised class. Our hands are tied. While we are in this condition, it is not for us to go passing resolutions against railroad corporations, or anybody else. We of the Suffrage Association must fight our race battles on some other platform. Miss Anthony’s words evidently swayed many votes, and the resolution was dropped by a large majority. Thus our president’s personal popularity, rather than the strength of her reasons, defeated the resolution. As protests and petitions are the only weapons in the hands of disfranchised classes, why forbid their use in appeals to corporations, rather than to legislatures? After passing a series of resolutions touching conditions in so many of our States, in Ireland, France, race questions in Isles of the Sea, on peace and arbitration, one on the wrongs of the colored women of the 2 South would not have been inappropriate on our platform. What would the sainted Lucretia Mott, Ernestine L. Rose, Lucy Stone 3 and Angelina Grimke, South Carolina’s noble daughter, have said, had they been present when one colored woman stood alone, pleading for the protection of her sex against the coarse speech and manners of ill-bred men? The president’s point, that colored men were there to share the incivilities, has no significance whatever, as much of the ribald talk referred only 4 to women. This outrage was in a measure mitigated by one voice sustaining Mrs. Jackson’s resolution, and that by one of the youngest members of the Association, the junior editor of the Woman’s Journal, Alice Stone Blackwell. What an incongruity for a society, claiming political equality for all citizens under our flag, to ignore in the person of one woman the great battles of the century that cost us a Civil War, with all its blood and treasure, angry debates in Congress prolonged for years, three hundred thousand
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petitions gathered from the Northern and Western States to secure three Amendments to the National Constitution, by which an oppressed race were finally emancipated and enfranchised, and, to crown all, a Civil Rights Bill, giving to them an equal entrance into hotels, all places of amusement, restaurants, public conveyances, railroads, steamboats, stage coaches and street cars! Verily, the freedom of this race was bought with too great a price to scorn the plea of one of its representatives. It is possible for a society to so narrow its platform as to destroy all enthusiasm in its conventions. Garrison, the great leader in the anti-slavery crusade, struck the keynote of reform in attacking every obstacle in the way of success. In the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, held in London in 1840, his disciples precipitated the sex question, though they convened specifically to discuss that of race. After a day’s discussion, and women were rejected as delegates by an overwhelming majority, Garrison refused to take his seat. He said: “I ask liberty for the slave, not because he is black, but because he is a human being. I ask liberty for woman for the same reason.” Abolitionists, in pressing their reform, attacked State and Church, Bibles and constitutions, political parties and religious sects, polite society and labor clubs, that refused colored members, without thought of losing subscribers to their papers, or members of their association, ever true to principle, as the needle to the pole. Not recognizing this grand example we have been slowly narrowing our platform from year to year. Like Poe’s raven on the door-post singing “Evermore,” our only refrain 5 is henceforth to be “Suffrage.” The questions of marriage and divorce, woman’s position in the Church, outrages on women everywhere, are all legitimate subjects for discussion in our association, and were so considered at one time, though now tabooed by our present coadjutors. According to the ruling of our president the race question cannot be discussed on our platform. The magnitude and far-reaching consequences involved in the emancipation and enfranchisement of this Africo-American race lifts this above all ordinary questions. U Elizabeth Cady Stanton. p.s.—As honorary President of this Association I desire to protest publicly against this action of the Convention held recently at Grand Rapids,
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Michigan. As the leading suffrage papers, the Woman’s Journal and the Woman’s Tribune, have refused to publish my protest, I ask for space in your columns. E. C. S. Y Boston Investigator, 22 July 1899. 1. This paragraph and the four following ones were copied verbatim from the account in the Woman’s Journal, 13 May 1899, Film, 39:820–23, probably written by Alice Blackwell. That article later supplied the official report of the annual convention. No newspaper other than the Woman’s Journal stated that SBA took a deciding role in the debate. 2. For the resolutions, most of them expressions of gratitude to men for improved laws, see Report of the Thirty-first Annual Convention, 1899, pp. 56–58, Film, 39:722ff. 3. Angelina Emily Grimké Weld (1805–1879), daughter of a South Carolina slaveholder and pioneer abolitionist. 4. The Woman’s Journal does not quote SBA to this effect. 5. Edgar Allen Poe, “The Raven.” •••••••••
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William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., to ECS Boston, July 26, 1899.
Dear Mrs. Stanton: Your letter of the 21st arrived simultaneously with the news of Col. Ingersoll’s death, which brought to mind the last time I saw you when we were at Dobbs Ferry, and you egged me into a discussion with him on pro1 tective tariff. It was a memorable evening and I often recall it. I heard Col. Ingersoll only last month at the Free Religious Convention in Boston at the 2 Hollis Street theatre, but was pained rather than edified by his address. It was flippant, irreverent, and shallow, lacking refinement and indicating no appreciation of the advancement the world has made since he began battling for freedom of thought. But he was a picturesque figure with a rare courage of conviction, and a most lovable man. Regarding imperialism, I wonder that you do not see how applicable your reasoning regarding inferior races is to the negro and the woman question. In your vaunting of the Anglo-Saxon supremacy you forget the individual rights of the less civilized races, if they can be said to be less civilized than this nation of lynchers and coarse commercialism. The Filipinos
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are entitled to grow and develop in their own manner, according to their inherent genius. In our present attitude we will stand in history pilloried with the slave-trader, the destroyer of the Indian and the persecutor of the Chinese. Our whole Indian record is one of disgrace and dishonor, and only shows the barbarism of our forefathers with their Calvanistic conceit and bigotry. I cannot help regretting that your attitude puts you in an unenviable company when supporting this McKinley infamy, unless brute force is superior to moral perceptions. Expediency is ever a failure, and no imperialist argues the question from any other ground. My family are summering at Jaffrey, N.H., where we went in consequence of the recent illness of my daughter Agnes, who is now happily recovering. I rejoin them every Friday for three or four days. If Ellie were here she would unite with me in affectionate regards. Very sincerely yours, U Wm L. Garrison [handwritten] Pardon my use of the type writer which I am obliged more & more to use nemployp on account of my crippled hand— Y TLS, ECS Papers, DLC. 1. Robert Ingersoll died on 21 July 1899. According to ECS’s children, the event recalled by Garrison happened 30 September 1892, while he visited his sister Fanny Garrison Villard in Dobbs Ferry, near the Ingersolls. (Stanton, 2:288.) 2. Before the Free Religious Association meeting on 2 June 1899, Ingersoll delivered a speech entitled “What is Religion?” See The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll (New York, 1929), 4:479–508. •••••••••
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SBA to Clara Bewick Colby Rochester, New York. Oct. 23, 1899.
My Dear Friend:— ¶1 I suppose you have seen the “tempest in a teapot” occasioned by somebody’s making the announcement at the Pennsylvania convention in Philadelphia, that Miss Anthony was to retire from the presidency of the National Suffrage Association, and had appointed Mrs. Catt as 1 her successor!! I stated over the telephone at once to the Democrat
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& Chronicle my protest against the person, whoever she may be, who 2 thus stole this march on me. I did hope to be permitted to make my own public announcement of my own particular business, but that somebody has felt otherwise it seems and so taken the matter out of my hands. It is a great shame to compel me to be thus discussed with obituary notices of all sorts coming to me from all directions. It would have been quite time enough to have had to endure all this when the occasion came that the resignation must be made, and my successor must be elected not appointed!! I heard that you were at Philadelphia. I at once wrote niece Lucy and Mrs. Foster Avery, neither of whom had heard a word about it until they saw it in the papers. Mrs. Avery was in the midst of moving to her winter quarters in West Philadelphia, and Lucy only attended the evening session that you spoke— I have also written 3 Mrs. Blankenberg for an explanation. Of course the young women nearest to me in business transactions have known, as you have, for the last four years, that it was my intention to refuse to stand as president, after I had rounded out my four score years. But I did want to make the announcement in my own time and in my own way, but somebody has cheated me out of my wish, so both myself and the association will have to take whatever results from it. I feel the sorriest for Mrs Catt. She was 4 awfully chagrinned with the explosion of three years ago— I do feel to provoked that I should be charged with appointing my successor— I am not quite a Czar in my powers—hence could not if I would do that thing— It is too cruel on [me?] ¶2 I have written a letter to every one of the 45 states and also to the several territories, asking their presidents to copy the enclosed petition and with their secretaries sign it and return to me at their earliest 5 convenience. I do not think it is necessary to publish this fact. I tell it to you simply that you may know what I am doing. I hope to be able to get them all into my own hands before December 1st, and to place them with members who will present them simultaneously in both houses of Congress. ¶3 Whatever you say or do about the presidential explosion at Philadelphia, I hope you will not fail to declare it wholly premature, and without the knowledge of either Mrs. Catt or myself. I know that Mrs. Catt was very much chagrined at a similar gossip through the newspapers in the Spring of 1896 when I was in California, and I know she will be equally annoyed with this pronouncimento. There must be somebody some-
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where who thinks she can manage this presidential affair better than the association itself or its president or national organizer. Whoever that somebody is, she had a great deal better be attending to her own specific work whatever that may be. So you see I am not a little but am absolutely cross over the whole matter. Very sincerely yours, U Susan B. Anthony [in SBA’s hand] p.s.—Dont forget to write your new address—I have lost the one you sent & your last letter hasn’t it Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Clara B. Colby Collection, CSmH. Directed to Washington, D.C. Square brackets surround uncertain reading. 1. The Philadelphia Woman Suffrage Society held its annual meeting on 16 and 17 October 1899. SBA kept an item from one of the city’s papers headed “Catt Succeeds Miss Susan B. Anthony,” stating that SBA’s retirement was announced at the meeting. As the story spun into national news over the next month, the claim was repeatedly made that SBA named her successor. (Clippings, October & November 1899, SBA scrapbook 30, Rare Books, DLC; Philadelphia Inquirer, 15, 17, 18 October 1899.) 2. Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 22 October 1899, Film, 40:154. She conceded that she planned to retire. “But the statement that Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt will succeed me is entirely premature. That cannot be determined before the convention, and there are four or five women talked of as a possible successor.” Catt’s candidacy for the office was in doubt in September 1899 and possibly more recently; after a week visiting Catt, Emma Sweet called on SBA to report their conversations. “She feels sure—as Miss Hay did when she talked to me in New York Station last June—that Mrs C. will not refuse Presidency of the National W.S.A—” (SBA diary, 9 September 1899, Film, 39:13ff.) 3. Lucretia Blankenburg, president of the state suffrage association, attended the city society’s meeting. 4. Reports that SBA was too frail to continue as president and would be succeeded by Carrie Catt circulated in the press in the summer of 1896. See, for example, Chicago Inter-Ocean, 26 July 1896. 5. Acting as chair of the Congressional Committee of the National-American association, SBA asked the presidents of state suffrage associations to circulate two petitions to Congress, one for the sixteenth amendment and one against male-only suffrage and office holding in the new possessions. She started the work as soon as she returned from England in August, assembled responses from nearly every state in November, and mailed the results to the senators and representatives of each state in January 1900.
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ll. 25–29 results from it. nI feel the sorriest for Mrs Catt. She was awfully chagrinned with the explosion of three years ago— I do feel to [sideways in margin] provoked that I should be charged with appointing my successor— I am not quite a Czar in my powers—hence could not if I would do that thing— It is too cruel on [me?]p ll. 10–11 I am not a little nbut amp absolutely •••••••••
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Samuel Gompers1 to SBA [Washington, D.C.] October 31, [1899]
Dear Madam: Your favor of the 27th inst., together with enclosed petition, came duly 2 to hand; and I beg to assure you that I fully appreciate your courtesy in asking the co-operation of our organization for the purpose of further agitation and securing equal suffrage for women and men. You say that you propose starting out on new lines of agitation. One is to insist upon the incorporation of a clause in the constitutions which may be adopted for the government of “Hawaiian Islands, for Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines” so as to leave the adjective “male” out of the suffrage clause, and to petition the Federal Government to adopt an amendment to the constitution that shall prohibit the states from “disfranchising citizens on 3 account of sex.” In regard to the latter proposition I would say that the American Federation of Labor some years ago circulated a petition of this character, and that within a few months more than 300,000 signatures were obtained and presented to Congress. Thus, you will see we are with you on this proposition, and have been for a very long time, and I am sure we shall have no hesitation at all in rendering whatever assistance we could to follow in the 4 same lines. But, in regard to your petition to the 56th Congress not to insert the word “male” in the suffrage clause of the constitution for the governments of Hawaii, Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines, and in which the petitions are asked in the name of justice and equality for all citizens of our republic, I think very peculiar, more particularly when it is asked upon the fundamental principle of the “consent of the governed.” I do not believe
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that the American Federation of Labor is likely to concede the right of our Congress to form constitutions for the islands you name. To petition Congress to incorporate such a qualification, or rather, to omit such a qualification for suffrage, is to recognize that the government of the United States has the right to foist itself upon the people of those islands, not only against the “consent of the governed,” but in spite of their protests, the protests that they are manifesting by sacrificing their very lives, if necessary, to make effective. You will not make friends for the cause of woman’s suffrage by following the course to which I refer, I imagine. It should require no assurance of my earnest desire for equal suffrage. So far as it lies within my power, I have been a consistent advocate and defender of that proposition, and am still willing to do all that lies in my power to further that cause; but I can not consent, and I do not think that the organized working people of our country will consent, to a movement which recognizes and practically sanctions a violation of the fundamental principles upon which the institutions of our country are based, and as involved in the wars of conquest. Very respectfully yours, U Saml Gompers President A.F. of L. Y TLS, letterbook copy, American Federation of Labor Papers, DLC. 1. Samuel Gompers (1850–1924) presided over the American Federation of Labor from its founding in 1886 until his death. As reflected in this letter, he was an outspoken critic of taking the United States “into the vortex of imperialism, with all the evils which that term implies,” as he expressed his opposition in a speech to the Chicago Peace Jubilee on 18 October 1898. (ANB; Gompers, Papers, 5:20–29.) 2. Film, 40:172. The text was edited by Ida Harper for her biography of SBA. Original recently located in American Federation of Labor Papers, Additions of 2012, Archives Division, WHi, not in Film. 3. In reply, in another letter recently located, SBA reminded Gompers that women, who were “powerless in regard to the policy of the government” with regard to war or empire, were in a position “quite unlike that of men.” “All that we women can do in the matter, is to beg of Congress, that in whatever it does or recommends to be done relative to the government of those Islands, the basis shall be one of justice and perfect equality of rights and opportunities to all the inhabitants, women included.” (SBA to S. Gompers, 14 November 1899, American Federation of Labor Papers, Additions of 2012, Archives Division, WHi, not in Film.) 4. Gompers remembers petitions, bearing one million signatures in all, that were gathered by unions and organizations of farmers in 1890 for the NationalAmerican association. Suffragists accepted funding for travel in the effort from J. W. Hedenberg, a businessman in Chicago, who then seized the petitions without
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presenting them to Congress and finally burned them. Learning of the destruction when she called on Hedenberg in May 1899, SBA “asked him if had not a list of the organizations and their memberships, that had sent those petitions, and he told me that he had not a single vestige of all of that wonderful work.” (S. Gompers to Frances Dickinson, 31 January 1891, in Gompers, Papers, 3:25; History, 4:184; SBA to S. Gompers, 14 November 1899, and S. Gompers to SBA, 22 November 1899, American Federation of Labor Papers, Additions of 2012, Archives Division, WHi, not in Film; SBA diary, 8 May 1899, Film, 39:13ff.) •••••••••
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Remarks by SBA to the New York State Federation of Women’s Clubs
Editorial note: When the fifth annual meeting of the New York State Federation of Women’s Clubs came to Rochester, SBA’s principal role was to organize and chair a session on “political study” led by woman suffragists. At her invitation, Harriet Mills, Lillie Blake, and Anna Shaw joined local suffragists in a session addressed to women not yet converted to the cause. But, as the city’s best-known resident, SBA was honored with a seat on the platform whenever she attended the meetings in the auditorium of the Eureka Club. Occasionally she stepped forward to join the discussion, and once she interrupted proceedings to teach women how to project their voices to the back of the room. It was, however, this incident on the fourth and final day of the meeting that captured national attention for several weeks. (Film, 40:101–2, 146–47, 208–19.)
[10 November 1899] The warmest discussions of the week marked the closing hours of the fifth annual convention of the New York State Federation of Women’s Clubs this afternoon. The question of presenting resolutions touching the case of Brigham H. Roberts, the Mormon elder, has been discussed between sessions all the week. 1 It was understood that Mrs. Wm. Tod Helmuth and others did not desire to have the subject touched upon. On the other hand, certain radical spirits felt that the convention would fail in its duty unless some action were taken. A resolution was finally presented this afternoon by Mrs. Hunting2 ton, of Steuben. The resolution read:—“Resolved, That the fifth annual convention of the New York State Federation of Women’s Clubs, representing 27,000
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women, send to our representatives in Congress a solemn protest against the seating of B. H. Roberts, the Mormon, a polygamist, in that honorable assembly.” Miss Anthony’s Remarks Immediately the president turned to Miss Susan B. Anthony, who sat at her right, and said, “Do say something!” Miss Anthony responded:— “I did hope this subject would not come up in the Convention. I should hate to see this federation going on record as asking Congress to do something unconstitutional. Congress has not the power to seat or unseat a man. He was elected to his office by the voters from his State, and the constitution does not give Congress the power to throw him out. “I think we had better let the men fight out this question among themselves. When I think of the double lives the men of the East are living without protest from any one, that they are not true to their marriage vows, it does seem unfair that the whole country should rise up in arms because one poor Mormon man from Utah has been elected to Congress.” The wife of a well known Rochester minister immediately arose and 3 begged to differ with Miss Anthony. “I am sure,” she declared, “all men are not untrue to their marriage vows. Some are, I admit, but not all.” Miss Anthony’s speech settled the question, and the resolution was strongly voted down. Y Unidentified and undated clipping, SBA scrapbook 31, Rare Books, DLC. 1. Fannie Ida Pritchard Helmuth (1838–1918), the wife and the mother of prominent homeopathic physicians in New York City, was former president of Sorosis and in her third year as president of the New York State Federation of Women’s Clubs. For several decades, she worked to organize and fund homeopathic hospitals, first in St. Louis, where she lived at the time of her marriage in 1859, and in New York, where she moved in 1870. Her own views in favor of woman suffrage were well known. (NCAB, 12:472; New York Times, 23 September 1894, 2 December 1918.) 2. Manuscript minutes of the meeting link the same Mrs. Huntington to Oyster Bay, not to Steuben, and she remains unidentified. (Records of the New York State Federation of Women’s Clubs, NElmC, with assistance of Mark Woodhouse.) 3. According to the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, this was Mary Gannett. (Film, 40:217–19.)
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Emily Parmely Collins1 to ECS Hartford Conn. Nov’r [12?] 1899
My dear Mrs. Stanton: My congratulations to yourself and more to all womanhood that you have lived to see your 84" birth-day. In the not distant future when woman shall have come into her rightful heritage the 12th of November will be established as a national holiday as the 22nd of February is now held. And the 12th of November will be commemorated for as much larger reason than the 22nd of Feb. now is, as the emancipation of the whole civilized human race is greater than that of a million and a half of men. With health, and, as now, with undimmed intellect, that you may see many more birth-days is the fervent wish of your old disciple. U Emily P. Collins Y ALS, on stationery imprinted with address, Scrapbook 2, Papers of ECS, NPV. Collins wrote no day of the month. 1. Emily Parmely Peltier Collins (1814–1909) organized what was thought to be the first woman’s rights society in the nation in South Collins, New York, in 1848, in response to reports of the convention at Seneca Falls that summer. Twice widowed, she lived with the son of her first marriage in Hartford, Connecticut, where she was active in the Hartford Equal Rights Club. (History, 1:88–94; American Women; Isabella B. Hooker to Virginia L. Minor, 1 April 1879, Film, 20:789–93; New York Times, 30 April 1909; Woman’s Journal, 29 May 1909.) •••••••••
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Statement by ECS [c. 20 November 1899]
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who has fought women’s battles for fifty years, said: 1 “I indorse every word Mrs. Anthony says. We will never have the right
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social relation until we have established woman’s social equality everywhere with men—in the state, the church, the home and the world of work. “Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were all polygamists, and the Pentateuch says nothing against it. I have charity for the Mormon, for he has the law of God on his side, as he interprets it. As Miss Anthony says, the Mormon lives up to his religious idea. The question is, does the Gentile do the same? “Social purity leagues and societies have got up a great furor over Roberts. It is all nonsense to talk of social purity until they put the mother, the builder of the race, in her proper place. If the question of polygamy were to come up before Congress, perhaps I wouldn’t want Roberts there, but Roberts may be as good a judge of war and financial questions as any other Congressman. “Do we know the character of Congressmen who sit about Roberts? A physician may be as good a doctor with two wives as if he had only one.” Y New York Evening World, 20 November 1899. 1. SBA’s part at the New York State Federation of Women’s Clubs in stopping a resolution against Brigham Roberts caused an uproar in women’s organizations and the press. “[I]t always hurts to suggest plucking the beam out of our own eye— before taking the mote from our neighbors,” SBA commented in her diary when noting the criticism leveled against her. She retained dozens of articles about the incident in her scrapbook. ECS’s comments were published with another iteration of SBA’s views on Roberts. Women should leave the matter to Congress, she told the Evening World, and take on “a more pertinent mission, and that is to attack the men of this ‘Gentile world’ who transgress the moral code more openly than most Mormons practise polygamy.” In the same article, the Rev. Madison C. Peters called SBA out of date with the modern reformers who espoused social purity; “Miss Anthony is getting old,” he explained. (SBA diary, 12 November 1899, Film, 39:13ff; assorted clippings, SBA scrapbook 30, Rare Books, DLC.) •••••••••
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SBA to Samuel Gompers Rochester, N.Y., Nov. 29, 1899.
My Dear Friend,— 1 Yours of the 22d inst. came duly. I have made a thorough hunt to find a copy of that old petition, but thus far have failed. Will you not write out a form which you think would be approved? I am very glad you prefer
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to make it simply cover a Sixteenth Amendment to secure equal political rights to the women of the United States and of the Territories. I am glad, too, that you agree with me that whatever form of government we permit in any State or Territory, it should be based upon equal rights for women. That is the only point I wish to cover. I would like to get the form of petition so clear and simple that it could not raise a question in the mind of any real friend of our cause, and I am sure you will be able to accomplish this better than any other person. I am sorry to say that Mrs. Chapman Catt cannot go to Detroit for the 2 12th, and neither can my first lieutenant, the Rev. Anna Shaw. Both of them will be at a great distance from Detroit on that date, but I am calculating to be there. I have an engagement in Indianapolis for the 9th and 10th, and so 3 shall reach Detroit from the West. At a later date I will write you my place of stopping. I think, as you say, that it will be perfectly splendid to start this new attempt not only from Detroit, but from the American Federation of Labor, and I hope that on the 12th of December we may be able to interest the leading representatives present of your auxilliary labor organizations so that when they return to their respective homes they will secure the endorsement of the petition by all the members of their local societies. I will try to reach Detroit in time to talk over the matter with you before going into the convention. It seems to me that it would be hardly necessary for me, as president of the National W.S.A., to take with me credentials as a fraternal delegate. Still, I will ask our corresponding secretary, Mrs. Foster Avery, to make them out, so as to be sure I am fully equipped for admission, and for entrance upon the floor of your convention. I am very glad you met my brother in Leavenworth, Kan. I don’t believe he differs so very much from you and from me, but when a man has not yet burnt all the bridges of either his sectarian or political party affiliations behind him, he is obliged to be a little conservative in his talk. Yet my brother generally speaks straight out what he thinks. Of course he, like other practical men, has always thought me very foolish to spend my time working to make things better for women hundreds of years hence, instead of devoting myself to some business and accumulating a fortune. Thanking you for your cordial response, and hoping to meet you in Detroit, I am, Very sincerely yours, U Susan B. Anthony
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[in SBA’s hand] It occurs to me that Mrs Clara Bewick Colby—Editor Woman’s Tribune—was one of Mr Hedenbergs Petition Committee and made a report upon its work— she lives at 2420—Fourteenth st. Washington—D.C,— I write her sa[ying] to send it to you—or to go & see you—& if possible revive the old, or what would be better—frame a new or better one— S. B. A Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, American Federation of Labor Papers, Additions of 2012, Archives Division, WHi. Directed to Washington, D.C. Square brackets surround letters run off margin. 1. S. Gompers to SBA, 22 November 1899, American Federation of Labor Papers, Additions of 2012, Archives Division, WHi, not in Film. 2. SBA took her appeal for the sixteenth amendment directly to the American Federation of Labor at its annual meeting in Detroit in December 1899. For her speech to the delegates, see Film, 40:304–10. 3. SBA stayed in Indianapolis for five days to attend a meeting of the Business Committee and a national conference. •••••••••
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SBA to John F. Shafroth1 The Riggs—Washington D.C.
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Feb. 2, 1900—
My Dear Mr Shafroth If you have not already done so—will you introduce into the House a 3 th 16 amendment bill—as Senator Warren has done in the Senate? We are to have our hearing before the Judiciary Committee on the 13th inst—and should have a bill in their hands before that date— Trusting you will attend to this I am Very sincerely yours U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, place corrected, Shafroth Family Papers, WH 912, Western History Collection, CoD. 1. John Franklin Shafroth (1854–1922), Democrat of Colorado, served in the House of Representatives from 1895 to 1905 and Senate from 1913 to 1919. He was a strong supporter of woman suffrage, although in 1914, his Shafroth-Palmer amendment undercut the goal of federal suffrage by proposing the requirement that a state hold a referendum on woman suffrage when eight percent of men petitioned for it. (BDAC; Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States [1959; reprint, New York, 1973], 267–68.)
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[in SBA’s hand] It occurs to me that Mrs Clara Bewick Colby—Editor Woman’s Tribune—was one of Mr Hedenbergs Petition Committee and made a report upon its work— she lives at 2420—Fourteenth st. Washington—D.C,— I write her sa[ying] to send it to you—or to go & see you—& if possible revive the old, or what would be better—frame a new or better one— S. B. A Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, American Federation of Labor Papers, Additions of 2012, Archives Division, WHi. Directed to Washington, D.C. Square brackets surround letters run off margin. 1. S. Gompers to SBA, 22 November 1899, American Federation of Labor Papers, Additions of 2012, Archives Division, WHi, not in Film. 2. SBA took her appeal for the sixteenth amendment directly to the American Federation of Labor at its annual meeting in Detroit in December 1899. For her speech to the delegates, see Film, 40:304–10. 3. SBA stayed in Indianapolis for five days to attend a meeting of the Business Committee and a national conference. •••••••••
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SBA to John F. Shafroth1 The Riggs—Washington D.C.
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Feb. 2, 1900—
My Dear Mr Shafroth If you have not already done so—will you introduce into the House a 3 th 16 amendment bill—as Senator Warren has done in the Senate? We are to have our hearing before the Judiciary Committee on the 13th inst—and should have a bill in their hands before that date— Trusting you will attend to this I am Very sincerely yours U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, place corrected, Shafroth Family Papers, WH 912, Western History Collection, CoD. 1. John Franklin Shafroth (1854–1922), Democrat of Colorado, served in the House of Representatives from 1895 to 1905 and Senate from 1913 to 1919. He was a strong supporter of woman suffrage, although in 1914, his Shafroth-Palmer amendment undercut the goal of federal suffrage by proposing the requirement that a state hold a referendum on woman suffrage when eight percent of men petitioned for it. (BDAC; Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States [1959; reprint, New York, 1973], 267–68.)
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2. The National-American established its convention headquarters in the Riggs House, at Fifteenth and G streets, Northwest, and SBA stayed there. 3. Francis Warren introduced Senate Resolution No. 80 on 30 January 1900. (Congressional Record, 56th Cong., 1st sess., 1292.) •••••••••
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John F. Shafroth to SBA Washington, February 4, 1900.
My Dear Madam: Your letter of the 2nd inst. received. In reply thereto will say that at the opening of Congress, I introduced a joint resolution proposing a constitutional amendment, which provides that the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by 1 any state on account of sex. This is I presume what you desired to discuss before the Judiciary Committee. With best wishes, I remain, Yours truly, U John F Shafroth Y TLS, on letterhead of House of Representatives, NAWSA Records, Manuscript Division, NN. 1. John Shafroth introduced House Joint Resolution No. 114 on 10 January 1900. (Congressional Record, 56th Cong., 1st sess., 754.) •••••••••
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Interview with ECS [7 February 1900]
Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, when asked yesterday whom she would prefer to see chosen president of the National Woman Suffrage Associa1 tion, Mrs. Blake or Mrs. Catt, said:— “I have no choice either way. Mrs. Blake is a woman of great force, and it is due to her that the cause has been kept alive in New York. She has been instrumental in getting many bills through the Legislature, and she has done splendid work for the last thirty years. “I admire Mrs. Catt greatly. I think her a woman of wonderful ability—
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executive ability, I mean. She is younger than Mrs. Blake, she has a wealthy husband, who is willing to help her; she has what Susan B. Anthony has and I had not, the faculty of raising money. Susan was always a great beggar. I never was. Mrs. Catt is. “I suggest as a way out of the difficulty that they be elected to the presidency and vice presidency.” Upon being asked which one she would vote for as president, she replied:—“Let them settle that among themselves.” Being questioned upon the proposed split in the party in case Mrs. Catt were elected, she was very emphatic in her denunciation of such a step. Y New York Herald, 8 February 1900, Lillie D. Blake Papers, MoSHi. 1. Sometime in January, ECS authorized use of her name on a public letter urging the election of Lillie Blake as president of the National-American. By the time ECS spoke to a reporter from the Herald, she likely had met resistance to her endorsement, and Blake’s friends watched her closely. The actor Harry Crisp sent this clipping to Blake with a message, “Talk about seamanship! How’s this for a lesson in trimming one’s sails?” (Film, 40:815–16.) •••••••••
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Report and Remarks of SBA to the National-American Woman Suffrage Association
Editorial note: Calling the convention to order at ten o’clock in the morning of its fourth day, 12 February 1900, SBA proceeded straight to the first item of business, her own report on the work of the Congressional Committee.
[12 February 1900] Miss Anthony, in reporting for the Congressional Committee, made a good point when she said: “One reason why so little has been done by Congress is because none of us have remained here to watch our employees up at the Capitol. Nobody gets anything done by Congress or by a State Legislature unless they have some one on hand to watch. We need a Watching Committee. The women cannot expect to get as much done as the railroads do, and the trusts, the Pullman Company, the liquor trust, etc. They keep thousands of agents at the National Capitol and at the State
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Legislatures to watch out for their interests. We have no one here, and yet we expect to get something done, though we labor under the additional disadvantage of having no ballots. Whatever takes place in Washington is felt to the circumference of the country. I have got almost all the States to send in petitions to Congress asking that upon whatever terms suffrage is extended to the men of Hawaii and our other new possessions, it may be extended to women upon the same; and it is this that has stirred up the ‘Antis’ in New York, Illinois, and elsewhere to their recent demonstrations. There was nothing more than usual going on in the Legislatures of any of those States. Mrs. Harper has culled extracts from all the favorable Congressional reports that we have had during the past thirty years, and I have 1 made a pamphlet of them, which will be laid on the desk of every member.” The report of the Resolutions Committee was read by its chairman, Mr. Henry B. Blackwell. The resolutions adopted have already been published. The one relating to Miss Anthony’s 80th birthday was accepted with a ris2 ing vote. In responding, Miss Anthony said: “I wish you could realize with what joy and relief I retire from the presidency. I want to say this to you while I am still alive—and I am good yet for another decade—don’t be afraid (applause). While my name stands at the head, I am Yankee enough to feel that I must watch every potato that goes into the dinner-pot and supervise every detail of the work. For the four years since I fixed my date to retire, I have been saying to myself ‘Let go, let go, let go!’ I am going to let go of the machinery part, but not of the spiritual part. I expect to do more work for woman suffrage in the next decade than ever before. I have not been for nearly fifty years in this movement without gaining a certain notoriety, at least; and it enables me to get a hearing before the annual conventions of many great national bodies, and to urge upon them the passage of resolutions asking Congress to submit to the State Legislatures a 16th Amendment to the Federal Constitution forbidding disfranchisement on account of sex. This is the work to which I mean to devote myself henceforward.” Y Woman’s Journal, 3 March 1900. 1. Congressional Reports in Favor of an Amendment to the National Constitution Prohibiting the Disfranchisement of United States Citizens on Account of Sex (N.p., 1900). The twelve-page pamphlet presented excerpts from eleven congressional reports issued between 1871 and 1893. 2. For the resolutions, see Report of the Thirty-second Annual Convention, 1900, pp. 31–33, Film, 40:829ff. Special attention is drawn to the one reading, “In view
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of the announced determination of Miss Susan B. Anthony to withdraw from the presidency of this Association, we tender her our heartfelt expression of appreciation and regard. We congratulate her upon her eightieth birthday, and trust that she will add to her past illustrious services her aid and support to the younger workers for woman’s enfranchisement. We shall continue to look to her for advice and counsel in the years to come. May the new century witness the full fruition of our labors!” •••••••••
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Testimony by ECS to the House Committee on Judiciary
Editorial note: Anna Shaw managed the hearing before the House Committee on the Judiciary on 13 February 1900 and introduced Harriet Mills to read a paper prepared by ECS. Although the hearing met to consider the usual sixteenth, woman suffrage amendment to the Constitution, ECS had her own proposal for federal action. Two versions of her message exist, this one, sent to Clara Colby and published in the Woman’s Tribune, and a variant published by the Government Printing Office. If custom prevailed, the latter derived from a stenographic record of what Mills said to the committee and reflects adjustments made by Mills while reading ECS’s text. Notes indicate where the Government Printing Office version differs significantly from the Tribune. (Woman Suffrage. Hearing before the Committee on Judiciary . . . February 13, 1900, pp. 5–7, and ECS to C. B. Colby, 11, 13, 20 February, 6 March 1900, Film, 40:938–40, 943–48, 1001ff, 41:23–25, 50–52.)
[13 February 1900] Honorable Gentlemen:—In adjusting the rights of citizens in our newly acquired possessions, the whole question of suffrage is again fairly open for 1 discussion in the House of Representatives; and as some of the Southern States are depriving the colored man of the right of suffrage, and all the States, North and South, deny to women the exercise of that right, we ask Congress to pass an amendment to the National Constitution, covering all these classes, declaring that citizens not allowed a voice in the government 2 shall not be counted in the basis of representation. To every fair mind, such an amendment would appear pre-eminently just; to count disfranchised classes in the basis of representation compels citizens to aid in swelling the number of Congressmen to legislate against their most sacred interests.
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Many Southern States are now passing laws to disfranchise their colored men in violation of the XIV and XV amendments, passed at the close of the Civil War, when the moral sense of the Nation was roused, through suffering, to a new appreciation of the principles embodied in our “Declaration of Rights,” that all the citizens of a republic have an equal right to 3 Life, Liberty and Happiness. If the Southern States, guilty of their present injustice toward the colored man, found that it limited their power in Congress that only those citizens who voted could be counted in the basis of representation, they would see that the interests of the races lay in the same direction. A Constitutional Amendment to this effect would also rouse the Northern States to their danger, for the principle applied to the North, in excluding all women from the basis of representation, would reduce their members of Congress by one half. And if the South should continue her suicidal policy toward women as well as colored men, these States would be at a still greater disadvantage. We have long asked Congress for an amendment to the National Constitution, forbidding the States to disfranchise any of their citizens on the ground of sex. The amendment now proposed seems more far-reaching, as it makes it to the direct interest of the ruling classes, both North and South, 4 to carry out the spirit of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments. Leading statesmen and lawyers were of the opinion that women as well as the slaves were enfranchised by these amendments, and made able 5 arguments to that effect, but the Supreme Court decided that they had 6 no effect on the status of woman; hence we now make our demand on a broader basis, wisely appealing to the selfish interests of the ruling classes. The degradation of disfranchisement is keenly felt by the class of citizens most highly developed—and the principles of government will apply equally to the women in the islands that have lately come into our possession; as many of these women are well educated and have filled important offices under their government, it would be a cruel act of injustice to inflict 7 on them the degradation of disfranchisement. Such an amendment to our National Constitution, affecting equally all 8 our States and foreign possessions, making the power of the ruling classes depend on the rights of the whole people, would be unassailable as a principle of government, and one formerly recognized in the Constitution in the three fifths representation of the colored population, in the old days of 9 slavery. 10 Matthew Arnold says, “The first desire of every cultured mind is
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to take part in the great work of government.” By every principle of our government, logically considered, woman’s emancipation is a foregone conclusion. The great “Declarations,” by the Fathers, regarding individual rights and the true foundations of government, are not glittering generalities for demagogues to quote and ridicule, but eternal laws of justice, as fixed in the world of morals as are the laws of attraction and gravitation in the material universe. As a Sixteenth Amendment to the National Constitution, asking the right of suffrage, has been denied, we now ask that women be no longer 11 counted in the basis of representation. Senator Anthony of Rhode Island, in a discussion on the rights of women, on the floor of the Senate some years ago, said: “It is not a fair statement of the case to say that man represents woman in suffrage, because it is an assumption on the part of the man. It is an involuntary representation on the part of the woman. Representation implies a certain delegated power, and a certain responsibility on the part of the representative towards the party represented—a representation to which the represented party does not assent is no representation at all, but is adding insult to injury.” In regard to the injustice of taxing unrepresented classes, Lord Coke says: “The Supreme Power cannot take from any man his property without his consent in person, or by representation. The very act of taxing those who are not represented appears to me to deprive them of one of their most sacred rights as free men, and if continued, seems to be in effect an entire disfranchisement of every civil right; for what one civil right is worth a rush after a man’s property is subject to be taken from him without his 12 consent!” Woman’s right to life, liberty and happiness, to education, property, and representation, can not be denied, for if we go back to first principles, where did the few get the right, through all time, to rule the many? They never had it; no more than pirates had the right to scour the high seas— force and fraud took the place of right in both cases. Honorable Gentlemen, in reading the speeches made in Congress I notice frequent references to Biblical texts, and to what the Great Creator of the universe commands. If the members of this committee believe in an over ruling Providence and His revealed will to us, I would refer them to what the Lord said, through Moses, when the five daughters of Zelophehad
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appeared before the Jewish Congress in their Capitol. The sacred historian, in the XXVII chapter of Numbers, tells us that these ladies were remarkably well developed specimens of womanhood and very eloquent 13 in their appeals for their civil rights. They made such an impression on Moses that he immediately retired alone and laid their case before the Lord, who said: “The daughters of Zelophehad speak right, thou shalt surely give them possession of their inheritance.” Thus did the daughters of Zelophehad secure their rights at the first appeal before the whole Legislative Assembly, while the daughters of the Knickerbockers, Van Rensselaers, and Stuyvesants, vouchsafed only a committee, have made their appeals in vain, for the last thirty years; this must be due to one of two reasons; either that the daughters of the Knickerbockers are not possessed of such eloquence and personal attractions as the Jewish petitioners, or, the Committee are not so faithful in their daily devotions as Moses was, listening to the still, small voice of the Lord, saying: “The daughters of the Republic are right; secure to them their just inheritance, civil and political equality, as citizens of a great Nation, by a Sixteenth amendment to the National Constitution, declaring that only those who exercise the right of suffrage shall be counted in the basis of representation.” Y Woman’s Tribune, 24 February 1900. 1. To end of paragraph in Woman Suffrage Hearing, p. 5, reads: “and as some of the States are depriving the colored men of the exercise of the right of suffrage, and all of the States, except four, deny it to all women, I ask Congress to pass an amendment to the national Constitution declaring that citizens not allowed a voice in the Government shall not be taxed or counted in the basis of representation.” 2. A state’s basis of representation affects the size of its delegation in the House of Representatives and the number of its electors in the Electoral College. To set that number, all states counted their population of women. The Fourteenth Amendment empowers Congress to reduce a state’s basis of representation in proportion to the number of male citizens denied voting rights. 3. Sentence was omitted from Woman Suffrage Hearing. 4. Sentence in Woman Suffrage Hearing, p. 5, reads: “The amendment I now propose makes it to the direct interest of the ruling classes, both North and South, to carry out the spirit of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments.” 5. To end of paragraph in Woman Suffrage Hearing, p. 6, reads: “but the Supreme Court decided that they made no change in the political status of woman; hence we now make our demand that all disfranchised classes shall be counted out of the basis of representation, thereby appealing to the self-interest of the ruling classes.”
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6. Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wallace 162 (1875). 7. Paragraph omitted from Woman Suffrage Hearing. 8. To end of paragraph in Woman Suffrage Hearing, p. 6, reads: “making the power of the ruling classes depend on the practical recognition of the political rights of the whole people, would be unassailable as a principle of government.” 9. Until ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, the Constitution of the United States, art. I, sec. 2, about the House of Representatives, read “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.” Federal protection of slavery was buried in the phrase “all other Persons.” 10. The English educator Thomas Arnold (1795–1842), not his son Matthew, expressed this view, recorded in Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D. In the eighth American edition, 1870, the quotation is on page 179. For the same mistake made in 1894, see Papers, 5:657. 11. Henry Bowen Anthony (1815–1884), Republican of Rhode Island, served in the Senate from 1859 until his death. ECS quotes his speech during the first debate on woman suffrage in the Senate, in 1866, on a motion to drop the word “male” from a bill to enfranchise black men in the District of Columbia. (BDAC; History, 2:107; Congressional Globe, 39th Cong., 2d sess., 11 December 1866, pp. 55–56.) 12. The words are from James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764), and were known to ECS through Charles Sumner’s “Equal Rights of All.” See Sumner, Works, 10:163–64. Edward Coke (1552–1634) was an English jurist and Member of Parliament. 13. Num. 27:1–11. She quotes the seventh verse. •••••••••
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Verse by ECS for SBA’s Birthday [15 February 1900] To Susan B. Anthony 1 On her 80th birthday—Feb. 15, 1900 My honored friend, I’ll ne’er forget, That day in June, when first we met— Oh! would I had the skill to paint, My vision, of that Quaker saint! Robed in pale blue and silver-grey, No silly fashions did she essay—
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Her brow, so smooth and fair, ’Neath coils of soft brown hair, Her voice was like the lark, so clear: So rich, and pleasant to the ear The “Prentice hand,” on man oft tried, 3 Now made in her, the Nation’s pride II
We met, and loved, no more to part— Hand clasped in hand, heart bound to heart— We’ve traveled West, years together, Day and night, in stormy weather— Climbing the rugged suffrage hill, 4 Bravely facing every ill— Resting, speaking, anywhere, Oft-times, in the open air— From sleighs, ox-carts, and coaches, Besieged with bugs, and roaches— All for the emancipation, Of the women of this Nation! III
Now we’ve had enough of travel, And in turn laid down the gavel— In the time-honored retreat, Gladly we will take a seat— In triumph, having reached four-score, 5 We’ll give our thoughts to art and lore— To younger hands resign the reins, With all the honors and the gains— United down life’s hill we’ll glide, Whate’er the coming years betide— Parted only when first in time Eternal joys are thine or mine U Elizabeth Cady Stanton Y Ms, in hand of E. L. White, Clara B. Colby Papers, Archives Division, WHi. In Film as enclosure at c. 13 February 1900. 1. This source text was mailed to Clara Colby in advance of SBA’s birthday
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with the note, “Tell Susan to tear up the copy I sent her, this is much better I am sending it to several papers”. It differs in many small details from the verse printed as a souvenir of the birthday celebration (Film, 41:10–12), and it most resembles the version in Rochester Union and Advertiser, n.d., SBA scrapbook 33, Rare Books, DLC, reprinted from New York Sun. The versions in Boston Investigator, 7 April 1900, and Woman’s Standard, May 1900, are closer to the souvenir but not perfect reproductions. 2. Whether ECS intended this line to read “brow, so smooth” or “brow, was smooth” is obscured by overwriting. Both forms appear in published versions of the verse. 3. From the last lines of Robert Burns, “Green Grow the Rashes.” Of nature, the poet says, “Her prentice han’ she try’d on man / An’ then she made the lasses, O.” 4. One variant began here to add a beat or two to each line: “And bravely face,” “While resting,” “Quite often,” “and mayhap coaches,” “beetles, bugs and roaches,” “All this for the emancipation,” and “Of the brave women.” 5. Lines three through six of this stanza were rearranged in the souvenir and several other publications, placing lines five and six as the third and fourth lines. Line four was also rewritten: “Side by side, we’ll take a seat.” •••••••••
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Article by ECS [March 1900]
Are Homogeneous Divorce Laws in All the States Desirable? There has been much discussion of late in regard to the necessity for an 1 entire revision of the laws on divorce. For this purpose the State proposes a committee of learned judges, the Church another of distinguished bishops, to frame a national law which shall be endorsed by both Church and 2 State. Though women are as deeply interested as men in this question, there is no suggestion that women shall be represented on either committee. Hence the importance of some expressions of their opinions before any changes are made. As judges and bishops are proverbially conservative, their tendency would be to make the laws in the free States more restrictive than they now are, and thus render it more difficult for wives to escape from unhappy marriages. The States which have liberal divorce laws are to women what Canada was to the slaves before Emancipation. The applicants for divorce are
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chiefly women, as Naquet’s bill, which passed the Chamber of Deputies of France a few years ago, abundantly proves. In the first year there were three thousand applications, the greater number being from women. Unhappy husbands have many ways of mitigating their miseries which are not open to wives, who are financial dependents and burdened with children. Husbands can leave the country and invest their property in foreign lands. Laws affect only those who respect and obey them. Laws made to restrain unprincipled men fall with crushing weight on women. A young woman with property of her own can now easily free herself from an unworthy husband by spending a year in a free State, and in due time she can marry again. Because an inexperienced girl has made a mistake, partly, in many cases, through the bad counsel of her advisers, shall she be denied the right to marry again? We can trace the icy fingers of the Canon law in all our most sacred relations. Through the evil influences of that law, the Church holds the key to the situation, and is determined to keep it. At the recent Triennial Episcopal Convention held in Washington, D.C., bishops, with closed doors, discussed the questions of marriage and divorce ad libitum, a large majority of the bishops being in favor of the most restrictive canons; and, though an auxiliary convention was held at the same time, composed of 1,500 women, members of the Episcopal Church, they had no part in the 4 discussion, covering a dozen or more canon laws. 5 A recent writer on this subject says: There is no doubt that the sentiment in the Episcopal Church, at least among the clergy, is strongly in favor of the Church setting its face firmly against divorce. An evidence of this is the circulation of a petition to the convention requesting that it adopt some stringent rule for this purpose, which has already received the signatures of about two thousand of the clergy. The proposition to adopt a stringent canon received the undivided support of the High Church ministers, and finds many supporters in the Low Church. The question of marriage and divorce, and the attitude the Church should take toward divorced persons who wish to marry again, has been up before many General Conventions. The attitude of the Episcopal Church has always been strongly against divorce, and particularly against the marriage of divorced persons. The Catholic Church takes a still narrower ground, positively declining to recognize such an institution as divorce.
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As early as the year 1009, it was enacted by the Church authorities of England that a Christian should never marry a divorced woman. Down to 1857, it was necessary that a private act of Parliament should be passed in order that a divorce could be obtained. In 1857, the State took action looking toward the granting of divorces by the courts without the interposition of Parliament, but this action has not been sanctioned by the Church of England. Hence has arisen a peculiar state of affairs in England, which has led to considerable confusion. The Church forbids the marriage of either party, except of the innocent parties in cases where the cause is adultery. But as the State permits the marriage of divorced parties, the ministers of the Church of England were put in an awkward position. As ministers of the Church, they were forbidden to marry these persons, but as the Church is allied to the State, and to a certain extent subject to it, a number of them believed it their civil duty to perform such marriages, and they performed them in violation of the canonical law. The agitation over this question has attracted a great deal of attention during the last few years, and is looked upon as being one of the most powerful causes which may lead to the disestablishment of the Church of England. Marriage should be regarded as a civil contract, entirely under the jurisdiction of the State. The less latitude the Church has in our temporal affairs, the better. Lord Brougham says: Before women can have any justice by the laws of England, there must be a total reconstruction of the whole marriage system; for any attempt to amend it would prove useless. The great charter in establishing the supremacy of law over prerogative, provided only for justice between man and man; for women nothing was left but common law, accumulations and modifications of original Gothic and Roman heathenism, which no amount of filtration through ecclesiastical courts could change into Christian laws. They are declared unworthy of a Christian people by great jurists; still, they remain 6 unchanged. There is a demand just now for an amendment to the United States Constitution that shall make the laws of marriage and divorce the same 7 in all the States of the Union. As the suggestion comes uniformly from those who consider the present divorce laws too liberal, we may infer that
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the proposed national law is to place the whole question on the narrowest basis, rendering null and void the laws that have been passed in a broader spirit, according to the needs and experiences of certain sections of the sovereign people. And here let us bear in mind that the widest possible law would not make divorce obligatory on any one, while a restricted law, on the contrary, would compel many, who married, perhaps, under more liberal laws, to remain in uncongenial relations. As we are still in the experimental stage on this question, we are not qualified to make a law that would work satisfactorily over so vast an area as our boundaries now embrace. I see no evidence in what has been published on this question, of late, by statesmen, ecclesiasts, lawyers and judges, that any of them have thought sufficiently on the subject to prepare a well-digested code, or a comprehensive amendment to the National Constitution. Some view marriage as a civil contract, though not governed by the laws of other contracts; some view it as a religious ordinance—a sacrament; some think it a relation to be regulated by the State, others by the Church, and still others think it should be left wholly to the individual. With this divergence of opinion among our leading minds, it is quite evident that we are not prepared for a national law. Local self-government more readily permits of experiments on mooted questions, which are the outcome of the needs and convictions of the community. The smaller the area over which legislation extends, the more pliable are the laws. By leaving the States free to experiment in their local affairs we can judge of the working of different laws under varying circumstances, and thus learn their comparative merits. The progress education has made in America is due to the fact that we have left our system of public instruction in the hands of local authorities. How different would be the solution of the great educational question of manual labor in the schools, if the matter had to be settled at Washington! From these considerations, our wisest course seems to be to leave these questions wholly to the civil rather than to the canon law, to the jurisdiction of the several States rather than to the nation. As many of our leading ecclesiastics and statesmen are discussing this question, it is surprising that women, who are equally happy or miserable in these relations, manifest so little interest in the pending proposition, and especially as it is not to their interest to have an amendment to the national Constitution establishing a uniform law. In making any contract, the parties are supposed to have an equal knowledge of the situation, and an equal
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voice in the agreement. This has never been the case with the contract of marriage. Women are, and always have been, totally ignorant of the provisions of the canon and civil laws, which men have made and administered, and then, to impress woman’s religious nature with the sacredness of this one-sided contract, they claim that all these heterogeneous relations called marriage are made by God, appealing to that passage of Scripture, “What 8 God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.” Now, let me substitute the natural laws for God. When two beings contract, the State has the right to ask the question, Are the parties of proper age, and have they sufficient judgment to make so important a contract? And the State should have the power to dissolve the contract if any incongruities arise, or any deception has been practiced, just as it has the power to cancel the purchase of a horse, if he is found to be blind in one eye, balks when he should go, or has a beautiful false tail, skillfully adjusted, which was the chief attraction to the purchaser. You must remember that the reading of the marriage service does not signify that God hath joined the couple together. That is not so. Only those marriages that are harmonious, where the parties are really companions for each other, are in the highest sense made by God. But what shall we say of that large class of men and women who marry for wealth, position, mere sensual gratification, without any real attraction or religious sense of loyalty toward one another. You might as well talk of the same code of regulations for honest, law-abiding citizens, and for criminals in our State prisons, as for these two classes. The former are a law to themselves; they need no iron chains to hold them together. The other class having no respect for law whatever, will defy all constitutional provisions. The time has come when the logic of facts is more conclusive than the deductions of theology. It is a principle of the common law of England that marriage is a civil contract, and the same law has been acknowledged by statutes in several of our American States; and in the absence of expressed statue to the contrary, the common law of England is deemed the common law of our country. Questions involved in marriage and divorce should be, in the churches, matters of doctrinal teaching and discipline only; and, after having discussed for centuries the question as to what the Bible teaches concerning divorce, without arriving at any settled conclusion, they should agree somewhat among themselves before they attempt to dictate State legislation on the subject. It simplifies this question to eliminate the pretensions of the Church and the Bible as to its regulation. As the Bible sanctions
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divorce and polygamy, in the practice of the chosen people, and is full of contradictions, and the canon law has been pliable in the hands of ecclesiastics, enforced or set aside at the behests of kings and nobles, it would simplify the discussion to confine it wholly to the civil law, regarding di9 vorce as a State question. U Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Y North American Review 170 (March 1900): 405–9. 1. “Recent” is a relative term. When writing about marriage and divorce in the last decade of her life, ECS repurposed and republished articles and speeches from a lifetime. She also sent nearly identical articles to different journals. Parts of this article dated back to the 1880s, and an earlier version appeared in the Boston Investigator, 17 December 1898, Film, 38:1011–12, and Free Thought Magazine, January 1899, not in Film. In addition, the same article, with a sentence added to its conclusion, appeared in Victoria Woodhull Martin’s Humanitarian 16 (March 1900): 193–97, Film, 41:191–93. 2. With reference to judges crafting new law, ECS may refer to the Commissioners for the Promotion of Uniformity of Legislation in the United States, meeting since 1890. By 1898, thirty-two states had joined the talks, though differences over laws of divorce led participants to focus elsewhere. Model legislation for the federal and state governments was also an aim of the general convention of the Protestant Episcopal church in 1898. (Nelson Manfred Blake, The Road to Reno: A History of Divorce in the United States [New York, 1962], 136–37; Journal of the Proceedings of the Bishops Clergy and Laity of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, 1898, 215, 273–74, 280–81, 357.) 3. Alfred-Joseph Naquet (1834–1916), a strong advocate of secular republicanism, wrote the law of 1884 that reestablished divorce in France. Though ECS had earlier made the same claims about use of that law, her sources are not known. In an interview in Paris with James Gordon Bennett for the Chicago Tribune, 14 October 1888, Naquet provided the number of three thousand divorces annually since the bill’s passage, but he did not mention women’s role. ECS’s claim is consistent with data from France during an earlier era of legal divorce, when overwhelmingly women were the petitioners for divorce. (David S. Bell, Douglas Johnson, and Peter Morris, eds., Biographical Dictionary of French Political Leaders Since 1870 [New York, 1990]; Wesley D. Camp, Marriage and the Family in France Since the Revolution: An Essay in the History of Population [New York, 1961]; Patricia Mainardi, Husbands, Wives, and Lovers: Marriage and Its Discontents in Nineteenth-Century France [New Haven, Conn., 2003], 11–12; Papers, 5:287.) 4. See note above at c. 4 March 1899. 5. ECS found this paragraph in the New York Sun, 25 September 1898, as she indicated in earlier publications of this text. The unsigned article previewed debates over divorce that would take place at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in October 1898. Here in the North American Review, her use of
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that source is obscured. The Sun was also her source for the paragraph beginning “The question of marriage and divorce,” though she changed that paragraph. On her own copy of the article in the Boston Investigator in 1898, she struck out the word “broader” and inserted “narrower” in its place, creating the phrase in this 1900 publication: “The Catholic Church takes a still narrower ground”. Closer perhaps to her own opinion, the new language reversed the author’s views. The Sun also supplied her long historical paragraph that begins, “As early as the year 1009”. (Film, 38:1011–12.) 6. Quoted in Lucretia C. Mott to Lydia Mott, 30 April 1861, in History, 1:746. After this passage, Mott wrote, “So Elizabeth Stanton will see that I have authority for going to the root of the evil.” 7. Talk in Congress of a national divorce law began with joint resolutions for a constitutional amendment “to empower Congress” to pass such a law or “give Congress jurisdiction.” Resolutions were introduced in every Congress from 1890 to 1902. Most recently, in the first session of the Fifty-sixth Congress, the House Committee on the Judiciary received three such resolutions and the Senate Committee on the Judiciary received two more. (Journal of the House of Representatives, 56th Cong., 1st sess., 5, 7 December 1899, 4 January 1900, pp. 40, 61, 131; Journal of the Senate, 56th Cong., 1st sess., 6, 14 December 1899, pp. 28, 44.) 8. Matt. 19:6. 9. When this article appeared in the Humanitarian, a final paragraph was added. “The contradictory statements of ecclesiastics in regard to texts of Scripture and Church usage, are too numerous and inconsequential for rational consideration.” •••••••••
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SBA to George F. Hoar1 Rochester, N.Y., March 12, 1900.
My Dear Friend,— I herewith enclose you a petition from the Bricklayers and Masons International Union of America, which represents fully sixty thousand voters in our different States and Territories, asking for women’s political equality in 2 Hawaii and our other new possessions. I have sent a similar one from the 3 National Building Trades Council by this mail to Senator Clay, of Georgia, asking him to present it at the earliest opportunity in the Senate, as I hope you will do with this one. Both these great associations have also signed the same petition for the House, and Sixteenth Amendment petitions for both House and Senate.
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The National Grange has also signed woman suffrage petitions, and the American Federation of Labor, representing fully a million voters, has done the same. As I have said already, the Masons and Bricklayers Union represents sixty thousand voters, while the National Building Trades Council adds fully half a million more, all asking for the enfranchisement of 4 women. Do you not think, my honored friend, that a measure like the submission of a Sixteenth Amendment proposition, which is thus demanded by two million voters—equalling one-seventh of the entire voting population of this country—might well command the respectful consideration of the Senate? I have now had presented by different members of the two Houses, or have placed in their hands for presentation, petitions from very nearly every one of the States and Territories of this nation, asking (1st) for equal political rights for the women of our new island possessions, and (2d) for a Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting the disfranchisement of United States citizens on account of sex. As you can bear me witness, I have now stood at the front for nearly twoscore years, with petitions in hand asking Congress to take the necessary steps to protect one entire half of the people of this so-called republic in their “citizen’s right to vote.” Will you not now, my friend, make a most earnest effort to bring the subject before the Senate for a discussion and a vote? The women of this nation, who have worked and plead for justice as no class of men, white or black, native or foreign, were ever forced to do, surely have a right to have their prayers heard and heeded by the so-called representatives of the people in this last year of the nineteenth century. Now do, I pray you, Senator, not allow this session to close without compelling the Senate to show its hand, whether for us or against us. Thanking you for all you have done, and hoping the last year of your official life may warrant a yet greater measure of gratitude, I am, Very sincerely yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, George Frisbie Hoar Papers, MHi. 1. George Frisbie Hoar (1826–1904), Republican of Massachusetts, entered the Senate in 1877 and served until his death. He was chiefly responsible for the creation of the Senate’s Select Committee on Woman Suffrage in 1882, and he voted in favor of the suffrage amendment in 1887, but Hoar believed that woman suffrage should be left to the states. Although SBA anticipates his retirement, Hoar was reelected to the Senate in January 1901. (BDAC. See also Papers 3–5.)
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2. Enclosures missing. Hoar presented the petition to the Senate on 14 March 1900 without the customary designation of a committee to receive it, and the chair sent it to the Select Committee on Woman Suffrage rather than the Committee on Foreign Relations. The Hawaii bill, Senate 222, was introduced in the Fifty-sixth Congress on 6 December 1899 and referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations on 12 December. It was essentially Senate 4893 as amended in the Fifty-fifth Congress, and it retained “male” as a qualification to vote and hold office. The committee reported back on 4 January 1900, and after extended debate over the last two weeks of February, the Senate passed the bill on 1 March and sent it to the House of Representatives. There it awaited debate. (Congressional Record, 56th Cong., 1st sess., 6, 12 December 1899, 4 January, 14 March 1900, pp. 89, 233, 643, 2870; 56th Cong., 1st sess., A Bill to provide a government for the Territory of Hawaii, 6 December 1899, S. 222, and 4 January 1900, S. 222 amended, and 2 March 1900 in the House of Representatives, S. 222 amended.) 3. Alexander Stephens Clay (1853–1910), Democrat of Georgia, served in the Senate from March 1897 to his death in November 1910. He did not present the petition SBA sent him. (BDAC.) 4. When the Bricklayers’ and Masons’ International Union met in Rochester, SBA addressed the delegates. The National Building Trades Council responded to the plea she sent to hundreds of conventions of men. See Film, 40:718–23, 734. •••••••••
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ECS to Lillie Devereux Blake [New York, between 12 & 24 March 1900]
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Dear Mrs Blake Your circular received. I consider this a very timely & important 2 move Of all the associations & clubs to day we have not one where all the vital interests of woman can be discussed. Send one of the circulars to Rev Antoinette Brown She has been treated very disrespectfully by Susans little cabinet of “girls.” She lunched with me a few days since & I was astonished to see how sore she felt & how fully she agreed with me on our narrow platform & 5 minute speeches I wish you could spend this evening with me, all my young fry are going to hear Ellen Terry & Irving & we could have an exhaustive talk on the situation & the many dissatisfied women with the present rulers I will make out a list of all I know who have retired from the movement because of snubs by Rachel Foster Avery & et al in that [line?]. I cannot attend the meeting but but will send you my 3 speech to the convention which was never read, & The Woman’s Journal
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would not publish either my speech to the convention nor nor to the Con4 gressional Committee. Do come & see me as soon as possible yours as ever U Elizabeth Cady Stanton Y ALS, Lillie D. Blake Papers, MoSHi. In Film at before 25 March 1900. 1. This undated letter anticipates a meeting on 28 March 1900, but its reference to the American tour of the great English actors Henry Irving (1838–1905) and Ellen Terry (1847–1928) places it between March 12 and 24. (New York Times, 11, 25 March 1900.) 2. The circular announced a meeting in New York City on 28 March 1900, at which Lillie Blake founded the National Legislative League, with the object “to obtain for women equality of legal, municipal, and industrial rights through action by the National Congress and State Legislatures.” State laws about mothers’ rights, wives’ earnings, and married women’s property were singled out for the league’s attention. ECS was made honorary vice president, and Blake told the press that the league would not “antagonize any existing body.” (Woman’s Tribune, 21 April 1900, Film, 41:163; Blake and Wallace, Champion of Women, 206–10.) 3. ECS refers to the speech that did not reach Washington in time to be read at the opening session but was published later by Clara Colby, Film, 40:925. For her letter to Blake’s meeting, see Film, 41:164–67. 4. See above at 13 February 1900. •••••••••
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George F. Hoar to SBA Washington, D.C., March 14, 1900.
[handwritten] Confidential My dear Miss Anthony: If attention had been publicly called to the matter of woman suffrage in Hawaii it is probable there would have been some legislation which would have not only prohibited it for the present, but have made it almost impossible to get it for a very long time in the future. On consultation with Mr. Blackwell and Senator Warren, phraseology has been secured in the bill organizing the government in Hawaii which puts it in the power of the people there at any time to establish woman suffrage if they see fit. If you consult Mr. Henry B. Blackwell he will tell you all about it and my humble share in accomplishing it. But I do not think any statement of the matter 1 should be made public just now.
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So far as the 16th Amendment proposition is concerned, I have never considered that of much practical importance. Whenever you can get a two-thirds vote in both Houses of Congress for a woman suffrage amendment, and get it also adopted by three-quarters of the States, you can get the three-quarters of the States to establish woman suffrage for themselves without such an amendment, which is much more easily accomplished. So I have regarded the discussions in Washington as valuable because good arguments for the cause of woman suffrage were made on a conspicuous theatre where they would attract more attention than if made elsewhere. Indeed the theory of the Constitution leaves the qualification for suffrage to the different States. The exception to that is the 14th and 15th Amendments. But so far as those give suffrage to the colored people at the South, they are now almost practical nullities. I hope and believe there will be before long a new awakening of the public conscience. But at present the sense of justice and righteousness and the love of liberty which abolished slavery and put down the Rebellion and gave citizenship and suffrage to the 2 colored people seems dead. Senator Morgan made his bid for re-election by a speech in the Senate in which he declared the unfitness of the negro for citizenship and demanded that the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution be rescinded. And now it is said that the Republicans in his State are to support him for Senator in spite of that platform and it is also suggested that the Administration desires his success, as he is too valuable a supporter of expansion policies to be spared from public life. I am faithfully yours, U Geo F Hoar Y TLS, on letterhead of United States Senate, NAWSA Records, Manuscript Division, NN. 1. Hoar’s cryptic narrative aligns with a public record that opened on 31 January 1900 with Senator Francis Warren again announcing his intention to amend Senate 222 to remove “male” from its stated qualifications to vote and hold office. Without pushing his amendments to debate, Warren, on 16 February 1900, introduced the amendment described by Hoar. It provided “That the legislature of the Territory of Hawaii may at any time after January first, nineteen hundred and three, submit to the lawfully qualified voters of such Territory such changes and modifications in the qualifications for electors as they shall see fit; and the same being adopted by a majority vote, taken in the mode prescribed by the legislature, shall be valid and binding as law.” The amendment passed, and it was included as chapter I, section 61, page 26, of Senate 222 when the bill was sent to the House of Representatives. (Congressional Record, 56th Cong., 1st sess., 31 January, 16, 20
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February 1900, pp. 1327, 1870, 1985; 56th Cong., 1st sess., Amendments Intended to be proposed by Mr. Warren to the bill (S. 222) to provide a government for the Territory of Hawaii, 31 January 1900, S. 222, and 16 February 1900, S. 222; 56th Cong., 1st sess., A Bill to provide a government for the Territory of Hawaii, 2 March 1900 in the House of Representatives, S. 222 amended.) 2. Congressional Record, 56th Cong., 1st sess., 6 January 1900, pp. 671–75. Speaking in defense of schemes to disfranchise African Americans in Louisiana and North Carolina, John Tyler Morgan (1824–1907), Democrat of Alabama, proposed that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments be reconsidered by a new generation, unaffected by “the passions or prejudices of the former times in which they originated.” “No great body of white people in the world,” he went on, “could be expected to quietly accept a situation so distressing and demoralizing as is created by negro suffrage in the South.” Hoar alludes to the challenge mounted against Morgan by rivals in the Alabama Democratic party. Morgan, who entered the Senate in 1877, was reelected on 27 November 1900 and served until his death. He was a strong proponent of American expansion. (BDAC; New York Times, 28 November 1900. See also Papers 4.) •••••••••
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SBA to Priscilla Bright McLaren Rochester, N.Y., U.S.A., March 31, 1900.
My Dear Mrs. McLaren,— I cannot forgive myself for having so long failed to write you. I think I 1 did not even report to you my safe arrival home, nor have I written you a word since I learned of the death of your best-loved brother Jacob, though 2 I received from you quotations from his good words. As we think of his work for the woman’s cause, all of us must feel that his place cannot be filled 3 by any one now living, unless, as you say, your own darling son Walter can make some approach to it. 4 My last note from you brings greetings for my eightieth birthday. I wish you could have been in Washington on February 15, not so much that they were celebrating my arrival at fourscore, as to see the representative women who had come to the capitol from nearly every State in the Union. It would have done your heart good to have met the nearly three hundred delegates, who gave an almost unanimous vote for Mrs. Chapman Catt, our new and young president. Every day makes me feel that it was the right thing for me to resign the
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helm of our good suffrage ship to younger hands. I am sure that the work will go on just the same. The fact is that the progress of our movement cannot now be impeded either by the going out of one person or the coming in of another. It will go ahead by its own momentum. It is with the greatest pleasure that I live over my delightful visit to you last August. It was very lovely of you to take into your heart and your home 5 my friend and companion, Mrs. Gross. She can never cease talking of you and of your kindness to her. I am sending you by this mail a photograph of her and myself, taken together some years ago. On my way home from Washington I spent a day with Mrs. Stanton in 6 New York. She is very well, and wide awake on everything [pertaining to?] the freedom of women and of the world. Her daughter, Mrs. Blatch, has been with her all winter and is to sail for England on the 17th of next month. 7 Among the little souvenirs enclosed is her little tribute on my birthday. Everybody admired her exceedingly at Washington. She certainly is a child worthy of her mother—and her father too, for he was a very brilliant man. Please remember me with much sympathy to your brother Jacob’s wife and children. I have wanted to write to her ever since the death of her husband, but time has been lacking. 8 Give my love to your daughter and to all of the sons and their wives. With love and gratitude, I am, Most affectionately yours, Y Typed transcript from a carbon copy, Loan collection of SBA Memorial, NRU. Directed to Newington House, Edinboro, Scotland. Square brackets surround words supplied by editor. 1. SBA visited the McLarens in Edinburgh early in August 1899, taking Emily Gross along. 2. Jacob Bright died 7 November 1899, leaving his widow, Ursula Bright, and three children. 3. Walter Stowe Bright McLaren (1853–1912), a businessman and son of Priscilla McLaren, assisted suffragists as early as 1867, when he circulated a petition to Parliament, and he was a key political ally of his mother until her death. He served on countless committees of reformers and sat in Parliament from 1886 to 1895 and again from 1910 to 1912. In 1883, he married Eva Maria Müller (1852?–1921), a political activist and suffragist. (Oxford DNB, s.v. “McLaren, Eva Maria”; Patricia Hollis, Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government, 1865–1914 [Oxford, 1987], passim; Who’s Who of British Members of Parliament, vol. 2; Bertha Mason, Walter S. B. McLaren: An Appreciation [London, n.d.], Women’s Library, London. See also Papers 4 & 5.) 4. McLaren was part of several birthday messages sent by British suffragists, the
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most elegant of which had not yet arrived when SBA wrote this letter. See SBA to P. B. McLaren and Millicent G. Fawcett, 14 May 1900, and “Susan B. Anthony from some earnest friends of the Political Enfranchisement of Women,” Film, 41:4–7, 281–82. 5. Emily Maude Brown Gross (1851–?), an admirer of SBA since Lydia Coonley introduced them in 1893, traveled with SBA on her trip to England in 1899. Emily Gross and her husband, Samuel Eberly Gross, often entertained SBA in their Chicago mansion. Samuel Gross earned fortune and fame as a designer and builder of subdivisions in the city with moderate-priced houses for the families of workingmen, and he was the model for Theodore Dreiser’s character, Samuel E. Ross, in Jennie Gerhardt. Emily Gross, also known as Maude, was born in England, moved to Chicago with her family, and married Gross in 1874. Their one child died young. (Emily Clark and Patrick Ashley, “The Merchant Prince of Cornville,” Chicago History 21 [December 1992]: 4–19; Emily Clark, “Samuel E. [G]ross: Dreiser’s Real Estate Magnate,” in Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt: New Essays on the Restored Text, ed. James L. W. West III [Philadelphia, 1995], 183–93; Chicago Daily Tribune, 25 October 1893; SBA diary, 2 November 1893, Film, 31:3ff. See also Papers 5.) 6. The transcript reads “everything pet [blank] the freedom of women”. The words in the text are the editor’s guesswork. 7. Enclosure missing. See the printed circular, illustrated with a portrait of Blatch, “Greetings. Harriot Stanton Blatch, Daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Lafayette Opera House, Washington, D.C. February 15, 1900,” Film, 40:933–34. 8. SBA knew some members of the family well. Agnes McLaren (1837–1913), a stepdaughter, pioneering physician of Scotland, and medical missionary, met SBA first in 1883, and again during SBA’s visit in 1899. (British Medical Journal 1 [26 April 1913]: 917.) SBA spent time with Charles Benjamin Bright McLaren (1850– 1937) and his wife, Laura Elizabeth Pochin McLaren (1854–1933), in 1883, when Charles McLaren served in Parliament and Laura McLaren, a second-generation suffragist herself, was active as a speaker and campaigner. (Who’s Who of British Members of Parliament, vol. 2; Oxford DNB, s.v. “McLaren, Laura Elizabeth.” See also Papers 4.) •••••••••
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SBA to Laura Clay Rochester, N.Y. April 15, 1900
My Dear Miss Clay Here it is just two months since I rounded out my four score years— I 1 little thought then—when told it was the illness of your noble mother that kept you away from us—that I should fail thus to write you. I do hope she
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is better—and that your hearts are lightened for a time at least— still we all know that approach to 80 must in the nature of things bring us nearer to the flight to the beyond!! Why is it that we cannot learn to see ourselves & our loved ones pass on with out such heart-breaks— Do—if but on a Postcard—tell me how your dear mother is—and how you & Mary & Sarah 2 are also— We did so very, very much need you my dear Laura—in our Business Committee meetings—yes and in our Ex. Com. meetings also— I am sure your level, judicial mind would have been a great help all round— Very sincerely & affectionately U Susan B. Anthony Personal— I found—I had better cut off the first sheet It was a most unexpected crisis— From what Mrs Upton nhadp reported to me that Mrs Catt said when you nallp returned to the Hotel from 3 calling on me at Mrs Sewalls—that Sunday a.m. at Indianapolis —last December,—I had thought she entirely agreed with what I replied to you— viz—that “when any one threatened to leave us & quit work for the cause— if she couldn’t have nfirstp the president’s chair at the meeting—and last the Chairmanship of the Organization Committee—it was time to let her 4 go”!! And Mrs C.—replied—“Well I guess Miss Anthony is right”— But to my utter amazement after all the amendments the B.C. had decided upon were made—and as we thought everything settled just as we all talked at Indianapolis—& just as we all had agreed in Washington—Mr Blackwell moved the re-instatement of the Organization Com—just at the close of the last session—when not a member of the B.C. was present—& it was voted! At the Ex. Com. next a.m. he—Mr B raised nopenedp the question—saying that Miss Hay was, by his motion, still the Secretary of the Org. Com.!! Well I cannot go through with the story—but finally at the last Ex. Com. meeting—she was discontinued—& the B.C. was made the 5 Organization—Com— The terrible hurt of all this came from the fact that Mr Blackwell went to Mrs Swift of California—and asked nherp to make the motion—saying to her—“Mrs Catt asked me to tell you that she wished you to make it”— Mrs Swift did not do it—& Mr B. at that last moment made it himself !— That Mrs C. had all through our talks seemingly assented to making the B.C. the Organization Com—leaving me in the feeling that it was just what she wished—and then at that very last session—getting Mr. B. to ask Mrs Swift to move the re-establishment of the old Com! &c— Well— to find I hadn’t learned Mrs Catt—was such a shock to me!— I cannot lose
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faith in one’s genuineness—frankness—openness—without a wound that agonizes me beyond words!— This revelation of one whom I had trusted absolutely—just spoiled my whole birth-day—the It came to me that a.m. at the Ex. Com. meeting—and I had all I could do to hold myself steady—as I sat through that Opera House scene— It was too cruel to have had it fall on me then—when all of my friends wanted me at my best— But I nerved 6 myself to the best I could & went through it all— But why need it to have been precipitated then?— Perhaps time will prove its wisdom!— I have felt ever since as one does at a funeral of the hearts love—a sore loss— Oh—if, only, my old trust could come back to me!!— I wouldn’t have written this— if I didn’t know that you must have received our new Presidents letter to the Business Committee— Its strangeness crushes me anew—her charges are fearful— I have asked her to call a B.C. meeting at the very earliest day possible— We cannot—we must no go on—this way— Just to think of her dictating that letter to an office clerk— Well it must stop— I do wish I could see you—but it will be better for us all to be together— She & also her husband told me nat Washingtonp that Miss Hay was the most suspicious & jealous person they ever knew—and Mr Catt said to me & to Mrs Upton her conduct has been such in my house—that she can never live in it again—and yet she went directly to their home & has remained in it ever since—until now—when she goes to Ohio— I am perfectly nonplussed—I cannot understand things— Mrs Foster Avery & Mrs Upton were fearfully broken up—they as you know had the most entire belief in Mrs Catt— But what can we do to get back into trust in each other that is the thing we must do—somehow—and it cannot be done by letter— We must have a meeting—and we must have you—& every single one of our members at it— Lovingly & trying to be hopefully U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, Laura Clay Papers, Special Collections and Archives, KyU. Verso of postscript marked “Personal for Laura Only.” 1. Rather than attending the annual convention in Washington in February, Laura Clay stayed at home to care for her mother. Mary Jane Warfield Clay (1815–1900) died on April 29. 2. That is, Mary Barr Clay and Sallie Clay Bennett. 3. The Business Committee met in Indianapolis on 9 December 1899, during a week planned by the Organization Committee to revive a state suffrage association. SBA was the guest of May Sewall, while Harriet Upton, Catharine McCulloch, Laura Clay, and Carrie Catt stayed in a hotel. (Report of the Thirty-second Annual Convention, 1900, pp. 11, 42, Film, 40:829ff.)
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4. Although much of the dispute at Indianapolis is obscured by bland minutes, some details emerge from scattered complaints in the wake of the meeting. Committee members discussed whether to recommend putting an end to the Organization Committee and absorbing its functions into the Business Committee. The topic itself suggests that Carrie Catt’s future election as president was taken for granted. Mary Hay, in town for the state organizing events, made very clear to the Business Committee that she expected to be named National Organizer to succeed Catt. SBA called it “a most curious exhibition of hopeless ambition.” (SBA diary, 9–10 December 1899; SBA to Grace J. Clarke, 18 December 1899; SBA to Catharine W. McCulloch, 18 December 1899; and Report of the Thirty-second Annual Convention, 1900, p. 11, Film, 39:13ff, 40:313–15, 319–23, 829ff.) 5. Carrie Catt not only changed her mind about dissolving the Organization Committee but also gained the Blackwells as allies. On the motion of Henry Blackwell, the full convention voted on 14 February 1900 “that the present Organization Committee be continued, with Mrs. Catt as Chairman.” At a session of the Executive Committee on February 15, Blackwell reintroduced his motion under the guise of clearing up misconceptions. Did the motion mean that an Organization Committee would continue to exist or that current members would still constitute the committee? Carrie Catt used this opening to pay “a tribute to Miss Hay’s work on the Organization Committee,” and SBA renewed her push to have the Business Committee be the Organization Committee. At the session on February 16, Catt overruled another attempt by SBA on the grounds that the Executive Committee could not reverse an action of the convention. In the debate, Alice Blackwell joined Catt in opposing SBA. The committee was continued with Catt as its chair, as moved by Henry Blackwell, but the resignations of committee members were accepted. Saved in theory, the Organization Committee in fact disappeared from the association’s list of standing committees. (Report of the Thirty-second Annual Convention, 1900, pp. 50–54.) 6. Birthday celebrations began in a session of the Washington convention on February 15 and carried over to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in the evening, where Joseph Douglass provided the music and wives of senators received the guests. At the time, Nettie L. White remarked, “Poor, dear Miss Susan B.! she did look rather weary about half past ten, with a very long line of eager guests still pushing toward her.” With hindsight a year later, a reporter in Rochester wrote about the party in 1900, “Only those friends who were very close to Miss Anthony at that time, and who tried to save her in every possible manner from the strain attending the festivities of that occasion, know how near she was to utter collapse.” (Nettie Lovisa White, Commonplace Book, 1899 to 1906, pp. 10–16, Susan B. Anthony Foundation Records, DLC; Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 16 February 1901, Film, 41:955.)
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Remarks by SBA to the Political Equality Club of Rochester
Editorial note: The Political Equality Club of Rochester held its annual meeting on 3 May 1900 at the Reynolds Library. Jean Greenleaf read Ida Harper’s column “The Cause of Woman,” subtitled “The Treatment of Women under the New Law for Hawaii,” written from Washington on 28 April, to launch discussion of the new Organic Act. Harper reminded her readers of the fruitless eighteen months of work put in by SBA and others to excise the word “male” from the bill. Here SBA adds a personal dimension to the conversation. (Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 4 May 1900, not in Film; New York Sun, 29 April 1900.)
[3 May 1900] Susan B. Anthony was present, and she spoke her mind about interference with the cause of women by men. She singled out Henry B. Blackwell, one of the editors of the Woman’s Journal of Boston, as the object of her attack. Miss Anthony said that when the question of a constitution for the Hawaiian islands arose Senator Warren of Wyoming arranged for amendments to be offered in both houses of Congress providing that the 1 word “male” be stricken from the constitution for the Pacific islanders. Continuing, she said: “When Mr. Blackwell heard of the amendment he interviewed Senators Hoar, Warren and other pro-suffrage statesmen, with the result that another amendment was offered. According to its terms the Hawaiian Legislature is given permission to submit an amendment providing for woman’s suffrage to the people of Hawaii in 1903. Of course Congress was willing to grant the permission. We women suffragists desire Congress to discuss the proposition for the benefit of the moral effect it might have. “We had doubts as to its passage under any circumstances, but our friends in Congress thought Mr. Blackwell was authorized to speak for us and because they did think so our efforts were futile. At the Republican national convention at St. Louis four years ago Mr. Blackwell also inter2 fered with our plans. I had arranged with Senator Teller of Colorado to have a woman suffrage plank submitted to the convention. It provided for a pro-suffrage amendment to the constitution.
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“Owing to the activity of Mr. Blackwell in our behalf a resolution was passed urging woman suffrage because populism was a menace to the welfare of the country and the aid of the fair sex was desired. Thus we were placed in a ridiculous light. Woman suffragists had no desire to interfere with populism or any other ‘ism.’ We simply desired woman suffrage. We were not anxious to aid the Republican or any other party except as it aided our efforts to secure our rights. Although Mr. Blackwell is an ardent sympathizer with our contentions and is as good as any man can be under the circumstances, he should not presume to represent our society.” Y Rochester Union and Advertiser, 4 May 1900. 1. The president signed the Organic Act for the Territory of Hawaii on 30 April 1900. Senator Francis Warren’s amendment to the Senate bill disappeared during negotiations between the Senate and the House over differences in their bills. 2. See above at 11 August 1896. •••••••••
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Remarks by SBA to the New England Woman Suffrage Association
Editorial note: After participating in the daytime business meeting of the New England Woman Suffrage Association, SBA joined several local women on the platform at the Park Street Church vestry for the public portion of the meeting. No report of the occasion explains what sparked SBA’s defense of her generation.
[28 May 1900] Miss Anthony referred to a remark made by a previous speaker, that suffragists had now learned to use wiser methods than in the past. She said: “The women of to-day ought to be wiser and more persuasive than those of the past,—or what is the advantage of the higher education?—but as a matter of fact they are not. When the pioneers were pelted, it was not because of any lack in them. There is no sweeter or more dignified woman to-day than Lucretia Mott. There is none more winning than Lucy Stone. We have never had a woman in our whole fifty years of this movement who could go before an audience and melt the heart of every one in it like that woman. She stood alone. Mrs. Stanton was about as early as anybody—I was not; I took up the work some years later—and she was most beautiful and charming, as well as logical and eloquent. Mrs. Nichols, of Vermont,
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and the other pioneers were not inferior to any of the women of to-day. Young women, do not delude yourselves with the idea that any young women of the present are sweeter, or more logical, or even better to look at, than were the early advocates of equal rights!” Miss Anthony went on to make a strong argument for suffrage, on several different grounds, including the present disadvantages of working women. She said: “Show me anywhere a disfranchised class of laborers, black or white, men or women, and I will show you a degraded class of labor. I cannot promise that all women will always vote right, but in equal justice to all citizens lies the only hope of better things.” Y Woman’s Journal, 2 June 1900.
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Article by ECS [3 June 1900] M’Kinley and the Women. Bowling Green Building, New York, May 25.
Dear Mrs. Stanton: I write you as the Honorary President of the National Legislative League in order to interest you in our Republican work, which is to forward the reelection of William McKinley. Yours sincerely, Grace White.
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In reply to this letter I would say, while I have no interest whatever in the success of the Republican party or the reelection of William McKinley, I would do my utmost to rouse the women of the nation to serious thought on the immense importance of their own emancipation, constituting as they do, one-half the people of the nation. Presidents and parties, finance and tariffs, are of minor importance to the civil, political and social rights of the mothers of the race. The enthusiasm of the mass of women for political parties and church fairs, for building statues to statesmen and parsonages for Bishops, I would
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turn into stern demands for their own recognition as equal factors in a true republic. William McKinley has never as yet, to my knowledge, uttered one word in favor of the education, elevation and emancipation of the women, wholly unrepresented in this Government. Though we have made our appeals in the Capitol of the nation, year by year for over a quarter of a century, asking for a XVI Amendment to the National Constitution giving us an equal share in all the rights and privileges that men enjoy, we have thus far appealed in vain. We have no champions in the Senate or the House to plead our case. In the twenty-seventh chapter of Numbers we are told that the daughters of Zelophehad appeared in their capitol, asking for their rights of inheritance. They had a respectful hearing; Moses, the great lawgiver, being deeply impressed with their demands, immediately retired to his closet to lay their case before the Lord, who said: “The daughters of Zelophehad 2 speak right, give them their inheritance.” Their legislators promptly obeyed the message through Moses and the very first appeal of the Jewish maidens was answered, while the daughters of Jefferson, Hancock and Adams are still pleading in vain, though every fundamental principle of our Government is violated in woman’s disfranchisement. The “Fathers” said: “No just government can be formed without the consent of the governed.” “Taxation without representation is tyranny”— and yet half the people of this nation are both taxed and governed without their consent. As long as this policy continues Presidents and parties have no interest for us. My message to our countrywomen is to give all the time and thought they are now expending on political clubs and church festivals to securing their own civil and political rights. U Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Y New York Sun, 3 June 1900. Not in Film in this version. 1. Grace White, sometimes reported to be M. Grace White, was described by the press as a married woman, a young woman, a speaker, a “writer of Republican literature,” and an editress, living at the start of 1901 in an apartment on West Sixtyfifth Street and at year’s end on One Hundred and Sixteenth Street. In New York City, she was a leading Republican operative in the presidential campaign of 1900 and municipal campaign of 1901, organizing rallies, speaking at mass meetings of men and women, and raising money for the party. According to the Evening World, Chauncey Depew “once said of Mrs. White that her political logic was as good
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as that of any man he ever heard on a political platform.” The return address on this letter to ECS was that of the Republican National Commercial and Industrial League. (New York Times, 20, 22, 26 September 1900, 7 February 1901; New York Tribune, 1 November 1900, 16, 25, 30 October 1901, 29 October 1902; Evening World, 29 January, 29 October 1901.) 2. Num. 27:7. •••••••••
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Ida Husted Harper to ECS 17 Madison St., Rochester June 5, 1900.
My Dear Mrs. Stanton:— Your card is just received. Miss Anthony arrived at home last Saturday night, in spite of our utmost endeavors to persuade her to stay over for the suffrage convention in Brooklyn. The thought of the immense amount of work piled up here weighed on her mind so that she could not enjoy 1 anything. She reports everything beautiful at the Boston festival. She was invited to be the guest of the Blackwells during her stay, but preferred to 2 stop at a hotel in Boston. However, she spent Sunday at Dorchester, and had a day with the Garrisons at Brookline. She then went down with Miss Shaw and Lucy Anthony to their summer home on Cape Cod for two days. Miss Shaw has rented her cottage for the summer, but her address until July 3 first will be “The Haven,” Wianno, Cape Cod. I suppose you know that she, Miss Anthony and Mrs. Catt are to speak at Chautauqua July 14, and 4 a great time is expected. Dr. Vincent probably will go into his cave upon that day, and put a stone up in front of the door. How splendid it would be if you could give one of your great addresses on that occasion! Yet after all, when one thinks of it, how many thousands more it is possible to reach with the pen. My department in the Sun is not exactly what I wish it to be. I have to feel my way very carefully with Mr. Dana. Frequently he leaves out the paragraphs which I was most anxious to have appear, and sometimes the others are run together and jumbled up in a style which almost sends me to bed; but the way the articles are copied and the letters I get from all parts of the country make me feel it is best to hold on to our space. I try very hard to make the articles light and popular, and to sugar-coat the suffrage so that it will go down.
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If every prominent woman in the country would come out boldly as you 5 did last Sunday, it would set the Republicans to thinking; and how I do wish they would do it! But they will not. They will be like dumb, driven cattle in this campaign, as in all of the others. All the obstacles piled on top of each other are not a thousandth part as discouraging as the women themselves. Your letter to the Mothers’ Congress was read early in the proceedings, but toward the last, when there was danger of the Congress stampeding for suffrage, they suppressed Miss Anthony’s. Possibly the influence of the many male mothers who were in attendance may have had something to do with this, but the female mothers who were in charge 6 were quite capable of the whole thing. Notwithstanding such instances, however, the masses of women undoubtedly are being converted to a belief in woman suffrage. As you know, I am struggling with the fourth volume of the History, and I am sure I have your sympathy. The work is not so difficult, however, as when you undertook it; for with the annual reports, the Tribune, the Journal and the scrap-books it is an easy matter to get the material. The chief trouble is to sift it out and condense it. I hate the work but Providence or some other fellow seems to have decreed that I must come to Miss Anthony’s assistance, now that you no longer can do these things for her. I am quoting freely from your addresses before the national conventions and the hearings’ committees. Nothing equal to them has yet been written. Miss Anthony leaves about the twelfth for the meeting of the Progressive 7 Friends near Philadelphia, and will then go in to the Republican Conven8 9 tion and be the guest of Mrs. Emma J. Bartol. She will probably be home the following Saturday. On Saturday, June 30, she is to address the annual Farmers’ Picnic at that lake near Auburn, and she and I are invited to spend 10 a few days with Mrs. Osborne, who will have Emily Howland come over. It would be delightful if you also could be there. Miss Anthony wants you to write her immediately where you will spend your summer, and when you are going. She says to tell you she has been wanting to write you, and will do so the first moment she can get. We are going to spend next Sunday at the 11 Dansville Sanitarium. I never saw Miss Anthony seem so tired, but please do not refer to this in any way when you write her, as she does not like to have it mentioned. With love to Mrs. Lawrence and yourself, Affectionately yours, U Ida Husted Harper p.s. I wonder how Sister Duniway feels about the defeat of the suffrage
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amendment in Oregon this week. It appears to be the largest majority vote against it which ever has been given in any State. You know they refused to allow any of the National Association to go out there and speak, or to have any voice whatever in the campaign. Sister Duniway said she knew exactly how to manage the men of Oregon, and that they should carry the amendment by a “still hunt.” It looks very much as though they were still hunting, and would continue to do so for a good many years to come. Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Clara B. Colby Papers, Archives Division, WHi. 1. SBA left Rochester for Boston on May 25 and spent the next four days in a flurry of events organized by the New England Woman’s Club and New England Woman Suffrage Association. She returned home on the night of June 1. She had been announced as a guest of the Brooklyn Woman Suffrage Association at a luncheon in Prospect Park on June 1, but she did not attend. (Film, 41:311–13, 315–23; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 16 May, 1 June 1900.) 2. Alice and Henry Blackwell lived in Dorchester. At the Garrisons, Helen Bright Clark and her family were also guests. 3. Anna Shaw owned a house in the beach community of Wianno in Osterville on Cape Cod, near her first parish and in what was once a colony of New England reformers that included William and Ellen Garrison and the family of Elizabeth Chace. The houses “are now rented or sold to strangers,” SBA noted in her diary. (Shaw and Jordan, Story of a Pioneer, 264–68; Stevens, Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Lillie Chace Wyman, 188–89; SBA diary, 31 May 1900, Film, 40:363ff.) 4. George Edgar Vincent (1864–1941), a doctor by virtue of a degree from the University of Chicago, had charge of the Chautauqua Institution founded by his father Bishop John Heyl Vincent in Western New York. By the lectures he scheduled, Vincent made the summer resort a power in adult education. (ANB.) 5. Above at 3 June 1900. 6. The Congress of Mothers, first convened in 1897, met this year in Des Moines, Iowa, under the leadership of Alice Birney. Funding for the organization came from Phoebe Hearst on the condition that the congress welcome men as participants. For the letters to the meeting by ECS and SBA see, Film, 41:292–93. According to the report in the Woman’s Journal, only the opening paragraphs of SBA’s letter were read. 7. These plans came to naught when SBA received a telegram in the early morning of June 8 that Merritt Anthony had dropped dead on a sidewalk in Fort Scott. She left for Kansas immediately and stayed until June 23. The Pennsylvania Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends was to convene at Longwood in Chester County, Pennsylvania, on 14 June 1900. Progressive Friends traced their gatherings back to reformers of the 1840s, but the movement was no longer confined to members of the Society of Friends. An uncodified religion of humanity bound the group together. Among the scheduled speakers this year were the Reverend Frederic A. Hinckley, William Garrison, Carrie Catt, and the Reverend Anna Shaw. (Proceed-
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ings of the Pennsylvania Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends, Held at Longwood, Chester County, Pa., 1900 [Kennett Square, Pa., n.d.].) 8. To begin at Philadelphia on 19 June 1900. SBA chaired a committee of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association that appealed to the national nominating conventions for a plank stating, “That we favor the submission by Congress to the various State Legislatures, of an Amendment to the Federal Constitution forbidding disfranchisement of the United States citizens on account of Sex.” (Memorial. To the National Presidential Convention of 1900, Film, 41:268–70, 314.) 9. Emma Jemima Welchman Bartol (1821–1908) was a charter member of Philadelphia’s New Century Club, founded in 1876; a donor to many of the city’s charities; and a world traveler who published books about her trips. Her husband, Barnabas Henry Bartol, an engineer who died in 1888, took over the Southwark Foundry in Philadelphia in the 1850s and extended his business into Cuban sugar refineries, for which the foundry made equipment. Bartol probably came to know SBA and ECS through her friendship with Rachel Avery’s mother. (Emma J. Bartol, Recollections of a Traveller [Philadelphia, 1906]; Anthony, 2:548; records of West Laurel Hill Cemetery, Bala Cynwyd, Pa.) 10. SBA kept this engagement when she returned from Kansas. See SBA diary, 30 June 1900. 11. SBA canceled this visit when she learned of Merritt Anthony’s death. Dansville, New York, was the site of the Jackson Sanatorium, formerly Our Home on the Hillside, the premier water-cure of the time. SBA and ECS had both rested there and lectured there as well. (American National Red Cross, Clara Barton Chapter No. 1, Clara Barton and Dansville, Together with Supplementary Materials [Dansville, N.Y, 1966], 440.) 12. Eastern newspapers reported a defeat in Oregon long before the votes were all counted after the election on 4 June 1900. In the final tally, the woman suffrage amendment lost 26,265 to 28,402. (With assistance of Jerry Curry, Oregon State Library.) •••••••••
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SBA to Anna O. Anthony1 Rochester, N.Y. June 7, 1900—
Dear Niece Anna O. Your nice letter of yesterday came this a.m— I read it to Aunt Mary— and we both give you our blessing—and wish that only the best results may come to both you & Mr Bacon in your marriage co-partnership. We shall surely welcome him into our circle of nephews most heartily; and we most earnestly hope he will find pleasure all the days of his life not only with
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nthep one member of the Anthony family—but with nallp of us—
And we hope, too, that our Niece Anna O. may not only find joy in the one member of the Bacon family but also in all of them—and they in her—to the end. So my dear—all from without is & will be right—the within must be the great source of help to each & all of us— With dearest love your trusting Aunt U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, SBA Papers, MCR-S. 1. Anna Osborne Anthony (1874–1959) was a daughter of Merritt Anthony. Like her sister and cousins, she spent time living with her aunts to pursue her education in Rochester and then found work in Philadelphia. On 24 July 1900 in Philadelphia, she married Leon Brooks Bacon (1870–1952). Bacon graduated from Williams College in 1893, lived abroad for two years, read law in Syracuse, and earned a law degree from Syracuse University. After a few years in New York State, he and Anna settled in Cleveland. (Anthony, Anthony Genealogy, 189, 191; Frederick A. Virkus, The Compendium of American Genealogy [Baltimore, 1968], 1:44; William B. Neff, ed., Bench and Bar of Northern Ohio: History and Biography [Cleveland, Ohio, 1921], 274–75; New York Times, 26 September 1952; Louisville Times, 14 November 1959.) •••••••••
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SBA to ECS Rochester, N.Y. June 11, 1900.
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My Dear Friend,— Mrs. Harper has just read me your letter. I wonder whom you are going 2 to visit at West Hampton, and after that you say you are to be at the beauti3 ful old home of Sarah Hallock at Milton-on-the-Hudson. 4 I hope Mrs. Helen Bright Clark will be able to find you when she goes to New York. Their son is to marry a New York girl on June 18th, and after that they are to make a trip to Niagara Falls. They sail for home on July 4th. William Lloyd Garrison is to speak at the Longwood Progressive Friends meeting, Kennett Square, on June 15th, and we have a Woman Suffrage Day there with Miss Shaw and Mrs. Catt on the 16th. Miss Shaw is to preach a good Quaker sermon on the 17th. Mr. Garrison and the Clarks will all remain over until the end, so do write them there if you think best and tell them you will be ready to receive them.
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I am starting for Kansas this evening. A telegram from Brother Daniel 5 brings the sad word of the death of Brother Merritt. So I am rushing westward as I did on May 11, 1875, just twenty-five years ago, when Brother Daniel was shot you remember. Merritt’s death is very unexpected. I had a letter from him a few days ago in which he made no reference whatever to his health. I shall doubtless return very soon, but may not be able to attend the Longwood meeting, and if so I shall not see the Clarks again, for which I shall be very sorry. Lovingly yours, Y TL, on NAWSA letterhead, Clara B. Colby Papers, Archives Division, WHi. SBA’s name typed on letter by Anna E. Dann. 1. Anna Dann typed the letter on this day, but SBA dictated it on June 8 before she took an evening train for Kansas. 2. ECS spent July at the Oneck House in Westhampton Beach on Long Island, an old hotel with accommodations for one hundred guests. (Woman’s Journal, 7 July 1900; Long Island Illustrated, Issued by the Passenger Department, Long Island Railroad [New York, 1903], 122; Federal Census, 1900.) 3. Sarah Hull Hallock (1813–1886), a Quaker who joined the Friends of Human Progress in the late 1840s, was an abolitionist and an ally of ECS and SBA through the Women’s Loyal National League, American Equal Rights Association, and National Woman Suffrage Association. She had kept a boarding house in Milton, New York, along the Hudson River. Hallock’s sister Dorcas Hull (1825–1906) stayed on in the house, farming and taking in guests. (Shirley V. Anson and Laura M. Jenkins, comps., Quaker History and Genealogy of the Marlborough Monthly Meeting, Ulster County, N.Y., 1804–1900 [Baltimore, Md., 1980], 60, 61, 128, 131; Federal Census, 1900; Woman’s Journal, 19 June 1886, 7 July 1900.) 4. Helen Priestman Bright Clark (1840–1927), William Stephens Clark (1839– 1925), and their son Roger Clark (1871–1961) were in the United States for Roger’s marriage on June 18 to Sarah Bancroft (1877–1973) in Delaware. Helen Clark, John Bright’s daughter, took the lead of her Bright and Priestman aunts in supporting woman suffrage, and she had entertained ECS and SBA at her home in Street, England, where her husband ran the C. & J. Clark Company, shoe manufacturers. Sarah Bancroft, of prominent Quaker families in Delaware and New Jersey, graduated from Swarthmore College in 1897. (J. Travis Mills, John Bright and the Quakers [London, 1935], 1:474–78, 2:60–63; David J. Jeremy, Dictionary of Business Biography: A Biographical Dictionary of Business Leaders Active in Britain in the Period 1860–1980 [London, 1984], 1:691–93; Percy Lovell, Quaker Inheritance, 1871–1961: A Portrait of Roger Clark of Street, Based on His Own Writings and Correspondence [London, 1970], 1–5, 260–61; Times [London], 17 January 1927. See also Papers 4 & 5.) 5. SBA recalls her trip in May 1875 following news that her brother D. R. had been fatally shot. In that case, however, she contributed over nine weeks to her brother’s remarkable recovery. (SBA diary, 7–11 June 1900, Film, 40:363ff; Papers, 3:200–1, 203n.)
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SBA to Mary McHenry Keith Rochester, N.Y. July 25, 1900.
My Dear Friend:— ¶1 I have just come across your good letter of June 9th in which you report your speech and your talk on woman suffrage, and especially the 1 good word that Mrs. Hearst told you that you had almost converted 2 her. I hope you will be able to let her hear you at least once more because I feel it would be of the greatest possible service to our cause to have her fully converted, so that she would see that the wisest appropriation of her millions would be in the direction of educating the young men and young women of California, and of the entire nation, into the knowledge that the votes of all the people, including women with men, will surely bring about the wisest and best government the world has ever seen. ¶2 How Mrs. Hearst or anybody else can possibly persuade herself that a government composed wholly of men can legislate better for themselves and for women than can a government composed of both sexes is more than I can understand. All of our wars today are the result of a government wholly masculine. I do not believe any one of them would have been possible had the women of the United States and of England had their full and rightful share in deciding all questions that were at issue between the various nations. Man is the fighting half of the human family, and woman is the peace-making half, and in order to have a fine and even adjustment of things the two halves must be brought into perfect co-operation. Thanking you for all your kind words, and with love to yourself and Mr. Keith, I am, Very sincerely yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Keith-McHenry-Pond Family Papers, C-B 595, CU-BANC. 1. Phoebe Apperson Hearst (1842–1919) was the wealthy widow of George Hearst and mother of William Randolph Hearst. She was a major donor to the University of California. (NAW; ANB.)
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2. This catching up with mail comes as SBA recovered from a serious collapse and partial paralysis suffered while in Auburn, New York, with Eliza Osborne on 1 July 1900. After giving her multiple “electric treatments,” a doctor there pronounced her ailment to be “a tired out body.” Anna Shaw and Lucy Anthony arrived on July 5 to escort her back to Rochester. She wrote nothing in her diary until July 22 and stayed home until September 1. (SBA diary, 1–5 July 1900, Film, 40:363ff.)
Textual Notes ¶2
ll. 6–7
England has had their full nand rightfulp share and right •••••••••
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ECS to the Editor, NEW YORK TRIBUNE1 No. 250 West Ninety-fourth-st., New-York September 3, 1900. 2
To the Editor of The Tribune. Sir: In reply to Miss Walbridge’s strictures on co-education I would say, first, that co-education accomplishes the best results for boys and girls alike for the development of character. As the lifework of many individuals of both sexes is essentially the same, there is no reason why their education should differ. Second—Thousands of men are at the head of hotels, where they must understand all departments of housekeeping; at the head of laundries, bakeries and restaurants; cooks and waiters in fashionable families and hotels, on yachts, railroads, in the army, the navy, on steamers, and in all engineering and exploring expeditions. Men are tailors, at the head of great mercantile establishments, making dresses and hats for women, as well as clothes for their own sex. Men are said to be more skilful than women in all these industries, and the devotees of fashion at the present time all demand tailor-made suits. Because thousands of men are thus engaged in what are called domestic employments, should all men in their college course be required to study cooking and sewing? Third—While a rapidly increasing number of women are crowding into all the trades and professions, as lawyers, doctors, preachers, presidents and professors in colleges, writers of history, novels, poetry, school books, articles for magazines and the daily press; artists, actors, typewriters, stenographers, clerks in courts, teachers in public schools, and in four States of the Union are the equals of men, crowned with all their civil and
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political rights, members of the Legislature and jurors in the courts, is it necessary for all these classes of women to add to their collegiate course cooking, sewing, the care of children and nursing the sick? Fourth—Miss Walbridge asks if the masculine and feminine elements are the same. They are not the same, hence the importance that they should be always together and in perfect equilibrium. 3 As Tennyson has well said: Two heads in council, two beside the hearth, Two in the tangled business of the world, Two plummets dropped for one, to sound the abyss Of science and the mind. These great moral forces in humanity are as necessary to equilibrium as the positive and negative electricity, the centripetal and centrifugal forces in the material world. If we had the power to throw these forces out of equilibrium for five minutes, we would have material chaos, just as we have had moral chaos in all civilizations yet tried, because the feminine element has been unduly depressed and degraded, and until the equilibrium of these great moral forces is fully established, we shall never have perfect conditions. Fifth—In the main, woman’s work is identical with man’s; that is, looking at men and women as individuals, differing in tastes, capacities and destinies, and not as two distinct classes. They should have alike, the highest and broadest education, prepared to fill all positions. To circumscribe the sphere of all women to wifehood and motherhood, to home life, to cooking and sewing, is to take a very narrow view of their destiny. Hundreds of women never marry, keep house, take care of children, nor choose nursing as a profession, hence, why fit them only for four places when they already fill four thousand? A general and thorough collegiate education, for all women who have time and money, and a special course afterward for the lifework they choose, is the present custom for all students, and will no doubt continue. As a professor of mathematics or languages, a knowledge of logarithms and Latin idioms would prove of essential service to a professor of either sex, Miss Walbridge to the contrary notwithstanding. In social life the sexes enjoy very much the same conditions. We do not build separate houses or spread separate tables for men and women. We all eat flesh, fish and fowl, vegetables and fruits and suffer the extremes of heat and cold. To-day the
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State is in a condition of half-orphanage, as it has no mothers; the home is 4 in a condition of half-orphanage because it has no fathers. When woman awakes to the beauty of science, philosophy and government, then will the first note of harmony be touched, then will the great organ of humanity be played on all its keys, with every stop rightly adjusted, and with louder, loftier strains, the march of civilization will be immeasurably quickened. Yours truly, U Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Y New York Tribune, 5 September 1900. 1. Whitelaw Reid (1837–1912), successor to Horace Greeley in 1872, remained the titular editor of the New York Tribune until March 1905, when he became Ambassador to Great Britain. (ANB; New York Times, 11 March 1905.) 2. Louise Rachel Castle Walbridge (1861–1947) was the daughter of Miles B. Castle, a leader among suffragists in Illinois and former president of the Federal Suffrage Association. She married a rancher from Russell, Kansas, and when her own daughters reached an age at which decisions about education must be made, she wrote up her thoughts on the subject as articles for the Woman’s Home Companion. Her opposition to coeducation was reprinted in part in the New York Tribune, 27 August 1900. “The ‘new woman’ may fight against her obvious destiny with all her acquired masculinity,” Walbridge wrote, “but she cannot alter the purpose of her creation, and woman will go down to the end of time as wife and mother, and it is for this her education should prepare her.” The Tribune published Walbridge’s reply to ECS on 22 September 1900. (Caroline Knickerbacker Walbridge, Gallant Lady, 1861–1947 [Topeka, Kan., 1968]; Woman’s Home Companion, September 1900, 21.) 3. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Princess,” pt. 2, lines 156–57, 159–60. The missing line reads, “Two in the liberal offices of life.” The final line should read, “Of science, and the secrets of the mind.” 4. On this concept of half-orphanage that ECS adopted from Samuel J. May, see note above at 26 November 1897. •••••••••
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From the Diary of SBA [8–11 September 1900] 1
Sat. Sept. 8, 1900. Mrs Bigelow came to talk to me about Fund—8,000 2 dollars were lacking— she sent for carriage—& I, with her, started out— called at Sarah L. Willis—got her $2,000— scholarship—to put with Sister 3 Marys $2,000— scholarship—which made one half —then drove to Mrs
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Miller, then to John Fahy’s, then to Mr Eastman’s —flat refusal—but he is doing good work with 200,000 at Mechanics Institute—then I told him of my scheme of the [blank] flats—only building not belonging to the institute—buy that & make it a training school for domestics—& then all employers agree not to take a girl without a certificate &c—the idea struck him— then home to dinner—carriage again at 1.30—then drove to W. B. 6 7 8 Morse —then to [blank] Woodworth then—Mrs Fitzsimons —then to 9 10 Mrs Sibleys & then to Wilders— Clara drove with me to Granger Hol11 listers —not at home— then went to Mr Gannetts he guaranteed Marys 500— & another 1000— making $1,500— then drove to Genessee [sideways on page for September 7] Valley Club—called out Sam Wilder— went in—& he guaranteed $2,500— then I drove to 11.40— Granite Building—& 12 13 after long waiting—the Trustees —Mrs Montgomery & Mrs Bigelow came— Mrs M. told them Miss Anthony had a report to make—they had not expected it—then they waited & queried—and then they asked if the persons had legally qualified. I then told them the truth that Mr W— had given me permit to use his name—that I stood—sponsor for the $2500— & would give them the collaterals—Monday a.m—a Com. was appointed—to meet Monday— 1. Fannie Rosenberg Bigelow (1861–1937), an ally in the crusade for coeducation, was the daughter of David Rosenberg, a German-Jewish immigrant, leader in Rochester’s Temple B’rith Kodesh, and successful businessman. Lewis Bigelow, her husband, was born into an old New England family and moved to Rochester as a teenager after his father died. There, an uncle trained him to be a bookkeeper, and in 1900, he was employed by one of the city’s many clothiers. Fannie Bigelow, who exemplified an interfaith thread in the city’s movements of women and social reformers, belonged to Mary Gannett’s Ethical Club, helped to found the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, and was a leader in Jewish charities and the Baden Street Settlement. (Federal Census, 1880, 1900; city directory, 1900; Gilman Bigelow Howe, Genealogy of the Bigelow Family of America [Worcester, Mass., 1890], 390; Stuart E. Rosenberg, The Jewish Community in Rochester,1843–1925 [New York,1954], 90, 113, 219–20; Rochester Times-Union, 25 October 1937; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records.) 2. At their annual meeting in June 1900, the trustees of the university agreed to cut in half the sum required in advance of women’s admission, reducing it to fifty thousand dollars. But over the summer months women raised only two thousand of the ten thousand dollars outstanding, and with only a week before classes started, Helen Montgomery had given up. Fanny Bigelow and SBA had other ideas. (Minutes, Board of Trustees, University of Rochester, 12 June 1900, vol. 3, pp. 69, 71, NRU; William C. Gannett to Mary T. Gannett, 5, 8 Spetember 1900,
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and M. T. Gannett to W. C. Gannett, 6 September 1900, W. C. Gannett Papers, NRU; Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 13 June 1900, SBA scrapbook 33, Rare Books, DLC; Pease, “Gannetts of Rochester,” 19–20.) 3. The trustees agreed to let money given for scholarships for female students be counted toward the total sum raised for their admission. 4. John Fahy (1840–1912), class of 1866 at the University of Rochester, lived at 288 East Avenue. He managed the department store Fahy, Schantz Dry Goods Company. (Federal Census, 1900, 1910, 1920; city directory, 1900; Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 9 October 1912; on-line Tombstone Records for Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, copied by Richard T. Halsey, April 2008.) 5. George Eastman (1854–1932) of the Eastman Kodak Company lived with his widowed mother at 400 East Avenue (not yet in the house now known as the George Eastman House). He served as a director of the Rochester Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute, and he was in the process of constructing a new building for the institute on land he purchased for it. SBA’s scheme offered a variation on a program begun by Jean Greenleaf and other women at the institute to train young women in domestic arts and sciences. (ANB; city directory, 1900; Peck, History of Rochester and Monroe County, 1:261–64.) 6. William B. Morse (1824–1904), who lived at 298 West Avenue, had retired from the lumber company of William B. Morse and Sons and still engaged in banking in Rochester. Two of his sons were at this time students at the university. (Peck, History of Rochester and Monroe County, 2:1305–6; city directory, 1900.) 7. If SBA’s driver followed a logical path, this was probably Chauncey B. Woodworth (1819–1901) at 41 South Washington Street. He developed manufacturing in the city, beginning with a business in perfumes to which he added a glass factory. Although his sons led the family firm by this date, Woodworth still held important positions in the city’s banks. (Peck, History of Rochester and Monroe County, 2:1221–22; city directory, 1900.) 8. Caroline Vernon FitzSimons (1847–1925), at 5 Livingston Park, was the widow of Charles FitzSimons, a founder of one of the city’s leading department stores. (Peck, History of Rochester and Monroe County, 2:866–67; Federal Census, 1900; city directory, 1900; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records.) 9. At least three women in the neighborhood of East Avenue and named “Mrs. Sibley” were possible targets of SBA’s fund raising. 10. This was the house of Samuel Wilder (1824–1902) at 297 East Avenue. SBA found him at the nearby Genesee Valley Club of which he was secretary. Wilder was an early director of Western Union, a banker, and founder of Wilder Realty. (Federal Census, 1900; city directory, 1900; New York Times, 17 March 1902.) SBA was probably joined by Wilder’s daughter Clara (1860–1944), later Haushalter, who resided with her parents. She married the artist George Haushalter in 1903. (Federal Census, 1900; New York Times, 30 December 1903; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records.) 11. Granger A. Hollister (1854–1924), at 375 East Avenue, was a partner in the Hollister Lumber Company, a controlling investor in local lighting companies, and
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a banker. His brother George Hollister was a trustee of the university. (Peck, History of Rochester and Monroe County, 2:1244; Federal Census, 1900; city directory, 1900.) 12. The executive committee of the board of trustees was meeting in the Granite Building on East Main Street, the city’s first steel-framed skyscraper. See Minutes, Executive Committee, Board of Trustees, University Rochester, 8 September, 6 October 1900, vol. 4, pp. 186, 192, NRU. 13. Helen Barrett Montgomery (1861–1934) graduated from Wellesley College and returned to Rochester, where her father was a Baptist minister, to marry a businessman. She became an effective club woman locally and statewide. She and SBA founded the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union in 1893, the group that assumed responsibility for raising the money for coeducation. The Local Council of Women chose her as its candidate for the school board, prevailed with Republicans to make her their candidate, and campaigned for her. She won election in November 1899 and served for ten years. (NAW; ANB; Film, 39:512, 514–15, 526–27, 618–19, 40:85–87, 92, 99–100, 123.)
Sun. Sept. 9, 1900. Went to Church—had a sleepy time—had a sleepy time— seems as if something the matter with my tongue—had a feeling of strangeness—could not think of what I wanted to say—a queer sensation—all the afternoon— Mary asked me if my teeth were out— Shall be better or worse to-morrow!! Wendell was to have some letter here—he 1 telegraphed the 6th—see letter!!— Wendell—at last wrote—Frank has been told he wasn’t wanted 1. Frank Merritt Mosher (1857–1951), a son of Hannah Anthony Mosher, grew up in Rochester but moved to the Midwest when his mother died and family members found him employment. D. R. Anthony gave him work in Leavenworth in 1877 but suspicion fell on him when money disappeared. Later he worked with his brothers in the insurance business. This entry is one of several that allude to trouble between Frank and his brother Wendell over what SBA called “Franks utter lack of Business integrity!” In 1884, he married into a Rochester family, and his three children spent much of their time with their mother, Ella Dix Mosher, and her parents in the city. (Anthony, Anthony Genealogy, 183–85; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records; SBA diary, 15–16 May, 31 July, 10–25 November 1877, 17 February, 2 March, 19 April, 14 November 1878, 28, 29 August, 4, 9, 11, 16 September, 5, 7, 8 October 1899, Film, 19:12ff, 19:791ff, 39:13ff.)
Mon. Sept. 10, 1900. Monday—felt queer— But went to Mr [blank] Wil1 liams office— Said he was ordered to go through all the pledges & see if they were good— I went home disgusted—he flinched only at my pledge of $2,000— Well they let the girls in—said there was no alternative— At night—18 girls called—who were going to the College—a fine lot— I
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felt so strange—couldn’t talk to the girls— at last went off to bed—called 2 Dr Sherman Ricker —she said it was “Fagg”—was tired out!! But I fear it was more Brother Daniel R. & Sister Anna arrived at 10 Oclock—I did not see them this night— 1. Charles Miller Williams (1851–1922), with an office in the Wilder Building, graduated from the University of Rochester in 1871 and, after studying at the Albany Law School, began to practice law in Rochester in 1875. He was made a trustee of the university in 1888 and the board’s secretary in 1891. (Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 15 May 1922; Mt. Hope and Riverside Interment Records; William F. Mohr, ed. Who’s Who in New York, 1914: A Biographical Dictionary of Contemporaries [New York, 1914].) 2. Marcena Sherman Ricker (1852–1933) was SBA’s physician for her last years. Ricker first trained at Rochester’s City Hospital to be a nurse, then earned her medical degree at Cleveland Homeopathic Medical College in 1888, and returned to Rochester to practice. She had a general practice with a speciality in obstetrics. In 1898, she married Wentworth G. Ricker, a manufacturer in the city. (Peck, History of Rochester and Monroe County, N.Y., 2:924, 927; Woman’s Medical Journal 40 [February 1933]: 55.)
Tues. Sept. 11, 1900. The Dr. came this morning & again & again for a 1 whole month every day— Brother D. R. & Anna—his wife—visiting us I staid in bed in the west chamber 1. On October 11, she recorded “first time I had been out,” when she attended the inauguration of Rush Rhees as president of the University of Rochester. Appointments to attend state suffrage meetings in the Midwest later that month were canceled. On November 4, she wrote “8 weeks to day—since I discovered any trouble with my talking—it was at close of church— I do not get back my power but am a good deal better.” (SBA diary, 1900, Film, 40:363ff.) Y Excelsior Diary 1900, n.p., SBA Papers, DLC.
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Josephine Shatz1 to SBA Berlin [Germany] Oct. 6—1900—
My dear Miss Anthony: Letters from home just received make clear what newspapers failed to, just how the strings were pulled which opened the University to our girls. As one interested deeply I want to express to you my personal gratitude for your efforts, & to assure you that whenever I shall feel discouraged this last act of yours shall be my inspiration never to give up till my end is accomplished. You have put all younger women to shame & shall serve as an example as long as I have power to point to one. Yours with love & deepest veneration U Josephine Shatz. Y ANS on postal card, SBA Papers, NRU. Postmarked at Berlin; addressed to Rochester, New York. Not in Film. 1. Josephine Shatz (1865–1920) was on leave from teaching in the high school in Rochester in order to study science at the University of Berlin. Born and raised in Rochester and educated at the city’s Free Academy, Shatz was the oldest of six children born to German Jewish immigrant and merchant Joseph Shatz. She was active locally in woman suffrage work and the National Council of Jewish Women. After leaving a career as a teacher, she worked in the advertising department of Bausch and Lomb Optical Company. (Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 15 April 1890, 11 December 1901, 12 February 1920; Rosenberg, Jewish Community in Rochester, 111; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records.) •••••••••
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From the Diary of SBA [10 November 1900]
Sat. Nov. 10, 1900. Nine week to-day—since I started out to get the money—8,000— to finish the 50,000— for the opening of the college doors to girls— got it—by Mrs Willis—giving $2,000— Sister Mary $2,000— Mr
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Gannett—$1500— with Mrs G. 500— 2,000 and Mr Sam. Wilder guaran1 teeing the other $200— My last speech—was made to the Ex. Com. of the Board of Trustees— They refused to take Mr Wilders guarantee—so I told them I was good for it— not a trustee—has given anything—though 2 there are several millionaires among them— Dr Moore —afterward told me he was ashamed that Sister Mary had to come forward with 2,000— of her hard earned money— 1. SBA makes several errors in recording numbers. See 10 September 1900 above for accurate record. 2. Edward Mott Moore (1814–1902) was a distinguished surgeon and heart specialist who also served as a trustee of the University of Rochester. On November 7, SBA called on him to talk about the university and her health; of the latter, “he said absolutely nothing could be done— Nature must do the remedy.” (NCAB, 12:55; WWW1; SBA diary, 1900, Film, 40:363ff.) Y Excelsior Diary 1900, n.p., SBA Papers, DLC.
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SBA to ECS Rochester, N.Y., Nov. 11, 1900—
Dear Mrs Stanton— A happy birth-day to you—there is something magic about eighty-five!! Glad you have reached it—hope you’ll stay yet many a year, blessed with all your children— Wish I could be with you tomorrow—but I am going to try and be equal to celebrating the birth day a month—yes a three weeks 1 after the fair— If all is well—and I go on improving the next three weeks at the rate I have been making—I shall go—and I think there is no doubt but I shall— I shall start the 30th or the 1st at latest— You must be in good trim to do all the talking—and we’ll sit up in our big chairs & behave just the prettiest!!— Good Bye—with Love to Harriot & Nora—Maggie & Bob—Kitt & 2 3 Wife & Gatt & wife— You wont have Theodore and his wife & children! but you’ll enjoy those you have & all you have—as ever yours U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, ECS Papers, DLC.
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1. SBA calculates the time between her anticipated trip to New York in December and the start of the twentieth century on 1 January 1901. She and ECS were scheduled to be guests of honor at a “grand octogenarian reception” to open the week-long National Suffrage Bazaar at Madison Square Garden’s Concert Hall on 3 December 1900. “Though still frail,” as the Woman’s Journal observed, SBA joined Antoinette Blackwell, Isabella Hooker, Anna C. Field, and Charlotte Wilbour as the honored pioneers. ECS could not make it to the event, although reporters from the Brooklyn Eagle and the New York Tribune thought they saw her. (New York Times, 29 November 1900; New York Sun, 4 December 1900; Woman’s Journal, 8 December 1900; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 4 December 1900; New York Tribune, 4 December 1900.) 2. Henry Stanton, or Kit, married Mary O’Shea (c. 1873–?) in 1892. Mary Stanton was the daughter of Patrick O’Shea, a prominent publisher of Catholic books. (New York Times, 8 November 1892, 5 March 1906; Federal Census, 1900.) 3. Along with ECS’s son Gerrit, or Gat, SBA refers to his wife, Augusta E. Hazleton Stanton (1850–?). (William A. Stanton, A Record, Genealogical, Biographical, Statistical of Thomas Stanton, of Connecticut, and His Descendants, 1635–1891 [Albany, N.Y., 1891], 463; Papers, 3:306–7.) •••••••••
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SBA to Fannie Rosenberg Bigelow Rochester, N.Y., Nov. 22, 1900.
My Dear Friend:— Owing to the fact that my health is not such as to warrant a great outlay of strength in any one direction, and the probabilities are that with increasing years it will not improve, my friends strenuously urge me to abandon my cherished plan of securing a large standing fund for the N.A.W.S.A. They think it would be wiser for me to use what strength I have along lines of work in which I shall be able to influence present, or near future, conditions, rather than attempt to secure a “fund” for the use of younger workers. I have at last come to feel that I must accept their view of the situation, and the question arises, what shall be done with money on hand, of which 1 there are $2,250? Two plans present themselves to me, one of which is that it might be turned over to others who would undertake to carry out the “standing fund” idea. This, however, would place the matter in the hands of those who are now constantly appealing for money to help the work at present, and would doubtless prove ineffectual. The other plan is one by which the money can be invested so as to help
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in carrying on the work through the coming years, and that is to assist me in the publication of the fourth volume of the History of Woman Suffrage, which is being prepared under the splendid supervision of Mrs. Ida Husted Harper, my biographer. This money would enable me to publish the work and place it with the other three volumes now in the libraries of the country, where it would be a means of continual education in the progress of the suffrage movement. The three volumes already published ended before the actual granting of full suffrage in the four States of our nation or in most other countries. This volume will complete the history of the movement for the nineteenth century, and leave the twentieth century in the hands of the younger women. If you approve of the plan and are willing your contribution should be used for this purpose due credit will be given you in the History. Please indicate to me your wish in the matter at your earliest convenience and greatly oblige, Very sincerely yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, SBA Collection, NR. Directed to S. Union St., Rochester. 1. Pledges to the Standing Fund were $30,000 in January 1900, but only this sum had been paid up. Other surviving copies of this form letter are addressed to Cordelia A. Greene, 20 November, and Sarah Williams Bentley, 23 November. See Film, 41:575–76, 582–83. Ida Harper acknowledged the contributions in History, 4:viii–ix. •••••••••
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ECS to the Editor, New York EVENING POST 1 [New York, before 28 November 1900]
To the Editor of The Evening Post: Sir: It is a sad commentary on the acknowledged moral power of women, that in their various convocations they should manifest such petty prejudices, in trying to exclude negro 2 women from their clubs and societies. It would be well for us to consider all it has cost our sires and sons to emancipate a race we had, as a nation, doomed for centuries to a cruel bondage. Think of all that the noble band of abolitionists did, for over a quarter of a century, to educate our people
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into a sense of justice; think of the prolonged debates by statesmen in Congress to prevent the extension of slavery into new territories; think of all the blood and treasure, poured out in the civil war, which struck the chains from four million bondmen in a single day; think of the discussions over the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the national Constitution, and of the “Civil Rights Bill,” that crowning act of justice to which the nation set its seal, securing “liberty and equality” everywhere 3 to that unhappy race. And in all these steps of progress, many women, with pen and tongue, proved themselves a moral power in helping men to accomplish this grand work. What shall we say, then, of the daughters of such noble men and women, who would ignore the promised protection of the “Civil Rights Bill,” the grand amendments to the national Constitution, all the beneficent results of the war, the discussions of the people in State and Church, in legislative halls, in Synods and General Assemblies, and thus block the way of a struggling race to higher development? Is there no sense of justice in your souls, when the colored delegate stands before you, doubly weighted with both sex and race, that you deny her recognition as an equal factor in your associations? Just as our most rabid opponents are admitting that woman is a great moral power in civilizing the race, it is a pity that those who claim to be leaders of thought should take a lower moral standard than our best men have already attained. It is to be sincerely hoped by all interested in woman’s emancipation that the press of the country may have no more disgraceful reports to make in regard to presidents of clubs, so blinded by prejudice against race that they cannot see a negro woman on the floor when appealing to the Chair, or so deaf that they cannot hear a resolution in favor of admitting negro delegates on terms of equality. That beautiful engraving of “Beatrice and Dante” well illustrates what the position of the mother of the race should be 4 in drawing her sons upward and onward to moral and spiritual perfection. U Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Y New York Evening Post, 28 November 1900. 1. Horace White (1834–1916), once editor of the Chicago Tribune, replaced E. L. Godkin as editor of the Evening Post on 1 January 1900. (ANB; Allan Nevins, The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism [1922; reprint, New York, 1968], 568.) 2. ECS reacted to the official statement issued by the Woman’s Era Club of Boston in November 1900 to provide an account of the club’s conflict with the General Federation of Women’s Clubs in May 1900. The club applied for member-
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ship in the federation, paid dues, and received an official welcome that lasted only until southern whites realized at the annual meeting that the club’s members were African Americans. As if to lessen the insult of taking away the club’s membership, its delegate, Josephine Ruffin, was told she could stay at the meeting representing a white organization. She refused. (New York Tribune, 26 November 1900; New York Evening Post, 1 December 1900; H. F. Kletzing and W. H. Crogman, Progress of a Race: Or, The Remarkable Advancement of the Afro-American, From the Bondage of Slavery, Ignorance and Poverty to the Freedom of Citizenship, Intelligence, Affluence, Honor and Trust [Atlanta, Ga., 1903], 219–23; Blair, Clubwoman as Feminist, 145–46n; Joan Marie Johnson, Southern Ladies, New Women: Race, Region, and Clubwomen in South Carolina, 1890–1930 [Gainesville, Fla., 2004], 107–21.) 3. ECS refers to the Civil Rights Act of 1875, one of the great achievements of Reconstruction. However, here as elsewhere in her late work she fails to acknowledge its fate: key provisions of the act were struck down by the Supreme Court of the United States in the Civil Rights Cases (1883). 4. Beatrice Portinari (1266–1290), a Florentine noblewoman who inspired the Italian poet Dante (1265–1321), guides him through Paradise in his Divine Comedy. ECS often described a popular engraving based on the painting Dante and Beatrice by Ary Sheffer, an early nineteenth-century French painter. It illustrates a scene in the “Paradiso,” canto 1, lines 46–54. (John Denison Champlin, Jr., ed., Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings [New York, 1885], 1:371, 4:124–26; Papers, 3:450–51.) •••••••••
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ECS to the Editor, New York SUN New York, Nov. 29 [1900].
To the Editor of The Sun—Sir: Ever and anon public thought is aroused on the question of prostitution: now, by a terrible tragedy like the one just 1 enacted in Paterson, again, by some unusual, open manifestation of vice in the streets of our cities, now the Philippines or South Africa, one of the terrible adjuncts of war. But though an aroused public sentiment can repress the evils for a time in one locality, they reappear at once with renewed energy in many others. Occasionally church officials make their protests, but no one seems to understand the hidden cause of all these outrages; they are all trying to lop off the branches, but no one goes to the root of the deadly upas tree, the wholesale degradation of the mothers of the race. The authorities of the Episcopal Church are just now fully aroused to 2 action: the first step to be taken is for it to teach woman a higher respect
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for herself, and the rising generation a more profound reverence for her. So long as we assign to her an inferior position in the scale of being, emphasize the fables of her creation as an afterthought, the guilty factor in the fall of man, cursed of God in her maternity, a marplot in the life of a Solomon or a Samson, unfit to stand in the “Holy of Holies,” in cathedrals, or to take a seat as delegate in a Synod, General Assembly or Conference, or to be ordained to preach the gospel or administer the sacraments—so long will her degradation continue! When the Episcopal Church, in the great gathering at Washington two years ago, held a meeting for the discussion of a national law for divorce, though 1,500 women belonging to the same church held an auxiliary meeting there at the same time, the Bishops discussed the questions of marriage and divorce with closed doors, not one woman being permitted to be pres3 ent though equally interested in these social questions. The moral effect of that act degraded woman in the estimation of every man, young and old, connected with the Episcopal Church. When in their marriage service, they make it the duty of woman to obey and be given away by some man, they make her the inferior and subject of the man she marries; when they read from the pulpit these passages of Scripture: “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak, but they are commanded to be under obedience,” as also saith the law; “If they will learn anything let them ask their husbands at home for it is a shame for women to speak in the church”; “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands as unto the Lord”; “For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the Church”; “Let the women learn in silence with all subjection”; “But I suffer not a woman to teach nor to usurp authority over the man”; “For Adam was first formed, then Eve”; “For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for 4 the woman, but the woman for the man”; as coming from the great Creator of the universe they make woman the victim of man’s lust. All our efforts to suppress prostitution are hopeless until woman is recognized in the Canon law and all church discipline as equal in goodness, grace, and dignity with Bishops, Archbishops, yes, the Pope himself. Canon Charles Kingsley well said long ago: “This will never be a good world for woman until the last remnant of the Canon law is civilized from the face of the earth.” Lord Brougham is equally pronounced as to the common law. He said, “The common law of England for woman is a disgrace 5 to the Christianity and civilization of the nineteenth century.”
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The sentiments of men in high places are responsible for the outrages on women in the haunts of vice and on the highway. If the same respect the masses are educated to feel for cathedrals, altars, symbols and sacraments, was extended to the mothers of the race as it should be, all these problems would be speedily settled. You cannot go so low down in the scale of being as to find men who would enter our churches to desecrate the altars or toss about the symbols of the sacrament, because they have been educated with a holy reverence for these things. But where are any lessons of reverence for woman taught to the multitudes? And yet, is not the mother of the race more exalted than sacraments, symbols, altars, or vast cathedral domes? When our good men in State and Church try to suppress the terrible outrages on woman, they deal but with the evil on the surface. They should begin the lasting work by securing her equal honor, dignity and respect by sharing with her all the liberties they themselves enjoy. To-day in our theological seminaries our sons do not rise from their study of Bibles, creeds, and church discipline for women, with a new respect for the mothers who went to the very gates of death to give them life and immortality. Sons in our laws schools do not rise from the study of our codes, customs and constitutions with any respect for the women of this Republic, who though citizens are treated as outlaws and pariahs in our government. In our colleges, where sisters are denied equal opportunities for education, the natural chivalry of these brothers is never called forth. The lesson of inferiority is taught everywhere, and in these terrible tragedies of life we have the result of this universal degradation of woman. U Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Y New York Sun, 30 November 1900. 1. In Paterson, New Jersey, Jennie Bosschieter, a teen-age immigrant from the Netherlands, employed by the Paterson Ribbon Company, was drugged, raped, and murdered by four of the city’s wealthy young swells on 19 October 1900. Indicted on November 1, the four jailed men awaited trial. (Gerald Tomlinson, Seven Jersey Murders [N.p., 2003], 15–35; New York Sun, 2 November 1900; New York Times, 13 November 1900.) 2. Since September 1900, Henry Codman Potter, bishop of the Episcopal church in New York, had been crusading against the complicity of a corrupt municipal government with social vice. Just days before ECS wrote this letter, he preached a sermon “God and the City,” calling upon citizens of every social class to fight vice with vigilance. (Michael Bourgeois, All Things Human: Henry Codman Potter and the Social Gospel in the Episcopal Church [Urbana, Ill., 2004], 128–33; New York Times, 24 November 1900.)
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3. See notes above at c. 4 March 1899. The committee named at the general convention of 1898 to rewrite rules of marriage and divorce in the Protestant Episcopal church issued its report on 14 November 1900. It proposed to prohibit marriage in the church to divorced persons and bar remarried persons from the sacraments. (New York Times, 15 November 1900; Journal of the Bishops Clergy and Laity Assembled in General Convention in the City of San Francisco on the First Wednesday in October A.D. 1901 [N.p., 1902], 568–70.) 4. 1 Cor. 14:34–35, Eph. 5:22–23, 1 Tim. 2:11–13, and 1 Cor. 11:8–9. 5. On the quotations from Canon Kingsley and Lord Brougham, see notes above at 14 February 1898. •••••••••
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SBA to Carrie Chapman Catt Rochester, N.Y., Dec. 28, 1900
Dear Mrs Catt Yours of 26th is here this a.m. I do not nknowp what to say about Dr 1 Wood— The trip you lay out for her seems good on paper—but when you remember she is not known—that no one who is not know can draw an audience in small—back-wood towns no larger than in the most cultivated parts—it look like paying money out of whole cloth—and getting very little for it! I don’t know but you know alive women in Arkansaw & 2 Tenessee—but I think Miss nCuninghamp the President of Arkansaw— 3 will do just nothing to get up an audience— Mrs Meriwet[her] is just the 4 same—but Mrs Selden is the pres. in Tenessee now—may be she will do something— I should feel it a great deal better to keep the woman pegging away in Iowa—even it was wholly out of pocket— I believe in working where there is hope—of getting an amendment!! $75— a month—above travelling expenses—is pay for a first class woman—one who is known—and she should be put under a good manager who would arrange meetings for her—open the way—so that her 5 time would not be wasted. in Where is Miss Hay to be? Couldn’t she make a successful tour in Iowa— It doesn’t matter whether they hold the nConstitutionalp Convention or not—they want an amendment submitted—so in either case they want to keep the state alive—& that can be done only by holding meetings at every available point—and at every county 6 seat— To withdraw help from Iowa—to work in a wholly new field—is a poor policy—so it seems to me— But, now, that you have sent Dr Wood to
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Iowa Oklahoma—I should let her work there till it was of no use—& then work her way back to Iowa—stopping at one or two places in Arkansaw & Tenesee—& give Miss Clay as much as she will give her person[al] attention to— It is of no use to send a woman alone to work her way—as we used to do—when w[e] didn’t expect anything from the meetings—above just the expenses!! To pay $75. over and above expenses—we cannot afford it—except in rare cases when we have meetings planned & worked up beforehand— As I have said before, Miss Hay knowing the ground so well could arrange meetings through Iowa—beginning with a County Convention—or first she go to one place—& Dr Wood to another—& then come together in a county Convention—first stir up a county—in nwithp separate meetings—then focus them in at the county— Could not some of the Iowa women join in this work—then three or four meetings—according to the number of speakers could be held—and so a good & thorough work done!! [struck out, through first question mark] There are all nthirty ofp the state Legislatures— Should we not do something—to get some expression from them? nWhat your plan? Was it to get them to pass a resolution [sideways in margin to end of question] favoring a 16th amend[ment]p I want to begin something National in character—and let the states manage their own little affairs—like organizing— they have come to depend on the national society to do their organizing work— We should stop it—and make them feel that they must earn the gift of help—by doing so much nforp themselves first— I wouldn’t go into a state that hadn’t done a thing for itself—it doesnt pay— We undertook to help Iowa 4 years ago now—and nIp dont believe in letting go of her until we get what we started for—an amendment— I know what you say of hindrances— But they are everywhere—the moment we begin to work in earnest—and they will have to be met & overcome every where— So I think to stick to Iowa where we have started and gotten a good momentum—is the thing!! I shall never forgive myself for leaving California—without our help at the close of that campaign— We committed a great mistake—not to say crime—when we all left the state!!— Had we continued the work there we would have had suffrage in that state by this time— Do not let us make the same blunder in Iowa! My vote will have to be for the employment of Dr. Wood— Try your experiment in Arkansaw & Tennessee— If Ohio—Indiana & Illinois—will employ & pay her—all well!
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There are thirty states with Legislatures in session— Two have passed— Alabama & Arkansaw— We ought to make every one express itself upon the question of woman suffrage—Nebraska— Eastern
Middle
Maine New Hampshire
Delaware
Pennsylvania New Massachusetts Jersey Rhode Island Connecticut New York Vermont
Middlewestern-
Pacific States
Nebraska
Colorado
Texas West Virginia
Colorado
Montana
Kansas
Idaho
Missouri Arkansas Florida (1901 April) Louisiana
Montana Idaho North Dakota Michigan South Dakota
California Okalahoma
Southern South Carolina
Maryland North Carolina Tennessee Virginia
Wisconsin Illinois Indiana Iowa
Wyoming Wisconsin Utah Oregon Washington Arizona New Mexico Nevada
Nearly every state meets—we surely should stir up every one of them—and how—is the question? Next winter not half as many Legislatures will be in session— Put on a force that will clear up the odds and ends of 1900 work—and be ready to begin new. It is dreadful to have not only the old years but the old century’s work to do after Jan. 1st 1901— What can I do help you do this is the question— You know you are to square out the books for 1900—and begin the new year & new century? all neat as a pin— With a happy new year & happy new century U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, SBA Collection, NR. Square brackets surround letters lost at margins. 1. Frances Jane Woods (1864–1959), who lived in Iowa at this time, was rising in the ranks of Catt’s organizers. Born in Missouri and raised in Nebraska, she
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attended Missouri’s Christian College before enrolling in the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. After graduation in 1894, she studied surgery at hospitals in Massachusetts and accepted a job in 1898 in Portland, Oregon. There, as soon as she arrived, a newly formed Red Cross Society selected Woods to accompany troops to the Philippines as a nurse. She was gone for a year. On her return, she settled in Iowa, and some of her first work for the National-American took place there, in the state’s long campaign. During 1900 and 1901, she also worked in Ohio, Indiana, Arkansas, and Kentucky. By 1901, she had settled in South Dakota with her widowed mother and a married sister. A long connection as an organizer in Arizona and Oklahoma began in 1902. She moved to Arizona in 1909 and lived there until her death. (Neander M. Woods, The Woods-McAfee Memorial, Containing an Account of John Woods and James McAfee of Ireland and Their Descendants in America [Louisville, Ky., 1905], 293–94; Certificate of Death, Pima County, Arizona State Department of Health; Frances Woods to Clara Marshall, 13 May 1900, Archives and Special Collections, College of Medicine, PPD; Morning Oregonian, 18 August 1898, 1 August 1899; Minneapolis Journal, 30 May 1901; San Francisco Call, 10 June 1907; History, 4:632–33, 880, 6:11, 521–22.) 2. Catherine Campbell Cuningham (1849–1908) succeeded Clara McDiarmid as president of the Arkansas Equal Suffrage Association in 1900 and served until at least 1904. A former teacher, she had published the South’s leading suffrage journal, the Woman’s Chronicle, from 1888 to 1893. She was described as a frail and sickly woman, and it was said that the state’s suffrage movement disintegrated during her presidency. (Dorsey D. Jones, “Catherine Campbell Cuningham: Advocate of Equal Rights for Women,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 12 [Summer 1953]: 85–90; A. Elizabeth Taylor, “Woman Suffrage Movement in Arkansas,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 15 [Spring 1956]: 17–52; Woman’s Journal, 18 April 1908; gravestone, Oakland Fraternal Cemeteries, Little Rock, Ark.; 3. Lide Parker Smith Meriwether (1829–1913), while active nationally in the National and National-American suffrage associations, presided over the Tennessee Woman’s Christian Temperance Union from 1884 to 1897. In the latter year, she became president of the new Tennessee Equal Rights Association and served until 1900. (American Women; History, 4:926–27; Marsha Wedell, Elite Women and the Reform Impulse in Memphis, 1875–1915 [Knoxville, Tenn., 1991], passim; Shelby County, Tenn., on-line archives of death certificates. See also Papers 5.) 4. Elise Massey Selden (1851–1931) of Memphis organized the city’s Nineteenth Century Club, a literary club for elite women, in 1890. She was also an early member of the local suffrage society and succeeded Lide Meriwether as president of the state society in 1900. SBA and Carrie Catt met her while visiting Memphis in 1895. (History, 926–27; Wedell, Elite Women and the Reform Impulse in Memphis, 78, 79, 83, 91, 97, 160n, 162n; Shelby County, Tenn., on-line archives of death certificates; Papers, 5:671–73.) 5. Within the next weeks, SBA learned, perhaps from Catt, that Mary Hay had resigned from her position in the National-American association, and she welcomed the news. “I am glad to have her name taken off our rolls,” SBA wrote
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to Ellen Garrison. The thought was premature: in May 1901, Hay was very active at the association’s annual convention. See SBA to Catharine W. McCulloch, December? 1900?, and SBA to E. W. Garrison, 15 January 1901, Film, 41:633, 913–15. 6. When pulling out her organizers, Catt may have reacted to the news that Iowa was not to hold a constitutional convention in 1901. Voters defeated the measure by five hundred and fifty-five votes in the November election, though the result was not immediately known. Early reports in newspapers in the East indicated the measure to hold a convention won approval, and the state board of canvassers, when releasing official figures on November 26 and 27, was reported to believe that “the official figures show beyond question” that the convention would be held. One day later, the board reversed itself when it found a clerical error, but few newspapers went back to correct the record, almanacs for 1901 carried the error, and the state suffragists’ report to the National-American anticipated taking their demand to the constitutional convention. (Washington Post, 9, 19 November 1900; New York Times, 9, 29 November 1900; Des Moines Daily Leader, 28, 29 November, 2 December 1900; Report of the Thirty-second Annual Convention, 1900, p. 69, Film, 40:829ff.) •••••••••
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Interview with SBA [1 January 1901]
“Many aspersions have been cast upon the so-called ‘new woman,’” said Miss Anthony yesterday to a reporter of this paper, “as the outcome 1 of these sensational charges. It has been said that if this is the result of giving the suffrage to women, and of all her boasted nineteenth century enlightenment and progress, that she had better return to old conditions, or words to that effect. I have never believed these reports for one moment, and I have taken particular pains to satisfy myself as to the truth or falsity of these sensational charges. The letter which I received from the mayor of Wichita, denying all knowledge of any talk of, or attempt at lynching, you 2 have already published, and this letter which I received to-day from the mayor of El Dorado, confirms, with emphasis, the statement of the mayor 3 of Wichita.” The letter to which Miss Susan referred follows: El Dorado, Kansas, Dec. 29, 1900. Miss Susan B. Anthony, Rochester, N.Y. Dear Madam: Your letter of inquiry and newspaper clipping read. The report was
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to Ellen Garrison. The thought was premature: in May 1901, Hay was very active at the association’s annual convention. See SBA to Catharine W. McCulloch, December? 1900?, and SBA to E. W. Garrison, 15 January 1901, Film, 41:633, 913–15. 6. When pulling out her organizers, Catt may have reacted to the news that Iowa was not to hold a constitutional convention in 1901. Voters defeated the measure by five hundred and fifty-five votes in the November election, though the result was not immediately known. Early reports in newspapers in the East indicated the measure to hold a convention won approval, and the state board of canvassers, when releasing official figures on November 26 and 27, was reported to believe that “the official figures show beyond question” that the convention would be held. One day later, the board reversed itself when it found a clerical error, but few newspapers went back to correct the record, almanacs for 1901 carried the error, and the state suffragists’ report to the National-American anticipated taking their demand to the constitutional convention. (Washington Post, 9, 19 November 1900; New York Times, 9, 29 November 1900; Des Moines Daily Leader, 28, 29 November, 2 December 1900; Report of the Thirty-second Annual Convention, 1900, p. 69, Film, 40:829ff.) •••••••••
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Interview with SBA [1 January 1901]
“Many aspersions have been cast upon the so-called ‘new woman,’” said Miss Anthony yesterday to a reporter of this paper, “as the outcome 1 of these sensational charges. It has been said that if this is the result of giving the suffrage to women, and of all her boasted nineteenth century enlightenment and progress, that she had better return to old conditions, or words to that effect. I have never believed these reports for one moment, and I have taken particular pains to satisfy myself as to the truth or falsity of these sensational charges. The letter which I received from the mayor of Wichita, denying all knowledge of any talk of, or attempt at lynching, you 2 have already published, and this letter which I received to-day from the mayor of El Dorado, confirms, with emphasis, the statement of the mayor 3 of Wichita.” The letter to which Miss Susan referred follows: El Dorado, Kansas, Dec. 29, 1900. Miss Susan B. Anthony, Rochester, N.Y. Dear Madam: Your letter of inquiry and newspaper clipping read. The report was
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absolutely without foundation. No meeting of any kind was ever held in this city by women or men to even talk of such a brutal affair. This report, I suppose, emanated and got away from some irresponsible newspaper reporter. The very first intimation I had of such a thing was a telegram from the New York Journal asking about this reported meeting, which was promptly denied. Miss Morrison is now at her father’s home in this city, he is my neighbor, and she is as safe as my own daughter from any harm or violence from the people of El Dorado. Very sincerely, W. W. Bugbee, Mayor. “Of course,” continued Miss Susan, “just as soon as the cry of wolf is heard the cause is laid at the door of woman suffrage. The people and the press immediately begin to cry for the ‘good old times when woman was the clinging vine,’ and all that. They either forget, or willfully overlook, the part which the ‘clinging vines’ of the good old times played in those same old times. For instance, to go back only so recently as the French revolution, History gives us instances of the most insatiable brutality on the part of the women of France during that bloody period. They were among the most ferocious of the French citizens, they frequently led the mobs, and incited them to the most bloody deeds, in which they did not hesitate to take an active part. “Again in England in 1766, we are told of the mob at the pillory, and the women having the front places because they could not throw as straight as the men, and they were furnished with baskets of missiles which they hurled with zest at the unfortunate victims of the pillory, whether these 4 were men or women. The first women actresses in England were pelted off the stage for shocking the sensitive feelings of the women of that period by thus appearing in public, and this was done by the men and women in the gallery. These scenes are frequently spoken of in the histories of the 5 stage, and in English history. Pepys’ history referred to these conditions as things of the past. Since then those ‘womanly creatures’ have been taught better morals. Women have progressed in the world, and the world’s enlightenment to-day is largely due to that fact. “But we don’t have to go to France or England for instances such as I have given of women and their brutality in the past. Whittier gives us a picture in his poem ‘Skipper Ireson’s Ride.’ Let me just read you his
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description,” continued Miss Anthony, as she turned to the particular 6 poem in her copy of Whittier, and read the following verse: Wrinkled scolds with hands on hips, Girls in bloom of cheek and lips, Wild-eyed, free-limbed, such as chase Bacchus round some antique vase, Brief of skirt, with ankles bare, Loose of kerchief and loose of hair, With conch-shells blowing and fish-horns’ twang, Over and over the Maenads sang: “Here’s Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt, Torr’d an’ futherr’d an’ corr’d in a corrt By the women o’ Morble’ead. “So, you see, compared with these wild maidens of Whittier’s, who did not hesitate to tar and feather a man and carry him in a cart, our modern women might be called ‘the clinging vine’ sort. Probably the whole story of the disgraceful scenes so graphically described in the press, as happening in Wichita, was gotten up by some enemy of equal suffrage.” “Well, Miss Anthony, what message have you for the new century,” asked the reporter. “We women must be up and doing,” was the prompt reply. “I can hardly sit still when I think of the great work waiting to be done. Above all, women must be in earnest, we must be thorough, and fit ourselves for every emergency; we must be trained, and carefully prepare ourselves for the place we wish to hold in the world. The time is passed when the unskilled laborer is worthy of his hire. More and more does the world demand specialists, and woman must rise to her opportunities as never before. I shall not be here to see it, but the twentieth century will see as great a change in the position and progress of woman in the world as has been accomplished in this century, but it will have ceased to cause comment, and will be accepted as a matter of course. There will be nothing in the realm of ethics in which woman will not have her own recognized place, and all political questions, and all the laws which govern us will have a feminine side, for woman and her influence, in making and shaping of affairs, will have to be reckoned with. “Oh, I wish we had the force to stir the world as it was never stirred before!” cried this wonderful woman, 81 “years young.” “First, we should
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make an appeal to every legislature now in session, and there are more than forty at the present time, and then there ought to be an appeal made to the president, to insert the birth of woman in his inaugural address in March, and then there should be a ringing appeal to the first congress of the century. “Now, how to do all that is the question. It means first, a force at the capitol in each state, to arouse the legislatures to pass a resolution favoring woman suffrage. Then we should get the president to put in his message a recommendation to congress to recognize woman suffrage by passing a sixteenth amendment, and to this appeal should be signed the names of all the presidents of the great national woman’s organizations. This is the work I should like to see undertaken. “I am filled with sadness at this passing of the nineteenth century. I feel as if I had buried my dearest friend, but then,” she added hopefully, “this new century will be just as good.” Y Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 2 January 1901. 1. On 17 December 1900, newspapers across the country picked up a report from Wichita, Kansas, about an indignation meeting of women in nearby El Dorado who, according to some accounts, vowed to lynch one Jessie Lee Morrison (c. 1868–?). “Express Desire to String Up the Morrison Girl to Nearest Tree,” screamed a headline in San Francisco. Charged with the murder of her boyfriend’s new wife in June 1900, Morrison stood trial in November. On December 14, with nine of the twelve jurors in favor of acquittal, the judge discharged the jury. The indignant women protested the outcome. Morrison was tried again in 1901 and again in 1902, jailed, and eventually pardoned. Newspapers in St. Louis followed the cases day by day. Morrison was the daughter of a farmer and former county probate judge who brought his large family to Kansas from West Virginia sometime between 1880 and 1885. Her siblings provided her with homes until at least 1930. (St. Louis Republic, 15, 17 December 1900; San Francisco Call, 17 December 1900; Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 17 December 1900; State of Kansas v. Jessie Morrison, 64 Kansas Reports 669 [1902], and 67 Kansas Reports 144 [1903]; Federal Census, Braxton County, W.V., 1880, Butler County, Kan., 1900, Canadian County, Okla., 1920, Los Angeles County, Calif., 1930; Kansas Census, Butler County, 1885.) 2. Finlay Ross (1847–1933), a merchant of carpets and furniture in Wichita, was mayor of the city from 1897 to 1900 and 1905 to 1906. His letter, received by SBA on Christmas morning, appeared in the Rochester Union and Advertiser, 26 December 1900. (Gravestone, Highland Cemetery, Wichita, Kan.; Edward N. Tihen notes from Wichita newspapers, Department of Special Collections, KWiU, on-line.) 3. William Wallace Bugbee (1847–1916) moved to Kansas from Michigan in
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1879 to breed and raise cattle in Butler County. By 1910, he was employed as the state agent of the Children’s Aid Society, placing orphans from New York State in Kansans’ homes. He won election as mayor of El Dorado in 1899. (Andreas, History of Kansas, 1450; Federal Census, 1880, 1900, 1910; Belle Vista Cemetery, City of El Dorado, Kan., on-line records.) 4. Food riots in England were numerous and intense in 1766. 5. Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), a government official in London, is principally known as a great diarist, whose topics included the leading actresses of the London stage. 6. John Greenleaf Whittier, “Skipper Ireson’s Ride.” •••••••••
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SBA to L. Burt Anthony [Rochester] Jan. 2, 1901.
Dear Nephew Burt:— I am beginning my new year by answering long-neglected letters. Yours before me is dated “10th Month, 27th,” and I think I have received one since, which I have sent to your mother or Lucy to read. This letter is all about the dear old desk. I will try to get about writing a label for it with my own hand, but meantime let me tell you it was pur1 chased by Robert Dale Owen for the Women’s Loyal League in 1863, and was first used in the office at 93 Cooper Institute. I am now sitting in the chair which was purchased at the same time, and which I sat in before that desk in those days. You may have this chair to go with the desk, and then you will be fully equipped for writing. The desk and chair are now thirty-seven years old. They were used there in that office, and next in my Revolution office until 1870, when I shipped the desk to your father at Fort Scott. I think he always kept it in the little office at the corner of Wall St., and then moved it to the old store on Main St., where you got it. Enclosed is one of the penholders with the pen in it, just as he wrote with it the last time. Your possession of the desk will date from June, 1900. The other desk your mother has sent to Anna O., and I will give her the other penholder. She likes it very much, and I hope she will write many a 2 loving letter to you upon it.
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I am glad you have preserved the old desk in all its simplicity. It was nice of you to write to Mrs. Gross. 3 I like the idea of your reading Dickens. It will help you more than anything I can think of, but you want to begin to read something like Ma4 cauley’s History of England, the History of the United States, etc., so as to be up in your knowledge of the history of the world. Aunt Mary and I took Christmas dinner with Anna O., and Aunt Mary remarked that Mary Luther herself could not have cooked a turkey any better, or got the various fixings up and served them any more nicely; and that is praise for anybody. I was over there last Friday to lunch, and she told me that Cousin Dan had sent your mother passes to come down, and she is expecting a letter from her daily. Now when your mother gets here, and is well settled, you must steal a 5 little time to come and visit her. If you keep watch you can take advantage of some of the excursions. There will be such to look at Niagara Falls when it is frozen. But at any rate, you must seize upon a time when your boss will think there is the least work to do. With a happy New Year and New Century, I am, Your affectionate aunt, Y TL carbon, SBA Collection, NR. 1. Robert Dale Owen (1801–1877), reformer, politician, and early advocate of woman’s rights, aided the Women’s Loyal National League in 1863 and 1864. (ANB. See also Papers 1.) 2. Burt Anthony’s sister Anna Bacon settled in Rochester after her marriage. 3. Charles Dickens (1812–1870), the English novelist. 4. Thomas Macauley published five volumes of The History of England from the Accession of James II between 1849 and 1861. 5. Mary Luther Anthony arrived to visit Anna Bacon on 31 December 1900, and SBA joined them for lunch on 4 January 1901. Burt Anthony worked in Easton, Pennsylvania, at this time. (SBA diary, 1, 4, 6, 7 January 1901, Film, 41:649ff.)
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Book Review by ECS [19 January 1901] Life and Letters of Thomas Huxley. 1 By His Son.
This has been, to me, one of the most interesting and profitable books that I have read during the past year. Besides the amount of general information it contains, the many striking characters introduced, and the prominence given to the great question of evolution, the study of such a remarkably upright, harmonious and transparent character as that of Huxley, gives one new hope for the higher development of the race. To me the great feature of the book is the indomitable courage, independence, truthfulness, honor and honesty shown by Huxley himself. His was a rare combination of opposite qualities; most tender and steadfast in his family and friendship relations, he was yet unswerving in his advocacy of what he believed to be true. Though often disappointed in obtaining desirable positions, and in serious financial straits, he made no compromise of principle for the sake of personal interest or public approbation. He had his full share of personal and domestic afflictions, but he bore all of life’s complications with a patience and fortitude worthy of all praise. Considered merely as a character study the book is invaluable. The spread of scientific knowledge among the people has risen to great heights 2 chiefly through the influence of Thomas Huxley. Like Darwin he began work on a vessel sent out by the British Government, and it was after the publication of the “Origin of Species” that he began his life-task of convincing the people of the truth of evolution. By pen and voice he fought for, and with, Darwin, rousing antagonism especially by his position toward 3 orthodoxy. He was the inventor of the much-abused term “Agnosticism,” helping largely in the modern movement which has made it impossible to blame people for doubt; naturally, he made many enemies, and for his devotion to the theory of evolution was called Darwin’s “bulldog.” Even 4 Carlyle at one time thought him so dangerous that he refused to speak to him, and many other great men whom Huxley would fain have counted
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among his friends treated him with marked coldness. Like all other martyrs to the truth of science he paid the lifelong penalty of being ostracised by many who should have been proud of his confidence and friendship. U Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Y Boston Investigator, 19 January 1901. 1. Leonard Huxley (1860–1933) published the two-volume Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (1900), about his father (1825–1895), the English biologist and philosopher. 2. Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882), English naturalist and evolutionist, published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. 3. Thomas Huxley is credited with coining the words “agnostic” and “agnosticism” about 1869, when membership in the Metaphysical Society obliged him to define his personal philosophy. 4. Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), Scottish essayist and historian. •••••••••
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ECS to the Editor, New York SUN New York, Feb. 2 [1901].
To the Editor of the Sun—Sir: One of the most important lessons for the people of a republic to learn is respect for and obedience to law. Here, where we have no king, queen, or royal family to revere, law is the only monarch for us to reverence and obey; all resistance to its behests threatens the safety and stability of our government; but to secure the faith and support of the people, all laws must be in the interests of justice, liberty, and equality. The Woman’s Temperance Association of the State of New York may be right in taking no action against saloon keepers here, who entice their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons into the haunts of vice, because our laws permit their existence, but in condemning this present war in Kansas they must remember that the women are trying to uphold the laws against the sale of intoxicating drinks, and they are sustained by the best men in Kansas, who helped to pass these beneficent measures. Under the present circumstances, what would be mob law in New York is justifiable war in 1 Kansas. But, say some, it would be well enough to empty the liquor into the street, but why smash the glass and gilded ornaments? Because they help
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to make these places attractive at the midnight hour. As women of Kansas have only municipal suffrage they have by their votes helped to make these laws and are determined to see them executed, as the officials elected for 2 this purpose are too timid or wicked to do their duty. Mothers having gone to the very gates of death to give their sons life and immortality have seen them degraded and demoralized in these haunts of vice, which are protected by law. Men in high places tell us home is our sphere, the rearing of children our highest duty, yet deny us a voice in the laws by which to protect our homes and make the outside world fit for our children to live in. Woman’s life in too many cases is one of prolonged misery, dissipated husbands, fathers, brothers and sons making home a pandemonium of horrors, and filling our asylums, jails, hospitals and prisons with idiots, paupers, invalids and criminals. The women of Kansas have taken the initiative, and unless they speedily have a voice in the laws they will not sit with folded hands much longer; and instead of prayers and petitions there will be a general movement inaugurated in every State that will compel attention. Men need not flatter themselves that women will not fight, for the temperance crusades in Ohio 3 years ago and now in Kansas abundantly prove their courage and capacity. Woman’s work as wife and mother is more sacred and far-reaching in its influence than any office in Church or State; with her rests the protection of all the virtues, and the time has come for her to assert herself. If those in authority will not listen to reason, then woman’s emancipa4 tion will be achieved by force. A class of women have tried argument for nearly a century, to which men have paid no attention; if they will not listen to reason and argument, another class of women will try more active measures. Y New York Sun, 4 February 1901. Not in Film in this version. 1. By constitutional amendment adopted in 1880, Kansas prohibited the “manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors,” but enforcement was uneven and saloons operated openly. Across the country, meetings of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union debated the merits and morals of Carry Nation’s campaign of smashing saloons in Kansas. ECS may respond to reports of such a debate in a local union meeting held a few blocks from her apartment on 30 January 1901. Among the many opinions expressed was that of the hostess, a state officer in the temperance union, who said that in New York, Nation would have no support from the union. Nation began her smashing in June 1900, but she attracted
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national attention in late December when she took her campaign to Wichita for a month. There her tense interactions with the temperance union came into view: her indisputable success undermined the union’s commitment to moral suasion. (Kansas Const. of 1859, art. XV, sec. 10; Fran Grace, Carry A. Nation: Retelling the Life [Bloomington, Ind., 2001], 145–76; New York Tribune, 31 January 1901.) 2. Before publishing the text of this letter as an article entitled “The War in Kansas,” editors at the Woman’s Journal rewrote this sentence to correct ECS’s misunderstanding of the law in Kansas. “As women of Kansas have only municipal suffrage, they have not by their votes helped to make these laws; they were made by men alone; but the women are determined to see them executed, as the county officials elected for this purpose are too timid or wicked to do their.” Prior to 1880, women outside the state’s cities had a voice in the granting of local liquor licenses, something ECS observed in person in 1867, but the constitutional amendment, adopted solely by men, erased that right and superceded local options about selling liquor. (Woman’s Journal, 9 February 1901, Film, 41:947.) 3. The Woman’s Crusade referred to bands of praying women who marched on saloons in many northern towns and cities in 1873 and 1874. See Papers 3. 4. This sentence was removed from the article published by the Woman’s Journal. •••••••••
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ECS to Booker T. Washington 250 West 94th st. Feb. 15th 1901
Dear Sir, In reading “The Outlook,” from week to week, I always turn first to your 1 There is a mistake in the last numdeeply interesting “Reminiscences” ber which I hope you will be sure to correct in the published volumn. My son’s name is Theodore, who graduated a few years ago from Cornell Uni2 versity; a far younger man than Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War in Gen. Grant’s cabinet, for whom a name more familiar to you. Theodore is very 3 proud of his name, given him in honor of Theodore Dwight Weld, one of the distinguished pioneers in the anti-slavery struggle. He nMr. Weldp married Angelina Grimké of South Carolina, who emancipated her slaves and lectured extensively in the North on the slavery question; she was a very eloquent and attracted large crowds to her meetings. Edwin Stanton was a cousin of my husband’s. As a family we are proud of our anti-slavery record, and hence tenacious as to our right names. When next you chance to be in New York, I hope you and Mrs. Washington will honor me with a
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visit. Your struggles and triumphs are a grand character study for all young men of either race. My son Theodore will be proud to have his slight attentions and acquaintance with you in Paris mentioned in your book. With kind regards for Mrs. Washington and yourself Cordially yours Y L, in hand of E. L. White, Booker T. Washington Papers, DLC. Signed for ECS by E. L. White. 1. In a second attempt at autobiography, Booker Washington published chapters of Up from Slavery as a serial in the Outlook from 3 November 1900 to 23 February 1901. His error about the name of ECS’s son Theodore occurred in chapter sixteen, “Europe,” in the issue dated 16 February 1901. Washington corrected his mistake before publishing the book later in the year. ECS wrote a nearly identical letter about the mistake to the editor of the Outlook, published in the next issue. See Film, 41:954. 2. Edwin McMasters Stanton (1814–1869) was secretary of war from 1862 to 1868. 3. Theodore Dwight Weld (1803–1895), a major figure in the antislavery movement, worked closely with Henry Stanton in the 1830s and educated two of the Stanton boys at his Eagleswood School in the 1850s. •••••••••
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ECS to Lillie Devereux Blake Feb. 19/1901— 250 West 94th St New York—
Mrs. Devereux Blake President—National Legislative League It is a good sign of the growing popularity of the woman suffrage movement that so many new organizations are being formed in New York for specific work in various directions. The pioneers in starting advocated what all these associations now propose, and labored assiduously for each, appealing in turn with popular lectures and constitutional arguments to the people, the Leg[islature,] the church, and the State, for moral and 1 financial aid. A Bazaar in the city of New York, from which we might real2 ize $8000, would have seemed like a fairy dream twenty years ago. Such a popular movement among a distinguished class of ladies and clergymen as appealed to the last constitutional convention in favor of nourp enfran3 chisement for women; and another organization against it intensifying the agitation; while your coadjutors have annually besieged the Legislature for years, have prepared the way for the various organizations we welcome
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to-day. Your efforts to enlist one branch of our great army in exclusive Legislative work is timely and important, as but little has been done of late in that direction. Twenty years ago we had many champions in the halls of Congress; our own room and regular woman suffrage committee who presented our petitions annually and gave us reports as to the position of each of the members. To my knowledge we now have no special committee, no champion in the house, neither petitions nor reports; naught but an annual nbienialp hearing before any chance committee chosen for the 4 occasion. Hence the formation of a special Legislative League to press on the consideration of Congress the great fundamental principles of our government as applied to women, is of vital importance. Daniel Webster in one of his great speeches nearly half a century ago, said—“This is a government 5 of the people, for the people, by the people.” Abraham Lincoln, mid the exciting scenes of our Civil War, at Gettysburg while eulogizing the heroes in that great battle, re echoed the sentime[nt.] “This is a government of the 6 people, for the people, by the people.” Statistics show that women constitute a majority of the people, yet they have no part in the government, no protection under it for their most sacred rights; no voice in the laws or the law makers. It is a pertinent question, are women people? Or are all these great principles glittering generalities—having no application whatever to the majority of the people? We have at least a right to ask that only those who hold the ballot should be counted in the basis of representation. For it is clearly unjust to swell the number of Congressmen by counting those against whose highest interests they may legislate. U Elizabeth Cady Stanton Y L, in hand of E. L. White, Lillie D. Blake Papers, MoSHi. Square brackets surround letters torn away. 1. The National Legislative League opened its first annual meeting in Washington on 20 February 1901. The press mentioned that a letter from ECS was received but not whether it was read to the gathering. By 1901, Blake had focused the league’s attention on a project it would pursue for several years, women’s forfeiture of their citizenship by marriage to a foreigner. See Washington Post, 20 & 21 February 1901, and Washington Times, 20 & 21 February 1901. 2. The Woman’s Journal, 9 February 1901, announced the eight thousand dollar profit. A few hundred dollars more were recorded in the final tally. (Report of the Thirty-third Annual Meeting, 1901, pp. 19–32, 52, Film, 42:32ff.) 3. New York’s Constitutional Convention of 1894. 4. ECS is mistaken: the United States Senate maintained a Committee on
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Woman Suffrage. At the end of 1883, the House of Representatives dropped its committee and left the matter of woman suffrage to the Judiciary Committee. 5. Daniel Webster (1782–1852), Federalist and Whig, served in the House of Representatives and Senate between 1813 and 1850. ECS paraphrases his “Second Reply to Hayne,” delivered over two days in the Senate beginning 26 January 1830. “It is, Sir,” Webster proclaimed, “the people’s Constitution, the people’s government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people.” (BDAC; Papers of Daniel Webster. Speeches and Formal Writings, ed. Charles M. Wiltse [Hanover, N.H., 1986], 1:330.) 6. Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address on 19 November 1863. •••••••••
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SBA to Alice Alt Pickler1 Rochester, N.Y., February 27th, 1901.
My Dear Friend:— I hear that you are elected president. I hope you will stick to the helm of the ship come what may. We want the right woman in the right place when the next submission comes and you are that woman in my opinion. 2 I wonder if you will be at Minneapolis next June! I intend to go if I am well enough. I cannot tell you how queer it seems to have to always put in that proviso. Never before did I have to do it. How is Mr. Pickler, and how are the bairns? Do write me and tell me all about yourself and about South Dakota, and what are the chances for getting enfranchisement there. Affectionately yours, U Susan B. Anthony [in SBA’s hand] How is “Susan Pickler”? What days those were— I see 3 Pierce has died—well peace go with him—he cheated us out of suffrage for women in both the Dakotas—for if the territory had [g]iven suffrage—men would not have dared to go back on it! Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Major John A. Pickler Family Papers, 1865–1976, SdHi. Square bracket surrounds letter rubbed from margin. Envelope addressed to Faulkton, South Dakota. 1. Alice Mary Alt Pickler (1848–1932) settled in Dakota Territory in 1883 with her husband, John Alfred Pickler (1844–1910), and three children. The couple played key roles in territorial and state suffrage history, beginning with Alice Pickler’s work through the temperance union and John Pickler’s election to the
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territorial legislature. With statehood in 1889, John Pickler entered Congress as a Republican and served until 1897, while Alice Pickler campaigned with state and national leaders for a suffrage amendment to the state constitution. After the defeat of 1898, South Dakota had no active suffrage society for several years, and SBA congratulates Pickler for becoming president of the new South Dakota Political Equality Association. SBA met the Pickler children during the South Dakota amendment campaign of 1890. No longer bairns, they were Lula Alberta, born 1871, Madge Emily, born 1878, Alfred Alt, born 1882, and Dale Alice, born 1887. (BDAC; Doane Robinson, History of South Dakota, Together with Personal Mention of Citizens of South Dakota [Logansport, Ind., 1904], 2:1618–19; Kingsbury, History of Dakota Territory, 5:1266–71; History, 6:535; Linda M. Sommer, “Dakota Resources: The Pickler Family Papers and the Humphrey Family Papers at the South Dakota State Historical Society,” South Dakota History 24 [Summer 1994]: 115–34. See also Papers 5.) 2. The annual meeting of the National-American association was called for 30 May 1901 in Minneapolis. 3. Gilbert Ashville Pierce (1839–1901) died on February 15. While he served as the appointed governor of Dakota Territory from 1884 to 1886, Pierce vetoed a bill granting woman suffrage that passed the territorial house and council with substantial majorities. (BDTerrGov; History, 3:667–68.) •••••••••
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SBA to William Van Benthuysen1 Rochester, N.Y., March 4th, 1901.
My Dear Friend:— ¶1 Your congratulations on my eighty-first birthday were received with pleasure. I hope I shall have just so many, and no more, years as my work can be of the useful kind. ¶2 I do not see The World regularly so do not know how much you are doing for the woman’s cause, but I hope a great deal. The day must be approaching when the whole world will recognize woman as the equal of man in all the rights and privileges that belong to the citizen. Is it not a little queer that we spread our philacteries over the ocean to 2 3 Porto Rico, Hawaii and the Philippines to clothe everything wearing the form of manhood with the rights of citizenship while we withold them from intelligent, cultivated, tax-paying women of the United States? It is enough to drive the whole sex mad, but there is only one 4 Mrs. Nation, and she flourishes her hatchet to good effect. Like John
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Brown and his nineteen men, who frightened the South more than all the preaching of the anti-slavery men, so Mrs. Nation with her hatchet has done more to make the liquor traffic tremble than all the laws and preaching put together. I do not believe that the hatchet is the weapon of civilization, but the ballot is, and I, therefore, ask for the ballot. With best regards, I am, Yours very sincerely, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, in the collection of Lisa Unger Baskin, Leeds, Mass. Addressed to Office of The World, New York City. 1. William C. Van Benthuysen (1855–1903), an editor of the New York World since 1898, began his career as a newspaperman in the Midwest. After publishing small papers in Iowa and Illinois, he worked for D. R. Anthony at the Leavenworth Times for a few years before moving to the Chicago Tribune in 1883. He and SBA corresponded on a variety of topics. (Federal Census, Leavenworth, Kan., 1880; New York Times, 20 June 1903.) 2. Congress settled how to govern Puerto Rico when, in April 1900, it passed the Organic Act of 1900, or Foraker Act, and enfranchised literate, adult men to elect the island’s lower legislative chamber. At this date, the Supreme Court of the United States had under consideration the first challenge to the act’s constitutionality in Downes v. Bidwell, one of what became known as the Insular Cases. In a decision issued on 27 May 1901, the Court upheld it. (Brook Thomas, “A Constitution Led by the Flag: The Insular Cases and the Metaphor of Incorporation,” in Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution, eds. Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall [Durham, N.C., 2001], 82–103; Downes v. Bidwell, 182 United States Reports 244 [1901].) 3. In the Philippines, the Municipal Code, passed in January 1901, created local governments and limited the franchise so narrowly that only an estimated two percent of the total population qualified to vote that year. The Organic Act of 1902, or Cooper Act, projected a future popular assembly but limited voting for legislators to the small number of men enfranchised as electors in municipal elections. (Rene R. Escalante, The Bearer of Pax Americana: The Philippine Career of William H. Taft, 1900–1903 [Quezon City, Philippines, 2007], 103–5, 196–97.) 4. Carry Amelia Moore Gloyd Nation (1846–1911) was the recognized leader of the uprising to enforce the laws of prohibition in Kansas that began in 1900. Drink killed her first husband and, Nation believed, caused disease in the daughter of that marriage. She smashed her way into February, most of the time in Topeka, until she was jailed mid-month. (NAW; ANB.)
Textual Notes ¶2
ll. 5–6
over the ocean to nPorto Rico,p Hawaii and
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SBA to Fannie Rosenberg Bigelow Rochester, N.Y., March 8th, 1901.
My Dear Friend:— ¶1 I think your birthday gift to me was the two American Beauty Roses, which bedecked our parlors, February 15th, 1901. They lasted a whole 1 week and more and were beautiful. ¶2 The palm which the University women sent is flourishing finely. I am glad they selected a palm, because it is a lasting reminder of that day when you took me the rounds to get the money and pledges that proved the open sessame to the University. I shall never regret that day’s labor. It was the added ounce that broke the camel’s back in more senses than one. In the largest sense, the back of the superstition, bigotry, and selfishness that held those old doors shut tight against the women. I think when the warm weather comes and I can get out of doors and drink in the sunshine that I shall be entirely recovered from the strain of the 8th of September, if that was the cause difficulty, but I do not think it was 2 that alone. It was the continuous work which I have subjected myself to from February 15th 1900 up to that day. I am amazed at the continuous whirl of work that I went through during those months, but all will be well, I am sure, when the warm weather comes. Very affectionately yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, SBA Collection, NR. Addressed to Union Street, Rochester. 1. A dinner and reception planned to celebrate SBA’s birthday in Rochester were canceled a week ahead; she was, said the New York Times, “suffering from an attack of grip.” A few friends ate dinner at 17 Madison Street, and a reporter was invited in to view the gifts and read the greetings. A week later, the first class of women enrolled at the University of Rochester, found another way to pay tribute, when SBA was their guest of honor at the first reception of their College Association for Women. (New York Times, 7 February 1901; Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 16, 23 February 1901; SBA diary, 31 January, 1–15 February 1901, Film, 41:649ff.)
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2. SBA was just recovering. The previous night she wrote, “Got up—took tub bath—dressed & went down to breakfast for first since 8 of January—& felt a good deal better—but my nose began to run—as if I had taken cold.” (SBA diary, 7 March 1901.)
Textual Notes ¶2
ll. 3–4 l. 10 l. 12
proved the opening wedge nsessamep if that was the ncausep difficulty, from February 15th n1900p •••••••••
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ECS to the Editors, WOMAN’S JOURNAL [New York, before 9 March 1901]
Editors Woman’s Journal: The sentiments of men in high places are responsible for the terrible outrages on woman in the haunts of vice and on the highway. We cannot 1 estimate the widespread demoralization, when a man like Dr. Abbott travels to another State to deprive women of their inalienable rights, of all those blessings which he prizes so highly for himself. It would have been bad enough for Dr. Abbott to have gone before the Legislature of his own State, to deprive his own mother, wife, sister, or daughter of justice, liberty, and equality; but to face the highly educated women of Massachusetts, his peers in virtue and intelligence, and in their own capitol, under their own flag, to protest against their admission to the most sacred rights of citizens, is as bad as going into a neighbor’s home, and denying him an honored seat at his own table. Suppose Dr. Abbott had appealed to the Legislature of New York for the restitution of some sacred right, what would he have thought and said 2 if Julia Ward Howe, Mary A. Livermore, Ednah D. Cheney, and Alice Stone Blackwell had come in hot haste from Massachusetts to implore the legislators of New York to refuse his appeal as unreasonable and dangerous to the public good? Where did Dr. Abbott get his inalienable rights? Precisely where these ladies got theirs, in the necessities of his being. They need all these rights, just as he does, for their growth and development. The outrages against woman, of daily occurrence, are sufficient proof that she must hold the means of protection and defence in her own hands. It is
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a wild and guilty fantasy to suppose that all women’s interests are safe in the hands of all men. Individual conscience and judgment are the foundation stones of a republican government and a true civilization. Whatever lessens woman’s self-respect, or the respect of others for her, is demoralizing to the entire race. The following item, now going the rounds of the press, illustrates the opinion of another man in a high place; and the want of self-respect in her who would bury the woman beneath the Queen: At the services yesterday morning in the Temple EmanuEl, Rabbi Joseph Silverman spoke on “The Lessons from the Life of the Late Queen Victoria—the Royalty of True Woman3 hood.” “Victoria was the uncrowned Queen of the whole world,” said the speaker. “Ascending the throne in her teens, she then displayed the qualities which have marked her entire reign— the simplicity, modesty, graciousness, and veracity of true womanhood. Victoria never forgot the woman in the Queen. She presented in her life not the royalty of a monarch, but the royalty of true womanhood.” At the time of her marriage, the speaker went on to say, an incident had occurred which was illustrative of her whole life. The Archbishop of Canterbury had approached her just before the service, and suggested that in view of her place it might be well to omit the word “obey” from the ceremony. “My lord, omit nothing,” she had replied. “I wish to be married as a woman, not as a Queen.” 4
This one act of Victoria, and of Wilhelmina also, has been more praised by churchmen than any other. But it is not an evidence of simplicity, modesty, or true womanhood willingly to accept a position of subjection, to be given away like a piece of merchandise, or to promise to obey, like a slave, another imperfect mortal. This part of the marriage ceremony should be abolished altogether by the authorities of the Church, out of respect for the dignity and honor of the mothers of the race. U Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Y Woman’s Journal, 9 March 1901. 1. Lyman Abbott (1835–1922), a former Congregational minister, found a new
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calling as a popular speaker against woman suffrage. On this occasion, he appeared as an opponent of woman suffrage on 18 February 1901, at a legislative hearing in Boston on a proposed constitutional amendment. (ANB; Ira V. Brown, Lyman Abbott, Christian Evolutionist: A Study in Religious Liberalism [Cambridge, Mass., 1953], 207–8; History, 6:290–91; Woman’s Journal, 9 March 1901.) 2. Not yet identified are two of the most distinguished women in the Commonwealth. Mary Ashton Rice Livermore (1820–1905) was a lecturer and former editor of the Woman’s Journal. Ednah Dow Littlehale Cheney (1824–1904) was a writer, reformer, philanthropist, and president of the Massachusetts School Suffrage Association. (NAW; ANB.) 3. This report of services appeared in New York Tribune, 27 January 1901. Joseph Silverman (1860–1930) became rabbi of New York City’s Temple Emanu-el in 1897. He held very conservative views about women. His sermon took note that Queen Victoria died on 22 January 1901. (DAB.) 4. Wilhelmina, queen of the Netherlands (1880–1962), came to the throne in 1890 and married on 7 February 1901. •••••••••
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ECS to Harriot Stanton Blatch 250 West 94 N.Y. April 2 1901
Dear Hattie 1 Maggie & Nora are invited to to Mrs Nathans Sunday evening to dine at 7 o’clock This week has been Blessed Babe’s vacation & she has had 2 She & Maggie have been to several games some amusement every day at all of which [these?] gymnasts [were?] beaten. There cry is Rickety rush rickety rush What in the world is the matter with us. Nothing at all nothing at all We are the girls That play basket ball Really it looks very much as if the femininity of this generation was going to the wall! The conservatives have reason to fear for the total wreck of the womanly element I had a pleasant letter from Alice a few days since 3 I wonder thanking me for the book I sent her, “Eighty years & more” 4 if Agnes got the one I sent her I did not know her direction so I sent it to Harry at Basingstoke Alice says she prefers her present domestic rela-
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tions to the “Solitude of Self.” She has probably drawn a prize Maggie has Miss Ellis here this week renovating her wardrobe, she has [diverse?] & sundry new garments. She & Nora are [doing?] frequent meanderings in the [illegible] of [illegible] Nora has five new shirt waists! Nannie Miller is in Boston, basking in the spiritual atmosphere of the 5 christian Scientists Henrietta Muller is there too, on her way round the world, to visit the Mahatmas, occult seers again & study the mystery of life! Nannie says in a late letter that she would rather life life than study it mystery. adieu U Mother Y ALS, Scrapbook 3, Papers of ECS, NPV. Square brackets surround words that remain in doubt. 1. Maud Nathan Nathan (1862–1946), whose husband shared her father’s surname, was president of the New York City Consumers’ League, where she worked with Margaret Lawrence, and a member of the executive board of the National Consumers’ League. (NAW; ANB.) 2. Vacation from the Horace Mann School. 3. Alice Blatch had just married George Edwards in London. 4. That is, Agnes Blatch Conran. 5. Frances Henrietta Müller (1846?–1906) was born in Valparaiso, Chile, the daughter of a German-born businessman who became a British subject. Henrietta, as she was known, was a sister of Eva McLaren, and a political activist and freethinker in the 1880s. She turned to Theosophy and, as ECS suggests, made trips around the world, especially to India. (Oxford DNB. See also Papers 4 & 5.) •••••••••
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Ida Husted Harper to ECS [Rochester] April 11, 1901.
My Dear Mrs. Stanton:— Miss Anthony has just handed me your letter to her, answering mine to 1 you. As she had not seen mine, yours was a surprise to her. I am amazed that you cannot see why the impression should go forth that you and she are antagonistic, and you are only begging the question when you assume that it is simply because your name stands as an officer in Mrs. 2 Blake’s association. That in itself is sufficient, but the public formed this opinion a year ago last winter, [at] the national convention in Washington,
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when Mrs. Blake’s circulars, headed by your name (the only one on them possessing any weight whatever, except her own), were scattered broadcast in the effort to defeat Mrs. Chapman Catt for the presidency. The indignation of the delegates was intense, and nothing but the determination to have a peaceable election and give no ground to the newspapers for a sensation 3 prevented an expression of this on the floor of the convention. They remembered the fight for you made by Miss Anthony at the union of the two associations, absolutely refusing to take the presidency herself 4 at that time or at any other, until you were ready to resign it. After all her years of loyalty and support for you, to throw all the weight of your influence into that convention in order to defeat the woman she had chosen for her successor and trained for that position, was a terrible blow to Miss Anthony and almost more than the delegates could bear. Mrs. Blake claims that her association was formed for legislative action. No one knows better than yourself that this has been the work of the national association for the past thirty years, and that it is still its principal object in every state in the Union and at all its annual conventions. No amount of sophistry on her part, or that of anybody else can convince the public that her organization was not formed in direct antagonism to the National, because she was not made president. It is never referred to in any newspaper in the country in any other way than as an opposing faction to the national. While your name stands at its head, giving it all the prestige it has except from Mrs. Blake’s own national reputation, the public will not consider you in any other light than as antagonistic to Miss Anthony. It will not stop to reflect that your name stands also at the head of the other official board; and if it did, it would be bewildered by the anomaly. As people in general are not able to fathom your good intentions in this matter, they are 5 sure to put a disagreeable construction on your actions. Of Mrs. Blake’s legislative work at Albany too much cannot be said in praise, but when she came to Washington last winter she did not have the privilege of appearing before any congressional committee whatever, which is rather a peculiar position for an association that claims to exist for 6 this especial purpose. Of course her work does not interfere in the least with that of the national association, but you are mistaken in assuming that the “younger coadjutors think two branches necessary,” as this is not the opinion of any outside of the small coterie in Mrs. Blake’s society. There is, indeed, no possible comparison between the two associations;
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but an injurious impression is made upon the public mind, when it sees that the two exist, and that your distinguished name heads the one opposed to the national. This is a constant source of grief and vexation to the great body of suffragists who stand by Miss Anthony and the latter association; and while it continues this feeling will not be abated. I have thought for a long time that I would tell you these things; for you are so shut in from the world at large that it is impossible for you to understand them. Miss Anthony, of course, would not condescend to contradict these newspaper reports, although she feels them keenly, and I never shall stultify myself by doing so while your name remains at the head of Mrs. Blake’s society. There is not a woman in the United States more sincere and loyal than myself in her admiration of the great work which you have done for the race. I proved that in Miss Anthony’s biography, and shall prove it again in this volume of the History; but I never attempt the slightest apology for the acts 7 which have been referred to above. I know that all the leading suffragists feel exactly as I do in this matter. I have not consulted Miss Anthony in writing either of these letters, and I accept the full responsibility for them. Ever your devoted friend, Y TL carbon, Loan collection of SBA Memorial, NRU. Letters in square brackets obscured by smudge. 1. None of these letters has been found. There is no explanation as to what prompted Ida Harper to intervene in a friendship exactly as old as she herself. 2. ECS was honorary vice president of the National Legislative League. 3. There is no evidence now that SBA shared Ida Harper’s views about disloyalty and “a terrible blow” resulting from ECS’s support of Lillie Blake’s candidacy in 1900. Harper was offended in part because by going to the floor of the convention with a plea for votes, Blake took a stand against backroom politics, but also violated customs against politicking. Blake withdrew before any votes were cast. SBA refused to say what Harper goes on to say, that SBA chose Catt as her successor and trained her. Though there is no definitive piece of evidence to explain how her successor came to be Catt rather than Anna Shaw, with those as her choices, SBA probably did lean toward Catt because she valued Catt’s skill as an organizer. As for training Carrie Catt, the evidence is pretty strong in the other direction, that SBA had little influence with her. 4. During the election of the first president of the united National-American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890, Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell instructed members of the American association to vote for SBA in the hope of stopping the election of ECS. Knowing of their advice, SBA instructed members of the National association not to vote for herself. By voting for ECS, she explained, they laid claim
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to the values that distinguished the National from the American in the first place. (Papers, 5:245–48.) 5. Blake and her friends felt and reacted to the spurn of Blake’s candidacy for president of the National-American association, and reporters spun the story of the National Legislative League as a challenge to the National-American, but such public gossip did not venture to rewrite the friendship between ECS and SBA as Harper does. 6. The National Legislative League met in Washington on 19 February 1901. (Washington Post, 20, 21 February 1901; Washington Times, 20, 21 February 1901.) 7. On 15 March 1901, Ida Harper arrived at 17 Madison Street to consult SBA’s scrapbooks and collections of pamphlets to prepare the fourth volume of the History of Woman Suffrage. Most of her work on the book was done elsewhere. •••••••••
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SBA to Clara Bewick Colby Rochester, N.Y., April 14, 1901—
Dear Mrs Colby If Mrs Stanton sends you a copy of her letter to me—relative to what the papers say about her name standing at the head of Mrs Blak’s new society nDont Publish itp—! You know that the papers have said Mrs Stanton heads one branch of the suffragists and Miss Anthony the other— I am afraid Mrs Stanton will send nit top you for the Tribune—and I don’t want it published—an[d] shall feel very badly if it gets into print— Of course they will say it!—but you know it is not so—but Mrs Stanton in her good nature does every thing Mrs Blake asks her too! She may not send it to you but I fear she will—she has written me a long letter asserting her old time friendship—and that nothing can make a break in it &c, &c.— Somebody has written her & sent her some of the editorials—you wont publish it will you?— Mrs Harper says she will not wait much longer for your chapter for Vol. IV! She is gett[ing] well toward the end of the 1 job—so do you hurry up and send her what you promised— Then I think you should see the District of Columbia chapter— Did 2 not Mrs Spofford get some law or appointment of a Police Matron? I remember something abou[t] her doing it— I do not know the woman Mrs 3 Chase —who has been writing the Chapter— But Mrs Harper says she will suggest to Mrs Chase that she show it to you— From /88 you have
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been in Wash. and the chapter is from 1883— It is a terrible job—this getting the facts of the state action— Yours affectionately U Susan B. Anthony I wouldn’t have you publish that letter to me for Mrs Stanton for anything— I do not thin[k] she would send it to the daily press—but if she does—I would rather you would copy that— S B A Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, Clara B. Colby Papers, Archives Division, WHi. Square brackets surround letters run off edge of page. 1. No chapter of volume four of the History of Woman Suffrage is credited to Clara Colby, though the author of the Nebraska chapter included information obtained from her. 2. Jane Spofford worked with Belva Lockwood and others to secure several changes in the District of Columbia’s systems for the detention of women in 1883, including a ladies’ room at the court house with a matron assigned to it and matrons at the District jail. Included in History of Woman Suffrage was a further success, a new House of Detention, opened in 1900. (Papers, 4:317n; Report of the Sixteenth Annual Washington Convention, 1884, p. 13, Film, 23:573ff; History, 4:571; Washington Post, 22 December 1883, 21 February, 16 March 1884.) 3. Florence Adele Strong Chase (1845–?) was a journalist who had recently moved to Washington. According to the contributor’s note in the History of Woman Suffrage, Chase left a job with a daily paper in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to take a job in the publications division at the Department of Agriculture. She grew up on a farm in New York’s Genesee County, bore two children in a shortlived marriage to Walter Howard Chase, and took her children back to Batavia, New York, after her divorce in 1876. Her name was splashed through the press in 1882, when her ex-husband was arrested for bigamy, and his defense attorney argued that his client’s second marriage was never legal because it predated his divorce from Florence Chase, and thus his third marriage could not be bigamous. Florence Chase could prove otherwise to the court, and Walter Chase was sent to jail. (Benjamin W. Dwight, The History of the Descendants of Elder John Strong, of Northampton, Mass. [Albany, N.Y., 1871], 235; Daughters of the American Revolution, Lineage Book, 1902, 39:142–43; People v. Chase, 27 Hun 256 [N.Y. Supreme Court 1882]; Federal Census, 1880 for Genesee County, N.Y.; New York Times, 26 December 1881, 25, 26 January, 21 June 1882; History, 4:567n; Washington Post, 5 October 1902, 21 June, 29 November 1903.)
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Article by ECS [May 1901] Rich and Poor.
A plump old gentleman in spectacles and slippers, sitting before a bright grate fire, reading his evening paper after a good dinner, possessing a pleasant home, broad acres, plenty of bonds, stocks and mortgages, is about as complacent a sight as one can behold. He usually has a calm, obsequious way of talking, walking, patting the dog, poking the grate, and welcoming each new-comer. He always enlarges upon his plans and projects, and the secrets of his past successes; tells us how carefully he watched and guarded the nest-egg of his fortunes—how the first thousand dollars was put on interest, and after that how everything he touched turned to gold. Balancing the future with the past, he has a settled assurance that his children, to the third and fourth generation, must be safe against every danger. Ignorant of the science of political economy and the differences in character and chance conditions, he takes it for granted that he is specially gifted and favored of heaven, and that his thrift, cunning and selfishness will go down to his heirs with his fortune. He congratulates himself, as he sits smoking, that his children are all in comfortable homes of their own, as he settled $100,000 in cash on them the day of their marriage, and will give them as much more when he dies. To this end he has worked early and late, denied himself comforts in his youth and acts of charity in later years, has concentrated all his powers on self-aggrandizement and the material prosperity of his own family. When he hears of the failures and defalcations of his neighbors, he thanks the Lord that his sons are wary and wise. When he sees pale, sadlooking girls going from slop-shops with their arms full of work, he is glad his daughters are clothed in purple and fine linen, and fare sumptuously every day. When ragged boys and girls beg of him for bread in the streets, he is comforted with the thought that his grandchildren will escape such humiliation. Going down Wall street, he soliloquizes thus with himself: “What a nuisance these beggars are! If everybody had worked as hard as I
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have, there would be no poverty in the world; but the working classes are proverbially idle, dissipated, improvident, and they deserve to suffer.” His equanimity, after parting with a few pennies, being restored, with pious resignation he philosophizes still farther: “Perhaps, after all, it is God’s will that there should be rich and poor, that the sweet virtues of benevolence on one side and gratitude on the other, might find abundant exercise.” Stop there, good sir! In all Nature’s laws we find order, harmony, equality. The air is free, the sun shines on the just and the unjust, the rain and dews fall alike on all. Man’s laws first ushered in inequality. We shall take the first step toward the reform of present abuses when the people understand that poverty, disease, misery and vice are the result of human ignorance and selfishness, and not “divine ordination,” to be remedied only by a knowledge of social science and obedience to its laws. There are two classes of people who always refer everything to God: lazy people who will not work with head or hand, or take any kind of responsibility; and conceited, aristocratic people, who imagine that they are not governed by the same universal law as the masses, but that there is some special legislation going on in heaven all the time for their benefit. A wise selfishness would teach the old gentleman in spectacles that his children cannot be permanently happy and prosperous until the whole human family are so. The best interests of the nation, the family, the individual, are all jeopardized, while nine-tenths of the race are ground to powder, that the one in gilded luxury may shine. So long as one class of men have more than their share of the wealth of the world, the rest must suffer; so long as some do no work, some must be overworked. But the wheel of fortune is forever turning, lifting up some and crushing out others, and in these selfish scrambles cunning sharpers will, perchance, outwit the old gentleman’s sons and daughters, and the estates he has so carefully gathered will in turn be scattered to the winds by the same system of legalized frauds by which he himself acquired them in the beginning. A man by fair dealing and industry alone never yet laid up a million of dollars. Such fortunes are accumulated by a false system of morals, of finance, land monopoly, tariffs, taxes, etc., the corner-stones of oppression in the world of work. Y Commonwealth 8 (May 1901): 10–12.
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Speech by SBA to the Rochester Council of Women
Editorial note: Assembling at the Berith Kodesh Temple, the Rochester Council of Women marked women’s international peace day on the anniversary of the First Hague Conference in 1899 for an audience of six hundred people. Joining SBA as speakers at the event were Max Landsberg, rabbi of the temple; William Gannett, Unitarian minister; Rush Rhees, president of the University of Rochester; Charles A. Gilbert, superintendent of schools; and Helen Montgomery, local activist.
[18 May 1901] Miss Susan B. Anthony, the famous exponent of woman’s rights, was the next speaker. She said: “What does this conference mean? In the city of Rochester there are forty different societies federated together; in the nation there are twenty national organizations combined, and there are eleven international societies banded in the same union. It means that there are a great many women, in a great many states, and a great many countries, all working for the same object this afternoon. It means that in a great many different countries women are gathered together this afternoon to think about peace and arbitration. Women have not much else to do about war but to think and think and think. “We have long since agreed as to the personal folly of settling personal quarrels by violence. The means of settling the quarrels of nations to-day are barbarous. But what can you expect of a nation that refuses to give a trial by a jury of her peers to one-half of its population? What can you expect of a nation that does that, and sees no harm in it? “There is work for us at home. This should be a nation set upon a hill for its righteousness, and our first duty should be to settle these questions for ourselves, that this nation may be a perfect republic, a sure republic. It is a remarkable work that lies before the women of to-day. Some means, some statement should be prepared, signing which, the nations of the world would agree never again to send out their young men in battle.” Y Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 19 May 1901.
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SBA to Catharine Waugh McCulloch Rochester, N.Y., July 3rd., 1901.
My Dear Friend:— After arriving home, Sunday night, June 30th, after a most unprecedented hot day on the cars, getting a bath and taking a sleep, I sat down to my pile of letters and papers on Monday morning, and among them I 1 find yours of June 20th. I am glad the saints of the Business Committee sent you a telegram and only wish we had had the power to have won the majority, but, as you say, we had the majority of brains, and I do not think it was fair either because we did 2 not canvas on the other side. I do not think it is right to let all the stirring up and talk be on the side that is opposed to us, and yet if we strictly follow the constitution we have to keep quiet and refrain from electioneering. I am sorry to part with you on the Board, and feel that you have been a brave worker and true to your own convictions in all cases. I shall continue to enjoy you on the Executive Committee I trust. It does seem to me you can do a great deal of good if you retain the chairmanship of the Legislative Committee. There is an opportunity for you to impress yourself and your thought and your good plan of work upon all the different States, and you can do an immense amount of good in that position. Still you must act as 3 seems best to you. 4 I have read your Illinois report on your work and that of Mrs. Hughes, and as I understand it she is a minister and the wife of Mr. Hughes, a member. It was splendid of her to work as she did, and if we searched through all the Legislatures I believe we should find wives of some of the members equally true and earnest in our work, and that should be our aim. I hope you will continue to work in your own State for the joint earnings to be equally owned by the husband and wife. It seems to me that such a law in one State would set the women to thinking. They do not realize their servitude. Your report is splendid. I enjoyed my little visit with you at Mrs. Gross’s immensely, but felt that it was selfish in me to tear you away from that baby and cause her to lose a 5 dinner. I hope she was none the worse for her potion that day.
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It is cloudy this morning and rained a little during the night but is exceedingly hot. I find no letters from any of our women excepting the one from Miss Blackwell with the minutes. With best love, I am Sincerely yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, A-68 Mary Earhart Dillon Collection, Series VI, MCR-S. 1. When the National-American’s convention in Minneapolis ended on 7 June 1901, SBA visited family in Leavenworth and Fort Scott, Kansas, Chicago, and Lake Geneva and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. See SBA diary, 1901, Film, 41:649ff. 2. After giving birth to her third child, a daughter, on 25 February 1901, Catharine McCulloch decided to skip the convention. In her absence, she was defeated for reelection as second auditor, “despite our loyal support to the end,” as her allies telegraphed from the meeting. This outcome was foretold: Harriet Upton warned McCulloch on the subject in April, as she braced herself for a purge of the Business Committee by Carrie Catt and Mary Hay, and someone tipped off the Minneapolis Journal. As soon as the convention opened, the newspaper reported that McCulloch would not be reelected “because she is known to be strongly opposed to Mrs. Catt’s ideas of work.” (H. T. Upton to C. W. McCulloch, 4 April 1901, and SBA, Anna Shaw, Clara B. Colby, R. F. Avery, and H. T. Upton to McCulloch, 5 June 1901, both in Catharine W. McCulloch Papers, 1877–1983, MC 378, MCR-S; Rachel F. Avery to McCulloch, 9 April 1901, A-68 Mary Earhart Dillon Collection, Series VI, MCR-S; Minneapolis Journal, 1, 4, 5 June 1901, and SBA diary, 4 June 1901, Film, 41:649ff, 42:108–12.) 3. In April 1901, the Illinois legislature approved an amendment to An Act in regard to Guardians and Wards, drafted by Catharine McCulloch to make mothers and fathers equal. The amendment to section four of the existing statute read “The parents of a minor shall have equal powers, rights and duties concerning the minor.” (Illinois, Journal of the Senate, 30 January, 13 March, 10 April 1901, pp. 226, 336, 470, 476; Illinois, Journal of the House, 30 January, 9 April 1901, pp. 114, 513–14; Laws of the State of Illinois, 1901, 18 April 1901, p. 216; “Report of the Legislative Superintendent of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association for the Annual Meeting, December 6, 1901,” typescript, Catharine W. McCulloch Papers, 1877–1983, MC 378, MCR-S.) 4. John Hughes (1834–1911), a Universalist minister, won election as a Democrat to the Illinois House of Representatives in 1900 and served two terms. His wife, Catherine Matteson Hughes (1854–1921), another Universalist minister, was active in the state suffrage association, and during the 1901 legislative session, after John Hughes introduced the joint guardianship bill, Kate Hughes, as she was known, stayed in Springfield as the association’s persistent and effective lobbyist. She later became president of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association. (Nomination form for Table Grove Community Church, National Register of Historic Places Inventory,
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on-line at Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, HAARGIS database; finding aid, John Hughes Papers, Archival and Manuscripts Collection, IGK; Illinois, Secretary of State, Blue Book of the State of Illinois, 1903 [Springfield, Ill., 1903], 369; Newton Bateman, Paul Selby, and Jesse Heylin, eds., Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois: Fulton County Edition [Chicago, 1908], 930–32.) 5. SBA spent a few days at the house of Samuel and Emily Gross between June 19 and June 28. •••••••••
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ECS to Elizabeth Boynton Harbert1 Wardenclyffe, L.I. [N.Y.]
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July 25, 1901.
Dear Friend, The little gem to which you refer was a sentence at the close of one of my speeches, on the degraded condition of woman, taught by her subjection in the Bible. I have reproduced it from memory, but you have the idea There 3 If may be a choice expression here or there that I have forgotten you can improve it making it more artistic, make another copy for the 4 artist. I can no longer see to write and dictating is quite another thing from writing with the pen in your own hand. I send you my speech on the “Solitude of Self ” which in beginning to read your letter, I though might have been the inspiration to which your artist refered. So I send it for you to read and circulate but on reading farther I found that it was “The Imprisoned Angel” Have any of my books ever been sold out in your vicinity? I send you the notice of two of them. I am busy now preparing all my speeches delivered during the last sixty years, for publication I have over a hundred on all questions of government, reforms, religion and social life, which I hope to have in print in the Autumn. If my suffrage coadjutors had ever treated me with the boundless generosity they have my friend Susan, I could have scattered my writings abundantly from Maine to Louisiana. They have given Susan thousands of dollars, jewels, laces, silks and satins, and me, criticisms and denunciations for my radical ideas. Did you read my letter to the last Womans Suffrage Convention at Min5 neapolis? It was extensively criticized.
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Dear Susan deserves all she has received for she certainly has been a faithful and ardent advocate of womans emancipation. I have often thought of you in these long years and am glad to hear from you once more Write again and tell me about your family, your husband and children and what you are doing and thinking. If you know any millionaires who are looking around for worthy objects of charity, tell them, that I am in search of money to publish and scatter many good things on all reform questions, before I leave the planet, which in the nature of things can not be far distant. The women are few who dare to say a word against the religious superstitions of our day and generation. They are all under the thraldom of the priesthood, victims of the canon law, the church, the clergy, the Bible. They worship the very powers that compose the chief block in the way of their emancipation. I want you to get my letter on this subject and have it read in your clubs, published in your papers. Do help to stir your women up to a sense of their degradation in the church. With kind regards for your self and husband Adieu U Elizabeth Cady Stanton Y LS, in unknown hand, Box 7, Elizabeth Harbert Collection, CSmH. Signed for ECS by secretary and signed by ECS. 1. Elizabeth Morrison Boynton Harbert (1843–1925) of Evanston, Illinois, was a journalist and leader in the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association, with a long history of activism in the National Woman Suffrage Association. She helped negotiate the union of the National and American associations in 1890. (American Women; NCAB, 18:232; Women Building Chicago. See also Papers 3–5.) William Soesbe Harbert (1842–1919) graduated from law school at the University of Michigan after serving in the Civil War. He practiced law in Chicago. (University of Michigan, Catalogue of Graduates, Non-Graduates, Officers, and Members of the Faculties, 1837–1921 [Ann Arbor, Mich., 1923], 470. See also Papers 4.) Their children were Corinne Boynton Harbert (1873–1958) and Elizabeth Boynton Harbert (1875– 1949), later Rowe; Arthur Boynton Harbert, the eldest, died in 1900. (Guide to William S. Harbert Papers, InHi; assistance from William P. Frank, the Huntington Library; on-line genealogy of the Soesbe family, in editor’s files.) 2. ECS, in company with son Bob and daughter Maggie, spent the summer at this new resort on the North Shore of Long Island, where cottages and log cabins for light housekeeping could be rented. On adjoining land, Nikola Tesla was building a power station that summer. (Woman’s Journal, 6, 20 July 1901; Mary Lou Abata, “History of Shoreham,” typescript, 1979, on-line at Village of Shoreham.) 3. Enclosure omitted. A sculptor freed the “Imprisoned Angel” from a block of marble just as ECS would cut away superstition to liberate the woman.
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4. According to SBA, Elizabeth Harbert carried out a request from the sculptor Lorado Zadoc Taft (1860–1936). See SBA to E. M. B. Harbert, 12 August 1901, Film, 42:221–22. 5. Published as “The Duty of the Church to Woman at This Hour,” Boston Investigator, 4 May 1901, Film, 41:1072. It was an exact reprint of her letter to the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1886, in Papers, 4:473–75. Clippings in a scrapbook document some of the criticism. “Her language, indeed,” said one unidentified paper, “resembles something very nearly like intolerance and bigotry.” According to the Minneapolis Journal, 3 June 1901, “To the delegates the reading [of ECS’s letter] meant merely the annoyance of hearing an offensive point reargued.” The paper also quoted Henry Blackwell: “I not only do not indorse Mrs. Stanton, but I think she has done much harm by continually obtruding her theological views before conventions.” (Scrapbook 1892–1901, SBA Papers, DLC.) •••••••••
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SBA to Anna E. Dann Rochester, N.Y., Aug 4th 1901
Dear Anna E. Dann— Well—how did you get through the day yesterday— No Postal was in the mail this noon—so we don’t know yet whether Mrs Harper met you— 1 2 nor how you got on— But we believe well— Margaret said last night “It is so lonesome”—“Ill bet Anna is lonesome to night”— We all spoke of you—and this morning wondered what you were getting for breakfast—& all—whether you would go to church— You must not forget the big Cathedral—at 50 street & fifth Avenue on Margarets account—she will want 3 to know all about nit.p 4 I wonder if Mrs Harper & Winnifred & Mr Cooley are going up to the 5 Park about now— Mary & I have been out to Mt Hope —and called at Mrs 6 Wolcotts —and have just got back almost 6 Oclock—and I will just scribble to tell you we miss you—the bedroom seems forlorn enough— Well take all the comfort you can—while you are there— I can imagine how happy Mrs Harper is to have you—by the way I miss you— Well—who do you think popped in when I went down— Why Nellie—just as bright & brisk 7 & brisk as need be— she thought she would come & see the two old ladies—for they would be lonesome—with Anna gone— She ate supper with us— Aunt Mary told her to sit in Annas place—so make believe it is Anna I said—& she responded yes as bright as could be— She is going to
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Mrs [Minors?] tomorrow—says Mrs Cole wants her to stay—but she will not—but goes to her new place— Well—she is down stairs talking away to Aunt Mary— Oh! she has on the lawn dress—she says you made while we were gone—and now she says she ironed it herself—it looks very nice—so I think she will do splendidly at Mrs [Minors?]— Good bye— Give my love to the trio U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, SBA Collection, NR. Square brackets surround uncertain readings. Envelope addressed Care Mrs Ida H. Harper 214— West 92d street New York City. 1. Anna Dann moved to New York City for two months to assist Ida Harper with final work on volume four of the History of Woman Suffrage. 2. Margaret E. O’Neil, known as Maggie, was the housekeeper at 17 Madison Street. Her wages first appear in SBA’s accounts in September 1900, and she continued at the house into 1902. That she was Roman Catholic becomes evident in this and subsequent letters. (City directories, 1900, 1902; pages of accounts, SBA diaries, 1900, 1901, Film, 40:363ff, 41:649ff.) 3. St. Patrick’s Cathedral, at Fifth Avenue and Fiftieth Street, is the church of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. 4. George Elliott Cooley (1871–?) married Winnifred Harper in 1899, after he graduated in theology from St. Lawrence University and accepted a post as Unitarian minister in Rutland, Vermont. The couple left Vermont in 1901, when Cooley settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at the All Souls’ Liberal Church. He resigned in 1906, due to “ill health and nervous collapse,” and returned to New York City. There he taught at Stuyvesant High School from 1908 to the 1930s. He and Winnifred apparently divorced sometime before 1920. (Federal Census, Hartford, Conn., 1880, Rutland, Vt., 1900, New York City, 1910, 1920; St. Lawrence University, General Catalogue of the Officers, Graduates, and Non-Graduates, 1856–1925 [Canton, N.Y., 1926], 60; New York Times, 14 June 1899; Unitarian Year Book, July 1, 1904 [Boston, 1904], 18; Grand Rapids Evening Press, 1 September 1906, courtesy of Gloria Korsman, Harvard Divinity School Archives; Columbia University, Alumni Register, 1754–1931 [New York, 1932], 999.) 5. The Mount Hope Cemetery, where their parents and the family of their sister Guelma McLean were buried, is a beautiful park. 6. Probably she visited Ann Eliza Follett Wolcott (1822–1904), the widow of Anson F. Wolcott, who lived at 226 Mount Hope Avenue, near the cemetery. (Chandler Wolcott, A Record of the Descendants of James and Miriam Wolcott [Rochester, 1907], 14–15; city directory, 1901; gravestone, Mt. Hope Cemetery.) 7. Nellie was a friend of Anna Dann. 8. Mrs. Minor and Mrs. Cole are unidentified.
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SBA to Anna E. Dann [Rochester] Aug. 16, 1901
Dear Anna Your letter is splendid— I enjoyed your museum trip with you—& the Obeleisk & all— Well drink it all in—go to the Head quaters & see Mrs 1 Catt—and take a look from her windows— I talk as if you had nothing but to go sight-seeing— I know you wont neglect a single thing there is to do— Mrs Harper has everything in such nice order that it is a great deal easier to do the work— Yesterday was—“holyday”—and Margaret walked in the procession for the fifth time—so she will be saved from the burning flames of hell—I suppose— She makes just as good as ever—and eats just as much of it as ever—she doesn’t seem to care for much else— nSisterp Mary went and got Mutton Chops for dinner—entirely forgetting nthatp Margaret wouldn’t eat meat on Friday— 2 Well—I think Mr Mason will begin to think he won’t hold his [letters?] 3 so [long?]— Charlotte came running in this a.m. with yours to her—& to Nellie—they are all so different— Well dont waste time to write each one—a letter to one—or to all—will do just as well—but I do want you to write your thoughts about everything you see—but write it so all can 4 see it— Sister Mary took all three letters over to Mrs Cook— She is so happy reading them—she is a great sufferer & I pity her— Sister Mary 5 went riding with Lillian Coleman last night— Well be a good girl—& be happy— Affectionately— U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, on verso of printed petitions to Fifty-sixth Congress, SBA Collection, NR. On one petition, SBA wrote “For Anna E. Dann The Champion Sight Seer.” 1. Headquarters for the National-American Woman Suffrage Association were located on the twentieth floor of the American Tract Society Building at Nassau and Spruce streets in lower Manhattan. When completed in 1895, it was among the tallest buildings in the city. 2. Gilbert Turner Mason (1878–1957) was engaged to marry Anna Dann. He grew up in Albion, New York, and found work in Rochester as a bookkeeper in a
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foundry. He later managed foundries in Rochester and Buffalo before he and Anna relocated to Santa Barbara in 1947. (Federal Census, Buffalo, N.Y., 1920; Santa Barbara News-Press, 5 October 1952; Mt. Albion Cemetery, Town of Albion, N.Y., on-line transcriptions of gravestone and cemetery records, by Sharon A. Kerridge, 1997.) 3. Charlotte M. Dann (c. 1887–1938), later Beers, followed her older sister to Rochester in 1899 or 1900, and her future became an object of consultation between SBA and Anna Dann. She entered West High School, graduating in 1906 after success as a debater, writer, and editor of several school publications. In the end, nursing was her chosen profession, and she was licensed by New York State in 1911. After training in Buffalo and a job as assistant superintendent of the training school at Prospect Heights Hospital, Brooklyn, she joined the Army Nurse Corps and served in Europe during the war. By 1920, her occupation was teacher of nurses, and she had married Lloyd Y. Beers, a military dentist trained at George Washington University. (The Occident: Senior Annual of 1906, West High School, Rochester, N.Y., on-line Yearbook Collection, Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County; New York State Education Department, Report on Higher Education in the State of New York for the School Year Ending July 31, 1911 [Albany, N.Y., 1912], 830; American Journal of Nursing 17 [July 1917]: 1026; Federal Census, Brooklyn, N.Y., 1910, Buffalo, N.Y., and Boston, 1920, and Montgomery County, Md., 1930; U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Interment Records, Arlington National Cemetery.) 4. Magdalena Auer Cook (1852–1925) lived with her husband next door to the Anthonys, at 19 Madison Street. Louis C. Cook had worked for many years as a manager and superintendent of large buildings and estates in Rochester. (City directory, 1890, 1895, 1897, 1900, 1901; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records.) 5. Lillian Blanche Coleman (1870–1957) was another neighbor on Madison Street, living with her widowed mother. She studied at Cornell University as a member of the class of 1896 but did not graduate. (James Cash Coleman, The Genealogy of William Coleman of Gloucester, Mass., and Gravesend, England, 1619–1906 [Goshen, N.Y., 1906], 174; Rochester house directory, 1901–1902; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records.) •••••••••
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SBA to Anna E. Dann Rochester, N.Y. Aug. 27, 1901—
Well—dear Anna— 1 Another week has gone by—we both went to Silver Lake on Friday— I thought of you—but it proved a rainy day—so there wasn’t so much fun
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in it—nor so very many people— Mary came home with Miss Shaw & Harriet May Mills—and I stopped at Wyoming and staid until yesterday— with Mrs Coonley-Ward—who has twenty visitors—and six girls to do 2 the work— I went into her Laundry yesterday a.m.—it was a sight to see the washing machine—two wringers—&c—then beside the laundry—she has two distinct & separate kitchens— with large ranges—and pantries to match— and when they—Mrs Coonley & the visitors—boys & girls washed the dishes in the dining room—it look like a whole China-store— there were so many dishes— I remained there three days— We expected Cousin Jessie Anthony—of Los Angeles—to arrive this a.m. but she hasn’t 3 come yet—she may be stopping at the exposition for the day— tomorrow—we go to dinner with Anna O.—at 6.30—her mother Bacon is visiting 4 5 her— Margarets mother came yesterday— she at first thought she must go altogether to nherp aunts to visit with her mother—but her mother told her to stick to her work—so she will stay and do the work—and visit in the afternoons & evening— She is very quiet but gets good meals— Well—I hope you are enjoying yourself and Mrs Harper— by the way—I hear 6 nothing from Winifred— I shall be happy to see her— Isn’t she able to go to Grand Rapids this week? With love to Mrs Harper & W. if there— I am as ever Yours affectionately U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, SBA Collection, NR. Envelope addressed to 214 West 92d street, New York City. 1. Nearing the end of a lecture trip across the Midwest, Anna Shaw spoke at the Silver Lake Assembly, a Methodist camp in Wyoming County, New York, on 23 August 1901. 2. She visited Hillside, the large summer home of Susan Look Avery and her daughter Lydia Coonley Ward, also in Wyoming County. 3. The Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo was a world’s fair open from May to November 1901. Jessie Anthony was in Chicago and Wisconsin with her Dickinson cousins in May and June and had continued eastward. 4. Anna and Leon Bacon lived at 240 Rosedale, Rochester. Leon Bacon’s mother was Esther Delila Munger Bacon (1846–1929) of Syracuse, the widow of the Sidney Brooks Bacon and mother of their four children. (Thomas W. Baldwin, Bacon Genealogy: Michael Bacon of Dedham, 1640 and His Descendants [Cambridge, Mass., 1915], 233; Gruman, “Oakwood Cemetery Records, Syracuse, N.Y.,” 2:16.) 5. That is, the mother of Margaret O’Neil. 6. That is, Winnifred Cooley.
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John C. Norton1 to ECS 2
Plainville, [Conn.] Aug., E.M., 301. [1901] Dear Mrs. Stanton:—You will excuse me for writing and telling you how much I have enjoyed reading “Eighty Years and More” and the “Woman’s Bible.” I have read them three times and shall read them many times more. I find something new in them every time. I lend them to whoever will read them; some refuse for fear of shattering their faith. Our doctor has them now. We belong to the old men’s Bible class, and a few Sundays ago the question of the creation came up in the class—the clergyman taking for his text the old story of the creation of man out of the dust of the earth. Now when this question came up in the class, I took the liberty to say that there seemed to be two stories about the creation. Now as I had been taught by a kind mother from my infancy that there was no truth in the story, it was nothing but a fable, I had thought but little about it until I had read the “Woman’s Bible,” so I must thank them for reviewing that knowledge. But our teacher informed us that there was but one story. Having a Bible with me, I said to him, “For your benefit and mine, I will just read it to you.” Then I said, “Is not that plain English?” No one said anything except the doctor; he thought as I did. But to my surprise, when the clergyman came into the class, he decided in my favor, saying that the scholars had now decided that there were two stories. I said to him, “Is it not rather late in the day for them to so decide; it is so plain I should have thought they would have decided that way long ago.” But the next Sunday when we went into the class, one of the members proposed that we divide the class and put the unbelievers in one class and the believers in another. As there was but two of us we told them that we would divide then and there and save them the trouble—so we left! I have now made up my mind that no one has a right to join a Sunday School class or the church unless they can fully believe that Jonah was swallowed by a whale and the world was made in just six days. My wife joins with me in thanking you for the present of the book. Your friend, U J. C. Norton.
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Y Torch of Reason 5 (5 September 1901): 3. 1. This was probably John Calvin Norton (1825–1916), a clockmaker and highly skilled mechanic residing in Plainville, Connecticut. As an indication of his political views, this Bostonian had named his younger son, born in 1861, Wendell Phillips Norton. At this date, Norton was married to Harriet Amelia Ryder Norton (1841–1911), a former dressmaker who became his second wife in 1883. (William Jamieson Pape, History of Waterbury and the Naugatuck Valley, Connecticut [Chicago, 1918], 3:64, 67; Federal Census, 1900; gravestone, West Cemetery, Plainville, Conn.) 2. Following a convention among freethinkers, Norton employs a calendar that measured time since the burning of philosopher, mathematician, and heretic Giordano Bruno in 1600. The papal calendar was replaced by one that counted years from 1 January 1601 in the Era of Man, or E.M. •••••••••
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SBA to Henry A. Baker Rochester, N.Y., Nov. 6, 1901.
My Dear Harry:— When I returned home last Friday and found the announcement of your 1 marriage with Miss Clara Lucretia Anderson I was indeed very much surprised. I am very glad that your old bachelorship has found a companion for his loneliness. Give my kindest welcome to Clara Lucretia into the list of grand-nieces. I shall want to see her when I go to New York. It will be very funny to see Dr. and Mrs. Anderson Baker. Are you going to housekeeping, or are you going to board, and where are you to be found? I had a letter from your mother the other day saying that Guelma is play2 ing “Floradora” in Philadelphia. Now that you are married I have thought that Guelma would have a home with you when she is in New York so that your mother can go back to her other children, Tommie King, Lawrence 3 and papa. She has been very much divided in her affections between you and Guelma and Tommie and Lawrence, but maybe this will settle the matter for her. But, my dear Harry, do you write me, and your Clara Lucretia too, and tell me all about yourselves. Affectionately your great-aunt, U Susan B. Anthony
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Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, SBA Papers, MCR-S. Directed to Washington Life Insurance Co., Broadway, N.Y. 1. Harry Baker married on 19 October 1901. Clara Lucretia Anderson Baker (1877–?) grew up in West Haven, Connecticut, where she also taught school before her marriage. The couple settled in New York City. (Carlton E. Sanford, Thomas Sanford, The Immigrant to New England: Ancestry, Life and Descendants [Rutland, Vt., 1910], 2:1123; Federal Census, 1900.) 2. Guelma Baker appeared on Broadway early in 1901 in the enormously popular English musical comedy Floradora, regularly in the role of Valleda, a maid, and occasionally as understudy playing Angela Gilfain. When a touring company set out to perform in eastern cities in the fall of 1901, she was cast in the bigger part of Angela. (Johnson Briscoe, The Actors’ Birthday Book, 2d ser. [New York, 1908], 223.) 3. George L. Baker (1844–1908), father of Harry Baker, returned to work for railroads, after losing everything on a farm or orchard in San Diego. According to the 1900 census, he was employed as a Pullman conductor. (Federal Census, 1900; SBA diary, 26 January 1903, Film, 43:2ff; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records.) SBA refers to his other sons, Thomas King Baker (1872–?) and Lawrence McLean Baker (1890–1925). Thomas lived with his parents in San Diego and worked as a shipping clerk. Lawrence was in school. (Federal Census, 1900.) •••••••••
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ECS to Theodore W. Stanton New York, November 13, 1901.
Dear Theodore: Your flowers and books and other gifts and missives from different 1 friends come duly to hand. The first thing early in the morning was a cablegram from England followed by letters and presents from all parts 2 of the country. My parlor looked like a flower garden. Mrs. Villard sent twelve magnificent chrysanthemums, some measuring nineteen and twenty inches. It was a dark, cold, rainy day, so that I did not have many callers. But we did have some friends to dinner. With love and kisses all round, U Mother. Y Typed transcript, ECS Papers, NjR. 1. To mark her eighty-sixth birthday. 2. Fanny Garrison Villard (1844–1928) was the daughter of William Lloyd Gar-
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rison and the wealthy widow of Henry Villard, financier, publisher, and railroad president. She had befriended ECS for many years and entertained her both at their house in Dobbs Ferry and in New York City. (NAW; ANB.) •••••••••
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SBA to William C. Gannett Rochester, N.Y., Nov. 27, 1901
Dear Sir:— 1 I notice that at the Union Thanksgiving service you are to speak on the subject “The Power of Organized Womanhood.” I expect to be present on this occasion and it hardly seems necessary for me to suggest to you that “Organized Womanhood” can never reach its highest “Power” until it is strengthened by the possession of the ballot. Sincerely yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Unitarian Church Papers, NRU. Directed to Unitarian Church, City. 1. Union services of Thanksgiving were held in Rochester each year, led by Unitarian William Gannett, Rabbi Max Landsberg, and Universalist Asa Saxe. See SBA diary, 24 November 1892, 26 November 1903, Film, 29:655ff, 43:2ff. •••••••••
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Article by ECS [5 December 1901]
Education Will Do It. Will in Due Time Solve Negro Question in the South. In starting, I would say of the negro just what Shakespeare says of the Jew in “The Merchant of Venice”: “Hath not the negro eyes? Hath not a negro hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter as the white man? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you poison 1 us, do we not die?”
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A critical analysis of all the vital organs of the body and shades of the epidermis is not necessary, in order to decide the comparative capacity for education of a black or white boy; long experience has proved that all races are capable of profiting by education. 2 Alexandre Dumas, Frederick Douglass, Robert Purvis and Booker Washington prove this fact. We must use the same common sense in educating the impecunious classes in the South, whether white or black. Those who are to earn their bread with their hands must necessarily have an industrial education first, and devote themselves to the trade. If through genius and success they amass a fortune, and desire to enter the professions, the higher branches of education should be freely open to them, black or white. In regard to society, no one asks that ignorant laborers, of whatever color, be admitted into the higher classes. 3 The hue and cry against Booker Washington dining with the President, came from those who either forgot or did not know that he is an educated, polished gentleman, laboring for the good of his race, a true philanthropist, 4 in the best sense of that term. The duty of the American people at this hour, to atone for the wrongs of centuries, is to give to the black race all the opportunities for development that we are extending our own. The chief panacea for the elevation of all races is education; as the influences in prenatal life are incalculable, the education of the mothers of the race is of vital importance; next, kindergartens and day nurseries for their 5 children, as suggested by Miss Dooly in her able contribution to a recent symposium. To this end we must interest men of wealth to plant schools, colleges and libraries generously in the Southern states, that men, women and children may learn their own organization and the laws that govern their being, which is far more important for them to know than French and German, the Greek and Latin languages. The starting point for all lasting improvement must begin in home life, when we have cultivated manners and conversation at the fireside, a higher 6 development for every individual breathing this atmosphere is inevitable. Y Torch of Reason 5 (5 December 1901): 2.
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1. William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, act 3, sc. 1, lines 54–62. Where Shylock says Jew and Christian, ECS says negro and white man. 2. Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), the French novelist and playwright known as Dumas père, was the grandson of a Haitian black woman and categorized by American writers as a quadroon. Though only one-eighth black, Alexandre Dumas (1824–1895), the French writer known as Dumas fils, was said at the time of his death to have been “large, brawny, curly-headed, and dark, full of that peculiar personality for which the mixture of French and negro blood is responsible.” (Independent 47 [12 December 1895]: 3; Literary World, 26 [14 December 1895]: 452.) 3. Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) was the twenty-sixth president of the United States, coming into office when President William McKinley died in September 1901. He served earlier as governor of New York in 1899 and 1900. 4. When Booker T. Washington dined at the White House with Roosevelt and his family on 16 October 1901, it set in motion weeks of racist rants against social mixing of the races. (Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901 [New York, 1972], 304–24.) 5. Isma M. Dooly (1870–1921) of Atlanta, Georgia, contributed to a symposium on the “negro problem,” published first in the New York Journal (of which no copy has been found) and reprinted in the Atlanta Constitution, 17 November 1901. Like the clubwomen of her native city, she recommended kindergartens and day nurseries for African-American children. Dooly, born Isma Flynn of Irish immigrants in Georgia, was adopted by an aunt and uncle, Martin H. and Meta Dooly, before her tenth birthday but continued to live near her parents and siblings. Sent north to attend Sacred Heart Academy in Manhattanville, New York, she retained social and professional connections in the city. She was an editor of the Atlanta Constitution, a clubwoman in Atlanta, and a promoter of education. (Death Certificate, Vital Records, RG 26-5-95, Georgia Archives, on-line; Federal Census, 1880, 1910; Rebecca S. Montgomery, The Politics of Education in the New South: Women and Reform in Georgia, 1890–1930 [Baton Rouge, La., 2006], 33; James B. Nevin, ed., Prominent Women of Georgia [Atlanta, Ga., 1928], 139, 159; New York Tribune, 23 August 1898, 26 April 1899.) 6. ECS revised and republished this article in May 1902 as “The Solution of the Race Question,” Film, 42:652.
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SBA to Emily Howland Rochester, N.Y., Dec 15, 1901—
Dear Emily Howland Your good note of Dec 12th came duly— I think $25— will do for the first payment—though I can’t tell yet what the other women will con1 tribute— But—I have the Vol. IV— of the History to publish & don’t know where the money is coming from—with which to do it— I have the $1,900— which was contributed, two years ago—to the “Standing Fund”—all of them have consented nthatp their money may go to publish the history—but I need $5,000— to do all that I wish to— I have 1,000 sheets of Vol. I— printed— I want to print 1,000— of each of Vol’s II & III—and 3,000 of Vol. IV— That will leave me a 1,000 sets of the entire work—to put in as many more libraries!— You remember nhowp I put the three volumes into fully 1,500 libraries—(the nfirstp edition was 2,000)— I have only 40 or 50 sets left— They cost me $20,000— and all the money I have ever received for them is $7,000— So you see it is mainly a work of love for the cause— I will tell you what a bold stroke 2 I have made for the money— [I h]ave written Helen Gould —Jean L. 3 Stanford—Mr Carnegie, Mr Rockefeller & Mr Pierpoint Morgan —setting forth to each the need of the complete work illegible in the libraries of the country—and I shall hope to hear from them all! What I shall do for the money—if they refuse—I do not know—but I thought I would do a rash thing to get it first— I do hope they will see that it is an object worthy their attention— But I shall try somewhere— Mrs Harper now has Vol—IV— nearly ready to go into the publishers hands— It is going to be a most valuable book—with the laws of the 45 states—beside the work done in them—and the National associations doings at Washington— I 4 shall have it published by Mrs Mann—the wife of Charles Mann —who published Vol. III— She has the type & every thing—just as her husband left it—and it will be here—handy for me— It is no use going to a publishing House—they will not look at it—because the work has two publishers already—Fowler & Wells for the first two—and Mann for the third—so I will do this Vol. IV— as I did Vol. III—
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SBA to Emily Howland Rochester, N.Y., Dec 15, 1901—
Dear Emily Howland Your good note of Dec 12th came duly— I think $25— will do for the first payment—though I can’t tell yet what the other women will con1 tribute— But—I have the Vol. IV— of the History to publish & don’t know where the money is coming from—with which to do it— I have the $1,900— which was contributed, two years ago—to the “Standing Fund”—all of them have consented nthatp their money may go to publish the history—but I need $5,000— to do all that I wish to— I have 1,000 sheets of Vol. I— printed— I want to print 1,000— of each of Vol’s II & III—and 3,000 of Vol. IV— That will leave me a 1,000 sets of the entire work—to put in as many more libraries!— You remember nhowp I put the three volumes into fully 1,500 libraries—(the nfirstp edition was 2,000)— I have only 40 or 50 sets left— They cost me $20,000— and all the money I have ever received for them is $7,000— So you see it is mainly a work of love for the cause— I will tell you what a bold stroke 2 I have made for the money— [I h]ave written Helen Gould —Jean L. 3 Stanford—Mr Carnegie, Mr Rockefeller & Mr Pierpoint Morgan —setting forth to each the need of the complete work illegible in the libraries of the country—and I shall hope to hear from them all! What I shall do for the money—if they refuse—I do not know—but I thought I would do a rash thing to get it first— I do hope they will see that it is an object worthy their attention— But I shall try somewhere— Mrs Harper now has Vol—IV— nearly ready to go into the publishers hands— It is going to be a most valuable book—with the laws of the 45 states—beside the work done in them—and the National associations doings at Washington— I 4 shall have it published by Mrs Mann—the wife of Charles Mann —who published Vol. III— She has the type & every thing—just as her husband left it—and it will be here—handy for me— It is no use going to a publishing House—they will not look at it—because the work has two publishers already—Fowler & Wells for the first two—and Mann for the third—so I will do this Vol. IV— as I did Vol. III—
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Poor Isabel—how devoted she is to her dear mother— She ought to have a trained nurse—and save herself to be company for her mother— fresh & joyous— It is a mistake for the dear friends to perform all the menial service for a sick friend—because it exhausts—and unfits them for the more important ministrations. There are rumors—that the p[ower]s that be—are bound to get Miss Hay—voted in to the Board—either as treasurer—or as auditor— So I hope—if you help any one to go to Washington this year—it will be Harriet May Mills—not that others are not worthy—but because Miss Mills understands the true inwardness of things—and therefore can help—to carry things the right way— It is said, too, that they mean to vote out Miss Clay & Mrs Upton—so as to clear the board of all person obnoxious to Miss Hay— Miss Shaw—it is thought—is deemed too important a personage—(she is really the only one of a national reputation)—to be spared from the board—and she & I would be so in the minority—that she could do no harm— But she says—if they put off Miss Clay & Mrs Upton—& put Miss Hay on—she will surely resign! and then poor me— I shall be the spared monument—of old times— They can’t cast me out—nor I can’t resign without making too great an adoo! So you see how important it is that you should be there—and that Hattie should be there too— I would rather you would use the other $25 to take Hattie there—than give it to the “Sun” Fund— Wouldn’t Isabel & her mother do something to help Hattie to go— All this must be done quietly—we must be innocent of all— Niece Lucy E. Anthony is here to spend the holiday— Miss Shaw 6 is probably on South American soil now— They are having a good time— I hope she will be back & I think she will— Love to Isabel & her 7 dear mother—& her father & brother from your affectionately U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, Emily Howland Papers #2681, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, NIC. Square brackets surround letters torn away. 1. SBA had asked Emily Howland to contribute to a fund to keep Ida Harper at the task of writing a weekly column for the New York Sun. See SBA to E. Howland, 10 December 1901, Film, 42:379. 2. Helen Miller Gould (1868–1938), later Shepard, was the daughter and heir of the financier Jay Gould. With considerable resources at her disposal, she took a leading part in the antipolygamy crusade against Brigham Roberts, working through the Presbyterian church and its network of home mission societies. (William Griffin White, Jr., “The Feminist Campaign for the Exclusion of Brigham
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Henry Roberts,” Journal of the West 17 [January 1978]: 45–52; Iversen, Antipolygamy Crusade, 191–92, 199, 216.) 3. Founders of great fortunes who became philanthropists, these men were Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), of the steel industry; John Davison Rockefeller (1839–1937), of the oil business; and John Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913), financier. 4. The late Charles Mann (c. 1861–1899), a son of Rochester’s former Unitarian minister, Newton Mann, headed the Charles Man Printing Company. When he was printing volume three of the History of Woman Suffrage, SBA paid him an enormous compliment: his recommended changes to the text “often very much improve even Mrs Stanton’s best sentences.” He was a special friend of Lucy Anthony, possibly from school in Rochester. When he was dying, SBA, Lucy, and Mary Anthony all spent time helping and visiting at the Manns’ house. After his death on 19 November 1899, his widow, Frances A. Mann (c. 1860–1916), a printer herself, ran their publishing company. (Federal Census, 1880, 1900; Rochester Post Express, 21 November 1899, SBA scrapbook 31, Rare Books, DLC; city directories, 1900, 1909, 1910, 1911; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records; SBA to Elizabeth B. Harbert, 26 October 1885, and SBA diary, 10, 11, 17, 18, 19 November 1899, Film, 24:585–94, 39:13ff.) 5. That is, Isabel Howland and her ailing mother, Hannah Howland. 6. Anna Shaw traveled for three months to the West Indies and South America with Lydia Coonley Ward. Back in time for meetings in Washington in February, she described her experiences in addresses to the National Council of Women and International Woman Suffrage Conference. See Woman’s Journal, 22 March 1902, Washington Evening Star, 17 February 1902, Washington Post, 18 February 1902, all in Film, 42:517–19, 527, 533–34; Washington Post, 21 February 1902; History, 5:42. 7. William Howland and his son, Herbert Slocum Howland (1863–1939). •••••••••
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M. Carey Thomas1 to SBA [Bryn Mawr, Pa.] January 20, 1902.
Dear Miss Anthony:— I hope you understand that our great wish is to have you address the students at the college and that Mrs. Florence Fenwick Miller’s address at 2 the same time is of secondary importance, so that, if the date selected by Mrs. Catt for Mrs. Miller to accompany you to Bryn Mawr is inconvenient to you, we should like to change it and arrange for her to address the college 3 at some other time. As I asked Mrs. Harper to tell you, Dr. Kelly would like to present the relief of you that he is to give the College when you are
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here, so that there might be an opportunity for him and me to say a few words about the work that you have done for women and, in short, to make of your visit to Bryn Mawr also a little occasion in honour of you. I am also anxious, if you would not be too tired, to ask the members of the senior class and our graduate students to meet you at tea in the afternoon. If the 25th of February does not suit you, will you not let me know at once, so that we may arrange some other date? Will you not also tell me frankly whether you would, or would not, prefer Mrs. Miller to come at the same time. It would be entirely possible to arrange for her to come at some other time. I want also to tell you that Mrs. Harper’s biography of you is already in the students’ library. I bought it for the library when it first appeared. From the fact that Mrs. Harper has several times sent me a notice of it, I thought perhaps she did not know that it was already in the library. Believe me, with very kind regards, Sincerely yours, U M Carey Thomas Y TLS letterpress, M. Carey Thomas Papers, Archives, PBm. 1. Martha Carey Thomas (1857–1935), a niece of Hannah Whitall Smith raised in Baltimore, became president of Bryn Mawr College in 1894 and established herself as a leader in setting standards for women’s higher education. This is the earliest known letter about scheduling SBA’s visit to the college; once everyone agreed on a date, SBA became gravely ill, and on her recovery, the correspondence resumed to find a new date. SBA spoke on April 21. (NAW; ANB; M. C. Thomas to SBA, 29 January, 10 February, 8 April, 15 May 1902, and SBA to M. C. Thomas, 1 February 1902, Film, 42:422, 429–30, 445, 619–20, 651.) 2. Florence Fenwick Miller came to the United States to attend the International Woman Suffrage Conference in February and stayed until early April. Her visit to Bryn Mawr preceded SBA’s. (Van Arsdel, Florence Fenwick Miller, 216–17, 222.) 3. Howard Atwood Kelly (1858–1943), Thomas’s gynecological surgeon in Baltimore, gave a bronze medallion of SBA, made by the artist Leila Usher, to Bryn Mawr College. (ANB.)
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ECS to the Editor, New York EVENING POST1 New York, January 22 [1902].
To the Editor of the Evening Post, Sir: A class of tolerably-well-educated college graduates, among some of our leading men in Church and State, have grown perfectly hysterical on the question of sex, so afraid are they that the feminine element in humanity is about to be wholly obliterated; that woman, through higher education, social freedom, political equality, industrial liberty, and just and equal laws, will become exactly like man; that the difference in sex will be lost altogether, and that in woman we shall simply have a coarser, rougher, ruder, and more war-like kind of man. Every step in woman’s emancipation from slavery to freedom is, in their minds, fraught with innumerable dangers to civilization. I will not mention the names of any of these hysterical writers, because by and by, when they come to see, as they must in the near future, the weakness and absurdity of their present position, they will be grateful for the omission. I would urge these illogical thinkers to a patient consideration of nature’s immutable laws, and the great fact that sex pervades every department of vegetable, mineral, and animal life; that there has been no cessation, variableness, or shadow of turning in this law from the dawn of creation to the present hour; through all the terrible convulsions of nature, earthquakes, cyclones, hurricanes, tidal-waves, volcanic eruptions, the intense cold of winter, the intense heat of summer, through thunder, lightning, and floods, the male and female elements in every rock and tree and flower, in every animal, fish, and bird, have preserved their integrity. The feminine element has been as perfectly maintained in the fragrant little violet and sweet-scented rose as has the masculine element in the mighty oaks and giant trees in the groves of California; the little wintergreen-berry blooms and buds and blossoms mid wintry winds and ice and snow, as in the balmy month of June, and thus vindicates her sex from year to year. In spite of all convulsions of nature, the process of creation and recreation goes on everywhere, and the great elements of male and female are
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preserved intact; there is no more reason to fear the annihilation of the masculine and feminine elements as two distinct forces, than there is to fear the annihilation of the centripetal and centrifugal forces, the law of gravitation, of attraction and repulsion, the positive and negative electricity. If these doubting Thomases ever are able to conjure up one monster, we shall have millions of tender-hearted mothers, affectionate wives, sisters, and daughters still left, to adorn the social world, as the feminine flowers, birds, and gentle animals do their phase of existence. Scientists suffer no anxieties in these directions. They do not warn the florists to cease cultivating double roses, lest they should turn into cabbages, or the smaller fruits, lest they should turn into pumpkins. However much the rose may be increased in size, varied in color, and intensified in fragrance, it will be a rose still. The co-education of the sexes, the study of mathematics, abstruse sciences, and languages, medicine, and theology, and skill in the industries, will have no more influence in changing girls into boys and women into men than have these improvements in vegetable life in changing the characters of fruits and flowers. And sex is as perfectly maintained in both cases. U Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Y New York Evening Post, 1 February 1902. 1. That is, Horace White. Several other journals published this essay under the title “Hysterical Gentlemen.” •••••••••
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ECS to Ida Husted Harper 250 West 94th St [New York] Jan 26—1902
Dear Friend, Every time I have read one of your articles, I have said, these should be put in a permanent form. To-day this feeling is so strong that I am impelled to conjure you to do this work the moment that you escape from Susan’s grip! You have touched every vital point of our movement, and we cannot 1 afford to lose one of your articles in the “Sun” Y L incomplete, in hand of E. L. White, Ida Harper Woman Suffrage Scrapbook 1, Rare Books, DLC. 1. “The Cause of Woman,” New York Sun, 26 January 1902.
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Remarks by SBA to the First International Woman Suffrage Conference
Editorial note: The First International Woman Suffrage Conference opened in Washington on 12 February 1902 at the invitation of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association. SBA’s remarks followed Clara Barton’s in a program designed to welcome the representatives of England, Australia, Canada, Russia, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Turkey, Chile, and the United States. Over the next several days, audiences heard reports on women’s status in nearly three dozen countries.
[12 February 1902] I hardly know what to say, but I certainly give a most cordial welcome to these women from foreign shores. They are ahead of us in some things; in some countries of Europe women have more suffrage than we. I will not go back to the time of the flood. We have had Wyoming for thirty years. How well I remember the day she was ushered in! Then came Colorado, a second star on our flag, then Utah and Idaho. I do not know how soon we shall have another. It depends not on the women but on the men. How I hate to hear it said that what we need is to convert the women! If every woman’s husband and father and all her male friends favored it, especially if the men upon whom she is financially dependent favored it, she would favor it. Till we convert the men, we cannot convert the women. The politicians dread the women’s vote, but we are going to overcome the politicians by getting the people with us. Mrs. Stanton and I conceived the idea of holding an International Suffrage Conference when we were in Europe in 1883, but our grandmothers there were afraid of us, and the plan was dropped. Now, after twenty years, 1 they have come to us, and we are going to march forward together. Y Woman’s Journal, 22 February 1902. 1. This is a unique historical rendering of several stories pertinent to the occasion—the agreement reached in England in 1883 to form an International Woman Suffrage Association, the subsequent American decision of 1887 and 1888 to organize an International Council of Women that marginalized woman suffrage, and
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a steady drizzle of difficulties working with English suffragists in an international context. See Sandra Stanley Holton, Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women’s Suffrage Movement (London, 1996), 64–65, 74, and Papers, 4:299–300n, 338–39, 349–50, 5:24–29, 86–93. •••••••••
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Remarks of SBA to the Senate Select Committee on Woman Suffrage [18 February 1902] 1
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Miss Anthony. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, this is the seventeenth Congress that has been addressed by the women of this nation. That means that we have been coming to Congress thirty-three 3 years. In 1887 the Senate brought the bill to a discussion and to a vote. We ask for a sixteenth amendment because your honorable body, the Congress of the United States, has power to submit the proposition to the legislatures of the several States, and it is much easier to canvass a legislature—it is much easier to persuade the members of a legislature to pass on the ratification of this amendment—than it is to get the whole three millions or six millions, as the case may be, of the rank and file of the men of the different States to vote for it. I appeal to you that you bring this question before the Senate of the United States. I think we are of as much importance as are the Filipinos, Porto Ricans, Hawaiians, Cubans, and all of the different sorts of men that you have before you. (Laughter.) When you get those men, you have an ignorant and unlettered set of people, who know nothing about our institutions. The 600 women teachers sent over to the Philippines are a thousand 4 times better qualified than are the men who go there to make money. The women go there to teach, to educate, and to get something to build a State upon. The women of the islands, as well as the women at home, are quite as well qualified to govern and have the charge of affairs in their hands as are the men. But I do not propose to talk this morning. I am simply here to introduce those who are to address you. I have here the report of the hearing two years ago, which contains a
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statement of the workings of suffrage in the different States of the Union. This report is published at the expense of Uncle Sam. The only thing we ever get out of him is the printing of that document. (Laughter.) This bears 6 the frank of Hon. Cushman K. Davis, and during his lifetime these reports were sent over the country in that way. Before that the reports of these hear7 ings were sent out under the frank of Senator Daniel, former chairman of the committee, and we shall expect Senator Bacon and Senator Berry and all of you gentlemen to do your part. Senator Mitchell here is an old war horse. I traveled with him thirty-one years ago over the Union Pacific, and we were snowed in together for nine days. (Laughter.) Senator Mitchell. We got pretty well acquainted then, did we not? Miss Anthony. Yes; and you have been a good suffrage man ever since. Senator Mitchell. You made one convert. Miss Anthony. Yes; and there were several others. A man came to me at the hotel the other night, who was with us on that trip, who remembered the trials we had. I now have the pleasure of introducing Harriet May Mills, the organizer of New York State. Y Woman Suffrage. Hearing before the Select Committee on Woman Suffrage, United States Senate, on the Joint Resolution (S.R. 53) Proposing an Amendment to the Constitution of the United States Extending the Right of Suffrage to Women (Washington, D.C., 1902), 3–4. 1. Augustus Octavius Bacon (1839–1914), Democrat of Georgia, chaired the Senate Select Committee on Woman Suffrage in the Fifty-seventh Congress. The hearing was convened to consider Senate Resolution No. 53, introduced by John H. Mitchell on 10 February 1902. (BDAC; Congressional Record, 57th Cong., 1st sess., 312, 1497.) 2. All members were present. James Henderson Berry (1841–1913) of Arkansas was the second Democrat. The Republicans were Thomas Robert Bard (1841– 1915) of California, John Hipple Mitchell (1835–1905) of Oregon, and George Peabody Wetmore (1846–1921) of Rhode Island. (BDAC.) On SBA’s snowbound adventure with Senator Mitchell in 1872, see Papers, 2:465–66. For other encounters between them, see Papers 2–4. 3. After a decade of relentless pressure to act on a constitutional amendment for woman suffrage, senators in the second session of the Forty-ninth Congress brought the matter to a vote on 25 January 1887. The measure then known as Senate Resolution No. 5 was defeated, sixteen yeas, thirty-four nays, and twenty-six senators counted as absent. (Papers, 4:535–36, 537–40, 545–48.) 4. The United States government began to transport American teachers to the Philippines in January 1901. The men and women became known as the Thomas-
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ites, named for the Thomas, the ship they sailed on. See Escalante, Bearer of Pax Americana, 142–47, and Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (New York, 1989), 200–206. 5. Hearing before the United States Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage, Held in the Marble Room of the United States Senate on the 13th Day of February, 1900, at 10 O’Clock A.M. (Washington, D.C., 1900), Film, 40:956–1000. 6. Cushman Kellogg Davis (1838–1900), Republican of Minnesota, served in the Senate from March 1887 until his death. (BDAC.) 7. John Warwick Daniel (1842–1910), Democrat of Virginia, chaired the Senate committee in 1900. A Confederate veteran, he served in the House of Representatives for one term beginning in 1885 and in the Senate from 1887 until his death. (BDAC.) •••••••••
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Remarks by SBA to the National Council of Women
Editorial note: The triennial meeting of the National Council of Women opened in Washington on 19 February 1902, as soon as the National-American’s convention ended. At the first afternoon session, Fannie Humphreys Gaffney delivered her presidential address and then introduced members of the audience. “Amid great applause, Miss Susan B. Anthony was escorted to the platform, where she made a brief speech.” (Washington Post, 20 February 1902, Film, 42:568.)
[19 February 1902] I see before me the face of the president of the first International Council of Women, (Frances Willard), and I believe that if she could see this gathering of representative women she would rejoice. I am in sympathy with all these movements, but I hope that when you get through with the temperance work and social purity, and universal peace, anti-vivisection, and dress reform, and all the other reforms, you will come to the conclusion that your own citizenship needs your attention. I expect that the cause which I consider the underlying one will be considered last, but I shall be content whenever its success comes. Y Woman’s Tribune, 1 March 1902.
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Remarks by SBA to the National Congress of Mothers
Editorial note: Next into Washington were delegates to the Continental Congress of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Spotted in the hall on 22 February 1902, SBA was again escorted to the stage to make remarks very similar to those delivered above to the National Council and here to the National Congress of Mothers. The congress opened on 25 February 1902. SBA’s visit two days later interrupted a report about the quality of milk reaching the nation’s cities. (Film, 42:570–71.)
[27 February 1902] A ripple of applause broke out as Miss Susan B. Anthony came up the aisle, and every woman in the house rose to her feet and gave her the Chautauqua salute of waving handkerchiefs. Miss Anthony was introduced by 1 Mrs. Birney in these words: “Miss Anthony, you need no introduction save the work you have been doing all your life for women.” Miss Anthony’s Kind Words. Miss Anthony spoke as follows: “It is with pleasure that I come into your presence this morning. I have heard of the Mothers’ Congress. I have been in the city when it has been held, but never before have I entered its portals. I do not know exactly what are the lines of the work that you proceed upon, but I suppose it is everything toward the rearing and training of children. I have been in your rooms below and have seen the various operations that are going on there, and I am very much pleased with it.” Needs of the Child. “You are looking at the matter of sterilizing milk, which is a good thing, and of guiding children at pivotal times in their lives, which is also a good thing. But of all things, mothers need aid to shape the conditions that should surround the child outside as well as inside the home. The mother is said to be the queen of the home, but you all know that she is often the victim of circumstances and that she cannot have absolute sway in her own home.”
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Reverts to Suffrage. “You may wish to guard your children from typhoid fever, from pneumonia. Typhoid fever is the result of bad water, and women have no power to break up the ring and work for pure water in Philadelphia. It seems to me that until they have that power their work will be far short of what they desire. You must have the control of outside as well as inside of the home to rear your child to perfection. “You cannot name a single incident of municipal government that does not affect the home. So I look forward to your education and development in the direction of making the conditions surrounding the home ideal conditions. Napoleon said: ‘It is he who makes his circumstances who is the great man.’ And it is she who makes the circumstances of her home who 2 has the perfect home.” Hoped for Affiliation. Miss Anthony then expressed the hope that the Congress of Mothers would affiliate itself with the National Council, and closed with the following words: “I should think that of all women in the world mothers would want the vote. You should want a word to say about sanitary matters in the government. I have stood for fifty years for the one idea of representation, not as a woman, but as a citizen.” Y Washington Evening Times, 27 February 1902. 1. Alice Josephine McLellan Birney (1858–1907) founded and led the Congress of Mothers. (NAW; ANB.) 2. A more common rendering of Napoléon’s idea is “I care nothing about circumstances; I make circumstances!” For another use of this sentiment, see Papers, 5:442–43. •••••••••
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SBA to Elizabeth Lowe Watson1 2
Atlantic City, N.J. April 1, 1902 Dear Mrs Watson Your lovely birthday letter reached me duly— It was nice of you & Lulu to have that celebration at your house— I can see you all stepping about
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and Lulu reading her description of S. B. A— It was all very good—and you are very enterprising to get up such an entertainment on that occasion— Long nlifep to you both—and the best blessings on you— I came here to the Sea shore after my illness in Philadelphia—shall stay here but through this week—then go back to Phila—stop there a few weeks longer— On April 9th the New Century Club—of Phila—give me a recep3 tion— They have invited all the clubs far & near that is in & around the City—so I must be in my best trim—for it is new thing for that club—to thus 4 honor the head and front of the offending— They have hitherto played very shy of any thing that savored of woman’s rights— It is a great step forward for them— This is a real April day—sun shining—& the clouds dropping their rain—alternately—so that my niece—Helen Mosher James—the nonlyp daughter of my sister Hannah—and I cannot walk or ride on the board walk—where the multitude take an airing daily— It is a wide board walk— along the sea coast—no houses between it & the ocean—fully 4 or 5— miles in lenth— We get the full benefit of the salt air—and have a full sight of the never ceasing roar & roll of the the surging sea— It is a constant beauty to see the waves break over each other— If you were here we would walk & talk!! 5 Dear Mrs L. C. Smith is [breaking?]— She no longer goes out alone every where as of old—but she seems very bright and is the same splendid woman as ever—but she like myself—is crawling up in the eighties—and must soon come to the end—and what then? She & you think you know— but I do not! only that I have nthep faith to believe that the same hand that has guided me here—will continue to hold me there—and I feel perfectly safe—resigned to whatever comes so with views differing—we shall meet in the beyond—if that is to be—and if not—then whatever comes will be right— Affectionately yours U Susan B Anthony Y ALS, on letterhead of Haddon Hall, Mary McHenry Keith Letters and Miscellany, 1912–1927, MS 3002, CHi. Square brackets surround uncertain reading. 1. Elizabeth Lowe Watson (1843–1927), a spiritualist since childhood when she toured as a young trance medium, ran her own fruit farm near San Jose. She shared friends with SBA in Rochester because, while married to an oil king of Titusville, Pennsylvania, Watson lived in the city after the Civil War. Leaving her husband about 1880, she relocated to California with two children, bought the ranch that became her farm, and preached to the First Spiritual Union of San Francisco. Ac-
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tive with the suffrage movement in the 1890s, she later presided over the California Equal Suffrage Association at the time of victory in the state in 1911. (American Women; Julia Schlesinger, Workers in the Vineyard: A Review of the Progress of Spiritualism, Biographical Sketches, Lectures, Essays and Poems [San Francisco, 1896], 121–32; Yvonne Jacobson, “Champion of Suffrage: Elizabeth Lowe Watson, 1843–1927,” San José Studies 19 [Spring 1993]: 8–22.) Watson and her daughter, Lucretia Estelle Watson Taylor (1873–1913), known as Lulu, hosted a celebration of SBA’s birthday. Taylor had been a student at the University of California when she joined the amendment campaign of 1896, and she went on to work in the campaign of 1911. In 1899, she married Benjamin Grant Taylor, then a law student, and continued to live for a time with her mother. (Robert Whitaker, One Woman’s Worth: The Story of Lucretia Watson Taylor [n.p., n.d]; Directory of Graduates of the University of California, 1864–1916 [Berkeley, Calif., 1916], 41.) 2. SBA was recuperating by the sea. Louise James nursed her through three weeks of extreme bronchitis at her home in Philadelphia, and then, on 22 March 1902, she took SBA to Atlantic City for two weeks, staying at Haddon Hall, a small boardinghouse. 3. Founded in 1877, the New Century Club had extensive programs for working women and research on laws affecting all women, but advocacy of woman suffrage fell outside of its purposes. The club’s Political Science Section hosted the late afternoon reception for several hundred people at the clubhouse on South Twelfth Street on April 9. (Film, 42:621.) 4. Shakespeare, Othello, act 1, sc. 3, l. 80. 5. Lewia C. Hannibal Smith (1811–1909), better known as Mrs. L. C. Smith, moved to Rochester as a widow in the 1850s and became a local activist. At her ninety-fourth birthday party, SBA called her “the champion worker in the way of begging money in this city.” (Federal Census, 1880; History, 3:413; Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change, 208, 210–11, 214; Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 14 June 1905, Film, 44:561; Garland Cemetery, Clarkson, N.Y., tombstone transcription on-line.) •••••••••
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ECS to Clara Bewick Colby [New York, 8 April 1902]
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Dear Mrs. Colby—I have just received a very remarkable letter from Susan. She had been staying for a week or two in Atlantic City at one of the hotels since destroyed by fire. She awoke one night in the midst of a very 2 vivid dream of being burned alive with no possible escape. On rising the next morning she told her dream to a niece who was with
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her, and said she was going to pack her trunk immediately after breakfast and leave for Philadelphia, which she fortunately did. 3 She is coming here on the 18th of April to make me a visit. U Elizabeth Cady Stanton Y Woman’s Tribune, 12 April 1902. 1. An editor’s introduction supplied the date. 2. SBA’s premonition of fire cut short her stay in Atlantic City with Louise Mosher and took them back to Philadelphia on April 2. In the morning of April 3 fire swept through the crowded frame buildings along the boardwalk, destroying thirteen hotels and twenty-seven other businesses. Trains brought extra fire equipment from Phildelphia and Camden, New Jersey, to help the local volunteer companies. (New York Tribune, 4 April 1902; SBA to Jessie Anthony, 4 April 1902, Film, 42:610–15; Franklin W. Kemp, Firefighting by the Seashore: A History of the Atlantic City Fire Department, December 3, 1874–March 1, 1972 [Atlantic City, N.J., 1972], 168–70, 183–84, 497–98.) 3. Plans called for SBA to spend a week with ECS. (SBA to Clara Barton, 29 March 1902, Film, 42:592–94.) •••••••••
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Article by ECS [20 April 1902] A Defence of Woman’s Tears
I cannot agree with Professor Mélinand on many points mentioned in 1 his article, and I am very glad to say that I have not found that all men, women and children are such artificial beings. Professor Mélinand says “that, when we weep at the theatre at the sight of a strong dramatical situation, we do this without feeling actual deep emotion, because we instinctively imitate the actor.” To this I must object very strongly. I have often been moved to tears in the theatre without crying for any special purpose, but because I have felt real deep emotion, because I have felt the sorrow of the person portrayed before my eyes as if it were my own. If we only cry “because we instinctively imitate the actor,” how is it that I have been moved to tears by reading touching novels, like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” or poems relating heroic, self-sacrificing deeds?
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Here I could surely not imitate an actor or a person whom I did not see. Often, very often, I have cried in witnessing the sufferings of other people, those suffering by poverty, unjust punishment and privation. Often I have also cried in court rooms during trials or after the passing of a sentence. No man, be he a professor or not, shall tell me that my emotion was not real, deep and true or my tears purely mechanical. Most men, women and children are easily moved to tears; those hardened as the professor says are the exceptions. Strong men who have great self-control can hardly judge us who have far less control of our feelings. When Professor Mélinand further seems to think that we women in most cases—though he is charitable enough not to say all—cry because we want to gain something for ourselves, he must either know very little of women or have been very unfortunate in meeting only women who certainly are the exceptions rather than the rule. Most men who berate women have generally some special personal grievance or neglect by women to complain of. But even if they have, they should not allow one single circumstance to sour their whole disposition or make them bitter against all womankind. Let them remember that even if they may have been slighted by one woman, who may have treated them unjustly, this gives them no right to judge all for the unfairness of one, and they must remember that every man has at least known one woman to whom he owes much more than he can ever hope to repay, whose life has been full of sacrifices for his sake, who could have done anything for him—the woman to whom he owes his life. I know in my own case that to hear other people talk about the foibles and weaknesses of women always arouses in me very strong feelings of both sorrow and vexation. U Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Y New York American and Journal, 20 April 1902. 1. ECS contributed to a symposium, “Power of Tears,” centered on an article by Camille Mélinand, “Pourquoi pleure-t-on? (Psychologie des larmes),” La Revue 40 (15 mars 1902): 659–70. The New York American and Journal compressed Mélinand’s ideas into a short translation with the title “The Hypocrisy of Tears” and asked ECS along with an actress and a former assistant district attorney to respond. Mélinand (c. 1871–1951) was a French philosopher whose studies of tears, blushing, and pity, to name a few subjects, found an audience in journals in France,
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England, and the United States. For many years he trained teachers at l’Ecole Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud. (Georges Bouquet, “Camille Mélinand,” Mémorial de Saint-Cloud 2 [1953], with the assistance of Elizabeth Churchich; Gonzalo J. Sanchez, Jr., Pity in Fin-de-Siècle French Culture: “Liberté, Egalité, Pitié” [Westport, Conn., 2004], 26–27.) •••••••••
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SBA to Anna H. Shaw Rochester, N.Y., June 23rd, 1902.
Dear Rev. Lady:— ¶1 Do you know that you have not written a word since you left Mrs. Catt’s in that rain? ¶2 I wonder how you are, how Lucy is and all that? I dreamed last night that I met you and you said that Lucy had never been so well, and get1 ting through her times so nicely. It seems that I must have had a letter from you the dream was so vivid. 2 ¶3 Miss Garrett telegraphed me the other day and said she would like to present the hundred dollars for a bronze medallion to be given to the girls of the Rochester University. I have thanked her for the proposal and invited her and Dean M. Carey Thomas to come to Rochester, at its 3 presentation and make a speech or speeches in favor of co-education. ¶4 There is now sixty-eight girls in the college. Three of them were graduated at the recent commencement, but they were kept very shady by the president because a large majority of the alumni are to speak 4 5 plain, mad because the girls are admitted. President Rhees is therefore very cowardly about giving them their place among the graduates. So I shall be very glad at the presentation of the medallion if I can get a good word spoken for co-education. Y TL incomplete, on NAWSA letterhead, SBA Papers, MCR-S. Directed to Wianno—Cape Cod, Mass. 1. Lucy Anthony suffered for decades from incapitating menstrual pain and other ailments that interfered with work. For other references to the problem, see Papers, 5:15–17, and SBA diary, 27 May 1896, Film, 35:1ff. 2. Mary Elizabeth Garrett (1854–1915) inherited great wealth from her father, president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and after his death, used it to advance education for girls and women. She funded Baltimore’s Bryn Mawr School
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for Girls; endowed the Johns Hopkins Medical School, guaranteeing access for women; and made substantial gifts to Bryn Mawr College. She was also the great love of M. Carey Thomas. (NAW; ANB.) 3. Leila Usher’s profile of SBA in plaster was on display at John Kent’s studio when Mary Garrett made her offer. Hopeful that Usher would cast it again in bronze, SBA laid a plan before Usher and Garrett. In January 1906, Usher mentioned to a reporter that she “recently received an order” to duplicate her medallion of SBA for the University of Rochester. Its whereabouts are unknown. (Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 28 June 1902, not in Film; New York Times, 14 January 1906.) 4. Of the thirty-three women who enrolled at the university in 1900, one was ready to graduate in 1901 and three were ready in 1902. In the class of 1902 were Mary Lewis Deland, transfer student from Vassar; Mary Cynthia Gillette, transfer student from Cornell; and Miriam Seligman, student in Hanover, Germany, and Lausanne, Switzerland, before entering the university. (General Catalogue of the University of Rochester, 1850–1928 [Rochester, 1928], 313; with assistance of Mary Huth, University of Rochester.) 5. Rush Rhees (1860–1939), a Baptist minister by training, was chosen to be president of the University of Rochester in 1899 and took office in 1900, just as the school became coeducational. (ANB.)
Textual Notes ¶2 ¶3 ¶4
l. 3 l. 2 ll. 1–2
that I had nmust havep had a letter hundred dollars and have nforp a bronze medallion Three of them was nwerep graduated •••••••••
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ECS to SBA 250 West 94th St New York—Sept 15th 1902
Dear Susan, Hattie and Nora arrived this morning at nine o’clock, both in good 1 health and spirits. I want you to take it on yourself to see that Hattie has an official invita2 tion to attend the State Convention in Buffalo, and to all other important convocations in this State. For some reason, Mrs. Chapman Catt does not seem disposed to push her to the front, why, I do not know; unless she is jealous of her as a speaker. Now, we must make the most of her eloquence in our woman-suffrage
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movement. I hope she will be able to build up a successful association in this city Do you intend to publish my appeal at the end of Vol. IV? A forecast of 3 our battle for the next half-century, should it take so long. We have just returned to the city, and are now all together at 250 West 4 94th St happy, I assure you, in the re-union. Yours as ever Y L, in hand of E. L. White, ECS Papers, DLC. Signed for ECS by secretary. 1. This trip to the United States followed Harriot Blatch’s decision to live on this side of the Atlantic. 2. The annual meeting was scheduled to begin on 29 October 1902. 3. No new work by ECS went into the fourth volume of the History of Woman Suffrage. Perhaps she had already prepared the appeal enclosed below at 25 October 1902. 4. ECS returned to Wardenclyffe, Long Island, in the summer of 1902. •••••••••
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Harriot Stanton Blatch to SBA 250 West 94th St., New York, Sept. 25, 1902—
Dearest Susan, I am so glad to be with Mother again. She has failed sadly since last spring, and needs Maggy or me to be near her constantly. I wish you could be in New York at the time of the 87th nbirthdayp, as I’m sure there wont be another. Tomorrow Theodore is to arrive on the Savoie, so the “children” will all be at hand. 1 My co-workers seem all out of town, so it is difficult to begin my work. Last evening Miss Hay was to have called, but the storm kept her away. Is she a good, sound, dependable worker? I should love to come to Rochester, but if anything is to be done here, I must stick close. It is my intention not to leave New York once this winter. The work & Mother seem to point to that course as wisdom. I am glad you are nearing the end of Vol. IV. Add to it the very best Index money can command. All Mrs. Harper’s facts on the State laws are invaluable, but without the Index, the best Index, would be lost. A book of reference, such as that will be, is useless, maddening, without the guide-post.
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I will call & see the portrait, as soon as this storm abates. Bob & Maggy went one Sunday by appointment to see it, & lo! no one was in. Better luck to me. My operation was nothing serious,—for hemorrhoids only, but I must be careful not to overdo for some months. Give my best regards to your Sister Mary and to Mrs. Harper. Affectionately, U Harriot S. B. Y ALS, ECS Papers, DLC. 1. Over the next months, while finding her footing in the city’s suffrage movement, Harriot Blatch was conspicuous in municipal reform through the West End Women’s Republican Club, Citizens’ Union, and Woman’s Municipal League. See, for example, New York Times, 10 October 1902, 10, 12 April, 5 June 1903. 2. Possibly they hoped to see the portrait of ECS, one of the last works of Lilly Martin Spencer who died in New York City on 22 May 1902. It is believed that Spencer started the picture in 1899, perhaps while ECS spent the summer in the Hudson River Valley near Spencer. Spencer thought she was nearly done with the portrait in June 1901, when she arranged to visit ECS, and she signed it in March 1902. (ECS to L. M. Spencer, 1 June 1901, Film, 42:131–32; New York Times, 23 May 1902; Robin Bolton-Smith and William H. Truettner, Lilly Martin Spencer, 1822–1902: The Joys of Sentiment [Washington, D.C., 1973], 69–70, 230–31.) •••••••••
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ECS to Ida Husted Harper 250 West 94th St New York—Sept 30th 1902
Dear Mrs. Harper, Your letter just received. As I was wide awake last night for hours, when I should have been asleep, I thought of you, and knowing how highly Susan appreciated your work I said to myself: “Now Mrs. Harper is just the person to edit my volumn of speeches and miscellaneous writings![”] 1 Will there be anything left of you when Vol—4— is finished? As you are thoroughly conversant now with the ups and downs of the woman suffrage question, the wrangles, pitfalls and triumphs of its leaders, its friends and its enemies, you are just the one to give the finishing touch to my literary efforts. I note what you say about your daughter. If the church members
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complain of her radicalism, all her husband has to say is: “You must not hold me responsible for my wife’s opinions! We have a right to differ. I do not believe that the husband owns the wife, or has any right to dictate what 2 she shall say or do.” “They are equal factors in the great drama of life; the masculine and feminine elements in the moral world hold the same place that the centripetal and centrifugal forces do in the material world, and it would be as calamitous to order the centripetal to fly off with the centrifugal as to order the masculine and feminine to hold forever the same opinions— We should have chaos as the result in either case.[”] Now tell me if you think you will be able to edit my book, and what you will charge for the work. I am tying to beg the money— I have tried Rockefeller & Carnegie and the former sent me five hundred dollars, which is 3 not enough! The latter turned a deaf ear— I am going to write this very 4 hour to Henry Phipps, of Pittsburg—Pa. When I get the money and you reply we will then decide when, where & how we will begin the work. 5 My secretary has just read to me your preface— I think it very good— and shall make it my chief business to read Vol—4— as soon as I receive it— I think Susan makes a great mistake: She & Roosevelt are the nearest examples of perpetual motion that we have yet had illustrated by any man & 6 woman and now Roosevelt is flat on his back for his many indiscretions. I conjure Susan to stay at home; as long as she can walk up & down Madison Street there is no necessity for her gallivanting off to the ends of the earth Hattie had a letter from Sister Mary the other day, in which she said, that, “Susan was not going to any conventions this winter, but would stay home & rest” to which rational idea we all sang in chorus “A---men!” My message to her is: “Stay at home under Mary’s wing.” If, when Roosevelt’s leg first pained him, he had stopped careering about, and rested under his own roof, he might now be enjoying perfect health— The fact is, he is vain of seeming so strong and active and I am afraid there is a touch of the same feeling in Susan. With kind regards to the trio, Y L, in hand of E. L. White, HM 10691, Ida Harper Collection, CSmH. Signed for ECS by secretary. 1. Harper neared the end of her work writing the fourth volume of the History of Woman Suffrage. ECS died before the book was published. 2. Ida Harper’s son-in-law, George Eliot Cooley, was the new pastor of All Souls’ Liberal Church, a mixed congregation of Universalists and Unitarians in
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Grand Rapids, Michigan. (Dwight Goss, History of Grand Rapids and Its Industries [Chicago, 1906], 2:1175–76; Unitarian Year Book, July 1, 1904 [Boston, 1904], 18.) 3. See Charles O. Heydt to ECS, 27 March 1901, Film, 41:1016. 4. Henry Phipps, Jr., (1839–1930) had been a partner of Andrew Carnegie in a series of steel companies. In retirement at this date, he was a philanthropist. ECS had long admired his scheme to build a great conservatory in a park in Allegheny City on the condition that it be open on Sundays. (DAB; Papers, 4:499–501.) 5. In the preface to the History, Harper recounted how the series began; the work performed by ECS, SBA and Matilda Joslyn Gage on the first three volumes; how it was that she became the author of the fourth volume; and the care she took to verify historical detail as well as legal conditions in fifty states and territories. 6. After President Roosevelt’s carriage collided with a trolley car in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on September 3, his bruises were thought to be slight, and he insisted on keeping all engagements. He headed into Tennessee and the Midwest. On September 23 in Indianapolis, the president required surgery to treat an abscess on his leg. Doctors in Washington confined him to his bed for two weeks, and on September 28, his injury required a second surgery. (Washington Post, 4, 8, 16, 24, 26, 29 September 1902.) •••••••••
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International Declaration of Principles [September? 1902]
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We, the men and women assembled in the First International Woman Suffrage Conference, held in Washington, U.S.A., Feb. 12–18, 1902, do hereby declare our faith in the following principles: 1. That men and women are born equally free and independent members of the human race; equally endowed with talents and intelligence, and equally entitled to the free exercise of their individual rights and liberty. 2. That the natural relation of the sexes is that of interdependence and coöperation, and that a repression of the rights of one inevitably works injury to the other and to the whole race. 3. That in all lands, those laws, creeds, and customs which have tended to restrict women to a position of dependence, to discourage their mental training, to repress the development of their natural gifts, and to subordinate their individuality, have been based upon false theories, and have produced an artificial and unjust relation of the sexes in modern society. 4. That self-government in the home and the State should be the
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inalienable right of every normal adult, and in consequence no individual woman can “owe obedience” to any individual man, as prescribed by old marriage forms, nor can women as a whole owe obedience to men as a whole, as prescribed by modern governments. 5. That the refusal to recognize women as individual members of society, entitled to the right of self-government, has resulted in social, legal, and economic injustice to them, and has intensified the existing economic disturbances throughout the world. 6. That governments which impose taxes and laws upon their women citizens without giving them the right of consent, or dissent, which is granted to men citizens, exercise a tyranny inconsistent with just government. 7. That the ballot is the only legal and permanent means of defending the rights to “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” pronounced inalienable by the American Declaration of Independence, and accepted as inalienable by all civilized nations; therefore, women should be vested with all rights and privileges of electors in a representative form of government. 8. That the rapidly-developing intelligence of women, resulting from new educational opportunities, and the important position in the economic world into which women have been forced by the commercial changes of the last half-century, call for the immediate consideration of this problem by the nations of the world. U Susan B. Anthony, Chairman, United States. U Vida Goldstein,2 Secretary, Australia. U Florence Fenwick Miller, England. U Antonie Stolle,3 Germany. U Emmy Evald,4 Sweden. U Caroline Holman Huidobro,5 Chile. U Gudrun Drewsen,6 Norway. U Rachel Foster Avery, United States. U Anna H. Shaw, United States. U Carrie Chapman Catt, United States. Y Woman’s Journal, 11 October 1902. 1. In a letter dated 6 October 1902 that prefaced this printing of the declaration, Carrie Catt explained who wrote it: officers of the International Suffrage Committee took over the task after a committee named in February failed to complete the job. Delegates to the international meeting had seen and approved this text, she continued. Another printing of the declaration added a footnote to the signatures:
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“Time prevented the submission of the Declaration to Miss Fensham of Turkey and Madam Friedland of Russia.” At Berlin in 1904, the Second International Woman Suffrage Conference dropped the eighth principle from its declaration, but otherwise made only modest alterations to this declaration. (Report of the International Conference, 1902, p. 4; Woman’s Journal, 11 October 1902; “Declaration of Principles,” unidentified and undated clipping, June 1904; all in Film, 42:446ff, 744, 44:231.) 2. Vida Jane Mary Goldstein (1869–1949), a second-generation suffragist, traveled to the United States to attend the international meeting as a representative of her native Australia and of New Zealand. On her return home, with suffrage in her country newly won, she stood for parliament, and turned her attention to providing women with political education. (Douglas Pike et al, eds., Australian Dictionary of Biography [Carlton, Australia, 1983], 9:43–45; Report of the International Conference, 1902, pp. 27–33.) 3. Antonie Stolle (1850–1926) was German-born, the daughter of the scientist Eduard Stolle, and educated in art and art history in Berlin and Geneva. She moved to the United States in 1878, making Massachusetts her home. At first she taught school, working at the Bradford Academy, but by 1884, she was a lecturer about art, famous for her hand-colored reproductions for the stereopticon. Marie Stritt sent the report from Germany for Stolle to read. Her gravestone errs in putting her birth three years after the death of her father. (Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, s.v. “Stolle, Eduard”; Federal Census, 1880, 1900, 1920; Woman’s Who’s Who 1914; gravestone, Forest Hills Cemetery and Crematory, Jamaica Plain, Mass.; Report of the International Conference, 1902, pp. 84–92.) 4. Emmy Christina Carlsson Evald (1857–1946), the daughter of one pastor of the Augustana Lutheran church and wife of another, was born in Illinois of immigrant parents and educated both in Sweden and at Rockford College. At Rockford she was a classmate of Catharine McCulloch and friend of Jane Addams. Organizing women’s missionary work was her career, not only in the United States but also around the world. At the meeting in February 1902, she read a report prepared by the Swedish Council of Women. (Alfred Theodore Andreas, History of Chicago, From the Earliest Period to the Present Time [Chicago, 1884], 1:350–51, 3:821–22; WWW2; National Lutheran Council, New York, press release, 11 December 1946, Archives of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Chicago, Ill.; Report of the International Conference, 1902, pp. 113–16.) 5. Carolina Frances Holman Huidobro (1859–1909) was born in Chile, where her father, George Holman, was the United States consular agent at Valparaiso. She came to the United States for her education as a teen-ager, returned to Chile to teach and write, and moved to Boston in the 1890s. Huidobro was a name she adopted to make herself more credible as a teacher of Spanish and a lecturer on South America. She spoke regularly at suffrage meetings in New England, delivered series of lectures in New York and other cities, and was well-known in the international peace movement. For the meeting in February 1902, she had helped prepare the report on South America. (Milton Rubincam, “American Families in
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Chile,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 109 [October 1955]: 289; New York Times, 14 April 1909; Woman’s Journal, 12 June 1909; Report of the International Conference, 1902, pp. 46–50.) 6. Gudrun Løchen Drewsen (1867–1946) of Norway arrived in Brooklyn, New York, in 1894 as the wife of the Danish chemist, Viggo Drewsen. When the call to an international suffrage meeting in Washington went out, Norway’s Frederikke Marie Qvam asked Drewsen to represent the Landskvinnestemmerettsforeningen, or National Association for Women’s Suffrage, founded in 1898. The request launched Drewsen into the American suffrage movement where she worked particularly among Norwegian immigrants. (Elliott Robert Barkin, ed., Making It in America: A Sourcebook on Eminent Ethnic Americans [Santa Barbara, Calif., 2001]; Report of the International Conference, 1902, pp. 108–13; Ida Blom, “The Struggle for Women’s Suffrage in Norway, 1885–1913,” Scandinavian Journal of History 5, no. 1 [1980]: 3–22; Ida Blom, “Modernity and the Norwegian Women’s Movement from the 1880s to 1914: Changes and Continuities,” in Women’s Emancipation Movements in the Nineteenth Century: A European Perspective, eds. Sylvia Paletschek and Bianka Pietrow-Ennker [Stanford, Calif., 2004], 125–51.) •••••••••
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ECS to the Editor, New York EVENING POST1 New York, October 10 [1902].
To the Editor of The Evening Post, Sir: In view of the recent judicial deci2 sion that the Bible shall not be read in the public schools of Nebraska, I suggest that inasmuch as the Bible degrades woman, and in innumerable passages teaches her absolute subjection to man in all relations, in the State, the Church, the home, and the whole world of work, it is to her interest that the Bible, in its present form, should be taken from the schools, and from the rising generation of boys, as it teaches lessons of disrespect for the mothers of the race. Or else to get out an expurgated edition of the Book, putting in one volume all the grand declarations, the moral lessons, poetry, science, and philosophy, and in another all the Christian mythologies, for those who would value it as ancient literature. The first would then be fit to place in the hands of the rising generation. U Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Y New York Evening Post, 11 October 1902. 1. That is, Horace White.
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2. Nebraska’s supreme court issued its ruling on 9 October 1902. To say that Bible reading in public schools was unconstitutional, the court relied on the section stating, “No sectarian instruction shall be allowed in any school or institution supported in whole or in part by the public funds set apart for educational purposes.” (State of Nebraska, ex rel. Daniel Freeman v. John Scheve et al., 65 Nebraska Reports 853 [1902]; Nebraska Const. of 1875, art. VIII, sec. 11.) •••••••••
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Article by ECS [13 October 1902]
How Shall We Solve the Divorce Problem? A Symposium: Article I Within the past few years a new interest has been awakened in questions relating to marriage and divorce, many of the ablest men in England, France 1 and America recognizing the extreme importance of the subject. In the prolonged debate on the “deceased wife’s sister” bill in the British Parliament we have had the opinions of the leading men of England as to what constitutes marriage and the best conditions to insure the happiness 2 and stability of home life. In the French Chamber of Deputies, where a divorce bill was pending for years, the social relations have been as exhaustively discussed, and now the proposition to secure a general law of divorce in the United States by an amendment to the National Constitution must necessarily rouse a widespread agitation in this country. When a distinguished Judge of the Supreme Court of New York, in an able article in one of our most liberal reviews, suggests important changes that should be made in our laws regulating the marriage relation, it is time 3 for every good citizen to give a candid consideration to this subject. With many points made by this Judge most thoughtful minds must agree, viz., more stringent laws against early marriages; the same moral code for men and women; that marriage should be regulated by the State, by the civil and not the canon law, wholly independent of Church interference, unless the parties desire to solemnize the contract with its ceremonies. Thus far I agree with the Judge; but there are a few other equally vital points that I would suggest for consideration. In common with the British Parliament, the Chamber of Deputies and
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the general spirit of our laws, he regards marriage wholly in its material bearings, and from the man’s standpoint. He says: “Restrictions ought to be imposed on the marriage of infants. The common-law rule of twelve years for females and fourteen for males is not a fit or decent one for this country. The age should be at least fifteen and eighteen years.” On what principle, I would ask, should the party on whom all the inevitable hardships of marriage must fall be the younger to enter the relation? Girls do not get their full growth until twenty-five, and are wholly unfit at fifteen for the trials of maternity. Both mother and child are enfeebled in such premature relations, and the girl robbed of all freedom and sentiment just as she awakes to the sweetest dreams of life. Few fathers or mothers would consent to the marriage of a daughter at fifteen, and the State, by wise laws, should reflect the common sense of the people. What knowledge can a girl of fifteen have of the great problems of social life, of the character of a husband, of the friendship and love of which the true marriage should be an outgrowth? The Judge speaks of divorce as the foe of marriage. He made this mistake throughout his article. Divorce is not the foe of marriage. Adultery, licentiousness, intemperance are its foes. One might as well speak of medicine as the foe of health. Again, in subordinating the individual to the State, the premises of the Judge were unsound. He said: “The interests of society are first and paramount, those of individuals secondary and subordinate.” We have so often heard the declaration that the individual must be sacrificed to society that we have come to think their interests lie in opposite directions, whereas the reverse of this is true. Whatever promotes the best interests of the individual promotes the best interests of society and vice versa. The normal condition of adult men and women is one of individual independence, of freedom and of equality; their first duty the full development of their own faculties and powers, with a natural right to life, liberty and happiness, and of resistance to all artificial contrivances that endanger life, curtail liberty or destroy happiness. The best interests of the individual are the primal consideration; individual happiness, the only true basis of a happy home; a united Church, a peaceful State, a well-organized society. “We must first have units,” says 4 Emerson, “before we can have unions.” We must have harmoniously developed men and women before we can
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have happy marriages. The central idea of barbarism has ever been the family, the tribe, the nation, never the individual; the Roman or pagan idea was that the individual was made for the State. The Christian idea is the sacredness of the individual, superior to all human institutions. It was this central truth, taught by the Great Founder of our religion, that gave Christianity such a hold on the people, slowly moulding popular thought to the higher idea, culminating at last in the Protestant Reformation and a republican government, alike based on individual rights, on individual conscience and judgment. I cannot estimate the importance of this discussion in the “American.” Two of the most vital questions up for consideration just now are marriage and divorce, the canon and civil laws, the action of State and Church on this relation. Though these questions involve alike the most vital interests of man and woman and of the race, yet man alone has ever had a word to say in regard to this subject. The consequence is, we have the masculine, but not the feminine sentiments; force, but not love, represented, and from the large share of discordant marriages we have defrauded half the race of their normal morality and beauty. The question of divorce, like marriage, should be settled as to its most sacred relations by the parties themselves. Neither the State nor the Church has any right. As to the property and children, they must be viewed and regulated as a civil contract. Then the union should be dissolved with at least as much deliberation and publicity as it was formed. The parties might simply declare that after living together for several years they found themselves still unsuited to each other and incapable of making a happy home. If divorce were made respectable and recognized by society as a duty as well as a right, reasonable common sense on the part of both parties could arrange all the preliminaries, including the division of property and the guardianship of children, quite as satisfactorily as it can be done in the courts. Where the mother is capable of training the children a sensible father would leave them to her care rather than place them in the hands of a stranger. But where divorce is not respectable, men who have no paternal feeling will often hold the child, not so much for its own good as to punish the wife for disgracing him.
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The love of children is not strong in most men, and they feel but little responsibility in regard to them. See how readily they turn off young sons to shift for themselves, and unless the law compelled them to support their illegitimate children they would never give them a second’s thought. On the mother soul rests forever the care and responsibility of human life, and we never can have a pure civilization until the mother of the race is free and independent. She must be the peer of man everywhere, standing side by side with him in the State, the Church and the home, equally versed in science, art and philosophy. As in the nine months of pre-natal life she stamps every soul for weal or woe born into the world, possessing an influence no man can know, it is a fatal mistake to rob her of this supreme power; and until she is recognized as an equal civilization stands at a deadlock. What the centripetal and centrifugal forces are in the material world the masculine and feminine forces are in the moral world, and either out of perfect equilibrium means chaos. When woman is made whole we shall be blessed with such a generation of scholars, statesmen and saints as this world has never seen before. One of the greatest canons in the English Church, Charles Kingsley, said long ago: “This will never be a good world for woman until the last remnant of the canon law is civilized from the face of the earth.” Lord Brougham, another distinguished Englishman with equal authority in the State, said: “The common laws for woman are a disgrace to the 5 Christianity and civilization of the nineteenth century.” John Stuart Mill, when the slaves were emancipated in the Island of Jamaica, said: “Marriage for woman is now the only form of slavery we have 6 left.” We give woman away in marriage, and make her promise to obey her husband; the civil law gives him the right to chastise her, lock her up at his pleasure and rob her of her children and property. He not only owns her, but her clothes, her wig, her false teeth, her cork leg if she has one, and if she meets with an accident on the cars he recovers the price of her injuries! In fact, he owns her absolutely, body and soul. Our daughters as well as our sons should be educated to self-support, and both trained not to marry earlier than twenty-five years of age, as until then they are not physically developed, nor have the sufficient judgment for so responsible a relation.
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It is cruel for girls to be allowed to marry in their teens, and thus be early deprived of all the freedom and pleasures of youth. But if, in violation of such rules, they do marry and are happy together, neither State nor Church should interfere except to help them make the best of the situation. Divorce should be granted wherever the parties are antagonistic and hopelessly discordant: for cruelty, desertion, drunkenness, insanity, adultery, imprisonment and incurable disease, if either party desires it. There is a demand just now by conservatives for reform divorce laws. As they differ widely in every part of the nation, as many States are very liberal, and as judges and bishops who would have the most influence in convocations called for that purpose, would be in favor of restrictive laws and would essentially change them, the relation of marriage would not be much liberalized by such a step, but the proposed national law would only place the whole question on a narrower basis, rendering null and void the laws that have been passed in a broader spirit according to the needs and experiences in certain sections of the sovereign people; and here let us bear in mind that the widest possible law would not make divorce obligatory on any one, while a restricted law, on the contrary, would compel many, marrying perhaps under more liberal laws, to remain in uncongenial relations. As we are still in the experimental stage on this question, we are not qualified to make a perfect law that would work satisfactorily over a country as vast as ours. Local self-government more readily permits of experiments on mooted questions which are the outcome of the needs and convictions of the community. By leaving the States free to experiment in their local affairs, we can judge of the working of different laws under varying circumstances and thus ascertain definitely their comparative merits. As it is now, the States that have more liberal divorce laws are for woman to-day what Canada was for the fugitive in the old days of slavery. Y New York American and Journal, 13 October 1902. 1. With this article, the newspaper launched a series of articles by distinguished writers, “for the discussion,” as the editor announced with ECS’s contribution, “of how best to check the divorce evil, the great national disgrace, and preserve the purity of the American home.” 2. Until 1907 British law forbade the marriage of a widower and his wife’s sister,
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but Parliament repeatedly debated Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister bills. See Margaret Morganroth Gullette, “The Puzzling Case of the Deceased Wife’s Sister: Nineteenth-Century England Deals with a Second-Chance Plot,” Representations 31 (Summer 1990): 142–66. 3. ECS here copies the next ten paragraphs from her earlier article, “The Need of Liberal Divorce Laws,” North American Review 139 (September 1884): 234–45, Film, 23:951–62, wherein she debated Noah Davis (1818–1902), at the time a justice of the Supreme Court of New York. (BDAC.) 4. To Ralph Waldo Emerson, “unit” was a word denoting a solitary individual, complete in his character. True unions, whether civic or romantic, required prior attainment of this state of self-reliance and fulfillment. See especially his essays “The American Scholar” and “Love.” 5. On the quotations from Canon Kingsley and Lord Brougham, see note above at 14 February 1898. 6. ECS adapts a sentence in “The Subjection of Women,” in Mill, Collected Works, 21:323. •••••••••
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Florence Beeton Everett1 to ECS Oct 15—1902—n2545 N. Oakley avep Chicago
Todays ‘American’ has a half-page that should be framed or better still 2 writ large or megaphoned everywhere— How many hearts today will thrill in response, & how many heads will begin to think!! It is by a G.O.W. God bless her! So say all of us! U Florence Everett (née Florence Beeton) Y ANS on postal card, ECS Papers, DLC. Postmarked at Chicago; addressed to New York. 1. Florence M. Beeton Everett (1857–?), an Englishwoman, lived for some years in Victoria, British Columbia, with her parents, before marrying Alfred B. Everett in 1899 and moving with him to Chicago. Henry C. Beeton, her father, was a London merchant and the agent-general for British Columbia, with many Canadian investments. Alfred Everett, seventeen years her senior and in the United States since 1860, had a floral business in Chicago. Florence Everett became a citizen in 1906. After her husband’s death in 1908, she taught school, gave dramatic readings, and delivered lectures to women’s clubs. In 1920, she moved back to England. (Census of Great Britain, 1881; Census of Canada, 1891; Victor G. Plarr, Men and Women of the Time: A Dictionary of Contemporaries, 14th ed. [London, 1895], s.v.
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“Beeton, Henry Coppinger”; Federal Census, 1900, 1910, 1920; Report of death for Alfred B. Everett, 9 January 1908, Department of Health, City of Chicago; city directories, 1900, 1901, 1910; Chicago Daily Tribune, 26 January 1908; passport application, 31 August 1920, DNA.) 2. Probably a reference to Hearst’s Chicago American, a paper launched in 1900. When the New York American and Journal, 12 October 1902, announced the series that began in its pages a day later, the editor referred to ECS as the “Grand Old Woman of America,” abbreviated in this postcard as “G.O.W.” •••••••••
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ECS to William R. Hearst New York, Oct. 21, 1902. 1
Mr. W. R. Hearst, Editor the “American.” I have read all the contributions so far printed in your grand symposium on Divorce, and though several proposed a national divorce law, not one has suggested that any woman should help in drafting such a law. 2 I have just finished reading Bishop Fitzgerald’s Article, No. 7 in the series. He proposes that a commission of eminent ecclesiastics and distinguished lawyers be appointed to frame a national divorce law, and by all means we should have a woman on such a commission. 3 I will submit another paper to you for this discussion in a few days. This is by all odds the very best discussion that was ever carried on in a newspaper. The articles are also being presented in an altogether dignified and admirable manner. Sincerely yours, U Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Y New York American, 22 October 1902. Not in Film. 1. With the issue of 18 October 1902, the New York American became the new, shorter title of William Hearst’s newspaper. 2. Oscar Penn Fitzgerald (1829–1911) became a Methodist bishop in 1890, after a varied career as a writer, missionary, and editor. For his article, summarized here by ECS, see New York American, 20 October 1902. (DAB.) 3. Film, 42:861.
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ECS to Theodore Roosevelt New York, October 22d, 1902.
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Dear Sir—As you are the first President of the United States who has ever given a public opinion in favor of woman suffrage, and, when Governor of New York State, recommended the measure in a message to the Legislature, the members of the different suffrage associations in the United States now urge you to advocate, in your coming message to Congress, an amendment to the National Constitution for the enfranchisement of the thirty-six million American women, now denied their most sacred right as citizens of a 2 Republic. In the beginning of our nation, the fathers declared that “no just government can be founded without the consent of the governed,” and that “taxation without representation is tyranny.” Both of these grand declarations are denied in the present position of woman, who constitutes one-half of the people. If “ political power inheres in the people”—and women are surely people—then there is a crying need for an amendment to the National Constitution, making these fundamental principles verities. Surely there is no greater monopoly than that of all men denying to all women a voice in the laws they are compelled to obey. Abraham Lincoln immortalized himself by the emancipation of four million Southern slaves. Speaking for my suffrage coadjutors, we now desire that you, Mr. President, who are already celebrated for so many honorable deeds and worthy utterances, immortalize yourself by bringing about our complete emancipation from the slavery of the past. With best wishes for your continued honorable career and re-election as President of the United States, U Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Y Independent 54 (6 November 1902): 2621. 1. When the Independent published this letter alongside the one to Edith Roosevelt dated 25 October 1902 below, the editor’s note explained that ECS, at the time of her death, “was engaged in preparing documents and letters urging upon President Roosevelt the claims of woman suffrage. The very last letter she wrote, dictated to her secretary on Saturday, twenty-four hours before her death,
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was addressed to Mrs. Roosevelt. The letters to the President and his wife were to have been recopied and signed on Monday. We are able to give below these two letters and a third document. The originals have been sent by the family to Mrs. Roosevelt.” 2. In his annual message of 2 January 1899, Governor Theodore Roosevelt included a paragraph headed “School Suffrage” that read in full, “I call the attention of the legislature to the desirability of gradually extending the sphere in which the suffrage can be exercised by women.” (Theodore Roosevelt, State Papers as Governor and President, 1899–1909, vol. 15 of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, National Edition [New York, 1926], 21.) •••••••••
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ECS to Edith Carow Roosevelt,1 with Enclosure 250 West 94th st New York Oct. 25 [1902]
Dear Mrs Roosevelt, Please read & consider this enclosed letter to the women of the Nation, in regard to the action of our President on the woman suffrage question. Do lend your influence to rouse the women to their duty on this subject, & urge the President to recommend, in his coming message to Congress, an amendment to the constitution, for the enfranchisement of the thirty-six million women citizens of this Republic. With kind regards Y L, in hand of E. L. White, in the collection of Coline Jenkins, Greenwich, Conn. Signed for ECS by secretary.
Enclosure Oct 20th 1902 Women Appeal to the President In July, 1848, history records the first movement among women for the discussion of their political, religious and social wrongs. Since then the demand for the right of suffrage has extended over many countries and has been granted, in one form or another, in the United States, in England and her colonies, in Australia, New Zealand, the Isle of 2 Man and New South Wales.
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Tax-paying women have voted by proxy in several nations of the Old World for many years. In the long history of woman’s wrongs there never has been so favorable a time to demand her complete emancipation in the United States as now, for we have for the first time in this Republic, a President who has declared himself in favor of woman’s political equality— When President Roosevelt was Governor of New York he recommended the enfranchisement of the women of the State in his message to the New York Legislature, and expressed the same opinion on several public occasions. Now is the opportune time for leading women to ask the President to make the same demand in his coming message to Congress, for this act of justice to thirty-six million American citizens, now defrauded of their most sacred right, one that underlies all others, a voice in the laws— For, as the Fathers said long ago: “No just government can be formed without the consent of the governed.” In a speech made by the President at Fitchburg on Labor Day, he said that he was: “In favor of an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, conferring additional power upon the federal government to deal 3 with corporations” To control and restrain giant monopolies for the best interests of all the people is of vast import, but of far vaster importance is the establishment and protection of the rights and liberties of one-half the people of the United States—the most moral half too—namely, women— Surely there is no greater monopoly than that of all men, in denying to all women a voice in the laws they are compelled to obey Y Ms, in hand of E. L. White, in the collection of Coline Jenkins, Greenwich, Conn. Signed for ECS by secretary. 1. Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt (1861–1948), first lady of the United States, was the second wife of Theodore Roosevelt and mother of five children. (NAW; ANB.) 2. On the spread of woman suffrage in the colonies of Great Britain, see Helen Blackburn, “Great Britain: Efforts for the Parliamentary Franchise,” History, 4:1025–34. 3. On 2 September 1902. See Theodore Roosevelt, Presidential Addresses and State Papers, February 19, 1902 to May 13, 1903 [New York, 1910], 1:137–44, quotation p. 141.
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SBA to ECS [Rochester, before 26 October 1902]
My Dear Mrs. Stanton:— I shall indeed be happy to spend with you the day on which you round out your four score and seven, over four years ahead of me, but, in age as in all else, I follow you closely. It is fifty-one years since first we met, and we have been busy through every one of them, stirring up the world to recognize the rights of women. The older we grow, the more keenly we feel the humiliation of disfranchisement, and the more vividly we realize its disadvantages in every department of life, and most of all in the labor market. We little dreamed when we began this contest, optimistic with the hope and buoyancy of youth, that half a century later we would be compelled to leave the finish of the battle to another generation of women. But our hearts are filled with joy to know that they enter upon this task equipped with a college education, with business experience, with the fully admitted right to speak in public—all of which were denied to women fifty years ago. They have practically but one point to gain—the suffrage; we had all. These strong, courageous, capable young women will take our place and complete our work. There is an army of them, where we were but a handful; ancient prejudice has become so softened, public sentiment so liberalized, and women have so thoroughly demonstrated their ability, as to leave not a shadow of doubt that they will carry our cause to victory. And we, dear old friend, shall move on the next sphere of existence— higher and larger, we cannot fail to believe, and one where women will not be placed in an inferior position, but will be welcomed on a plane of perfect intellectual and spiritual equality. Ever lovingly yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y Pearson’s Magazine (American edition) 14 (December 1902): unpaginated. Printed with a facsimile signature.
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Telegrams from Harriot Stanton Blatch to SBA New York Oct 26 1902
Mother passed away today
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U Harriot Stanton Blatch T* New York Oct 26 1902
Private funeral for you & ourselves only, Wednesday eleven. apartment full. trained nurse Maggie ill. U Harriot Stanton Blatch Y Forms of Western Union Telegraph Company, ECS Papers, DLC. 1. When she donated this telegram to the Library of Congress, SBA wrote near it: “First Telegram—of Mrs. Stanton’s death—or indeed of her illness!! Oct 26th Sunday p.m.—” •••••••••
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Article by ECS [27 October 1902] An Answer to Bishop Stevens
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In his article the Bishop of North Carolina deals with scientific matter, but instead of giving biological proof of his first assertion that husband and wife are one flesh, or sociological statistics in support of his second assertion that the “disruption of one flesh” is bad, he quotes the Bible. But I decline to accept Hebrew Mythology as a guide in twentieth century science. In the beginning of his article, the Bishop declares that the wife should be allowed divorce on no ground whatsoever. But after endeavoring to
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bring agreement out of the contradictions of the Bible, he thinks it a “troublesome case,” and decides it might be expedient to allow divorce for desertion. Put simply this is the Bishop’s position: If a drunken man comes home every night and beats his wife, she must not divorce her husband; but if the same drunken man does not lift his hand against his wife, but on the contrary runs away and leaves her alone, then she may divorce him. The common-sense, plain people of the nation know life, and will not follow the advice of men who turn for guidance to writings of a people of 2,000 years ago. More and more intelligent people embrace truth as it is revealed to-day by human reason. I agree with exactly one sentence of the Bishop—“Most women will object to this article.” 2 I commend instead of the myths of the second chapter of Genesis, the following verses which theologians always overlook: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them. “And God blessed them. God said unto them . . . have dominion over every living thing.”—Gen., 1, 27 and 28. Y New York American, 27 October 1902. 1. Peter Fayssoux Stevens (1830–1910) of South (not North) Carolina was an alumnus and former superintendent of the Citadel, officer in the Confederate army, and bishop in the Reformed Episcopal Church for a special jurisdiction in the South. He worked primarily with African-American churches. The contribution by Stevens and this response by ECS appeared in the same issue of the New York American, although editorial notes near each article stated otherwise. The editor described her reply to Stevens as “the very last article written by Mrs. Stanton.” (Samuel Macauley Jackson et al., eds., The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge [New York, 1911], 11:88; Annie Darling Price, A History of the Formation and Growth of the Reformed Episcopal Church, 1873–1902 [Philadelphia, 1902], 275–76.) 2. Gen. 2:21–25. Stevens endorsed and exploited this account of God making woman from a rib of Adam in his pronouncement, “Just as Eve was made of Adam, not Adam of Eve, so the wife becomes a member of the husband, not the husband a member of the wife.”
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SBA to Friend 250—West 94 street New York Oct. 27n8p, 1902 1
Dear Friend at Buffalo— It seems to me you must forgive me for not going to Buffalo—tomorrow nights train—after the funeral—which is to be at 11 Oclock—the burial 2 about 2 p.m.—but may be I shall come— I will send you Mr Conway’s remarks—but—then dear Rev Anna H. Shaw will be a host in herself— she will say all & better than I could—for I have no language to express the feelings that surge throug my brain— I shall be with you in spirit on Thursday—when you have a memorial— I should think you had better announce the last evening session as such— We have lost our great leader of thought— the young women cannot try too hard to imitate her—taking “Truth for Authority not authority for truth”—in the language of her friend & coworker Lucretia Mott— Her very last letter said with regard to Divorce—she did not care to take the myths & fables of the past ages—rather than the “Science of the Twentieth 3 Century”— When women come to care more for scientific facts—than the myths & superstitions of the past—we shall grow more rapidly than we can imagine now— With love & sympathy U Susan B. Anthony p.s. N.B.—It is my wish that N.Y. State Suffrage Association shall set the pace—and urge all the Woman Clubs throughout the nation to celebrate— Nov. 12th her 87th birth-day— If we could have that done all over—it would tend to rouse the women as nothing else can— talk to Miss Shaw— and see if it is not best to make that a memorial day—Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, SBA Papers, MCR-S. In Film at 29 October 1902. 1. SBA probably answers a telegram from Anna L. Osborn Williams, president of the Buffalo Political Equality Club and host of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association convention, that said, “Am grieved for you Do not abandon Buffalo it needs you.” Williams (1833–?), founder and head of a boarding and day school for young ladies and children in Buffalo and known as Mrs. Richard Williams, led the club until 1910. During the ECS memorial session on opening
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day, Anna Shaw read this letter. (Woman’s Who’s Who 1914; Federal Census, 1880; Commerce, Manufactures and Resources of Buffalo and Environs: A Descriptive Historical and Statistical Review [Buffalo, N.Y., 1880], 35; A. O. Williams to SBA, 27 October 1902, and Buffalo Daily Courier, 30 October 1902, Film, 42:834, 847–49.) 2. Moncure Daniel Conway (1832–1907), a Unitarian minister and writer, lived in London from 1863 to 1885 and became a friend of ECS there in 1883. A handwritten copy of his speech made by family members can be found in ECS Papers, DLC; Conway published it in Free Thought Magazine 21 (January 1903): 11–13. (ANB. See also Papers 3–5.) 3. Above at 27 October 1902. •••••••••
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SBA to Ida Husted Harper 250—West 94th street New York—Tuesday—Oct. 28, 1902—
Dear Mrs Harper— 1 I found my nephew Arthur at the Station last night—went direct to his house—Graham Court—Corner of 116th & 7th avenue— after dinner—first, I had Arthur telegraph you—& then after dinner I telephoned Hattie Stanton that I was there—and she came over immediately—with Nora—who had arrived in the a.m.—and Bob & their Cousin— Well, it is an awful hush—it seems impossible—that the voice is hushed—that I have longed to hear for 50 years—longed to get her opinion of things—before I knew exactly where I stood— It is all at sea—but the Laws of Nature are still going on—with no shadow or turning— What a world it is—it goes right on & on—no matter who lives or who dies!! They have had nap cablegrams from Mrs Jacob Bright of England— showing how one the nations are— The whole world knows of the fact!— 2 The Sun had good Editorials this a.m.— The Tribune very good —The Times—I do not know—I can think of nothing— The Telegram—(Eve3 ning)—had reporter at my nephews this a.m. —and the Sun Reporter met me as I came out—but oh the lack of knowledge— I wish Vol IV—was done—so we could give it to every one who asks— How shall we ever make the world intelligent—as ever U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, HM 10692, Ida Harper Collection, CSmH.
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1. That is, Arthur A. Mosher. 2. In the New York Sun, 28 October 1902, the editorial celebrated progress in women’s legal and economic standing since 1848 and called ECS “the heroine of the victory.” The New York Tribune, 28 October 1902, drew from Eighty Years for anecdotes of ECS’s life and closed with her recent “attention to the relation of women to the canon law.” 3. See New York Evening Telegram, 28 October 1902. Not in Film. •••••••••
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Lavina A. Hatch to SBA Oct 28th 1902 East Pembroke Mass
Dear Miss A The expected picture came safely and is now in the the hands of those who have the future disposal of it. I did not think, as I sat looking at it, and thinking of you and Mrs Stanton, that she would pass on so soon, though I have often wondered how, in the inactive manner which she has indulged for several years, she could hold out as long as she has. But I think it was her unusually active brain at work that has helped her to hold out bodily. As you, with your always active habits, and healthy, natural way of living, are likely to do good work here for many years longer, do not expend strength in grieving over the loss of so well spent a life as hers has been. I shall expect soon to hear that you have worked up something original, some work for the younger suffragists to do, to help on the day when women who desire to accomplish more for the good of humanity, can have the opportunity to do so. Let it be one of the brightest thoughts of your life, and give the present workers an inspiration to urge on the work with the 1 consecration and unselfishness that you have done all these years. With thanks I am aff ’y yours U Lavina A. Hatch Y ALS, ECS Papers, DLC. Beneath the signature, SBA wrote “Miss Hatch died very soon after— S. B. A.” 1. Lavina Hatch died on 20 March 1903.
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SBA to Clara Bewick Colby Rochester, N.Y., October 31, 1902
My Dear Mrs Colby—I returned last night from the last sad sitting with our beloved—I wish that you could have been there that you might have written it up. That I should always be everywhere to see and hear the things that ought to be written, and yet be powerless to put the feelings into words, is too cruel. Your pen would surely have been equal to the occasion had you been there. The coffin was covered with flowers. A beautiful bunch of red roses in some shape, I cannot tell what, from the women of Colorado. The 1 National Association, by the hand of Mrs. Kate Gordon, the corresponding secretary, sent a beautiful testimonial of flowers. The Colored Women’s 2 Hospital sent a beautiful bunch of flowers. The Brooklyn Elizabeth Cady 3 Stanton Club, and clubs from various parts of the country sent their 4 testimonials. Charlotte B. Wilbour sent a beautiful wreath and there was another sent by a distant relative from New Haven. But I cannot linger on them. The whole casket was completely covered and embedded with flowers, then there were lovely palms in the back of the room, and my picture was exactly over the coffin. The scene was beautiful. Mr. Moncure D. Conway sat on the left, and Rev. Antoinette Brown on the right of the folding doors. Then I sat next to Mr. Conway, and next her most tenderly beloved Elizabeth Smith Miller, Gerrit Smith’s daughter, whom she always wrote 5 to as “Johnson,” Phoebe Hanaford, Charlotte B. Wilbour, Mrs. Blake, and then the family and a few others. Mr. Conway’s remarks were surpassingly fine. If you choose you may write directly to him, 22 E. Tenth street, for the Sun did not I believe, print them in full, but it has the best of anything I have seen published, but the Tribune ought to have the words exactly as he said them. It seemed to me they were very comprehensive and covered her whole character. I will write Phoebe Hanaford to send you what she said at the grave. If I was a “word artist,” as I used to call Mrs. Stanton, I could tell you of my feelings at the going out of so grand a soul. But “be still and know that I am God,” is all 6 that I can say. Lovingly yours, U Susan B. Anthony.
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Y Woman’s Tribune, 8 November 1902. 1. Kate M. Gordon (1861–1932), founder of the Era Club in New Orleans and a white supremacist, was chosen corresponding secretary of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association in 1901. For a time, she moved to New York City to work at headquarters. (NAW; ANB.) 2. It is likely that she refers to the Colored Home and Hospital and Training School for Nurses in the Bronx, though its name changed in August 1902 to the Lincoln Hospital and Home. Managed by some of the city’s wealthiest white women and staffed by white, male physicians, this charitable institution, founded in 1839, opened the school for African-American women to study nursing in 1898. Booker T. Washington took an interest in its students, assuring them, when he visited in March 1901, “of a broad field for their labor in the South.” (Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., Encyclopedia of New York City [New Haven, Conn., 1995], 256; New York Times, 8 December 1900, 8 August 1902; Colored Home and Hospital, Sixtyfirst Annual Report [New York, 1901], 8.) 3. The Elizabeth Cady Stanton Political Equality League was founded in Brooklyn in 1899 as a constituent group of the Kings County Political Equality League. (Brooklyn Daily Eagle Almanac. 1901, 316.) 4. Charlotte Beebe Wilbour (1833–1914) lived in Paris from 1874 until 1896, when she returned to New York City after the death of her husband. She had been a leading organizer of women in New York before their move: she was secretary of the Women’s Loyal National League, an officer in the New York and National suffrage associations, a founder of Sorosis, and a planner of the first Woman’s Congress in 1873. She and her family moved abroad when Charles Edwin Wilbour came under scrutiny for his association with the Tweed Ring. (NCAB, 13:370; New York Times, 26 December 1914; file on C. B. Wilbour, Sorosis Collection, MNS-S. See also Papers 1–5.) 5. Phebe Ann Coffin Hanaford (1829–1921), a retired Universalist minister, had been associated with ECS since the late 1860s when she worked with Isabella Hooker and Olympia Brown. In the 1880s, she held office in the National Woman Suffrage Association. (NAW; Past and Promise: Lives of New Jersey Women, 148– 50.) 6. Ps. 46:10.
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SBA to Mary McHenry Keith Rochester, N.Y. Nov. 28, ’02
My dear friend:— ¶1 I have just finished reading the speech you delivered at the State 1 Suffrage Association held October 25th. It is really very excellent. You struck the key note when you said that we had state co-education in only four states, for whatever may be done for woman, so long as she is disfranchised, denied a voice in the making and enforcing of the laws in City, State and Nation, there can be no real work begun in the direction of Equality. Your two women in California, of course you mean Mrs. Hurst and Mrs. Stanford, are doing splendidly, but what does the president who has visited your high school mean? Does he really want 2 to shut the girls out of the schools because they make it too feminine? ¶2 Your story of the woman in Berkeley with her six small children her only bequest from her husband, came very pat. I do wish that men could see that “women have done their full share of thinking, planning, 3 worrying and fighting for everything” that has been gained so far, and will have to fight on to maintain what they have got, for men seem inclined to take away from us, even that which we thought we had, for 4 instance, Mr. Harper, of Chicago University. ¶3 Wendell Phillips used to say in the olden time, that when the lioness painted pictures, they would be as handsome as the lion, and I think when women come to write their books out of their hearts and consciences instead of writing just what will sell on the market, we shall have some truths told that men have never yet heard, but when the time will come that women will be free, and speak their full thought, I hardly know. ¶4 I see that you elected Mrs. Sperry for president. That is a good move. She links the old people to the new, and I hope you will come forward with a great deal of unanimity of feeling, and sustain her right royally. 5 ¶5 How is dear Mrs. Wood. Her afflictions are terrible. ¶6 We are just going to press with Volume IV of the History. It has been
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a long drawn out agony of getting that book done, but it will be worth having, that is sure. I have sent a letter with the circular announcing the fact that it was done, to nearly all of the 4000 libraries in the country, and we are getting a few orders for the book. A library in San Francisco sent for Volume I the other day through a book dealer. You would think they must see that when I sent out the circular about the book, that I handled the whole of the 4 volumes. There is no other person who has to do with the History. Have you the books in the State University? They ought to be in every college library where students can have access to them, and I think my Life and Work, and Mrs. Stanton’s Eighty years and More will be good to be there also. ¶7 The world seems the poorer that Mrs. Stanton is gone out of it, and yet her writings, and speeches will speak for her through the History of Woman Suffrage, and in almost every place there is something to remind us that she has lived, and that she still lives. Do you remember her when she was in California in 1871? She was then in the prime of life, spoke with her full vigor and was beautiful to look at and beautiful to hear. I think she had the most melodious and richest voice in speaking that I ever heard. But she is gone, and we shall ne’er see her like 6 7 again. With kind regards to your mother and your husband, I am, Affectionately yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Keith-McHenry-Pond Family Papers, C-B 595, CU-BANC. Directed to Berkeley, Cal. 1. Mary M. Keith, Address Delivered at the California State Suffrage Asssociation (Annual Convention), San Francisco, October 25, 1902, by Mrs. William Keith (Berkeley, Calif., n.d.). Keith’s topic was the status of young women in coeducation and the trend she called “a tendency to crowd her back a page.” SBA refers to Keith’s assertion that without voting rights, coeducation was insecure. 2. Keith reports that the president of the Berkeley campus toured the state’s high schools and returned with the alarming news “that everywhere he went he found that the girls outnumbered the boys. ‘Something must be done,’ he said, ‘to protect our boys!’ ” 3. SBA quotes an editor used by Keith as a foil in her speech. To him “’women were the camp-followers of existence.’” Keith’s account of the widow answers the editor’s foolishness. 4. William R. Harper, president of the University of Chicago, was a reluctant manager of coeducation when the school opened in 1892, and in 1902, he proposed segregated classes for the large and successful female half of the student
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body. Alumnae, local women’s clubs, and regional suffrage societies were quick to protest but unable to stop the change. (Lynn D. Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era [New Haven, Conn., 1990], 112–17.) 5. Annie Eliza Rogers Wood (1835–1906) was president of the California Equal Suffrage Association from 1900 to 1902. Born in Philadelphia and married to Charles Leland Wood in 1855 in Ohio, Wood gave birth to three children in Minnesota, before the family moved to Alameda, California, in the mid-1880s. There her husband had a lumber business. (Federal Census, St. Paul, Minn., 1880, and Alameda, Calif., 1900; San Francisco Call, 14 February 1906; Woman’s Journal, 24 March 1906; notes from family Bible, in editors’ files.) 6. Ellen Josephine Metcalfe McHenry (1827–1922), a writer and San Francisco pioneer, was Mary Keith’s mother. (Guide to the Keith-McHenry-Pond Family Papers, C-B 595, CU-BANC.) 7. William Keith (1838–1911) came to the United States from Scotland as a boy, worked as an engraver, and settled in California in 1859, becoming one of its most successful landscape painters. In 1883, he married Mary McHenry as his second wife. (DAB; Guide to the Keith-McHenry-Pond Family Papers, C-B 595, CUBANC.)
Textual Notes ¶4 ¶6 ¶7
l. 3 ll. 7–8 l. 7
feelingn, and sustain her right royally.p I handled them nwhole of the 4 volumes.p melodious and richnestp voice •••••••••
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Margaret Richardson Sievwright and Christina K. Henderson1 to SBA Gisborne New Zealand December 22 1902
Dear Madam, In this hour of separation from the life-long friend, who has lately received a summons to come up higher, the Executive of the National Council of the Women of N.Z. feels constrained to offer you its heartfelt sympathy. We can scarcely hope that the feeling of inseparable loss will ever be quite healed; but, gradually, we trust sweet memories of the grand and fruitful work you and Mrs Stanton have accomplished together will take the place of sadness, and you will realize how fitting it seems, that you, who have always borne the hardest burdens, should also have found yourself chosen to meet this final blow.
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Wherever the English tongue is spoken, there will the names of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton be by-and-by cherished, loved and venerated by a now rapidly evolving humanity. Praying that you may be long spared to see of the travail of your soul, and to have your heart’s dearest desire granted, We remain, dear Madam, Yours faithfully U M. H. Sievwright, President Christina Henderson, Secretary Y TLS, on letterhead of National Council of the Women of New Zealand, ECS Papers, DLC. Directed to Rochester, U.S.A. 1. Margaret Home Richardson Sievwright (1844–1905) and Christina Kirk Henderson (1861–1953) wrote as officers of New Zealand’s National Council of Women, founded in 1896 after women won the vote. Sievwright, born in Scotland, trained for nursing with Florence Nightingale before moving to New Zealand in 1870. Through the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, she became a leading advocate of woman suffrage. Henderson was born in Australia but raised in New Zealand. She trained for teaching, taught in a girls’ high school, and became president of the Association of Women Teachers at its founding in 1901. (New Zealand Ministry of Culture and Heritage, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand [On-line encyclopedia, 2005—].) •••••••••
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Interview with SBA in Rochester [26 January 1903] 1
“I believe Mr. Smoot, the Mormon apostle, will take his seat in the United States Senate and that he will keep it. There seems to me no possibility of prevention.” Miss Anthony was at her comfortable home, 17 Madison Street, looking as vigorous as ever. February 16 next she is to celebrate her 83d milestone 2 on the great highway. “You will find,” she said, “that Helen Gould and many other women, especially members of the Presbyterian clubs in New York, will be deeply opposed to Mr. Smoot’s ambitions on the ground that he is a Mormon apostle, and because the Mormon church is said to approve of polygamy. The W.C.T.U. is taking steps to oppose him, and all this is done because of prejudice to his religion. Whether or not he should be seated, I do not care to give out any opinion, but I am certain he has every right to the office he
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Wherever the English tongue is spoken, there will the names of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton be by-and-by cherished, loved and venerated by a now rapidly evolving humanity. Praying that you may be long spared to see of the travail of your soul, and to have your heart’s dearest desire granted, We remain, dear Madam, Yours faithfully U M. H. Sievwright, President Christina Henderson, Secretary Y TLS, on letterhead of National Council of the Women of New Zealand, ECS Papers, DLC. Directed to Rochester, U.S.A. 1. Margaret Home Richardson Sievwright (1844–1905) and Christina Kirk Henderson (1861–1953) wrote as officers of New Zealand’s National Council of Women, founded in 1896 after women won the vote. Sievwright, born in Scotland, trained for nursing with Florence Nightingale before moving to New Zealand in 1870. Through the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, she became a leading advocate of woman suffrage. Henderson was born in Australia but raised in New Zealand. She trained for teaching, taught in a girls’ high school, and became president of the Association of Women Teachers at its founding in 1901. (New Zealand Ministry of Culture and Heritage, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand [On-line encyclopedia, 2005—].) •••••••••
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Interview with SBA in Rochester [26 January 1903] 1
“I believe Mr. Smoot, the Mormon apostle, will take his seat in the United States Senate and that he will keep it. There seems to me no possibility of prevention.” Miss Anthony was at her comfortable home, 17 Madison Street, looking as vigorous as ever. February 16 next she is to celebrate her 83d milestone 2 on the great highway. “You will find,” she said, “that Helen Gould and many other women, especially members of the Presbyterian clubs in New York, will be deeply opposed to Mr. Smoot’s ambitions on the ground that he is a Mormon apostle, and because the Mormon church is said to approve of polygamy. The W.C.T.U. is taking steps to oppose him, and all this is done because of prejudice to his religion. Whether or not he should be seated, I do not care to give out any opinion, but I am certain he has every right to the office he
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aspires to and to which he has been legally elected. He is not a polygamist, I understand, and is, according to all accounts, a decent sort of a man, even though a member of the Mormon church. This feeling against any person because of that person’s religion, is something I do not and never did approve of. There is, in every religion, much bigotry.” Miss Anthony laughed as she recalled her own experiences in the stronghold of Mormonism. Her first visit there was made in 1871, which, 3 she naively remarked, was a long time ago. Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was with her, and both were en route for the California coast. They decided to lecture on the unique topic of that day—freedom of women. Few women comparatively, other than the wives of the “saints,” then lived in the intermountain country. The Mormon authorities readily gave the use of the splendid tabernacle and encouraged their wives to come. The first meeting was held on the Fourth of July. Both of the ladies were at their best and perhaps went farther in their arguments than the men “saints” imagined they would. Miss Anthony recalls that she, in her address, made refer4 ence to Brigham Young, then alive, being president of the entire church. She asked him regarding the health of his 21 wives. There was so much enthusiasm at this meeting, said Rochester’s famous woman, that another meeting was arranged for a few days later in the same hall. “But sad to say,” continued Miss Anthony, “no women came. Seems as though the menfolk deemed the freedom the Eastern ladies advocated as a dangerous matter for Utah wives.” Miss Anthony has an intimate knowledge of matters in Utah as they are conducted to-day. The reporter having recently spent a year in Salt Lake City and vicinity referred to prominent Mormons of the hour, and there were few of whom she had not some knowledge. She recalled the 5 father of the present Governor, Heber Wells, and is intimately acquainted 6 with Mrs. Susie Young Gates , daughter of the famous and much wived Brigham, through co-labors in the field of suffrage. “It seems to me,” concluded Miss Anthony, “that the women of this country who are getting up agitation against Mr. Smoot are but wasting effort. We already have a law which affects Utahns just the same as other Americans—that plural marriage is a violation. Now it rests with the nation to inforce this law. Most violations are said to be happening in the rural districts, many miles from the city. I suppose people are living there much as did our forefathers in Biblical times and have ‘two,’ ‘three’ or ‘four’ or ‘five.’ Well, they will probably keep on living in that fashion until people of
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other faiths and of other ways move in. The idea of crushing polygamy by action against an individual who doesn’t practice it, instead of enforcement of the law, seems to be a small way for our country to be acting.” In her recollections of the Utahns of the early days she noted the traits of frugality and kindness that they then possessed. Much of the sinfulness of the rugged mountainous country happened after Gentiles arrived in numbers. In her opinion it is much the same as in our Philippine possessions. As to the matter of plural marriage in those rural places in the state, it would only be a question of time when that would cease, and until then, thought the speaker, it did not matter so much about the number as in the way the husband and lord treated those wives. Y Rochester Herald, 27 January 1903, Scrapbook 1902–1904, SBA Papers, DLC. 1. Reed Owen Smoot (1862–1941), Republican of Utah, was elected to the United States Senate on 20 January 1903. In a reprise of the campaign to bar Brigham Roberts from Congress, Protestant ministerial associations and women’s missionary groups had already launched their attacks on his fitness to serve, even though Smoot was not suspected of practicing polygamy himself. Smoot was a member of the Council of Twelve Apostles, one of the highest positions in the Church of Latter-Day Saints, and his critics charged that he could not be a loyal senator while serving that church. Though he was sworn in as a senator in March 1903, investigations into his fitness were only postponed. The attacks did not stop, and in January 1904, the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections responded with an investigation about whether to expel Smoot. Finally, in February 1907, the full Senate defeated the committee’s recommendation for expulsion, and Smoot served until 1933. (ANB; BDAC; Washington Post, 21 January 1903; Senate, Committee on Privileges and Elections, Compilation of Senate Election Cases from 1789 to 1913, 62d Cong., 3d sess., S. Doc. 1036, p. 928, Serial 6349; Iversen, Antipolygamy Controversy, 213–38.) 2. February 15 was SBA’s birthday. 3. On this trip in 1871, see Film, 3:219–20, 230, 240, 15:701, for contemporary accounts, and Eighty Years, 283–86, for memories. 4. Brigham Young (1801–1877) succeeded Joseph Smith as leader of the Church of Latter-Day Saints and headed the migration into Utah. 5. Daniel Hanmer Wells (1814–1891) was the polygamous husband of Emmeline B. Wells. A prominent political, religious, and military leader among Mormons, Wells served as mayor of Salt Lake City when ECS and SBA visited in 1871. He introduced ECS when she lectured on June 29. His son Heber Manning Wells (1859–1938) was the Republican governor of Utah from 1896 to 1905. (Orson F. Whitney, History of Utah, Comprising Preliminary Chapters on the Previous History of Her Founders [Salt Lake City, Utah, 1904], 4:175–79; SBA diary, 29 June 1871, Film, 15:91ff; BDGov.) 6. Susa Amelia Young Dunford Gates (1856–1933), the forty-first child of
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Brigham Young, was a prolific writer and especially active in the National Council of Women. She also attended the International Council’s meeting in London in 1899. She divorced her first husband in 1877 and married Jacob F. Gates in 1880. (Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 2:535–36; Carolyn W. D. Person, “Susa Young Gates,” in Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah, ed. Claudia L. Bushman [Logan, Utah, 1997], 198–223.) •••••••••
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SBA to Elizabeth Smith Miller Rochester, N.Y. Feb. 4, 1903.
My dear friend:— 1 Your note with the enclosed from Mrs. Henry shows that she is bound to throw the weight of her influence with the Nationals, or in other words she looses her influence by going in with those men!! 2 That Miss Closz you remember, was the one whose book on agnosticism Mrs. Stanton circulated so widely. I guess it was the last document she had sent out in quantity. 3 It looks as if Nannie made a speech at the hearing yesterday. I hope she did break the silence. Nannie could be a first rate speaker if she could only forget everything and everybody but just her thought; that is always good. You saw Hattie too, at Albany? How did she speak. She wrote me sometime ago that she was not well, that the whole burden of settling up affairs came upon her. Are Bob and Maggie living at 250 W. 94th. St. now? I should have liked very much to have been at Albany, but I am just now getting my books and papers ready to go to the Congressional Library at Washington, D.C. Volume IV has not yet appeared. They had a fire in the bindery and all the covers and a part of the printed sheets were destroyed so that they 4 have had to print over again. It is about time for them to come now as they said the fire would delay them two weeks, and the two weeks were up on Monday, so I am hoping every mail to get word that they will be here. Hattie 5 wrote me she was going to New Hampshire. I am glad of it. Nothing will do her so much good as to come in contact with the people. 6 [in SBA’s hand] Are you & Nannie going to New Orleans— I shall not start until near the date—the delay about Vol. IV—makes it very hard for me—all the work comes at last moment— Affectionately yours U Susan B. Anthony
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Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Smith Family Papers, Manuscript Division, NN. Directed to Geneva, N.Y. 1. Josephine Kirby Williamson Henry (1846–1928), a native of Kentucky, had been a leader in the Kentucky Equal Rights Association until her work on the Woman’s Bible put an end in 1899 to her collaboration with Laura Clay. SBA refers to Henry’s leadership in the National Liberal party, founded in 1901 by dissident members of the American Secular Union. Late in January 1903, Henry won reelection as the party’s vice president at a meeting in Lexington, Kentucky. (American Women; New York Times, 11 January 1928; Paul E. Fuller, Laura Clay and the Woman’s Rights Movement [Lexington, Ky., 1975], 38–41, 184n; Blue Grass Blade, 27 October, 29 December 1901, 2 February, 16 November 1902, 11 January 1903; Free Thought Magazine 20 [March 1902]: 159–65, and [November 1902]: 662–63; Atlanta Constitution, 26 January 1903.) 2. Harriet Marie Bonebright Closz (1861–1940), later Carmichael, a teacher and writer in Webster, Iowa, was an ally of Josephine Henry in the freethought movement and an officer of the National Liberal party. She published Woman and Her Relation to the Church, or Canon Law for Women in January 1902. In hopes of breaking the connection between women and the church, Closz compiled a history of canon law, showing its degradation of women in the distant past and, through persistence in custom and civil law, into the present. She credited Matilda Gage for many of her historical examples. In July 1902, ECS asked Closz for fifty copies of the pamphlet and praised the work. “A knowledge of this fragment of the Canon Law you have given us,” ECS wrote, “is surely enough to rouse a woman who has one particle of self-respect to action. I feel it my imperative duty to begin this battle with the planet. You are on the right track to begin the campaign. Write your best thoughts and scatter them to the four corners of the earth.” (A Biographical Record of Hamilton County, Iowa [New York, 1902] 621–22; Daily Freeman-Journal, 9 September 1940, courtesy of Kendall Young Library, Webster City, Iowa; ECS to H. M. Closz, 26 July 1902, Blue Grass Blade, 31 August 1902, not in Film; with the assistance of David Lai and Kathi Kern.) 3. Anne Miller and Harriot Blatch spoke in Albany on 3 February 1903 at a hearing about the Ambler Bill “extending to women taxpayers in third-class cities the right of suffrage on questions of taxation.” Named for state senator Henry S. Ambler, the bill was introduced yearly from 1902 to 1905. In this year, the assembly passed it on March 10, but the senate never voted on it at all during an acrimonious end to the legislative session. (Report of the Thirty-fifth Annual Convention, 1903, pp. 87–88, Film, 43:403ff; New York Tribune, 4 February 1903; New York Times, 11 March 1903; “Cause of Women,” New York Sun, 10 May 1903; clippings in Scrapbooks of Elizabeth Smith Miller and Anne Fitzhugh Miller, vol. 3, pp. 120–24, NAWSA Collection, Rare Books, DLC.) 4. On 18 January 1903, a fire broke out in a warehouse of the Hollenbeck Press in Indianapolis, where publishers kept sheets and covers for the History of Woman Suffrage. SBA learned about the fire on January 24 and received her first four car-
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tons of bound volumes on March 6. (SBA diary, 18, 24 January, 13, 27 February, 6 March 1903, Film, 43:2ff.) 5. Harriot Blatch was slated to join Carrie Catt, Anna Shaw, and other speakers in a campaign for woman suffrage in New Hampshire. On 10 March 1903, voters would decide whether to amend the state constitution by removing the word “male” from qualifications for voting. With less than three months in the dead of winter for their campaign, the organizers and lecturers of the National-American association faced difficult conditions. (Report of the Thirty-fourth Annual Convention, 1902, p. 83, not in Film; Report of the Thirty-fifth Annual Convention, 1903, pp. 84–85, Film, 43:403ff; History, 6:400–402; New Hampshire, Constitutional Convention, 1902, Convention to Revise the Constitution, December 1902 [Concord, N.H., 1903], 35, 93, 336, 709.) 6. The National-American’s annual convention was scheduled to open in New Orleans on 19 March 1903. •••••••••
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SBA to Mass Meeting on Disfranchisement in New York City [Rochester, before 19 February 1903]
To refuse to qualified women and colored men the right of suffrage and to still count them in the basis of representation is to add insult to injury, and is as unjust as it is unreasonable. The trouble, however, is farther back and deeper than the disfranchisement of the negro. When men deliberately refused to include women in the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the national constitution they left the way open for all forms of injustice to other and weaker men and 2 peoples. When men fail to be just to their mothers, they cannot be expected to be just to each other. The whole evil comes from the failure to apply equal justice to all mankind, male and female, alike, therefore, I am glad to join with those who are like sufferers with my sex, in a protest against counting in the basis of representation in the Congress of the United States or in the state Legislature any class or sex who are disfranchised. Y Rochester Union and Advertiser, 20 February 1903; New York Sun, 20 February 1903.
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1. This mass meeting at Cooper Union, sponsored by Ten Thousand Colored Voters, was a stop on a state tour by James H. Hayes. Major national newspapers picked up three paragraphs of SBA’s letter to the meeting; additional opening sentences appeared only in the New York Sun. Hayes was an African-American lawyer and former city councilman from Richmond, Virginia, who filed suit in November 1902 to challenge the disfranchisement of African-American men under Virginia’s new constitution. On this tour he raised money for an appeal of the cases to the Supreme Court of the United States. A month later in New Orleans, SBA was held to account for resolutions introduced at this meeting she did not attend, specifically one defending African-American appointees to federal posts in the South. (R. Volney Riser, Defying Disfranchisement: Black Voting Rights Activism in the Jim Crow South, 1890–1908 [Baton Rouge, La., 2010], 183–207, 241–51; J. Clay Smith, Jr., Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844–1944 [Philadelphia, 1993], 263n, 264n; J. H. Hayes to Booker T. Washington, 3 February 1903, and Charles William Anderson to B. T. Washington, 13 February, 13 May 1903, all in Booker T. Washington, Papers, 7:30, 74–75, 138–41; Jones v. Montague, 194 United States Reports 147 [1904], and Selden v. Montague, 194 United States Reports 153 [1904].) 2. As published in the New York Sun, the letter ends here. •••••••••
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Carrie Chapman Catt to SBA [New York] Mch 11, 1903
My very dear and revered Leader:— I am just in from New Hampshire and at the office an hour before any one else is about. When I left last night at 6 pm, the returns were coming in and we were 1 being beaten about 3 to 1. Not all of Concord had yet reported. The days of miracles seem about over and unless there had been one, we had no chance. R.I. defeated her amendment 6 to 1, I believe and if we come out 3 2 to 1, we must consider that we have moved on a peg. I sent papers to Miss Blackwell and the envelope in which they were wrapped came to her hand, but the papers were gone. I hope you received yours. Our two meetings were a fine climax and certainly the moral effect 3 of Brother Lyman was quite overcome. He is as blind as a bat to the real situation, but I hope he will keep on, for he is a great help to us. I shall see you soon in New Orleans. May peace and health attend you, dearest of women. Hastily U Carrie Chapman Catt
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Y ALS, Emma B. Sweet Papers, NRU. 1. By the official count, the amendment lost 21,788 nay votes to 13,089 yeas. (New Hampshire, Manual for the General Court, 1905 [Concord, N.H., 1905], 349, 363, with the assistance of Charles Shipman, New Hampshire State Library.) 2. Catt refers to the disasterous defeat of a woman suffrage amendment in Rhode Island in 1887, long regarded as the national movement’s worst loss. (History, 4:909–11.) 3. Representatives’ Hall in Concord was the scene of a rally for opponents of woman suffrage on 4 March 1903, addressed by Lyman Abbott, and one for advocates on 5 March, at which Catt spoke. (History, 6:400–402; New York Times, 8 March 1903.) •••••••••
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Business Committee to the Editor, New Orleans TIMES-DEMOCRAT New Orleans, La., March 18, 1903. 1
To the Editor of The Times-Democrat: The article in this morning’s Times-Democrat, entitled “Woman Suffrage in the South,” contains some remarks that are evidently based on a misapprehension. The officers of the National American Woman Suffrage 2 Association ask the courtesy of space in your columns to correct the error. Referring to the color question, this article says, “The association’s record does not encourage the South to believe that the association’s view on this subject is wise.” The association, as such, has no view on this subject. Like every other national association, it is made up of persons of all shades of opinion on the race question, and on all other questions except those relating to its particular object. The Northern and Western members hold the views on the race question that are customary in their sections. The Southern members hold the views that are customary in the South. The doctrine of State’s rights is recognized in the national association, and each auxiliary State association arranges its own affairs in accordance with its own ideas and in harmony with the customs of its own section. Individual members, in addresses made outside of the national association, are of course free to express their views on all sorts of extraneous questions, but they speak for themselves as individuals, and not for the association. It is a curious fact that the opponents of equal rights for women seek
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to arouse sectional feeling against the Suffrage Association, both at the North and at the South. At a legislative hearing in Massachusetts, where the advocates of woman’s ballot quoted the New Orleans victory for improved sewerage and drainage as an instance of the good effect of women’s 3 vote, Mrs. A. J. George, who appeared as the official representative of the “Massachusetts association opposed to the further extension of suffrage to women,” declared in her speech before the legislative committee that the Louisiana constitutional convention gave the suffrage to tax-paying 4 women “for the meanest possible motive—to secure white supremacy,” 5 and a reference to white supremacy made by Miss Kate M. Gordon at the National Suffrage convention in Washington has ever since been quoted in the North by the opponents of equal rights for women, in the effort to prove that the National American Woman Suffrage Association is seeking to establish white supremacy. The National American Woman Suffrage Association is seeking to do away with the requirement of a sex qualification for suffrage. What other qualifications shall be asked for it leaves to each State. The Southern women most active in the national association have always, in their own States, emphasized the fact that granting suffrage to women who can read and write, and who pay taxes, would insure white supremacy without resorting to any methods of doubtful constitutionality. The Louisiana State Suffrage Association asks for the ballot for educated and tax-paying women only, and its officers believe that in this lies “the only permanent and honorable solution of the race question.” Most of the suffrage associations of the Northern and Western States ask for the ballot for all women, though Maine and several other States have lately asked for it with an educational or tax qualification. To advise Southern women to beware of lending “sympathy or support” to the National Suffrage Association because its auxiliary societies in the Northern States hold the usual views of Northerners on the color question is as irrelevant as to advise them to beware of the National Woman’s Temperance Union because the Woman’s Christian Temperance unions of the Northern and Western States draw no color line; or to beware of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs because the State federations of the North and West do not draw it; or to beware of Christianity because the churches in the North and West do not draw it. Equal suffrage for women 6 is a modern improvement, like the Australian ballot or the electric cars. Would there be any wisdom in rejecting the Australian ballot because Aus-
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tralia does not draw the color line for suffrage, or in debarring Louisiana women from the convenience of an electric car system because the electric 7 street railways in the North and West do not separate the races? The Times-Democrat says: “A vast majority of Southern women believe that to go to the polls would detract from their womanly dignity.” Fifty years ago the vast majority of women, both North and South, believed that to go to college would detract from their womanly dignity. This has proved to be a complete mistake. More than a million and a quarter of English-speaking women now possess the ballot in England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and four of our own Western States. Lord Mayor 8 Tallon of Dublin says they exercise it “without any loss of either dignity or domesticity,” and in this all impartial observers are agreed. No one who knows the women of the South can believe that their womanly dignity is less deeply rooted than that of the women in Great Britain or any other of the many parts of the world where women have been using the ballot for years without its doing them the slightest visible harm. U Susan B. Anthony, U Carrie Chapman Catt, U Alice Stone Blackwell, U Laura Clay, U Kate M. Gordon, U Harriet Taylor Upton, U Anna H. Shaw. Y New Orleans Times-Democrat, 19 March 1903. 1. Page Mercer Baker (1840–1910), editor of the New Orleans Times-Democrat, served in the Confederate army and navy and, more recently, distinguished himself as an agitator for the restoration of white rule in the South. (W. O. Hart, “The New Orleans Times and the New Orleans Democrat,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 8 [October 1925]: 574–84.) 2. SBA arrived in New Orleans at night on March 17 and met first with the National-American’s officers sometime the next day. With two days of meetings behind them, the Business Committee was already embroiled in a dispute with Page Baker about race and woman suffrage. Alice Stone Blackwell wrote this answer to the morning’s editorial in the Times-Democrat, the committee endorsed it, and Baker published it the next day. Baker set up this collision. His reporter interviewed Carrie Catt when she reached New Orleans on March 16, focusing his questions on the roles of African-American women in the association and its position on black suffrage. Catt explained that two myths made it difficult for woman suffrage to take hold in the South: that casting a ballot undermined femininity
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and that woman suffrage opened the door to “negro domination.” Dismissing the second of these, Catt continued, “It seems to me that the South has safeguards sufficient to prevent any such thing.” Pressed by the reporter to tell about black women in the suffrage movement, Catt was coy; “I am told we have them,” she stated. “I do not know them personally.” The interview appeared on March 17. The next morning, Baker published his editorial against woman suffrage. He did not share Catt’s faith “that the South has safeguards sufficient to prevent” negro domination. The South could not protect itself “from the evils of woman’s suffrage, accompanied as they would be by a new and perplexing phase of the negro problem,” he wrote, and advised that the South “should deprecate any movement which would enlarge the vicious and ignorant negro vote.” Baker found more reason to warn women away from the National-American association in news about the meeting on disfranchisement on 19 February 1903 to which SBA sent a letter. He disparaged SBA for “recently assail[ing] the South for its attitude toward the negro,” and held her accountable for that meeting’s vote in support of appointing black Republicans to federal posts in the South. (Times-Democrat, 17, 18 March 1903; SBA diary, 17–18 March 1903, and Report of the Thirty-fifth Annual Convention, 1903, p. 9, Film, 43:2ff, 403ff.) 3. Alice Nelson Vant George (1866–1939) of Brookline, Massachusetts, graduated from Wellesley College in 1887 and married a fellow schoolteacher, Andrew J. George, the next year. She held membership in several organizations concerned with the welfare of laboring women while also figuring prominently as an outspoken antisuffragist. (Wellesley College Record, 1875–1912: General Catalogue of Officers and Students [Wellesley, Mass., 1912], 270; Woman’s Who’s Who 1914; New York Times, 28 December 1907, 4 May 1939.) 4. Woman’s Journal, 9 February 1901, reported this same statement by Alice George, dating it to “soon after” Louisiana’s constitutional convention granted taxpayer suffrage to women. In 1898, women in Louisiana gained the right to vote on “questions submitted to the taxpayers, as such, of any municipal or other political subdivision of this State.” In New Orleans, women immediately organized to use their new right to improve the city’s sewerage and drainage systems. Their votes were decisive in an election in June 1899 that approved increased taxes for infrastructure. (Louisiana Const. of 1898, art. 199; History, 4:680–85; Joy J. Jackson, New Orleans in the Gilded Age: Politics and Urban Progress, 1880–1896 [Baton Rouge, La., 1969], 151–53; Carmen Lindig, The Path from the Parlor: Louisiana Women, 1879–1920 [Lafayette, La., 1986], 112–17.) 5. Kate Gordon’s speech to the National-American convention in 1900 appeared in Woman’s Journal, 17 February 1900. 6. An innovation gaining in popularity, the Australian ballot was one prepared by government that included all candidates and propositions. Where the reform was not yet adopted, ballots were prepared by political groups and parties to show their followers how to vote rather than to list all their choices. 7. On the segregation of streetcars in New Orleans that began in the fall of 1902, see Blair L. M. Kelley, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson [Chapel Hill, N.C., 2010], 88–115.
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8. Daniel Tallon of Dublin (c. 1836–1908) had been a tailor and a wine and spirit merchant before becoming High Sheriff of Dublin in 1895 and Lord Mayor in 1898. While in Boston on an American tour in 1899, Tallon wrote a letter to the Woman’s Journal about the Irish Local Government Act of 1898, by which women voted in all but parliamentary elections and held local office. “I have no reason to think,” he wrote, “that the women who voted or were elected Councillors and Guardians in any way suffered a loss of dignity or domesticity; but, on the contrary, I think the entire community is better and richer by the new powers accorded to women, who are so devoted to the social amelioration of the human race.” (Irish Times, 14 July 1908; Woman’s Journal, 4 November 1899.) •••••••••
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Robert J. Burdette to SBA East Orange, N.J.
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March 18th 1903
Dear Miss Anthony— 2 Your letter—welcome as the spring-time—reached Mrs Burdette this morning. And as I found a line or two in it for me, I am going to answer my part in it. What a memorandum-book of a memory you have? Does n’t it make a beautiful “traveling library”—these volumes of people and places and times that you can read at any time you will? And the pages shine forth a little more clearly in the dark than they do in the day time. People who have eyes in their brains never go blind. You refer to our meeting on the platform of the Friday morning Club 3 in Los Angeles in ’96. I was very proud of that honor. When I was a “cub reporter” on the Peoria, Ill. Transcript I “reported” a convention you held in that city. I’ll never forget how you “slammed down” Tom Cratty—excuse 4 my French—and he was our star lawyer. Then I had the distinguished honor of having you in my audience at Johnstown Pa. And I hope to see you many times before you put on your wings. Mrs Burdette says I need not monopolize all of her letter. But I will add this—you owe us a call. Pay it at “Sunnycrest” and see what good care we can take of you. Cordially your friend U Robert J. Burdette. No; we didn’t make any mistake when we came away from your home. That visit must have set our faces in the right direction—toward each other. Come and see!
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Y ALS, Papers of SBA, NPV. 1. Perhaps a lecture tour took Burdette to New Jersey. He lived in Pasadena, California, at Sunnycrest or Sunny Crest, the elegant house his wife inherited from her second husband. 2. In 1899, Robert Burdette married the twice-widowed Clara Bradley Wheeler Baker (1855–1954). SBA met Baker while traveling in Southern California in 1895. Clara Bradley Burdette, as she came to be known, was a philanthropist, a leader in women’s clubs, an activist in the Republican party, and a writer. (Max Binheim, ed., Women of the West: A Series of Biographical Sketches of Living Eminent Women in the Eleven Western States of the United States of America [Los Angeles, 1928], 29–30; Franklin Harper, ed., Who’s Who on the Pacific Coast: A Biographical Compilation of Notable Living Contemporaries West of the Rocky Mountains [Los Angeles, 1913]; New York Times, 7 January 1954.) 3. Above at 13 March 1896. 4. Thomas Cratty (1833–1913) practiced law in Peoria until moving to Chicago in 1884. Early collaboration with Robert Ingersoll in Republican politics and the county bar was recognized decades later when Cratty presided at his friend’s memorial service in Chicago. Burdette describes a meeting in Peoria on 15 March 1870 to organize a county suffrage association. According to the liveliest account of their exchange, Cratty and SBA disagreed about charging an admission fee at the evening session, and in backing down, Cratty “said he ‘was convinced against his will’—wouldn’t argue with a woman—and withdrew his motion.” Rising to her feet, SBA said “she hoped never again to see a man on the platform who would be guilty of saying ‘he wouldn’t argue with a woman.’ When they say that they confess their inability to do so.” (The History of Peoria County, Illinois [Chicago, 1880], 637; Men of Affairs: A Gallery of Cartoon Portraits [Chicago, 1906], unpaginated; Illinois State Archives, Statewide Death Index, pre-1916, on-line; Peoria Review, 15 March 1870, Film, 14:640.) •••••••••
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SBA and Mary S. Anthony to Anna Dann Mason Tuskegee, Ala., March 29, 1903.
Dear Anna D. M. Here we are—at the Tuskegee institute—at Booker T. Washingtons house & home—his wife and son David are at home—but not the husband 1 & father— It is a beautiful new house—with all the modern Conveniences—everything from cellar to garrett made by the students of the
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school—from the making of the brick—to the carving of the matels— Our 2 Party is Dr Sherman Ricker, Mrs. Webber Sister Mary & myself— We arrived about 8.30— last night in the rain— The week had been very pleasant & cool— Mrs Catt spoke Thursday night, and Miss Shaw spoke 3 Friday night—after the Con—was over— they had packed Houses—so the New-Orleans people had nine evenings nin successionp of good speaking— Now—it is nearly 12 noon—all the rest have gone to Church—and Sunday School— I remain at home—the rain is pouring— The school grounds are about a mile from Tuskegee city or village— Right in front of this house is the new Carnegie Library—a splendid brick building— We shall leave this place tomorrow Monday—and go to Atlanta & stop there over night—then go to Washington & stop there over night—so that 4 it will be Wednesday or Thursday night before we get home— I wish you were here to see & hear all—it is most interesting— I wish I could have one of these splendid colored women for a house-keeper—at No 17 Madison st—!! Sincerely yours U Susan B. Anthony One oc. p.m. Sunday— Just back from church— Splendid singing— I enjoyed it very much— We are to go to a 4 oc service, where we shall hear more singing 5 and speaking by Miss Emily Howland, Hattie May Mills and Susan B.— We have had a continuous rain since yesterday p.m.—and we feel somewhat relieved that we are out of the path of the Mississippi which they are continually fighting to keep it from overflowing the levees & flooding the city— We had splendid meetings all through the convention— Every thing is lovely there, if only we will “down the nigger”—many of whom are evidently equal or even superior to the whites— Truly— U M. S. Anthony Y ALS, on Tuskegee Institute letterhead, SBA Collection, NR. Envelope addressed to Rochester N.Y. 1. At Tuskegee Institute, Margaret Washington hosted a number of women returning north from the National-American’s convention. Ernest Davidson Washington (1889–1938) was the youngest son of Booker T. and Olivia Davidson Washington. At the time of SBA’s visit, he was a student at the Tuskegee Institute training school. (Booker T. Washington, Papers, 2:518n–19n.)
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2. Lydia Lucy Ricker Webber (1843–1919) was Marcena Ricker’s sister-in-law and the wife of Orrin Blake Webber, a grocer in Rochester. As a delegate from New York to the National-American’s convention, she accompanied SBA from Rochester to New Orleans and back again. (John Wentworth, The Wentworth Genealogy: English and American [Boston, 1878], 2:88; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records.) 3. For Catt’s speech to the Progressive Union on March 26, see unidentified clipping, 27 March 1903, Scrapbooks of Elizabeth Smith Miller and Anne Fitzhugh Miller, vol. 3, p. 118, NAWSA Collection, Rare Books, DLC. For Shaw’s speech to the Era Club on March 27, when SBA introduced her, see Film, 43:512–13. 4. According to a short interview with SBA that appeared in the Atlanta Constitution, 1 April 1903, she and her party visited Clark University and Spelman Seminary while in the city. Interview not in Film. 5. Emily Howland and Harriet Mills had arrived at Tuskegee from New Orleans with a different party of visitors, and they stayed on after SBA’s departure. For the speeches made on this occasion, see Film, 43:518. •••••••••
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Harriot Stanton Blatch to SBA [New York, Spring 1903]
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Dear Susan, This was to mother on her 85th birthday. ’Twas among her papers. I have found her first speech written after the first Convention at Seneca Falls. ’Tis beautifully written in her hand, tied with blue ribbon, & fairly 2 well preserved. Where shall I send it? It ought to be treasured somewhere. Harry goes to Castine, Maine, Thursday. I follow in ten days time. Lovingly, U Harriot B. Y ALS, ECS Papers, DLC. 1. SBA wrote “Written in the spring of 1903” on this undated letter. On the page of a scrapbook where she placed it, SBA added, “This has reference to my letter to her mother on her 85th Birthday—written the evening of Nov. 11th 1900—” See above at that date. 2. On this manuscript and its travels, see Papers, 1:94–95.
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Remarks by SBA to Mass Meeting on Disfranchisement in Rochester
Editorial note: At this meeting in Rochester’s Central Presbyterian Church, positions of honor on the platform were allotted to men and women, white and black, and ministers of several denominations. African-American activists John W. Thompson and Hester C. Jeffrey were joined by SBA and Mayor Adolph J. Rodenbeck. The evening’s program consisted of a lengthy speech by the mayor, short remarks by SBA, and a concluding speech by James H. Hayes of Richmond, Virginia. For background on this meeting, see notes at 19 February 1903, above. (Rochester Union and Advertiser, 29 April 1903, Film, 43:536.)
[28 April 1903] Nothing but this outrage against the colored race could have brought me out here to-night. The remedy for this abuse is simple. If a state will violate the Constitution, it should be denied the rights conferred by the Constitution—it should not be given representation. I have often thought how hard it is for us women to have any rights. We are permitted to do only those things that are permitted by the men. I often ask myself, Why is it that negro men, negro women and white women are being educated, if we are not to be allowed to exercise the powers that this education gives us? You see, we women are in the same boat with the disfranchised negroes. As has been said, it is mockery to grant freedom and deny the franchise. And now I hope the negroes may succeed in securing recognition and may again be enfranchised. The trouble is that the men of the north cannot take determined action very well because of the inconsistency of that action. They cannot reasonably advocate the enfranchisement of the negro while they withhold the same advantage from the women of their own part of the country. They are really in such a muddle that they don’t know how to get out of it. Y Rochester Union and Advertiser, 29 April 1903.
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SBA to Elizabeth Smith Miller Rochester, N.Y. April 29, 1903—
Dear Mrs Miller Your most welcome letter with its ample check of $14. came this morn1 ing— If you will wait a little I will send you a set of the History with all new bindings—like Vol. IV— You are the first person I have mentioned the fact to;—But I am having 1,000 new books of all the different volumes—and their bindings will be alike—while the three old nLeatherp volumes having been bound 25 years ago—they are grown dark in color— The printers nsayp the new ones will turn dark— I don’t believe them— But to make sure—I will send you the three volumes—so that you will have a set—to give away to somebody— Don’t think of Miss Putnam—at Lottsburg—for she had a set & now has Vol IV— What a time the poor creature has 2 had— Uncle Sam’s Post Office has served her many a good turn— I am turned out of house and home— I staid in the pulling off of the paper—and hanging the paper—but when they began to paint—I simply had to run— I couldn’t breathe— I am stopping with my little Anna E. Dann—that was my stenographer—but is now married & keeping house— so she takes the best of care of me— I just go down & look into house, but leave it as soon as possible— The paint & lime & dirt does not affect Sister Mary’s Lungs—so sticks by the stuff—with a girl to help and men to do the different kinds of work— The house is being papered & painted from the attic to the cellar—inside & out—so we shall be good as new—or as nearly so as an old house—40 years old—can be— When we get settld I want you and Nannie to come & see us— Hoping we shall get through all well—and that I may live to see the 1,000 sets of the History well placed—in Libraries, schools and colleges— I am affectionately yours U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, Smith Family Papers, Manuscript Division, NN. 1. On 25 April 1903, SBA sent volume four of the History of Woman Suffrage to Elizabeth Miller as a gift; “Don’t send me any money for it,” she instructed.
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With this sum, Miller paid for additional volumes and sets to be mailed out at her direction. (SBA to E. S. Miller, 25 April, 23 May 1903, Film, 43:532–33, 577–78.) 2. SBA alludes to Caroline Putnam taking the position of postmaster in Lottsburg in 1869 and fighting to keep it despite harassment by Democrats when they regained political control of the state. She lost the position in 1903. (Katherine Lydigsen Herbig, “Friends for Freedom: The Lives and Careers of Sallie Holley and Caroline Putnam,” [Ph.D. diss., Claremont Graduate School, 1977], 373.) •••••••••
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Inscriptions by SBA to Adella Hunt Logan [25 May 1903] In History of Woman Suffrage, volume one
Mrs Adella H. Logan Tuskegee Institute Tuskegee—Alabama— 1 With cordial greetings from Dr Mary D. Hussey East Orange—NewJersey— In History of Woman Suffrage, volume two
Mrs Adella H. Logan Tuskegee Institute Tuskegee—Alabama With the best wish of Dr Mary D. Hussey—East Orange—N.Jer I send you these books— See how hard Mrs Stanton & a few of us fought for the recognition of women—under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution—and now—true to her prophecy—negro men are not protected under it—so we go down together—and by & by both will go up together— Susan B. Anthony Rochester N.Y. May 25, 1903. In History of Woman Suffrage, volume three
Mrs Adella H. Logan Tuskegee Industrial Institute Tuskegee—Alabama From Dr Mary D. Hussey— East Orange—New Jersey— What a pleasant time all of us—Dr Hussey, Miss Howland, Miss Mills, Miss and Dr Marcena Sherman Ricker, Mrs Lydia Webber, my sister Mary S. and I, did have at Tuskee— It is pleasant memory for me— Sincerely yours Susan B. Anthony 17 Madison street Rochester— N.Y. May 25, 1903. Y SBA MsS, AAP. 1. Mary Dudley Hussey (1853–1927) was both doctor and lawyer, a Quaker
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from New Jersey, and a leader in the state suffrage association. She grew up in the movement as the daughter of the late Cornelia Collins Hussey, a member of the American and the National associations. On a visit to Tuskegee at the time of SBA’s visit, she had joined the party on its homeward journey, including a stop at Clark University in Atlanta. (David Lawrence Pierson, History of the Oranges to 1921; Reviewing the Rise, Development and Progress of an Influential Community [New York, 1922], 4:198–201; Anson and Jenkins, Marlborough Monthly Meeting, 61; Atlanta Constitution, 1 April 1903.) •••••••••
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Theodore W. Stanton to SBA Paris, June 9, 1903.
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My dear Susan: 2 I have duly received your letter of the 18th of May. I should have liked to see the 4th vol., but it has not come to hand. It is not perfectly clear in your letter how you sent it to me. You appear to have sent it in care of the Figaro. I have enquired there & they know nothing about such a volume. And as I cannot imagine why you should send it to me through that paper, or through any paper, for that matter, I write back to you first, before searching any farther, to get more light on the subject. If you cannot find that list of libraries to which I sent the three other volumes of the History, let me know. It is just possible that I have it. Yes, I miss poor old mother very much. Not one day has passed since she died that I have not thought of her at least once. It was too bad that she had to go as she liked this world so much & was still working. I read with so much interest the letters Mrs. Harper printed in a recent number of the 3 Independent. I have been trying to get Hatty to come over here for next winter so that we could take hold of mother’s biography. Nellie & I will be alone here next winter. Why couldn’t you & Mrs. Harper come over too? You two, Hatty & I could all take hold of the work & get out promptly a nice biography. We could all eat here at the house. Right next door is a boarding house where bed rooms could be had if we hadn’t enough in this apartment. You could take a good rest & the rest of us could “pitch in” to the book. We could pass a charming winter. How does this plan strike you, Mrs. H. & Hatty? With kindest regards to Mrs. Harper, I am, as ever, yours affectionately, U Theodore.
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Y ALS, on stationery imprinted with address, HM 10699, Ida Harper Collection, CSmH. 1. Theodore Stanton’s return address showed as 9 Avenue du Trocadéro. 2. SBA to T. W. Stanton, 18 May 1903, Film, 43:566. In a poorly written, partly illegible sentence, squeezed between typed lines, SBA thoroughly confused Stanton: “The book was directed to care of that paper that is published in French & English—no—it was to the Figaro—so you will have [illegible].” Le Figaro was and is a daily newspaper published in Paris. For a summary of Stanton’s work distributing the History of Woman Suffrage to the libraries of Europe, see Papers, 5:450. 3. Ida H. Harper, “Early Letters of Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” Independent 55 (21 May 1903): 1188–94. •••••••••
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William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., to SBA Boston, June 12, 1903.
My dear Friend, Until your letter of the 10th arrived I was not aware of Vol. 4, my desk being heaped up with months of accumulated matter & the book was underneath. I am delighted to have it and thank you sincerely. I think the 1 portraits admirable and shall dip into the reading as soon as possible. You and Mrs. Harper have preserved material of great value to the future historians of the movement and your work is a monument of labor and industry. After five months in California I got back a fortnight nagop and Ellie has just returned from St. Louis via Auburn. She spent two weeks helping 2 nurse her brother Frank who seems fatally ill. We met many of your friends on our travels. The winter in Southern California proved delightful. I hope you are well and not overtired. What a relief it must be to have the last volume completed! With the loving regards of Ellie & myself Sincerely U Wm Lloyd Garrison. The fourth line of my sonnet on page 395 should end with a period & not 3 with a comma. As it is the reading is confused. Y ALS, HM 10700, Ida Harper Collection, CSmH. 1. Thirty-five portraits went into the fourth volume of the History of Woman Suffrage.
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2. Francis, or Frank, Wright (1844–1903) was Garrison’s brother-in-law. He died in St. Louis on June 16, after his sister Ellen Garrison returned to the East Coast. Wright was remembered as the father of baseball at Harvard, having organized and pitched the first game played there in 1863. At the time of his death, he worked as an auditor of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. (Alumni files, MH-Ar; Wright family genealogy, Garrison Papers, MNS-S.) 3. History, 4:395. When reprinting William Garrison’s poem about SBA’s eightieth birthday, an error of punctuation occurred: the fourth line, intended to conclude a thought, ended with a comma, creating an eight-line pileup of thoughts. It appeared as written in Report of the Thirty-second Annual Convention, 1900, p. 10, Film, 40:829ff. Corrected, the poem began: The gibe and ridicule and social frown, / That through long years her faithful life assailed, / Are dead and vanished; as a queen now hailed, / Upon her reverend brow rests Honor’s crown. •••••••••
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SBA to Margaret A. Haley1 [Rochester, before 6 July 1903] 3
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Miss Margaret A. Haley, the Brunswick Hotel —My Dear Friend: Your long letter, and then your telegraph message, came duly, but I could not say “yes” to them. I know how you feel, that I ought to be in Boston with you at this crucial hour, and if I could go “on the wings of the wind” and be set down there for a few minutes, and then hie me back to my home, I might think of seeing you; but the thought of the crowds of women that will be there overwhelms me. So you must give my love to all of them, and tell them, each and all, that they must stand up for the rights of women, not only for themselves and for their own comfort and advancement, but for the rights of woman as woman. You teachers of to-day will make a precedent for the women of tomorrow and next year, just as the teachers of the past have made a precedent for you to be ignored on the program to-day. Had the women of each year been true to woman’s best interests instead of their own quiet and ease, you would have a great deal easier time in asserting yourselves to-day. I hope you will maintain the right of women to be on the program committee next year, and that you will insist upon their recognition in all positions of honor and emolument equally with men. Women must have equal pay for equal work, and they must be considered equally eligible to the offices of principal and superintendent, professor and president. The saying that women have equal pay is absurd while they
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are not allowed to have the highest positions which their qualifications entitle them to; so you must insist that qualifications, not sex, shall govern the appointments to the highest positions. With best wishes for all, yours for equal rights and equal chances, U Susan B. Anthony. Y Woman’s Journal, 11 July 1903. 1. Margaret Angela Haley (1861–1939), a former teacher in the public schools of Chicago, was president of the National Federation of Teachers and business agent of the Chicago Teachers’ Federation. She spent a day with SBA when Rochester’s Political Equality Club and the city’s teachers invited her to lecture on 16 January 1903 about her success finding new money for Chicago’s schools by focusing on untaxed corporate property. Since then, Haley had importuned SBA to join her in Boston for meetings of the National Education Association and the National Federation of Teachers. While declining Haley’s invitation, SBA wrote two open letters to Haley about women, work, and wages. Haley published the first, dated 27 June 1903 and addressed to Chicago, in a special convention issue of the Chicago Teachers’ Federation Bulletin, 3 July 1903. SBA sent this undated, second letter to Boston, where Haley read it aloud to the National Federation of Teachers meeting. When the Chicago Teachers’ Federation Bulletin resumed publication in the school year, this letter was reprinted in the issue of 2 October 1903. (ANB; NAW; Battleground: The Autobiography of Margaret A. Haley, ed. Robert L. Reid [Urbana, Ill., 1982], 128–40; Rousmaniere, Citizen Teacher, 106–11; Anthony, 3:1290–92; SBA to M. A. Haley, before 27 June and 27 June 1903, and SBA diary, 16 January 1903, Film, 43:2ff, 628–30; Papers, 1:226–29.) 2. Dated with reference to the day Haley read this letter aloud to the National Federation of Teachers. 3. The Illinois delegation to the National Educational Association and the Chicago Teachers’ Federation opened headquarters at the Hotel Brunswick on Copley Square. (Chicago Teachers’ Federation Bulletin, 24 April 1903, 19 June 1903.) •••••••••
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SBA to Herbert Putnam1 Rochester, N.Y. July 18, 1903.
Dear Sir,— As my life has been largely spent on the lecture platform and in the work of conventions, I have not been able to make an especially systematic collection of books or to enjoy the pleasures of a library as one does who
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spends much time under her home roof. My books, therefore, represent, in a large part, autograph copies presented by the authors and those given me by friends because of their information on the special subject in which I am most interested. To these I have added a number of old volumes which were favorites 2 of my maternal grandmother Richardson-Reed, born in 1754, and my father and mother, Daniel and Lucy Reed Anthony, born in 1793. Among these are their Bibles and hymnbooks, dated 1801; medical works and old school books of the beginning of the century; also the poems of Maria 3 4 5 6 7 Edgeworth, Mary Howitt, Cowper, Young, The Book of Martyrs, 8 9 works of Mrs. Jameson, Job Fox and others, published between 1810 and 1840. There is a large collection of fables, poems, stories of travel, biographies and books on temperance, issued about 1850, of which it is possible very few are now in existence. Many of the first works on anti-slavery are included, dating from 1840, with biographies of the early reformers, and a number of its earliest convention reports. There are seven volumes on Marriage and Parentage, nine on the Social Evil, and many on the educational and industrial status of women. This collection includes all of the standard works on the enfranchisement of women, so far as known. Among these are The History of Woman Suffrage in four volumes, The Reminiscences of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, and others by well-known American and English authors. To these are added the bound volumes of The Revolution, edited by Mrs. Stanton, Parker Pillsbury and myself in 1868, ’69, ’70; of the Woman’s Journal, Woman’s Tribune, and Ballot Box and National Citizen; Garrison’s Liberator, and Wendell Phillips’ Anti-Slavery 10 Standard. These are supplemented by official reports of the National Suffrage Conventions, the speeches given at Congressional hearings since 1869, and the reports of Senate and House Committees. The student of this subject will find here practically all of importance which has been said and written upon it. I will not take space to enumerate the many works of the most liberal thinkers of the past and present century, men and women, among them a volume from the first edition of The Rights of Woman, that wonderful 11 product of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792. Believing that these authorities should be made accessible to the largest possible number of those who are studying all questions in relation to woman as never before, I take great pleasure in presenting this collection
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of over 300 volumes, exclusive of pamphlets and reports, to the Library of Congress. I do this with the deepest appreciation of this magnificent repository of learning which has been erected as a monument to the intelligence of the American people. Very Sincerely yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Putnam Archives, Central Files, Library of Congress Archives, DLC. Directed to Washington, D.C. 1. Herbert Putnam (1861–1955) was Librarian of Congress from 1899 to 1939. Writing on 18 May 1903, he asked SBA for a letter of gift to accompany her large donation of books, and he invited her “to include also a reference to the circumstances under which the material came into your possession so far as these can be briefly noted, and of the relation which the collection has borne to the movement with which you have been identified.” SBA obliged in this letter, sent to Putnam as an enclosure in a letter dated 17 July 1903. (ANB; H. Putnam to SBA, 18 May 1903, SBA to H. Putnam, 17 July 1903, Film, 43:567, 646.) 2. That is, Susannah Richardson Read. 3. Maria Edgeworth (1767–1849) was a prolific British author. The Anthony Collection contains a copy of Readings on Poetry (1816), written by Maria and her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth. For an introduction to the Anthony Collection, see Leonard N. Beck, “The Library of Susan B. Anthony,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 32 (October 1975): 324–35. 4. Of the work of Mary Howitt, the Anthony Collection contains only her translation of Fredricka Bremer, The Homes of the New World; Impressions of America (1854). 5. The Anthony Collection includes William Cowper The Task: A Poem in Six Books (1811). Cowper (1731–1800) was an English poet. 6. Edward Young (1683–1765) was an English poet. SBA’s donation of a book by him is unidentified. 7. The Anthony Collection includes An Abridgment of the Book of Martyrs: to Which Are Prefixed, the Living Testimonies of the Church of God, and Faithful Martyrs, in Different Ages of the World; and the Corrupt Fruits of the False Church, in the Time of the Apostasy (1810). 8. Anna Brownell Murphy Jameson (1794–1860) was an Irish author and lecturer on woman’s rights. SBA’s donation is unidentified. 9. SBA or the typist confused things here: John Foxe was the author of the Book of Martyrs, and Job Scott (1751–1793) was a Quaker minister from Rhode Island. SBA donated The Works of That Eminent Minister of the Gospel, Job Scott (1831). 10. Not previously identified in this volume are William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, published in Boston from 1831 to 1865; the National Anti-Slavery Standard, published from 1840 to 1872 with a dozen different editors; the Ballot Box, edited by Sarah R. Langdon Williams for the Toledo Woman Suffrage Association from 1876 to 1878; and its successor, the National Citizen and Ballot Box, published in Syracuse, New York, by Matilda Gage from 1878 to 1881.
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11. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. SBA’s copy came to her not through her family but through one of Rochester’s leading families of reformers. Published in Boston in 1792, it was purchased by Samuel Porter in July 1804, and in the year of his death, in 1881, his sister Maria G. Porter presented the book to SBA. •••••••••
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Ainsworth R. Spofford1 to SBA [Washington, D.C.] July 22 1903
Dear Madam:— Replying to your two favors of the 17th and 18th instant, permit me to say, in the absence of Librarian Putnam, now on his way to Europe, that your collection of books, newspapers, manuscripts and scrap-books has been temporarily placed in two separate alcoves awaiting its being catalogued in 2 full. Each volume has been provisionally labeled by inserting the presentation book-plate now in use in the Library. But as the eminent American artist, Elihu Vedder, has offered to design a new book-plate for this Library, samples of this when it comes to be engraved will be duly forwarded to 3 you. In the card catalogue of this Library it is proposed to assign to each title of the Susan B. Anthony Collection a monogram which will identify the source whence the book was received. This, I think, will meet your inquiry as to whether the books will all be catalogued under one collection. Permit me to add that, after some examination, I regard the series of over forty volumes of scrap-books containing full reports of the National Suffrage Conventions, besides a multitude of speeches on the subject, decisions of the courts, reports of Congressional committees, etc., as an 4 invaluable addition to the Library of the United States. Assuring you that all possible freedom of examination will be accorded to those wishing to see any item of your collection, and assuring you that it will be of distinct and increasing interest as time elapses, I remain, with high regard, Very respectfully, U A R Spofford Acting Librarian of Congress
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Y TLS, letterpress, Library of Congress Archives, Secretary’s Office, DLC. 1. Ainsworth Rand Spofford (1825–1908) was Librarian of Congress from 1864 to 1897 and Chief Assistant Librarian from 1897 to 1908. At this writing, he was Acting Librarian of Congress while Herbert Putnam traveled in Europe. (ANB.) 2. See her letter of July 18 above at its date. In a cover letter, also to Herbert Putnam and dated July 17, SBA asked, “Am I correct in thinking that although it is necessary to scatter the books in the library they will all be catalogued under the same collection?” She also wanted to see the bookplate that would mark her donation. 3. Elihu Vedder (1836–1923) was a prominent American painter and illustrator who created murals and a mosaic for the new Library of Congress building. Most of SBA’s donations contain a bookplate credited to Herbert Putnam, showing an eagle atop a circular seal that reads, “The Library of Congress 1800.” Each scrapbook was also stamped, “GIFT SUSAN B. ANTHONY Ack’l 2 Ap ‘03.” (ANB; Marcus Benjamin, “Some Government Bookplates,” Bookman 39 [August 1914]: 652–53; John Y. Cole, “Symbols of a National Institution: Bicentennial Background,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 59 [February 2000]: 28–29, 37.) 4. SBA started to collect printed material for scrapbooks at the suggestion of her father. In the winter of 1854 and 1855, he asked her, “Would it not be wise to preserve the many and amusing observations by the different papers, that years hence, in your more solitary moments, you and maybe your children can look over the views of both the friends and opponents of the cause?” She did not keep up with the cutting and pasting; when work began in 1897 on Harper’s biography of SBA, teams of young women were hired to help organize the clippings into large account books discarded by insurance agents. There are thirty-four volumes in the Rare Book Division, and several more making up a part of SBA’s papers in the Manuscript Division. (Anthony, 1:125.) •••••••••
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SBA to Ainsworth R. Spofford Rochester, N.Y. July 24, 1903.
My Dear Friend,— I was very glad to get your pen-tracks with the good words with regard to the books I have sent to your library. I shall be very glad, indeed, to get a sight of the new book-plate when you get it. I have no doubt but that you will do the best thing possible with the books. I am very glad if you think my scrap-books amount to very much. They
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are a heterogenous mass; everything is put in as nearly as possible in chronological order and that makes a wonderful mixing up of the subjects. If I could have commanded time, patience, eyesight, etc. etc, I would have made an index to them. They are a perfect swamp of things, which, if indexed, would be of a great deal of value. I wonder if you can not set some of your boys or girls, when they have nothing else to do, about the work? I shall send you in a few days my grandmother’s old Bible and hymn book, with some other books that have been dug up out of the mass here. My attic, though, is quite cleared out; I am now making a scrap book of all of Mrs. Stanton’s speeches that I have. There will be three large books; I 1 shall send them to your library together with the rest as soon as done. I am trying to get things cleared up ready to go over, and hope I shall have as 2 little to worry about leaving behind as the old Pope had. Sincerely yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Ainsworth Rand Spofford Papers, DLC. Directed to Washington, D.C. 1. These scrapbooks are part of the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. 2. Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903) served from 1878 until his death on 20 July 1903. His decline was chronicled by American newspapers, and as he neared his end, a handful of articles described his few possessions. The New York Tribune, 11 July 1903, declared, “To tell the truth, Leo has little to leave.” On the day SBA wrote to Spofford, newspapers reported on the opening of the pope’s will. •••••••••
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SBA to Helen Leslie Gage Rochester, N.Y. July 30, 1903
My Dear Helen,— 1 ¶1 Your letter has at last come and as I understand it you want three 2 copies of the leather bound for yourself, Julia and Clarkson, and one cloth bound to complete Clarkson’s other set!! Now, if this isn’t right tell me and I will make them good for what I want everyone of you to have a full set, and if there is any place that you want a set of the History sent I wish you would tell me! I find on my books, that, much to my astonishment, I did not send a copy of the book to Clarkson!
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I should like to see Julia and will write her at once care of Mrs. Til3 lotson and invite her here. I have some documents relative to your mother that I should like to give her; if she doesn’t call I shall send them to you, because I think you must have some sort of a scrap-book of her sayings and doings. I have just made a scrap-book of Mrs. Stanton—all her speeches, letters and the things that were said about her—and shall take a new book to finish out with her death, and the newspaper comments and magazine articles relative to her. It seems so strange that she is gone; I wonder if she and your mother have found each other; what an eternal thinking about the future we do keep up and yet we learn nothing!!! 4 Your answer to the Antis at Albany was splendid; just enough to make them feel the sting. Did you know that the daughter of J. J. Hol5 land lives in Albany? Her name is Anna Holland Howe; her husband’s name is John K. Howe, 37 State St. She is the only daughter of Mr. Holland and you remember he was a bitter opponent of Woman Suffrage, and she has become converted and joined the Albany Suffrage Society. I sent her some documents and she was very grateful. She came to life—to the surface, when Miss Mills and Miss Shaw went to Albany to 6 hold a meeting. You will see by the enclosed that I have put your mother’s name on the circular. I had the plate cut and the whole paragraph had to be made over. So I have made what reparation I could for the omission in the 7 first. Mrs. Catt is the best all round woman for president this nation affords. She is a young and beautiful woman to begin with; she has very great organizing ability, she is a splendid speaker and possesses what we call magnetism to draw people together. She was all worn out this Spring and we felt that the best thing for her was to take a years rest. She wanted to resign her office but we all said, “No; you may have a leave of absence.” Mrs. Upton offered to take the office and do the work and 8 Miss Shaw as vice-president to do double duty. She has now gone to Europe with her husband and I hope she will come back invigorated and refreshed to take up the work again. I like her and think she is the best possible president. Mrs. Blake has become a dead letter to us since 1900; then she aspired to be president instead of Mrs. Catt; she called her friends together in the parlor of the Riggs House several times and she had a circular printed
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signed by Mrs. Sage, Dr. Mary Jacobi and Mrs. Stanton saying she was the person for president; before the election began she made a speech declining the many offers of votes she had had, and walked immediately out of the house. I have seen her but once since and that was at Mrs. Stanton’s funeral. She had only nine votes; she ought to have seen and known her limitations. She never could have drawn the people to her as Mrs. Catt has. But that is neither here nor there; she has chosen to go off in a society called the Legislative League or something, 11 and is entirely apart from us. She hasn’t been to a single meeting that I know of since 1900. I am sorry for her but bolters always come out at the little end of the horn and she is no exception. Her daughter is a very excellent teacher in New York; the two keep house together. The other daughter is married and has two or three children. 12 ¶8 I hope your daughter will soon be well. With love to Clarkson and his wife and to your daughter, I am, Affectionately yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Gage Collection, MCR-S. Addressed to Aberdeen, South Dakota. 1. In earlier correspondence, SBA asked members of Matilda Gage’s family to instruct her about which volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage should be sent to them. (SBA to T. Clarkson Gage, 8 April 1903, and to Helen L. G. Gage, 16 June 1903, Film, 43:524, 606–7.) 2. Thomas Clarkson Gage (1848–1938), Matilda Gage’s only son and a businessman, and his wife, Sophie Taylor Jewell Gage (1855–1945), lived in Aberdeen, South Dakota, where they hosted SBA during the amendment campaign of 1890. (Rita Shipman Carl et al., comps., The Shipman Family in America [N.p., 1962], 506, 508; Brown County Territorial Pioneers Association, Early History of Brown County, South Dakota: A Literature of the People by Territorial Pioneers and Descendants [Aberdeen, S.D., 1965], 31, 47, 194, 186.) 3. Helen Adell Hopkins Tillotson (1843–1922) lived in the neighborhood of the Gage family home in Fayetteville. She grew up in town and stayed after her marriage to James Marshall Tillotson, a grocer. (Charles S. Newman, Memories of Fayetteville, mss., Fayetteville Free Library; Fayetteville Cemetery, Index to Interments, 1900–1925, prepared by Nancy D. Schiffhauer, on-line.) 4. SBA may refer to an odd incident in 1898. A prominent antisuffragist from Albany sent a letter and leaflets to Helen Gage in South Dakota in which she asked for advice on her plans to send an antisuffragist organizer into the state. As Gage stated the matter in her reply, “I am wondering what freak of kind fortune induced you to write to Matilda Joslyn Gage’s daughter, of the treason in the camp.” In the future, “you will hang your heads in very shame”; each antisuffragist “will rank in
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history with the Benedict Arnolds and the Judases of the time, to be despised by her descendants.” At the time, Gage sent a copy to Carrie Catt who, in turn, sent a copy to the Woman’s Journal for publication after the South Dakota campaign. (Anna Parker Pruyn to Madam, 9 September 1898; Helen L. Gage to A. P. Pruyn, September 1898; and Carrie C. Catt to H. L. Gage, 8 October 1898; all in Matilda Joslyn Gage scrapbooks, Rare Books, DLC.) 5. Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819–1881) was a writer and editor associated for many years with the Massachusetts Springfield Republican who lectured against woman suffrage in 1867 and 1868. (DAB; Papers, 2:136.) Holland’s daughter Annie E. Holland Howe (c. 1852–1937) and her husband, John Kasson Howe (1850–1917), lived mainly in Troy and Albany, New York, after their marriage in 1881. Annie Howe became one of Albany’s activists for woman suffrage, and in 1907, she founded the Albany Woman’s Suffrage League. (Federal Census, 1870, 1910, 1920; Obituary Record of Yale Graduates 1917; A. H. Howe to Anne F. Miller, 12 February 1907, Scrapbooks of Elizabeth Smith Miller and Anne Fitzhugh Miller, vol. 5, p. 41, NAWSA Collection, Rare Books, DLC; with additional assistance of James Mooney, general manager, Springfield Cemetery.) 6. If SBA speaks of recent events, the meeting at which Annie Howe surfaced was probably that on 12 May 1903 in the Assembly Chamber in Albany. Harriet Mills, organizing for the New York State suffrage association, ran a five-week tour with Anna Shaw that included the Albany event. (Albany Evening Journal, 13 May 1903; New York Suffrage Newsletter, November 1903, Film, 43:732–33.) 7. SBA had earlier responded to protests from Clarkson and Helen Gage about the omission of Matilda Gage’s name from Ida Harper’s circular advertising the fourth volume of the History of Woman Suffrage. Writing in June, SBA pledged that Gage’s name “shall certainly go back in the next lot I have printed. But in the preface to the History,” she promised before they had seen the book, “you will find full credit is given to her for her work on the first three volumes.” (SBA to T. Clarkson Gage, 8 April 1903, and to Helen L. G. Gage, 16 June 1903, Film, 43:524, 606–7.) 8. To reduce Carrie Catt’s work, the National-American once again changed the location of its headquarters, closing the office Catt headed in New York City and establishing a national office in Warren, Ohio, under the direction of Harriet Upton. (SBA to Isabel Howland, 6 April 1903, Film, 43:522; Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt, 131–32.) 9. The circular is in Film, 40:815–16. Margaret Olivia Slocum Sage (1828–1918), second wife of the wealthy financier Russell Sage, was a friend of ECS through alumnae circles of Troy Female Seminary, but she was not yet well known as an advocate of woman suffrage. After 1906, when she controlled her husband’s wealth, she made significant contributions to the cause. (NAW; ANB.) 10. Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi (1842–1906), an eminent physician in New York City, collaborated with Lillie Blake in the amendment campaign of 1894. (ANB; 1894. Constitutional-Amendment Campaign Year, 217–20.) 11. By 1902, the National Legislative League had auxilaries in New York City and
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the District of Columbia, and though individual members came to annual meetings from many states, those meetings were very small, according to the Washington newspapers. In 1902, the league entrusted New York Senator Thomas C. Platt with a memorial seeking legislation to relieve women of the loss of citizenship due to marriage to a foreigner. A year later, just before the league convened again in Washington, Senator George Hoar introduced Senate 7032, a bill setting out procedures by which women could regain their citizenship. Lillie Blake ceased to be president after 1904, but consideration of such a bill continued. Senate 4438, introduced by Hoar in 1904, reached the floor of the Senate for debate and amendment before senators and members of the league lost interest. (Woman’s Journal, 8 March 1902, 7, 14, 28 February 1903, 9 & 30 April 1904, 11 March 1905; Congressional Record, 57th Cong., 1st sess., 6 March 1902, p. 2424, and 57th Cong., 2d sess., 19 January 1903, p. 941, and 58th Cong., 2d sess., 20 February, 4 April 1904, pp. 2120, 4210, and 58th Cong., 3d sess., 14, 18, 19 January 1905, pp. 829–31, 1007, 1064.) 12. Leslie Gage (1882–1966) became a teacher. Many years later she earned degrees from Teachers College, Columbia University and the University of Minnesota and taught elementary education at Winona State College. (University of Minnesota, Commencement Convocation, Winter Quarter, 1939 [Minneapolis, 1939], 80; Winona Sunday News, 10 July 1966.)
Textual Notes ¶4 ¶5 ¶7
ll. 7–8 l. 1 beg. ll. 3–4 l. 8 ll. 13–14
came to lifen—to the surface,p when Miss Mills You will see by the enclosed circular that for the omission that was made in the first. She had had nonlyp nine votes; always come out natp the little end
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Speech by SBA to the Judean Club of Rochester
Editorial note: SBA was the guest of the Judean Club at its rooms on Baden Street. Formed in 1895 to provide young Jewish men with a forum for religious and cultural education, the club evolved from the social services offered by the Gannetts at the Unitarian church. “It is an organization of young men,” the press remarked on this occasion, “but the Ladies’ Auxiliary . . . was largely represented in the audience which the eminent suffragist addressed.” (Rosenberg, Jewish Community in Rochester, 71–74.)
[17 November 1903] “The Local Council of Women is trying now to secure the right of 1 women in the cities to vote upon school matters. They should not only vote for school commissioners, but for members of the Common Council, and the mayor as well. We cannot take up a paper that does not tell of a shooting, murder, or some disaster resulting from a fight in a saloon. We want to shut up the saloons so that they will at least do their fighting out in the fresh air, if there is any to be done. “The majority of women are better qualified to vote than the majority of men. How many homes do you know where the husband cannot read English, at least, where the wife in addition to the cooking, dishwashing, washing and ironing and the care of the children, finds time to read the newspaper, and when her husband comes home at night is able to tell him while he is eating his supper what she read during the day? “When I was in California during the last campaign I knew a woman who was a graduate of a normal school, but her husband was a foreigner. He was a master iron worker, but he could not read English. That woman got him his breakfast in the morning and filled his dinner pail with good food, got her children ready for school, washed her dishes and found time to read the paper. When her husband came home at night she always either read to him or told him what was in the newspaper.” Miss Anthony had given the young people the privilege of asking any questions they wished her to answer, and just at this point some one
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suggested that it would be well to disfranchise all men who cannot read. To this the speaker replied: “No, it is a great deal better to have them vote. In New York the ignorant men, those in the slums, all vote, and we are a thousand times better off with their having the ballot than if they did not have it. I would much rather have a man vote, no matter if he was so ignorant that he could not read a letter. We are a great deal safer. Those men would be the first ones to rise up in a mob if we should disfranchise them. At each election they are led to think that this or that candidate will better the condition of the country and that their wages will be raised. It gives them a voice. As women, we cannot ask that any one be disfranchised.” Y Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 18 November 1903. 1. Still unable to vote in school elections, women of Rochester worked hard through the Local Council of Women to keep Helen Montgomery on the school board and get a second woman elected. (Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 9 September 1903, Film, 43:699; Pease, “Gannetts of Rochester,” 16–18; Blake McKelvey, “Rochester’s Public Schools: A Testing Ground for Community Policies,” Rochester History 31 [April 1969]: 9–10.) •••••••••
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SBA to Elizabeth Browne Chatfield1 Rochester, N.Y., Dec. 12, 1903.
Dear Lib:— ¶1 Your good letter came duly. “Kit” Stanton had been miserable for 2 a long time. Your word of him was so sweet, carrying me back to his young and beautiful days, that I sent the letter to Mrs. Blatch, asking her to send it to Maggie and for Maggie to send it to Kit’s wife, who is a beautiful woman of thirty perchance, now. She was very young when 3 he married her. I presume she will go home to her father’s and live. Kit belonged to societies enough to break any man down. They do say that he was the son of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They could not well say he was the son of Mr. and Mrs. Henry B. Stanton. It is a wonder they did not. Well, he has followed his mother very soon, and I suppose is 4 lying at Riverside by the side of her. That is a nice place that Julia has, and your letter was very refreshing in its word from her and your other
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sister. I am pretty well and doing as well as I can in sending out Volume IV and then with it Vols. I, II and III, very often. ¶2 Some time, if I ever can, I mean to call to see you again. I did enjoy 5 my visit with you ten years ago the coming Winter. You will remember it. It seems but a night in time, and yet it is a long time. Just to think that one short decade ago I made the circuit of every county seat with a convention of two days, Anna Shaw speaking the alternate night with me. It was a grand campaign that of 1894, and when 1914 comes around, if our women are at all alive to the situation, they will make 6 another still stronger and better canvass, and I hope the men elected to that convention will have back bone to vote in accordance with their conscience and not be governed by the prospects of the governorship 7 of any of Chairman Choate, ambassador, now you know, or any other popinjay. 8 ¶3 Enclosed is a programme of our Political Equality Club. You will see that Harriet Stanton speaks two weeks from tomorrow, and Miss Shaw closes the campaign. When you see Miss Shaw advertised again at Binghamton, go and see her and tell her who you are. That you were my private secretary and trusted friend during the publication of the Revolution. I am sure she will give you a welcome, but if she does not it will be the worse for herself and not for you. Sincerely yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, F. M. Denison Collection, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, CaOTUTF. Directed to 18 West Front St., Owego, N.Y. 1. Elizabeth C. Browne Chatfield (1842–1917) returned to live in her parents’ house is Owego, New York, after the death of her elderly husband, Levi S. Chatfield, in 1884. As a young woman, she and her sister Julia came to work as clerks in the office of the Revolution, and SBA hired Lib, as she was known, as her secretary. She also organized the Decade Celebration of woman’s rights in 1870 and tried her hand as SBA’s lecture agent across New York later that year. (Federal Census, 1850; New York State Census, 1855, 1865; New York Times, 5 August 1884; Owego Gazette, 3 May 1917; with the assistance of the Tioga County Historical Society, Owego, N.Y. See also Papers 2 & 5.) 2. Kit Stanton died in New York City on 5 December 1903, age sixty. 3. Kit Stanton’s widow, Mary O’Shea Stanton, was the daughter of Patrick O’Shea (1832–1906), a Catholic publisher who moved his family from New York City to Summit, New Jersey, by the time he died. O’Shea arrived from Ireland in 1851 and launched his business in 1854. Over fifty years, with more than two hundred original titles to the firm’s credit, O’Shea’s publications reflected interests in
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literature, Catholicism, and American history. (Peter Dzwonkoski, ed., American Literary Publishing Houses, 1638–1899 [Detroit, Mich., 1986], Pt. 2:49; New York Times, 5 March 1906.) 4. Julia Brown Bemis (1846–1920) was the sister of Elizabeth Browne Chatfield (who had changed the spelling of her maiden name). The third Brown sister was Jean (c. 1860–?). 5. SBA stayed with Chatfield on 28 March 1894, when her tour of counties for the New York State amendment campaign reached Tioga County. (SBA diary, 1894, Film, 31:879ff. See also Papers 5.) 6. New York’s constitution required that voters be asked every twenty years whether a constitutional convention should be held. SBA has, in this sentence, added twenty years to the date of the most recent constitutional convention in 1894. In fact, the provision about calling constitutional conventions was amended in 1894, and the constitution now stipulated that the next vote would occur in 1916 and every twenty years thereafter. (New York Const. of 1846, art. XIII, sec. 2; New York Const. of 1894, art. XIV, sec. 2.) 7. Joseph Hodges Choate (1832–1917), a prominent lawyer and Republican in New York politics, chaired the constitutional convention of 1894 and appointed antisuffrage delegates to the convention’s suffrage committee. (ANB.) 8. Enclosure missing.
Textual Notes ¶1
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SBA to Elizabeth Smith Miller Rochester, N.Y., Dec. 15, 1903.
My Dear Friend:— ¶1 On Saturday the express man left a package at the door. I ran down to see what had come and found it was a beautiful plum pudding with a card to sister Mary and myself. We shall save it for about Christmas. The apples you sent are most delicious and are keeping beautifully. The girl looks them over every day and picks out every one that is at all specked, so that we are keeping the best of them just as long as possible. The Northern Spies remind one of the old fashioned Spitzenburg, and the Baldwins are almost as nice. Both are splendid, so I want to thank 1 you over and over for them as well as for the plum pudding. ¶2 We were very much surprised a week ago Sunday to receive a tele-
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gram signed Caroline F. Putnam, saying, “will arrive on Northern 2 Central 8:17 Monday morning. Interment immediate, Mount Hope.” Sister Mary could not understand it at first, but I had seen the notice in our papers that Mrs. Douglass was dead, so I was prepared to know. 3 Monday morning sister Mary and Mrs. Blackall and Mr. Gannett were at the depot. The train was late but it came with Miss Putnam as you 4 have heard from her, with Miss Messer and Mrs. Douglass’ brother 5 Mr. Pitts. Not one of the children of Frederick Douglass was along, 6 nor have I heard from Rosa Douglass who lives in this city. If Miss Putnam is still with you give her my love. I was exceedingly sorry not to go meet her. I thought she would surely come home with sister Mary and I was very much disappointed, but she thought you would meet her at the noon train. It was a lucky thing that she was with Mrs. Douglass during her last days. Sister Mary almost froze in riding around Mount Hope up to the monument of Myron Holley to look at the mound that 7 covered Sally Holley. Well, Mrs. Douglass has done with her troubles here. I have been expecting every day to see some objection on the part of Lewis or Charles Douglass or Rosetta Douglass Sprague, to the burial of Mrs. D. in the family lot, but they have not made any sign yet, 8 so perhaps they will not. I hope not, for decency’s sake. ¶3 The weather is so cold that I have not been out since the day after I left your house. I went to a Thanksgiving dinner the next day to Mrs. Greenleaf ’s, and then on Friday evening I had a fainting and dizzy spell which prostrated me and I have been slowly coming up since, so that now I think I should venture out if it were not so cold. Mrs. Caroline Bartlett Crane spoke here Sunday night as you will see by yesterday’s paper. She is the guest of Mr. and Mrs. Gannet. She spent yesterday with us and Mrs. Gannett telephoned for me to come over there to lunch to-day, saying she would send a carriage for me, but I thought it wouldn’t be worth while and said, no, and then afterwards I heard 9 that Mrs. Wilkinson, a daughter of Samuel J. May was to be there to luncheon. I would have strained a point and gone out, cold as it is, if I had known it. Perhaps it is all for the best that I did not know she was there [in SBA’s hand] for I should have been tempted to go— With pleasant [times?] for Christmas & New Years I am very affectionately U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Smith Family Papers, Manuscript Division, NN.
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1. When Elizabeth Miller sent a barrel of apples to SBA in November, SBA recognized the Baldwin apple at the open end of the barrel. Baldwins were principally an apple of the Boston area until the middle of the nineteenth century, but they had become New York’s most popular commercial apple. Further exploration of the gift revealed the Northern Spy, an apple that was not widely planted in northern New York until 1850, but ranked as the third most important commercial apple in the state. The Esopus Spitzenburg, cultivated in New York since the middle of the eighteenth century, did not adapt well to commercial production, and thus it was harder to find by 1903. Thomas Jefferson thought it the best of apples and planted trees at Monticello, and many people still esteemed its superb flavor and texture. (SBA to E. S. Miller, 27 November 1903, Film, 43:766–68; S. A. Beach, N. O. Booth, O. M. Taylor, The Apples of New York [Albany, N.Y., 1905], 1:56–60; 120–22; 229–33.) 2. Helen Douglass died at home in Washington on 1 December 1903, with Caroline Putnam and a few other friends by her side. After a funeral in Washington, the body was brought to Rochester for burial. (Washington Post, 2 & 6 December 1903; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records.) 3. Sarah Colman Blackall (1836–1917) was an old friend of SBA who had joined the Women Taxpayers’ Association of Monroe County in 1873, worked with the Political Equality Club, and was active in the Unitarian church. She and her late husband, Burton F. Blackall, a former telegrapher who became an expert in fire alarm systems, were close friends of Frederick and Helen Douglass. (Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change, 208, 214; Victoria Sandwick Schmitt, “Rochester’s Frederick Douglass, Part Two,” Rochester History 67 [Fall 2005]: 1–32; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records.) 4. Probably this was Mrs., not Miss, Elizabeth Page Messer (c. 1846–?), long a friend of Frederick and Helen Douglass and their co-worker in the Association for the Relief of Destitute Colored Women and Children in Washington. She and Helen Douglass had recently served together on the association’s board of managers. Messer worked as housekeeper in Miner Hall at Howard University. (Federal Census, 1880, 1900; Report of the Commissioners of the District of Columbia for the Year Ended June 30, 1903, 58th Cong., 2d sess., H. Doc. 7, vol. 1, p. 519, Serial 4654; A. J. Halford, comp., Official Congressional Directory, For the Use of the United States Congress, 58th Cong., 3d sess., S. Doc. 4, pt. 1, p. 349, Serial 4767; Clifford L. Muse, Jr., “The Women of Howard University: A Tradition of Educational Involvement,” HUArchivesNet, no. 4, May 2000, electronic journal.) 5. Gideon Wells Pitts (1851–1937), class of 1872 at Cornell University, was a lawyer and banker in Iowa. His sister’s funeral was delayed until he could reach Washington. (Edith E. Davenport, comp., David Benton and Nancy Pitts: Their Ancestors and Descendants, 1620–1920 [Rochester, 1921], 79; Cornell Alumni News 40 [2 June 1938]: 428; gravestone, Nassau Township Cemetery, Sioux County, Iowa.) 6. Three children of Frederick Douglass survived, Rosetta Douglass Sprague (1839–1906), who lived in Rochester; Lewis Henry Douglass (1840–1908); and
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Charles Remond Douglass (1844–1920). (Douglass, Papers, 4:232–33n, 279n; William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass [New York, 1991], passim.) 7. Myron Holley (1779–1841) was a New York State abolitionist and Liberty party founder. (ANB.) His daughter, Sallie Holley (1818–1893), for many years Caroline Putnam’s companion, had taught in the school Putnam founded for freed slaves in Lottsburg, Virginia. Father and daughter were both buried in Mount Hope Cemetery. (NAW; ANB.) 8. Douglass family burials and reburials verged on farce. In 1882, Anna Douglass was buried at Graceland Cemetery in Washington, but in 1895, Frederick Douglass was buried in Rochester’s Mount Hope Cemetery. There he joined Annie Douglass, a ten-year-old daughter who died in 1860. In 1898, after Graceland was condemned and bodies removed because they were poisoning the water supply, her children moved Anna Douglass to Mount Hope. Meanwhile, Helen Douglass had plans to move the body of Frederick Douglass back to Cedar Hill, where a burial plot for Frederick and herself at the house would heighten the importance of the Frederick Douglass Historical and Memorial Association that she established. The Douglass children were loud and public in their complaints about that plan; their parents should stay together in Mount Hope. Although the plan to move Frederick Douglass to Washington was still in circulation at the time of Helen’s death, she was buried in the Douglass family plot. (Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records; Washington Colored American, 13 August 1898, SBA scrapbook 27, Rare Books, DLC; New York Sun, 9 October 1898; Washington Times, 30 September 1898, 2 December 1903; Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 5 December 1903.) 9. Charlotte Coffin May Wilkinson (1833–1909) was also the widow of Alfred Wilkinson, a Syracuse banker. As a young woman she determined to become self-supporting and attended a normal school in Massachusetts and then taught in the Syracuse public schools. She had also run a Home School for Girls in the city. (Garrison, Letters, 4:317, 5:51; Donald Yacovone, Samuel Joseph May and the Dilemmas of the Liberal Persuasion, 1797–1871 [Philadelphia, 1991], 122.)
Textual Notes ¶2
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l. 20 l. 3 l. 11
“will leave narrivep on Northern with Miss Pitts nMesserp and her nMrs. Douglass’p brother Mr. Pitts. Not one of the children nof Frederick Douglassp was along, but they have not made any scene nsignp yet, then on Friday morning neveningp I had a fainting a daughter of Sally nSamuelp J. May
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Last Will and Testament of SBA [4 January 1904]
I, Susan B. Anthony, of the City of Rochester, County of Monroe and State of New York, do make, ordain, publish and declare this to be my Last Will and Testament, in manner and form following: First: I direct the payment of my funeral expenses, and my just debts, if any. Second: I give and bequeath to the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the electro-type plates of the History of Woman Suffrage, together with the entire number of books that are printed, to be used in its educational department. Third: I give, devise and bequeath all of said rest, residue and remainder of my estate, both real and personal, to my sister Mary S. Anthony, my niece 1 Lucy E. Anthony, and my friend Anna Shaw. Likewise, I make, constitute and appoint the said Mary S. Anthony, Lucy E. Anthony, Anna H. Shaw and Rachel Foster Avery, executors of this my Last Will and Testament, hereby revoking all former Wills by me made. And I hereby request that no bond shall be demanded of my executors. In witness whereof, I have hereunto subscribed my name and affixed my seal, the 4th day of January, in the year of our Lord, one thousand nine hundred and four. Witnesses: U Irma B. Butler2 U Carrie M. Bahl3 U Susan B. Anthony (L.S.) We, whose names are hereto subscribed, do certify that Susan B. Anthony, the testator, subscribed her name to this instrument in our presence, and in the presence of each other, at the City of Rochester, New York, on this 4th day of January, 1904, and at the same time declared in our presence and hearing that the same was her Last Will and Testament, and requested us and each of us to sign our names thereto as witnesses to the execution thereof, and which we hereby do in the presence of the testator and of each other, and write opposite our names our respective places of residence. U Irma B. Butler, Rochester, N.Y. U Carrie M. Bahl, Rochester, N.Y.
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Y TMsS, with date in hand of Irma Butler, Estate of Susan B. Anthony, case file 1906–13, Surrogate Court of Monroe County, New York. Admitted to probate 18 June 1906. 1. Anna Shaw, Mary Anthony, and Lucy Anthony filed a memorandum in probate as follows: “On March 7th, 1906, Miss Anthony verbally requested Miss Mary Anthony and Miss Anna Shaw to see that the whole of what moneys she had should be put into the fund Miss Thomas and Miss Garrett are raising for the Woman Suffrage cause. “It is the intention of the undersigned to comply with and carry out this last request.” 2. Irma B. Butler, a young married woman, worked for SBA as a stenographer and typewriter for at most a few months. Her start late in 1903 cannot be dated because SBA’s accounts for that year were not saved. A large payment to her on 5 February 1904 may mark the end of her employment. (SBA diary, 2 January 1904 and account pages for February, Film, 43:816ff.) 3. Caroline Mathilda Bahl (1859–1931), known as Carrie, moved to Rochester from Sullivan County, Pennsylvania, about 1903 and found work as SBA’s live-in housekeeper. After SBA’s death until 1913, Carrie Bahl stayed in Rochester near a married sister and changed her occupation from domestic to private-duty nurse. She was buried with her parents in Overton, Pennsylvania. (Federal Census, Sullivan County, Pa., 1900, and Rochester, 1910; city directories, 1904, 1906, 1911, 1914; George Streby, History of Forks Township and Forksville Boro. [Dushore, Pa., 1904], p. 39, in George Streby, History of Sullivan County, Pennsylvania: Memorial Edition [N.p., 1921]; St. Francis Xavier Cemetery, Overton, Pa., on-line transcriptions of burial records.) •••••••••
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SBA to Clara Spalding Ellis1 Rochester, N.Y., Jan. 19, 1904.
My Dear Friend:— I am not a word artist. I can’t tell you at all of my belief of things beyond the grave, for I know nothing of the conditions there so I can’t figure with your people who think they know, but I can safely trust the same power that has provided all things well in this life, to take care of the future. Whether it shall be that I live in the form that I now do, or a different form, or whether I live not at all, I do not know. Of course I have my intuitions and feelings the same as other people, but I do not believe in setting them forth as a belief based on any principle. And I think your work would be a great deal better if it was directed to
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the changing of the conditions of women and men so that they might get an honest living in this World, and do the right thing at the right time. People are looking to what is to be done in the future far too much for their usefulness here, while here is the only sphere that they know certainly about. Now I do not send you this for publication but simply to acknowledge your letter and to say to you that I think we should leave what we are to be in the future, to the ministers of the different Churches. They have nothing else to do but to imagine how things will be there! I want to think and work for the bettering of the conditions here, sure that all will be right there. Sincerely yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead for 1903, uncorrected, Jeanette Bailey Cheek Papers, MCR-S. Directed to 78 Hawthorne Place, Montclair, New Jersey. 1. Clara Spalding Brown Ellis (1855–1935), a writer, was compiling a book of answers to the question, What’s Next, or Shall a Man Live Again? (1906). She chose not to include SBA’s letter. Ellis had married the dime novelist Edward Sylvester Ellis in 1900 and lived with him in New Jersey. As Clara Brown, during her first marriage, she lived in and wrote about Tombstone, Arizona, and Southern California. (WhNAA; Tombstone from a Woman’s Point of View: The Correspondence of Clara Spalding Brown, July 7, 1880, to November 14, 1882, ed. Lynn R. Bailey [Tucson, Ariz., 1998].) •••••••••
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SBA to Robert L. Stanton Rochester, N.Y. April 15, 1904—
Dear Bob— Well—how do you get along—acting as book publisher & agent of “Eighty years & More”— I was reading the book last evening—it seems to me your mother gave an undue proportion of the pages to her life long friend— But, be that as it may—it is all we have of her in book form— much—very much of her we have in our memories, but when we throw off this mortal col coil—there will be nothing else left—but this book—and the History of woman suffrage— I am so thankful that she stuck to the work of those volumes—they really contain the most of her great speeches—until 1883—and then Vol. IV—contains extracts of all her speeches to 1900— So the four books are really the record of her public life—and then in my “life
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& work”—there is about as much of your mother as of me—and then if Hattie ever materializes the volumes of her letters that she now hopes for—the world will have something of her life—beside tradition— I do hope she will make a good selection— But I hope she will not put in her mother’s lapses in gramma—& rhetoric—which she often made in her hasty letter writing— Mrs Harper told me she—Harriot “was not going to change a word”— Mrs Harper told her that not to do so—would be a great injustice to her mother!— Hattie wants me to go down to Ithaca next week— I think it will have to be the week after—as things now look!— I have three middling sized scrap-books pretty nearly filled with clipping of your mother—but I find I had put a great many of my clippings about her in my other book—40 of them—which are in the Congressional 1 Library— I intend these three to go there when I am through with them!— I have a speech on “Educated Suffrage” nicely type written—which I am sure she must have sent to be read at the Washington nConventionp of 2 1902—or else for the Hearing before nthep Congress Committees— Can you give me any clue to the date of its sending— There were so many foreign women to speak that year—I think her speech might have been crowded out— Can’t you tell me about it— She was very strenuous about Educated Suffrage—and I do not find that she hdd had any carefully prepared argument but this— I shall be in New York a day or two before sailing on May 19th— I shall be very glad to receive a call from you— Affectionately— U Susan B. Anthony [sideways on verso] p.s. I shall be at my Cousins—Mrs S. V. Laphams, No 10— East 68th street—New York— Isn’t this Introduction pretty nearly as well written as you Mothers Introduction—in the 1st volume—writ3 ten when she was 70 years “young”— That makes me think of George Francis Train—he always told of 70 or 80 years young— Poor fellow he is gone over the big river— Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, Scrapbook 3, Papers of ECS, NPV. 1. Now in ECS Papers, Library of Congress. 2. A typescript titled “Educated Suffrage” made its way to the Library of Congress, but it matches an article ECS published in 1895 and was likely prepared for the National-American’s convention that year in Atlanta. ECS sent addresses on educated suffrage to the conventions in 1898 and 1902, but typescripts of them have not been located. See Film, 33:643–51, 38:89–92, 245–68, 41:972–74, 42:520. 3. She may refer him to Ida Harper’s introduction to volume four of the History of Woman Suffrage.
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SBA to Anna Dann Mason1 [en route to Plymouth, England, before 28 May 1904]
2
Dear Anna— Your letter was good news from Norristown—that was right—$10— for a travelling Library— I wish every one in the country would order a set at that price— Still—wherever I can get the full price—I shall take it to save myself— My next will be written from Berlin—and in June— The weather has been cold so we have needed our shawls, coats and blankets to keep warm on deck— My leg gets lame after walking round the deck once or twice—so I am glad to sit down & wrap up—and go into dream land— It is so queer that you feel so safe when at sea—it seems like a house & home afloat— I hope you can cross the water before many years—before you get too old to enjoy it—people make a great mistake to put off their pleasure goings until they get rich—when they are likely to nbep past enjoying all they see— But until the time comes—make the most & the best of your powers—learn all you can from reading—take all the comfort you can as 3 you go—and when Charlotte gets through College—and into her headearning—she may earn more than mere head—and have enough to get the pleasures & instruction of foreign travel— I want Charlotte to gain everything she possibly can—so that she may be capable of taking the highest position—that means the best paying place—and then she will gain nthep place & pay that you missed because of circumstances beyond your control— So help her to be thorough in all her studies—especially in all the Classics, English Literature—composition, elocution, debate &c— I want her to take on all the accomplishments of both the High School & college—& then be ready to take all the good that comes in the work of life—after her school days are over— Well I have devoted this letter to Charlotte—but I know your head & heart are centred on her developement— Mrs Harper sits at the table opposite me writing to Winifred—and she doesn’t think more—love more, and feel more anxiety for her welfare—happiness, and culture than do I for you & Gilbert & Charlotte—and Miss 4 Heath —but you three especially— Sister Mary says dont forget to send
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love to Mrs Cook—and to Carrie —if you see her—& Mrs Smith & Mrs 6 Fenner —I think of them a good deal— So good bye—with lots of love to all three of you—affectionately yours U Susan B. Anthony May 28, 1904. Fredrich der Grosse Saturday morning—just inside the Channel—have seen Lands End—Scilly Islands—The eddystone Light House—and in an hour we are to make our first landing since we left New York—at Plymouth—a great many land there—and many ngo up top London— Then we go across the Channel to Cherbourg—and thence to Bremen—we are to get there Monday morning—& go direct to Berlin that 7 p.m. to the—der Pallast Hotel—where the most of us are to stop— it was a mistake about there being 100— or 50— going on this Steamer—to the Council—there are more nearly 15— in all—20 or 30— may be— We have had a delightful trip—not more than a ripple on the water The boat has had at no time any more motion than a river steamer—the ocean has been one vast monotony— I have had a letter each day—this a.m. at breakfast a good note from Dr Ricker—and yesterday a.m. one was on my breakfast plate from Lela Heath—splendid—the day before one came from 8 Col. & Mrs Greenleaf —and many mornings I got one from Mrs Avery— I expect a lot of letters at Plymouth— This is the only letter I have written—have touched pen to paper but twice before—and then to merely write in an atograph books—so I give you the first and only letter written on ship-board—between New York and Plymouth— Love to Charlotte— I am glad you & she can be together you to act as her mother & guide— Y ALS, on Dampfer “Friedrich der Grosse” letterhead, SBA Collection, NR. Envelope addressed to Mrs Anna Dann & Gilbert Mason, 202—Wellington Avenue, Rochester N.Y. U.S.A., and postmarked at London. 1. On 9 October 1902, Anna Dann married Gilbert Mason in a ceremony at SBA’s home, with Anna Shaw officiating. 2. On May 19, she sailed from New York City for Bremen on board the steamship Friedrich der Grosse of the line Norddeutscher Lloyd. 3. That is, Charlotte Dann. 4. Ophelia J. Heath (1851–1906), known as Lela, ran a boarding house on Clifton Street, Rochester, where Gilbert Mason lived before his marriage. SBA connected with Heath through Anna Dann, but she must have known the family earlier. Lela Heath went west to Kansas with her parents as part of the Free State movement in 1855 and lived through the destruction of her family’s house and farm by pro-slavery marauders a year later. Sometime after her father, Erastus Heath, died early in the Civil War, her mother, Jennette Brown Heath, moved
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to Rochester with three children. Jennette Heath, who knew ECS in their youth in Montgomery and Fulton counties, was active in the Moneka Woman’s Rights Society in Kansas before the war and took a seat on the platform at the American Equal Rights Association meeting in New York City in May 1869. (Kansas Claims. Report, 36th Cong., 2d sess., Rept. No. 104, 2 March 1861, pp. 214–21; History, 1:642–43, 2:255–56, 379n; Federal Census, Kansas, 1860, Rochester, 1870, 1880, 1900; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records.) 5. That is, Magdalena Cook and Carrie Bahl. 6. Mandana D. Smith Fenner (1833–1904) was Lewia C. Smith’s daughter and a resident, along with her husband, in her mother’s house. (Forest Hill Cemetery, Fredonia, N.Y., on-line records; city directory, 1903–1904.) 7. The Palast Hotel, on Leipziger Platz, was the site of headquarters for the International Council of Women meeting. 8. Halbert Stevens Greenleaf (1827–1906), partner in the Sargent and Greenleaf Lock Company and former Democratic congressman from Rochester, was the husband of Jean Greenleaf and a suffragist in his own right. After he attended a dinner party at her house in April, SBA noted in her diary that eight years after he suffered a stroke, “he can walk & talk—but imperfectly.” (BDAC; SBA diary, 10 April 1904, Film, 43:816ff. See also Papers 4 & 5.) •••••••••
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SBA to Mary Lewis Gannett [Berlin, Germany] June 17, 1904.
Dear Mrs Gannet I have just received your good news letter— It is splendid that the man contributed the $2000. and made a “Helen Barrett Montgomery”—schol1 arship— I hope she wont call it a “Mrs W. A. Montgomery” scholarship— there is my hope & wish for that one!— Now I wish there were 25 other men who would give $2000— and make 25 scholarships—that is, raise the original sum of $100,000—it would be most magnificent—wouldn’t it? Why wont the stars come forth—& make us free!! The Council & Congress have gone off splendidly— This evening we have the political with Mrs Fawcett, Mrs Chapman Catt & Miss Shaw—and me— I will tell you of it tomorrow after it is over—if I can get a pen to write with— Sunday a.m.—Well the Congress is ended— We had a tremendous sup2 per nlast night,p—given us by the Municipal government— The Burgomaster presided—all of the Common Council were present—the feast was
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in the great nCityp hall—there were tables spread in all the Corridors & rooms leading to it—there were fully 3,000 present— The eating over here is great—a whole half sheep put on a platter—Lobster—Fish—Ronapst beef, chicken everything— Well it was something to remember—though I came away hungry & thirsty—for a drink of just plain cold water!— The last session of the Congress was splendid—the big hall was full & an overflow Meeting was held— I did not go— I had sat through a five hours session— for 9 until after 2—and this last one was at 4—and I must go to the recep3 tion— To day Miss Shaw is to preach in the American Church— We 4 have seen everybody but the Emperor William— He ought to give us audience— Well I have thought & thought and felt so thankful that the whole $50,000 was paid—there was another scholarship for some worthy, poor girl— I am so glad that the university is open to the daughters of the poor— We must get a lot more scholarships— [Miss?] Cary Thomas 5 spoke strongly for co-education—her address was strong and good— I 6 am so glad that Charlotte will go to Bryn Mawr—Cary is splendid— If I sent to any girls college it would be that— affectionately U Susan B. Anthony I see I did not tell you of our political meeting Friday night— It was grand—Mrs Fawcett for England—and Miss Shaw & Mrs Chapman Catt for America— You see my pen is just as sticky as before—this is Sunday— and the Hotel cant get a new one until tomorrow— S. B. A. Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, W. C. Gannett Papers, NRU. 1. Nearly a year later, this Helen Barrett Montgomery scholarship for women, endowed anonymously, was listed in the university’s catalogue as a new thing. It brought the total value of the women’s scholarship fund to ten thousand dollars. (Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 8 April 1905; Report of the President of the University of Rochester and the Report of the Treasurer, 1904–1905 [Rochester, 1905], 39.) 2. The Lord Mayor, or Oberbürgermeister, of Berlin, Martin Kirschner (1842– 1912), hosted a thousand members of the International Council of Women at a banquet on Saturday, June 18. “For the first time,” Kirschner told his guests, “these halls see women gathered in far greater numbers than men; for the first time the citizens of the capital of the German Empire give official greeting to women.” (British Journal of Nursing 32 [25 June 1904]: 514–15; Anthony, 3:1321–23; Neue Deutsche Biographie, ed. Historischen Kommission Bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften [Berlin, 1953–].) 3. A union church serving all Protestant denominations, the American Church
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was located near Nollendorf Platz in Berlin. See “History of the American Church in Berlin,” in J. F. Dickie, In the Kaiser’s Capital (New York, 1910), 259–315. 4. William II, emperor of Germany and king of Prussia (1859–1941). 5. M. Carey Thomas, “The University Education of Women in the United States of America, with special reference to Coëducation,” in Marie Stritt, ed., Der Internationale Frauen-Kongress in Berlin 1904 [Berlin, 1905], 124–30. 6. Charlotte Katharine Gannett (1889–1940), later MacDowell, in fact graduated from Vassar College and studied social work at Simmons College. After her marriage to the zoologist Edwin Carleton MacDowell in 1919, she worked with him in research at the Carnegie Institution’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. (Alumnae Biographical Register Issue. Bulletin of Vassar College [Poughkeepsie, N.Y., 1939], 160, 162; New York Times, 25 October 1940.) •••••••••
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Interview with SBA by Ignota1 [c. 26 July 1904]
A type of beautiful old age, a face, seen in full, of motherly sweetness, soft, silky, silver hair plainly knotted behind the head and braided at the sides of the face, leaving the tips of the ears visible; a heart as warm as ever and brimful of quick sympathy; a brain firm, clear and resourceful; such is Miss Susan B. Anthony in her eighty-fifth year. With all her great past behind her, her life as a teacher, her work for the temperance cause and for the freedom of the slave, and her fifty years of ceaseless effort for the full emancipation of women, she still lives keenly in the present, quickly and appositely applying the wisdom of her wide experience to the problems of to-day. 2 It was my great privilege, thanks to the kindness of a valued friend, to pass recently in a typical English home two days with Miss Anthony, President at Large of the American National Women’s Suffrage Association—days spent in discussing the past history and the present position of the woman question in the United States of America and in the United Kingdom, and in comparing memories, fears and hopes. “How soon do you expect to win Women’s Suffrage throughout the United States?” was an early question.—“You ought to win full suffrage for the women of the United Kingdom far sooner than we can hope to win it throughout the United States—for look how easy your task is, compared with ours. You have but to convince one single Parliament of the justice
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and urgency of your claim, and to carry your Bill through both Houses by a sufficiently decisive majority, the Royal Assent being given as a matter of course; whilst we need to convince both Houses of forty-five separate Parliaments.” “How comes this about?”—“The United States of America is hampered by a written Constitution, which it is almost impossible to change; and each of its federated States has also a written Constitution, which cannot be altered in the least particular without the explicit consent of a majority of the electors. Every one of these separate Constitutions was framed by a Convention which no woman had any voice in selecting, and of which no woman was a member. Wyoming alone permitted its women to vote on its Constitution, and every State except Wyoming and Utah confined its elective franchise strictly to male citizens.” “What, then, is the method of procedure?”—“We have first to create and develop in the Governor of a State such a sense of justice as shall induce him to recommend the Legislature to submit to the electorate a Women’s Suffrage amendment to the State Constitution; next, the same process of conviction and stirring up to action must be repeated with the members of the State House of Representatives and the Senate, so as to assure a decisive majority in each; and finally we must convince such a proportion of the electorate as shall assure a decisive majority when the question is at last submitted to them. In some States a clear majority of the votes cast on that one issue is decisive; in others it must be a clear majority of the largest vote cast on any issue at that election; and again in many States such a resolution must be submitted to the electors by two successive Legislatures before it becomes law.” “What are the adverse elements in the electorate?”—“Largely the newly enfranchised men of alien birth (for only a year of residence is required to gain for these men the right which a life of public service cannot gain for us) and, speaking generally, the rougher and rowdier elements of the nativeborn American electors.” “Is there no other method than this seemingly hopeless one?”—“Yes; by an amendment of the Federal Constitution, recommended by the President to the Federal Legislature, adopted by the House of Representatives and the Senate, and finally ratified by three-fourths of the State Legislatures.” “And for this you must wait till you have a President righteous enough to recognise the injustice of your position, and like-minded Federal and State Legislatures?”—“Yes; and from this point of view our task seems
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almost hopeless, though we shall never despair. The women of the United Kingdom owe it to us to help us, since the United Kingdom led the way in the evil path followed by our legislators.” “What do you mean?”—“The celebrated Reform Act of 1832 first used the word ‘male’ with regard to the new franchises created by it. Not one of the many previous Statutes dealing with the franchise used one word 3 limiting its exercise to the male sex. This evil precedent was followed by our Federal rulers in 1865, when by the use of the word ‘male’ in the fourteenth amendment to the Federal Constitution, which enfranchised the male negro, women were first formally excluded.” Will the women of the United Kingdom respond to this appeal, and realising that their struggle for enfranchisement is not for themselves alone, but for the sake of womanhood everywhere, unite in one supreme effort for the immediate accomplishment of this great act of justice? Y Review of Reviews 30 (September 1904): 268. In Film at July? 1904. 1. “Ignota” was the penname of Elizabeth Clarke Wolstenholme Elmy (1833– 1918), one of England’s most committed advocates of woman’s rights since her career began in 1865 and a friend of the radicals in the Bright family. SBA noted in her diary when she and Elmy were guests of Katharine Thomasson together at Woodside in Bolton, an encounter mentioned in the interview. (Oxford DNB; Sandra Stanley Holton, “Free Love and Victorian Feminism: The Divers Matrimonials of Elizabeth Wolstenholme and Ben Elmy,” Victorian Studies 37 [Winter 1994]: 199–222; SBA diary, 25–27 July 1904, Film, 43:816ff.) 2. Katharine Lucas Thomasson (c. 1841–1932), the daughter of Margaret Bright Lucas, married the wealthy, Quaker cotton manufacturer, John Pennington Thomasson in 1867, merging two great families of reformers. Settled at Bolton, she became active in the Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage, and when her late husband served in Parliament from 1880 to 1885, she hosted a notable salon of Liberal politicians and woman suffragists in London. (Times [London], 21 March 1932; Mills, John Bright and the Quakers, 1:293n. See also Papers 4.) 3. In the narrative of woman suffrage in England, as told by nineteenth-century activists and repeated by SBA, the Reform Act of 1832 “enacted the first statutory disability,” limiting new rights to males while retaining older, common law rights for every person. See Caroline Ashurst Biggs, “Great Britain,” in History, 3:834–35, and Helen Blackburn, Women’s Suffrage: A Record of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the British Isles, with Biographical Sketches of Miss Becker (1902; reprint, New York, 1970), 12.
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SBA to Jane Cobden Unwin1 Rochester, N.Y., Sept. 6, 1904.
My dear friend:— ¶1 It is with a great deal of pleasure that I look back across the ocean to your beautiful home. It seemed to me like sacred ground that your 2 father trod, the fields, and across the little brook, just as you do today. I admired your home very much more than I can tell, and enjoyed every moment of my visit at Oatscroft. I was only sorry that we had not more time to enjoy it, though the memory of a short and sweet visit is so much better than that of a long and unsatisfactory one. 3 4 ¶2 I was very much pleased with your niece, Mrs. Hurst. She came in to see us at the Hotel, and we were all more than charmed with her. ¶3 We had a very pleasant journey across the ocean, and I read two old novels, “The Last Days of Pompeii,” and “Jane Eyre,” and I was just as interested in them now as I was when I read them fifty years ago for the 5 first time. “Jane Eyre” is a wonderful story, and that old “Rochester” is a stalwart fellow. I do not blame her for loving him, and I do think there are few girls in the world who would refuse to marry him, or run off with him if the opportunity offered; but she made her heroine equal to facing the law, and waiting for conditions to come, so that it would be according to custom to marry him. It is a weird story and I enjoyed it hugely. ¶4 I do hope the time will come, when you and your husband can visit this country again. I was very sorry that I did not go to Pater Noster Row 6 and see Mr. Unwin. I do not know that there was any business that needed to be attended to, but I did want to thank him in person for the pains he took in scattering the “Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony.” I found it in many places I visited, and heard of it in St. Margaret’s 7 College, so I feel well paid for the money I invested, some sixty two dollars, and I hope he will not feel that he was the loser of any money, or that his time was wasted in scattering the books. I should be glad to fill whatever orders he may have for the “Life and Work,” and for
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the “History of Woman’s Suffrage.” I think I told you that I had some eight hundred sets of the “History,” which I long to see placed in every college, university and high school in the land as well as every public library in cities and towns. ¶5 Miss Shaw and niece Lucy E. are at their home in Philadelphia. My niece was so disappointed when she saw Mrs. Hurst that she had missed the good times we had with her at your house. She was charming; but after all, I enjoyed you a great deal more than any of the young 8 people; and the pictures that remain with me are of Mrs. Jacob Bright, 9 Mrs. Thomasson, the Misses Priestman, Mrs. Elmy, Mrs. Rebecca 10 11 Moore, Mrs. McLaren, Mrs. Helen Bright Clark and her family, and your own dear self. My visits to all of these were without alloy. ¶6 There is one beautiful woman in London whom I want you to know. 12 It is Mrs. Stanton Coit, 30 Hyde Park Gate, London, S.W. Her husband, you know is the Ethical lecturer, and he is now a member of the Local and National Committees, and I think I told you he was getting 13 out a new edition of John Stuart Mill’s “Subjection of Women.” I have written him that I should think that Mr. Unwin would like to bring out the book, and I hope you will bring about an acquaintance with his wife. Mrs. Coit is without exception one of the most charming women I have ever met. She feels great pride in being able to help a man who preaches such liberal ideas, and who is so strongly in favor of suffrage for women; so when you come up to town to live, I hope you will meet her. Most sincerely yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Cobden and Unwin Manuscripts, West Sussex Record Office, Uk. Envelope addressed Oatscroft, Heyshott, Midhurst, Sussex. 1. Emma Jane Catherine Cobden Unwin (1851–1947), known as Jane, was one of Richard Cobden’s four daughters and an activist in the Liberal party and suffrage movement. SBA first met her in 1883. In 1892, Jane Cobden married Thomas Fisher Unwin (1848–1935), publisher and liberal activist. SBA dined with the Unwins on August 8, possibly at Oatscroft near Midhurst. Neither location of nor travel to this meal is mentioned in her diary, though biographer Ida Harper offered much undocumented detail. (Oxford DNB; SBA diary 1904, Film, 43:816ff; Anthony, 3:1334. See also Papers 4.) 2. Richard Cobden (1804–1865), father of Jane Unwin, was the moving force behind the Anti-Corn Law League and a close political ally of John Bright. 3. A correction here to read “cousin” appears to be by Jane Unwin, not SBA.
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4. Helena Mary Carroll Cobden Hirst (?–1965) was a great-niece of Richard Cobden and companion of Cobden’s daughters. In 1903, she married Francis Wrigley Hirst, a journalist and political economist. SBA dined with her at the Unwins, and Hirst called on SBA on August 12. (Oxford DNB, s.v. “Hirst, Francis Wrigley”; SBA diary 1904.) 5. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), and Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847). 6. Paternoster Row was a center of publishing and bookselling in London and the site at this date of T. Fisher Unwin, Publisher. 7. Probably the Queen Margaret College for Young Ladies, later St. Margaret’s School, near the McLarens in the Newington section of Edinburgh. 8. SBA stayed with Ursula Bright in Esher, then just outside London, on 6 and 7 August 1904, after visiting with her in London in July. (SBA diary, 14, 19 July, 6, 7 August 1904, Film, 43:816ff.) 9. Anna Maria Priestman (1828–1914) and Mary Priestman (1830–1914) of Bristol formed part of the Bright family circle of reformers in Britain by virtue of being sisters-in-law of John Bright and raising their niece Helen Priestman Bright, later Clark, after the death of her mother. They were great admirers of ECS, and they entertained SBA on each of her trips to England. (Oxford DNB, s.v. “Priestman, Anna Maria”; Mills, John Bright and the Quakers, 1:384–85, 392–97; S. J. Tanner, How the Women’s Suffrage Movement Began in Bristol Fifty Years Ago [Bristol, England, 1918]; Holton, Suffrage Days, passim; The Shield, January 1915. See also Papers 4.) 10. Rebecca Fisher Moore (1820–1906) was an early activist in the Garrisonian female antislavery societies of England and wrote the column of English correspondence for the Revolution from 1868 to 1870, when she worked with Lydia Becker in the suffrage movement in Manchester. SBA traveled with her in Great Britain in 1883, and Moore visited Canada and the United States a year later. (Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 [London, 1992], passim; Douglas Cameron Riach, “Ireland and the Campaign Against American Slavery, 1830–1860,” [Ph.D. diss., University of Edinburgh, 1976], 131–33, 313; Woman’s Journal, 3 June 1905. See also Papers 4.) 11. SBA was the guest of Priscilla McLaren at Newington House in Edinburgh from July 28 to August 1. McLaren was bedridden at the time. From there she traveled to Bristol to the Priestmans’ and Somerset for a few days with McLaren’s niece Helen Clark. (SBA diary, 1904, Film, 43:816ff.) 12. George Stanton Coit (1857–1944), known as Stanton, was an American in London, once destined to succeed Moncure Conway as minister of South Place Chapel but working instead through ethical societies and social settlements. His German-born and wealthy wife, Fanny Adela Wetzlar Coit (1863–1932), was a woman suffragist. While in London in July 1904, SBA was the guest of the Coits at 30 Hyde Park Gate. (ANB; I. D. MacKillop, The British Ethical Societies [Cambridge, England, 1986], 99–108.) 13. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, new ed., edited with introductory
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analysis by Stanton Coit (1906). Published in London and New York at the start of the year, this reprint of Mill’s classic essay of 1869 aimed to make the argument more accessible and bring working women into the analysis. Parts of Mill’s case were, Coit reasoned, obsolete in light of changes to married women’s property laws, but “while the condition of women may not have grown actually worse, and while for propertied women it has greatly improved, our knowledge of the evils endured by women has widened and deepened” (27). Mill overlooked “those wives and daughters of working men who suffer through no fault of the husband or father, but because of economic conditions wholly beyond the control of any but the voters of the country” (27–28). Noting that the woman suffrage movement was attracting working women to its ranks, Coit offered this “cheap reprint” of Mill for their edification.
Textual Notes ¶1 ¶3 ¶5
l. 5 l. 3 ll. 4–5
of my visit to natp Oatscroft. interested in them then nnowp as I was a great deal more than nany ofp the young people; •••••••••
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From the Diary of SBA [4–8 October 1904] 1
Tuesday October 4, 1904. We arrived in Leavenworth at 10.30— Found brother D. R. at the station to meet us—but Oh so changed— Had a warm welcome from sister Annie—& Maud came down to see us— 1. Since leaving Rochester, SBA and Mary Anthony had visited in Cleveland on September 24 and 25; attended a meeting of the National-American’s Business Committee at headquarters in Warren, Ohio, from September 26 to 30; sat in on the Illinois Woman Suffrage Association annual meeting in Chicago on October 1; and attended the Council of Jewish Women meeting in Chicago on October 3 before they boarded the night train to Leavenworth.
Wednesday October 5, 1904. We all went to dinner with Maud—& her 1 2 Lewis —Brother Daniel sister Annie D. R. Jr & Bessie & Mary and me— It was the last time he went out to dinner— 1. Lewis M. Koehler (1863?–1924), a professional soldier and graduate of West Point in 1885, met Maud Anthony while training at the United States Infantry and Cavalry School at Fort Leavenworth between 1887 and 1889. They married in 1896, after he served across the American West. He shipped out to the Philippines
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in 1899 to fight insurgents in the new territory, returning to the United States in March 1901. Leavenworth was his home from then until ten days after SBA’s visit in 1904, when he and Maud moved to the Presidio in San Francisco. Koehler, the son of an immigrant, Bavarian wagonmaker, grew up in Illinois and Iowa. Birthdates for Lewis Koehler range over a decade from 1857 to 1867. (George W. Cullum, Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. from Its Establishment, in 1802, to 1890 [Boston, 1891], 3:389; Cullum, Biographical Register, Supplement, 1890–1900 [Cambridge, Mass., 1901], 4:407; Cullum, Biographical Register, Supplement, 1900–1910 [Saginaw, Mich., 1910], 5:374; Anthony, Anthony Genealogy, 187; New York Times, 18 July 1924; U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Interment Records, Arlington National Cemetery.) 2. Bessie was Elizabeth Havens Anthony (1874–1948), wife of young Dan Anthony. Like her husband, she was born and raised in Leavenworth. (Anthony, Anthony Genealogy, 189; William E. Connelley, A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans [Chicago, 1918], 5:2224; Kansas City Journal, 22 June 1897; gravestone, Mt. Muncie Cemetery, Leavenworth.)
Thursday October 6, 1904. Brother D. R. Sister Mary & I went to Law1 rence on the morning train— we drove immediately to the Park—where they were celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first settlement of the city— Brother D. R. was so weak & short breathed that he couldnt go on 2 the Platform— We took dinner at the Eldridge House —and went back to Leavenworth on p.m. train— it was too bad that he went—he did not enjoy it—it was the last time he went out from home— 1. In a week of events to mark the semicentennial of the founding of Lawrence, Kansas, this was Anniversary Day, fifty years from the day when the town, settled by members of the antislavery New England Emigrant Aid Society, was named. D. R. Anthony had arrived in the town in July 1854 and ranked as a founder, but he missed the events of Old Settlers Day on 3 October 1904, when he was scheduled for a ten-minute talk. On this day, SBA was on the program to say a few words at the evening banquet. The local newspaper said that the Anthonys did not stay for the banquet, but SBA spoke somewhere this day, as she indicated in her letter to Catharine McCulloch, 12 October 1904, below. (Lawrence Daily Journal, 1, 6, 7 October 1904.) 2. The Eldridge House dated to the beginnings of Lawrence, when it was the Free State Hotel. Twice it was destroyed in pro-slavery attacks on the town, in 1856 and 1863, and rebuilt both times. (Martha B. Caldwell, “The Eldridge House,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 9 [November 1940]: 347–70.)
Friday October 7, 1904. We staid at home—brother D. R. used up with his trip to Lawrence—
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Saturday October 8, 1904. Sisters Annie & Mary & I went to Paul Havens 2 to dinner at 6 Oclock— Eleanor took sundry pictures of us— brother Dan. could not go—he felt too ill— [entries for 9–13 October omitted]
1. Paul Egbert Havens (1839–1913) was young Dan Anthony’s father-in-law, an early settler in Kansas, president of the Leavenworth National Bank, and a very wealthy man. (Anthony, Anthony Genealogy, 189; Connelley, Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, 5:2224.) 2. Eleanor Havens Anthony, born 31 August 1898, was the daughter of Dan and Bessie Anthony and granddaughter of Paul Havens. Y Excelsior Diary 1904, n.p., SBA Papers, DLC.
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SBA to Catharine Waugh McCulloch Leavenworth, Kansas, Oct 12, 1904—
Dear Mrs M’Culloch 1 We—my sister & I, are to be at my cousin’s—Melissa Dickinsons — fro[m] 11 na.m.p to 2 Oclock p.m.—on Saturday— If you can come there for a few minutes—I shall be very glad to see you— Miss Shaw writes that 2 the Protest takes like wild fire— I am going home to do all I can with my pen—to help on the howl in the ears of Congressmen— I spoke at 50th anniversary of the founding of Lawrence and told of the proposed outrage—the old folks joined with the howl— Well come down if you 3 can—Saturday between 11 & 2— I am so grateful to dear Mrs Springer that she came to the rescue—when she was so muc[h] needed— “she is a [pip?]”— Affectionately U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, on letterhead of Leavenworth Times, A-68 Mary Earhart Dillon Collection, Series VI, Box 8, MCR-S. Square brackets surround letters run off page and an uncertain reading. 1. Melissa Dickinson (1839–1910), daughter of SBA’s aunt Ann Eliza Anthony Dickinson, grew up in Chicago and joined her brothers as an executive in the family’s business, the Albert Dickinson Seed Company. When in the city, she lived at 307 North Clark Street in the Walton Flats, where several siblings occupied their own apartments. By the 1890s, she spent each winter in Florida and acquired considerable property there. (Anthony, Anthony Genealogy, 218; Will of Melissa Dickinson, signed October 1906, NAWSA Papers, DLC.)
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2. At the recent meeting of the National-American’s Business Committee, Catharine McCulloch won endorsement of her plan to build an ambitious coalition of women’s organizations to protest a bill before Congress regarding statehood for Oklahoma and Arizona. House Resolution 14749, passed on 19 April 1904 and sent to the Senate the next day, included language in its section twenty-one, paragraph five, that the coalition made infamous over the next months. It read: “That said State shall never enact any law restricting or abridging the right of suffrage on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, or on account of any other conditions or qualifications save and except illiteracy, minority, sex, conviction of felony, mental condition, or residence.” The Senate would take up the bill at the start of the third session of the Fifty-eighth Congress on 5 December 1904. At this date, an ad hoc Woman’s Protest Committee was preparing a letter addressed to scores of organizations asking that senators and the Senate Committee on Territories be petitioned to remove “sex” from that paragraph. Dated 22 October 1904, the letter was signed by twenty-six well-known women, representing the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, National Council of Jewish Women, National Catholic Woman’s League, the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and more. (Report of the Thirty-seventh Annual Convention, 1905, pp. 30–33, and Woman’s Protest Committee, 22 October 1904, Film, 44:332, 569ff; Woman’s Journal, 15, 29 October 1904; Congressional Record, 58th Cong., 2d sess., 5153, 5161; 58th Cong., 2d sess., A Bill to enable the people of Oklahoma and of the Indian Territory to form a constitution and State government, 4 April 1905, H.R. 14749; James R. Wright, Jr., “The Assiduous Wedge: Woman Suffrage and the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 51 [Winter 1973–1974]: 425–29; Charles Wayne Ellinger, “Congressional Viewpoint toward the Admission of Oklahoma as a State, 1902–1906, Chronicles of Oklahoma 58 [Fall 1980]: 283–95.) 3. Esther Elmina Skiff Springer (1831–1912) was the wealthy widow of Theodore G. Springer, an inventor who held valuable patents for the manufacture of illuminating gas. She owned and lived in the Ravenna Flats building at LaSalle and Division streets. Springer was an officer of the Chicago and Illinois suffrage societies, and in 1904, she was a candidate for trustee of the University of Illinois. She was also active nationally in the Woman’s Relief Corps. (Album of Genealogy and Biography, Cook County, Illinois, 8th ed. [Chicago, 1897], 72–73; Federal Census, 1900; New York Times, 10 July 1896, 15 December 1912; Certificate and Record of Death, Department of Health, City of Chicago; with assistance of Greenwood Cemetery staff.)
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From the Diary of SBA [14 October–8 November 1904]
Friday 14 October, 1904. Left Leavenworth Kansas at 5.30 p.m. on the Rock Island—had good night— Left dear brother D. R. very weak & feeble— he seems destined to go—but I hope against hope that he may recover— [omitted entries 15–25, 29 October; no entries 26, 28, 30 October.] Monday 31 October, 1904. Nephew D. R. Jr. telegraphed that Father was more comfortable— It is dreadful to hold one’s breath every time the door bell rings—expecting it is a telegram telling of death of brother D. R. and then we must be off for Leavenworth— Tuesday 1 November 1904. Anna Dann Mason at Homeopathic Hospi1 tal—born a girl baby—at 3 Oclock—doing nicely— Dr Sherman Ricker Telephoned us— I am glad she is through the ordeal safely— A letter from sister Annie written Sunday— Brother D. R. very bad— Saturday—so they thot he was gone for a time—was put to sleep on 2 Napha & Strychnine —slept 8 hours—woke exhausted— [no entries 2–6 November] 1. The Masons named their daughter Leanora Charlotte Turner Mason. She died at age seventeen. (Federal Census, 1910; Mt. Albion Cemetery, Town of Albion, N.Y., on-line transcriptions of gravestones and cemetery records, by Sharon A. Kerridge, 1997.) 2. The use of naphtha and strychnine suggests treatment for consumption or other lung disease.
Monday 7 November 1904. Letter from Sister Annie saying brother D. R. was [more?] quiet—knew her & Dannie for a moment— Helen Stanton—Theodores second daughter—coming on 9.5 train to night met her at Station—saw Theodore for a moment— it is two years since he was here at his mothers funeral— Nellie looks very much like Maggie Stanton— Tuesday November 8, 1904. Helen Stanton is a nice girl of 15— took her driving in a.m. to Eastmans—she bought a Kodack—then to the falls &
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home— She left on the 4 train for Geneva—Mrs Smith Millers [no entries 9–11 November] 1. Rochester was sited on the Genessee River to take advantage of waterfalls that powered the city’s industrial development. The Upper or High Falls, dropping ninety-six feet, could be best viewed from the Platt Street Bridge opened in 1891 across the river gorge. Eastman’s Camera Works on State Street was nearby. The company’s Brownie Camera had been introduced in 1900. 2. SBA pasted to the page the notice that Catharine A. F. Stebbins died this day at her brother’s house in Rochester. Y Excelsior Diary 1904, n.p., SBA Papers, DLC.
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SBA to the Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association [Rochester, before 12 November 1904] 2
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My Dear Friends in Convention Assembled—Your secretary asked me for a letter for your convention, to be held in Janesville, November 15 and 16, and I gladly send it to you. With all the sins of omission and commission, we have never had so great a one as that proposed by the first session of this congress, which is to be acted upon at the coming session. Women have always tacitly and inferentially been classed with the illiterates, insane people, idiots and criminals, but it remained for the Republicans, at this opening of the year 1904, to propose to write us down in the same category with the defective and delinquent male citizens. It is an insult beyond words to describe. I trust that you will see that a resolution passes your convention that shall speak 3 your indignation in terms fitting the “Badger State.” The Democrats are greatly troubled about the Filipino not voting or having the right to vote, and the Republicans talk about the negroes in the Southern states, but neither party has a word to say about depriving the women of the country of their entire right to the franchise. You will have your president, Rev. Olympia Brown, with you, and she will pronounce the verdict upon this outrage on the women of the United States as no other person can. You will of course pass a strong resolution. I should be glad indeed to be with you, but three score and ten and
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fifteen more years, bid me remain at home, and think and do what I can with my pen, but in spirit I am with you in your meeting, and with all the meetings in all the states of the Union. I hope you will have a good convention 4 and will send out a ringing resolution and protest to Senator Beveridge and your United States Senators, and as many of the Congressmen as you can write to. As my Leavenworth brother, D. R., says, “this is the biggest handle the Republicans have ever given us with which to strike back,” and he said we would be greatly at fault if we did not make use of it. I will send a copy of Vol. IV of the History of Woman Suffrage to the society that increases its members in the largest proportion, if that will be any inducement to the women to work to hold up the societies in the state. How any one can feel that it is of no importance to join and work for a woman suffrage association is more than I can understand. Hoping you will have a splendid convention, I am, most sincerely yours, U Susan B. Anthony. Y Woman’s Tribune, 10 December 1904. 1. It is likely that SBA wrote this letter before taking the train to Kansas on 12 November 1904. 2. Margaret Airis Geddes (c. 1848–?) came to the United States from Scotland as a child with her parents and, after marriage to another Scottish immigrant, she raised her family in Janesville, Wisconsin, while also teaching school. With her husband, Robert Geddes, who worked in a drygoods store, and their two grown daughters, a stenographer and a teacher, she moved to Platteville during the 1890s. In 1901, the Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association elected her corresponding secretary and she held the post at least through 1906. (Federal Census, 1880, 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930; Janesville city directory, 1880; Lawrence L. Graves, “The Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Movement, 1846–1920,” [Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1953], 374–75.) 3. The campaign against the statehood bill continued. To acompany the letter of the Woman’s Protest Committee, Alice Blackwell wrote a pamphlet, “Why Women Should Protest,” also published in the Woman’s Journal, 5 November 1904. The Washington Post began its coverage of the protest on 2 November 1904. At the meeting in Wisconsin, suffragists adopted a unique resolution on the topic. “Whereas, The men of Arizona have twice expressed by a large majority in the legislature their desire for the enfranchisement of women of the territory, and “Whereas, The statehood bill now in the hands of congress sets the seal upon the disfranchisement of women—insulting them by classing them with idiots, lunatics, and felons—and also defeats the expressed will of the voters of Arizona and denies them the control of suffrage exercised by the states, fastening upon them forever an alien vote and taking from them the power to dignify citizenship by making suffrage its distinguishing characteristic; therefore be it
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“Resolved, That we protest against the passage of that bill, regarding it as a great wrong to the people of Arizona, as a glaring injustice to those pioneer women who have given the best of their lives to develop the civilization of the west, a blow to democratic institutions, and a lasting disgrace to the Republican party, and that we most earnestly request our senators—Messrs. Spooner and Quarles—to use their best powers to secure the defeat of the bill, thus saving our nation from a great blot upon its honor.” (Woman’s Tribune, 10 December 1904, Film, 44:350.) 4. Albert Jeremiah Beveridge (1862–1927), Republican of Indiana, served in the Senate from 1899 to 1911. He chaired the Committee on Territories. (BDAC.) •••••••••
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From the Diary of SBA [12–19 November 1904]
Saturday 12 November, 1904. 89th Birthday of Mrs Stanton Brother Daniel Read Anthony died this a.m.— Sister Mary & I go to Leavenworth this p.m. at 5.30— get to Chicago Sunday a.m. 8— and at L. at 10 Monday a.m. so we go—he is our last brother only Sister Mary & 1 self left— 1. SBA pasted an obituary from the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle on this page of her diary.
Sunday 13 November 1904. Arrived Chicago at 8 a.m Went Wal1 2 ton — Found Cousin Melissa gone—went up stairs to Cousin Fanny’s — found hearty welcome spent day there— Mrs Springer called said she would 400 dollars for the Protest against Congress classing Women with Criminals &c— she cheered my heart No! She gave me $25— The $400— was in October when we were in Chicago— 3 I got nitp in my head that the Rock Island went at 6.30— Cousin Albert went to station with us—the train had left—then we walked over to the 4 Santa Fe and left at 9.30— so I lost my 25 dollars—paid it out in fare— 1. The Walton Flats was located at 307 North Clark Street. 2. Frances Dickinson (1856–1945) graduated from the Woman’s Medical College in Chicago, studied ophthalmology abroad, and launched a distinguished medical career. She frequently worked in the woman suffrage movement. (F. M. Sperry, comp., A Group of Distinguished Physicians and Surgeons of Chicago: A Collection of Biographical Sketches of Many of the Eminent Representatives, Past and Present, of the Medical Profession [Chicago, 1904], 150–53, and obituary in
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unidentified paper, 24 May 1945, both courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society. See also Papers 4 & 5.) 3. Albert Dickinson (1841–1925) of the same family succeeded their father as president of the Albert Dickinson Company, a major supplier of seeds in the Midwest. Still single at this time, Albert Dickinson, when seventy years of age, married Emma Benham, a dental surgeon from Chicago and a friend of his sister Frances. Like his sister Melissa, he settled in Orange City, Florida. (Andreas, History of Chicago, 2:356; Albert Nelson Marquis, ed., Who’s Who in America: A Biographical Dictionary of Notable Living Men and Women of the United States, vol. 9, 1916–1917 [Chicago, 1916].) 4. They missed a through train to Leavenworth on the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railway and walked from its LaSalle Street Station to the Dearborn Station to take the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway. No train was scheduled at the time SBA indicates; it is likely that they caught the train scheduled to depart at 7:30 p.m. Then with a change of trains at Kansas City to ride the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railway, they could arrive in Leavenworth, as she notes the next day, at 11:00 a.m. (Travelers Railway Guide: Western Section [November 1904].)
Monday 14 November 1904. We arrived on the Burlington at 11 a.m. just had time to look on the face of our dear brother Daniel R. under the glass— but he seemed so calm & still— The funeral was at 2.20— Mr [blank] 1 Page read scriptures & made brief prayer— Then at Mt Muncie the old 2 Soldiers had their ceremony—it was very touching —& Mr Page closed by repeating the Lords Prayer—and we left all that is mortal there at the Cemetery—but [continues in space for 15 November] he still lives closer than before in the hearts of all who love him— 1. William Noble Page (1837–1908), pastor of Leavenworth’s First Presbyterian Church from 1873 to 1905, led prayers at the Anthony house. Born in Vermont and raised in New York State, he completed his education after service in the Civil War. Like D. R. Anthony, he belonged to the Grand Army of the Republic in Leavenworth. In 1889, Page had conducted the funeral for the Anthonys’ daughter Susie. (General Catalogue of the Auburn Theological Seminary, Including the Trustees, Treasurers, Professors, and Alumni. 1883 [Auburn, N.Y., 1883], 141; Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. Proceedings, etc., of the 120th General Assembly [Philadelphia, 1908], 83.) 2. When the casket left the house, it was preceded by the elderly General Hugh Cameron, the man with whom D. R. Anthony walked from Kansas City, Missouri, to Lawrence, Kansas, in 1854. Near the Soldiers’ Home, hundreds of veterans of the Civil War lined the street as the procession passed. At the gravesite, by arrangement with the family, the Leavenworth post of the Grand Army of the Republic led a burial service. (Unidentified and undated clippings, “From Sunday’s Daily
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Times” and “From Tuesday’s Daily Times,” Scrapbook 1902–1904, SBA Papers, DLC.)
Tuesday November 15, 1904. Sisters Annie & Mary & self drove out to the cemetery this p.m.— The flowers covered the grave—all was still—there lay Brother D. R. his head to the north of the monument—Susie B. and little Annette at his right and brother J. Merritt & sister Hannah at the left—half of our family are at Mt Muncie 1
Wednesday 16 November, 1904. In p.m. we drove to the Fort —and called 2 on Hattie Bitman Bard —then drove out on the south and into city on Shawnee street 1. Fort Leavenworth is north of the city of Leavenworth. From the 1880s to the start of the Spanish-American War, the fort housed the United States Infantry and Cavalry School for training junior officers. To meet military needs identified during the war, education at Fort Leavenworth was expanding with four Army Service Schools for junior officers. (Jonathan M. House, “The Fort and the New School, 1881–1916,” in A Brief History of Fort Leavenworth, 1827–1983, ed. John W. Partin, on-line at the Combined Arms Research Library Digital Library, Fort Leavenworth.) 2. Harriet Bittman Barth (1864–1958), not Bard, was a contemporary of Maud Koehler, who grew up in Leavenworth as the daughter of a German wholesale grocer and his Irish wife. A military wife, her family was together in Leavenworth at this date while her husband, Charles Henry Barth, served as an instructor from August 1903 to December 1905 at the United States Infantry and Cavalry School and Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. (Federal Census, Leavenworth, Kan., 1900, and Washington, D.C., 1910; U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Interment Records, Leavenworth National Cemetery; Cullum, Biographical Register, Supplement, 1910–1920 [Saginaw, Mich., 1920], 6–A:322.)
Thursday 17 November, 1904. Sister Annie, Mary & I took a long drive out west of City— Riding in the fresh air seems to be the life of Sister Annie— Friday 18 November 1904. Left L. at 5 with D. R. Jr. went to Hiawatha—to 1 see Webster Wilder—found him at Station— his wife—& wife’s mother & he make the family—their youngest daughter Sarah is in the University— had a good visit— Web. was in brother Dan’s mind—he thought he could write his life—but I saw at once that he was too feeble— 1. Daniel Webster Wilder (1832–1911) had a long career as a judge, insurance commissioner, editor, and journalist in Kansas, where he moved in 1857. Before the war, he and D. R. Anthony published the Leavenworth Conservative together. In 1876, they collaborated again while organizing the Kansas State Historical
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Society. On the basis of his book Annals of Kansas (1875), Wilder was regarded as the state’s leading historian. His wife, Mary Elizabeth Irvin Wilder (1846–?), was the daughter of Ellen M. Irvin (1817–?), a widow who lived with the Wilders. Their daughter Sarah A. Wilder (1883–?) graduated with the class of 1905 from the University of Kansas and went abroad to study vocal music. The Wilders’ home in Hiawatha, Brown County, lay north of Leavenworth in the northeast corner of the state. (Federal Census, 1900; NCAB, 11:191; WWW1; Catalogue of the Alpha Delta Phi [New York, 1899], 256; William E. Connelley, “Daniel W. Wilder, The Father of Kansas History and Literature,” Collections of the Kansas State Historical Society, 1923–1925 16 [1925]: 1–21.)
Saturday 19 November 1904. At 2.30[?]—nephew D. R. came from Nemaha 1 farm— he & his wife both came to station— I looked at the Huron farm as we passed it— how much pride brother Dan did take in it— Nephew Dan now will have to look after both farms—the Times Office—& his Mayor’s business—a big load for a young man n34p— 1. D. R. Anthony owned two large stock farms north of Leavenworth on land that he acquired before the Civil War in anticipation of railroad construction. In Nemaha County, near the town of Baileyville, he raised cattle, horses, and hogs on eleven hundred and twenty acres. At Huron in Atchison County, he raised horses on eight hundred acres. Both farms were well-served by railways. (U.S. Bureau of Land Management Records, on-line; The Official State Atlas of Kansas, Compiled from Government Surveys, County Records and Personal Investigations [Philadelphia, 1887].) Y Excelsior Diary 1904, n.p., SBA Papers, DLC.
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SBA to Anna Osborne Anthony [Rochester, c. 2 December 1904]
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Evening— Well we have marked our dear Mother’s birth day—by a thanksgiving dinner—tomato soup—celery—Roast Turkey—tip-top dressing—potato, squash, onions, Cranberry sauce—and lastly coffee— Plain nice nplainp cake baked to day—Peaches beautiful—bread & butter—and pickles—and mothers tall dish with oranges & grapes— So much for the menu— The guests were 12 in number—Mrs L. C. Smith—94—Mrs 2 Sarah L. Willis—86—Mrs Hallowell—82—Mrs Watkeys —70—Mrs Black3 4 all 70—Mrs Maria Wilder Dupre —74—Mrs W’m B. Morse, 62—Mrs D.
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M. Anthony —50—Mrs Mary L. Gannett—50—oh yes—Mrs Charlotte 6 7 Wilbur Griffing —75 and Miss Bedell a niece of Mrs L. C. Smith and Mrs Jean Brooks Greenleaf, 73 with Sister Mary & me— it made 14 which is all that our table—or our dining room would hold— We had on cousin 8 Melissa’s Christmas present—it was a beautiful table cloth—that would cover a table 2 or three feet longer—& the napkins to match— Then we used the beautiful 6 knives—pearl handles—and nsilverp forks—and fruit spoon—that brother Dan sent down to me for a Christmas present—some years ago—then the Dozzen Desert Spoons—that Mrs L. C. Smith presented to me a few years ago, for the Political Equality Club— then we had on the table pieces that were embroided by Mrs 9 Murray of New York—she nwhop is over 90 years old—and Mother’s China Cups & Saucers—her old glass dish had the Cranberries in—and I set in the centre of the table my mother’s & father’s old brandy glass—or goblet—turned down— They laughed lots at its being turned down— the dinner went off nsplendidlyp— Sister Mary carved the Turkey and our tall 10 Carrie served the table nicely—and had the things cleared away—and all the dishes nicely washed and ready to put away—when we went into the kitchen after all were gone— Do you not remember when you were here on a Dec. 2 for thanksgiving dinner—and after it—you & I went down to Skaneateles to Cousin Anson 11 Laphams —and how cousin Anson called me to his desk and gave me back my notes for $4,000— all cancelled!! My that was one of the happiest days of my life— Well I wonder where brother Dan. is now—has he seen & heard all that was said of him—Mother & Father & all—where are they? Echo answers—where oh where!! Please send this to Maud it will serve to while away the hours until you come— My how happy she will be— Affectionately your sister U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS fragment, SBA Collection, NR. 1. This is the handwritten postscript torn from a typed letter, the last and only words of which are, “suprised after I got it marked that it was not of the right sort. Affectionately yours,” and signed by SBA. December 2, the birthday of Lucy Read Anthony, was often celebrated at Madison Street with a feast for guests. 2. Zerviah Temple Colman Watkeys (1834–1928) was a sister of Sarah Blackall and the widow of Henry Watkeys, a mechanical engineer with the New York Central Railroad. Four of her eight children lived in Rochester and boarded with her. (Brown Thurston, comp., Thurston Genealogies, 1635–1892, 2d ed. [Portland,
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Me., 1892], 174, 291–92; city directory, 1904; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records.) 3. Maria Richardson Wilder Dupuy (1830–1910) was a sister of two friends of SBA, Daniel Webster Wilder of Kansas and the late Samuel Wilder of Rochester. After her marriage in 1858, she settled in Pennsylvania until the death of her husband in 1875. With five young children to care for, Dupuy moved to Michigan to be near a sister, and about 1888, she and her youngest son settled with the Wilder family in Rochester. She died in England while visiting a daughter. (Charles Meredith Dupuy, A Genealogical History of the Dupuy Family [Philadelphia, 1910], 42, 55; Federal Census, Luzerne County, Pa., 1870, Rochester, 1900; Detroit city directories, 1877, 1882, 1887; Rochester city directories, 1889, 1904; death registration, General Register Office, England, courtesy of C. Kathryn Camp.) 4. Frances Case Morse (1841–1933) became a widow in September 1904, at the death of William B. Morse, a successful lumber dealer in Rochester. Several of her eight children still resided at her house on West Avenue. (Federal Census, 1900; Peck, History of Rochester and Monroe County, 2:1305–6; city directory, 1904; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records.) 5. Helen Chase Anthony (1841–1928) was the third wife of SBA’s distant cousin and friend Daniel M. Anthony. She was active in the Political Equality Club and bore responsibility for a report on international progress at each meeting. (Federal Census, 1900; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records; Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 8 January 1897, Film, 36:668.) 6. Charlotte S. Wilbur Griffin (c. 1827–1907) was a twice-widowed businesswoman, said to have attended the Rochester woman’s rights convention of 1848. She was still working in the “ornamental hair works” or “hairdressing store” she had run for many decades. Her first husband, Theodore E. Wilbur, active in the city’s antislavery societies, died in 1858; her second husband, Lewis V. Griffin, a daguerreotypist and bookkeeper, died in 1884. Charlotte Griffin lived with the son of her first marriage on University Avenue. (Federal Census, 1880, 1900; Anthony, 3:1342; Joseph R. Struble, “Captured Images: The Daguerreian Years in Rochester, 1840 to 1860,” Rochester History 62 [Winter 2000]: 17, 20; city directories, 1883, 1884, 1890, 1904; Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 23, 24 July 1907; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records.) 7. Adelaide L. Bedell (1849–1925), the youngest guest, had moved recently into the house of her aunt, Lewisa Smith. She would later, after Smith’s death, take in boarders there. Bedell was widowed at age thirty-one and had raised her four sons before settling in Rochester. (Federal Census, Orleans County, N.Y., 1880, and Dutchess County, N.Y., 1900, and Rochester, 1910, 1920; city directory, 1905; Garland Cemetery, Clarkson, N.Y., tombstone transcription.) 8. That is, Melissa Dickinson. 9. Margaret Cady Livingston Murray (1809–1909), a distant cousin of ECS and early activist for woman’s rights, retired to her native Johnstown, New York, after many decades running a boardinghouse in New York City. She was instrumental in gaining passage of a special married women’s property bill that allowed mar-
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ried keepers of boardinghouses to have legal standing in disputes over rent. In the 1860s, SBA sometimes stayed at Murray’s establishment on Twenty-third Street, and the two friends spent time together in 1884, when ECS and SBA settled in Johnstown to work on volume three of the History of Woman Suffrage. (Howland Davis and Arthur Kelly, comps., A Livingston Genealogical Register [Rhinebeck, N.Y., 1995], chart N8; Catherine Bryant Rowles, Tomahawks to Hatpins: A History of Johnstown, New York [Lakemont, N.Y., 1975], 83–86; History, 1:688. See also Papers 2 & 4.) 10. That is, Carrie Bahl. 11. Anson Lapham (1804–1876), a first cousin of SBA’s father, left Danby, Vermont, for New York City about 1833 and became a successful businessman and philanthropist before retiring to Skaneateles, New York, in 1861. He loaned SBA four thousand dollars to run her newspaper, the Revolution, and later forgave the debt when SBA and Annie Anthony spent Thanksgiving at his house on 27 November 1873. (Aldridge, Laphams in America, 53; Quaker Genealogy, 3:198; Friends’ Intelligencer 33 [1877]: 682; Anthony, 1:354, 448; SBA diary, 27–29 November 1873, Film, 16:617ff.) •••••••••
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Albert J. Beveridge to SBA [Washington, D.C., after 3 December 1904]
I have read with keenest interest your esteemed letter of December 3d, and shall lay the same before the committee of which I am chairman, as soon as we reach this portion of the bill. Of course I assume that you know that this bill was passed by the House and reached this committee only two or three days before adjournment, so that it has not been possible thus far for any of this committee even to examine the bill. You may be sure that your letter and the large number of communications I have received from other women over the country shall receive most 1 careful and kindly consideration. Thanking you for the courtesy of your letter, which I personally value on account of the great distinction of the writer and her historic championship of her sex, and begging that you will communicate with me quite freely whenever I can be of service, I am, dear Miss Anthony, with kind regards and best wishes, Very sincerely, U Albert J. Beveridge.
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Y Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 13 December 1904. 1. The third session of the Fifty-eighth Congress opened on 5 December 1904. Six weeks after the Woman’s Protest Committee began its agitation against the statehood bill, senators and members of the House of Representatives had large numbers of petitions on hand to present in their respective chambers. On December 7, for example, Senator Jacob H. Gallinger of New Hampshire offered a typical array of petitions that came from the state temperance union, equal suffrage clubs of Franklin and Concord, the Outlook Club of Manchester, Candia Grange No. 167, Patrons of Husbandry, and a plea from an officer of the state suffrage association. Petitions continued to arrive through January 1905. (Congressional Record, 58th Cong., 3d sess., 7 December 1904, p. 45.) •••••••••
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Remarks by SBA to the Rochester Council of Women [12 December 1904]
The local Council of Women held its December meeting yesterday 1 afternoon in the Chamber of Commerce rooms. In the absence of the 2 3 president, Mrs. W. E. Armstrong, the vice-president, Mrs. J. M. Ingersoll, presided. Susan B. Anthony talked informally on the statehood bill and the Platt-Morrell bill. She said women should interest themselves actively in both bills. Miss Anthony explained that the statehood bill seeks the admission into the Union of Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Indian Territory. She referred to the fact that this bill proposes to unite Oklahoma and Indian Territory into one state under the name of Oklahoma, and to combine Arizona and New Mexico into a state under the name of Arizona. She said that this bill contained clauses depriving women of the right to vote. These clauses, she said, are in paragraphs 5, of sections 3 and 21, which would allow these states when organized, to disfranchise minors, criminals, luna4 tics, non-residents, ignoramuses and women. This part of the bill reads: “That said state shall never enact any law restricting or abridging the right of suffrage on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude, or on account of any other conditions or qualifications, save and except on account of illiteracy, minority, sex, conviction of felony, mental condition,” etc.
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That Offensive Word “Male.” Miss Anthony said an injustice to women might be averted if the word “sex” were stricken from the paragraphs. Of the Platt-Morrell bill she said that bills to amend the Federal Constitution were being introduced in the Senate by Thomas C. Platt, of New York, and in the House of Representa5 tives by Edward De V. Morrell, of Pennsylvania. Miss Anthony said that these bills were ostensibly to cut down the representation of the South because of its disfranchisement of the negro. “But,” added she, “we should ask that the word ‘male,’ used three times, be stricken out of section 6 of Mr. Platt’s amendment, because the object of all Americans, of whatever party, is that all states shall be equally treated, and that all citizens who do not vote shall not be counted on the basis of representation. By this plan the only states where women would be counted in making up the number of representatives they should have in Congress are Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho. Miss Anthony added: “It seems to me that we have come to the parting of the ways. We should have the basis of citizenship placed upon the basis of qualification, not upon sex. I wish that you women would watch this matter closely.” “And write to Mr. Platt and Mr. Morrell,” added Mary S. Anthony, who occupied a chair in the front row. Susan B. Anthony further said that if Indian Territory were admitted as a state, with a clause in its constitution classing women with lunatics and idiots, the effect would be especially bad upon its mixed population of Indians, half-breeds and Mexicans, who have no idea of treating women with the consideration they would give to men. Y Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 13 December 1904. 1. At this date, the Rochester Chamber of Commerce occupied the top floors of a large office and commercial building on Main Street East at the corner of South Avenue. The facilities included a large auditorium. 2. Jane L. Bennett Armstrong (1864–1947), a leader in the social reform work of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, was the wife of William W. Armstrong, state senator from Monroe County. In acknowledgement of her considerable experience working with women in trouble in Rochester, she was named warden of New York’s penal farm for women at Valatie in 1916 and served two years. By the time of her resignation, W. W. Armstrong had divorced her and remarried; settling their disputes entailed removing remains of her family from the cemetery in his hometown and reintering them in her hometown. This first marriage was erased from his biography. Jane Armstrong stayed on in Rochester, boarding with a woman she once employed as a servant and holding various jobs. (Federal Census,
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1910; city directories, 1917 to 1919; Albany Evening Journal, 31 July 1916; Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 4 December 1918; marriage certificate of William W. Armstrong and Sara E. Briscoe, 19 June 1918, No. 4161, Prothonotary and Clerk of Courts, Potter County, Pa.; Hillside Cemetery, Holley, N.Y., interment records, on-line; with assistance from Marsha I. DeFilipps, Holley Village Historian.) 3. Adele Remington Ingersoll (1860–1926) was a poet and an officer of the Local Council of Women who grew up in Rochester. Though in club work she used the name of her husband, Joel M. Ingersoll, a distinguished physician in the city, she published under her own name. (Federal Census, 1900; Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 85 [August 1892]: 399; Magazine of Poetry 6 [August 1894]: 366–67; Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 24 May 1926.) 4. SBA refers to the bill passed by the House: 58th Cong., 2d sess., A Bill to enable the people of Oklahoma and of the Indian Territory to form a constitution and State government, 4 April 1904, H.R. 14749. 5. Thomas Collier Platt (1833–1910) of New York was the state’s Republican party boss. Edward de Veaux Morrell (1863–1917) of Pennsylvania entered the House of Representatives as a Republican in 1900 and served until 1907. They offered different ways to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment by reducing the representation in Congress of states illegally disfranchising male citizens, but they were alike in relying on the amendment’s masculinity phrase. Platt introduced An Act making an apportionment of Representatives in Congress among the several States under the Twelfth Census, S. 5747, on 7 December 1904, with the explanation that it was prepared by a committee of the Republican Club of New York City. Intended to amend the apportionment enacted after the census of 1900, the bill named eleven southern states whose representation should be reduced because, as the bill stated, “Congress is satisfied that the right of male inhabitants . . . to vote . . . has in fact been denied or in some way abridged for causes not permitted by the Constitution of the United States.” The bill included the excess number of representatives currently serving in the House for each of the eleven states, totaling nineteen. On the next day, Morrell introduced H.R. 15969. Without naming states or tabulating the excess, this bill was similar in stating that a state’s basis of representation “shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of [disfranchised] citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.” Both bills chose March 1907 as their target date. The bills were referred to the Committee on the Census in each house and disappeared. (BDAC; Congressional Record, 58th Cong., 3d sess., 47, 91; 58th Cong., 3d sess., A Bill For the apportionment of Representatives among the several States of the Union, 8 December 1904, H.R. 15969; Richard B. Sherman, The Republican Party and Black America: From McKinley to Hoover, 1896–1933 [Charlottesville, Va., 1973], 76–77; Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 [Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001], 241–44.)
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SBA to Aletta H. Jacobs1 Rochester, N.Y. December 17, 1904.
My dear Friend— I had a letter from Mrs. Harper the other day, asking me to send you Volume 4, in leather, of the History of Woman Suffrage. I have put that up to go to you, and also have put in my Life and Work, and some other documents, and hope you will be glad to get them all. I have written Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, 205 W. 57th St., N.Y., telling her that I have sent the books to the hotel to you, so I think you will get them without a doubt. I am greatly disappointed that I couldn’t meet you while you are in this country, but my brother’s sickness and death occurred about the time you passed through, I understand. I should like to know what you think of the people of this country. I wish you could stay here a whole year and watch us and see us work. Isn’t it pretty good that the Territorial Committee at Washington declared that it was the woman suffrage letters from all parts of the country that moved them to strike out the whole clause from the bill 2 which classed sex with idiots, criminals, etc. It really gives me hope when any body can be moved by the letters from women, and I should think that our women all over the country would take courage. You are not going to see Miss Shaw, either, for she is in Oklahoma and doing grand service there, but I am glad that you can see Mrs. Catt, and that we have one woman that can be reached. The International Suffrage Alliance grows apace, and Mrs. Catt is just the woman to be president of it. Hoping to meet you at the International in London two years from now, I am Very sincerely yours, Y TL, on NAWSA letterhead, Aletta Jacobs Papers, Aletta, Instituut voor Vrouwengeschiedenis Amsterdam. Directed to New York City. 1. Aletta Henriëtte Jacobs (1854–1929) of the Netherlands was a physician and woman suffragist who met SBA first in London in 1899. Besides maintaining her medical practice alongside her political interests, in 1900 she published her translation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics, into Dutch. After Jacobs and her husband, Carel Victor Gerritsen, attended the International Woman Suffrage Alliance meeting in Berlin, they toured the United States for
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nearly four months at the end of 1904. (Aletta H. Jacobs, Memories: My Life as an International Leader in Health, Suffrage, and Peace, ed. Harriet Feinberg [New York, 1996].) 2. On 15 December 1904, the Committee on Territories reported back to the Senate an amended H.R. 14749, with “sex” eliminated from the controversial paragraph. A holiday recess delayed scheduling a vote until January. (Washington Post, 16, 17 December 1904; Congressional Record, 58th Cong., 3d sess., 16 December 1904, pp. 340–41.) •••••••••
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SBA to Elizabeth Smith Miller Rochester N.Y. December 22nd, 1904.
My dear Friend— I have received the plum pudding and a beautiful letter from your 1 daughter Lou. Many thanks to you for thinking of us and saying on the card the good word you did. I suppose you have received a letter from Senator Beveridge and others, and that you have seen, if he has not written you, that the obnoxious placing of “sex” with idiots and criminals, etc., has been done away with. I have this morning been reading the bill which the Senator sent me, and it has “male citizen” over and over, but I suppose it will be no use to try 2 and get them to drop it. They are the last two territories that are to come in. We have got to learn to fight on some other line, and I think Senator Platt’s bill to cut off the southern representation is the place for it. You see he has a long bill and has to hedge around all sorts of ways in order to hit the south and not take in Massachusetts and other states that have the educational qualifications. It seems to me that now is the time,—after forty years of wandering in the wilderness which the Republicans have had 3 since 1865, —when they put “male” in the 2nd Section of the 14th Amendment,—to demand of the Republicans to base their representation upon the voters, and say that each state having 60,000 voters shall be entitled to a representative,—it makes no difference whether those voters are black men or white, or black women or white. Then the four states of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and Idaho would not have either their base or representation changed, for they already have their full quota. All New York would have to do, if it wanted its quota, would be to enfranchise the women, and
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Massachusetts to remove its educational qualifications, and let all men and women vote. The southern states would have to enfranchise their negroes and women as well. Don’t you think we might begin to harp on this line now? I am going to find Mrs. Stanton’s Resolution, in the early 70’s, upon 4 a speech made by Senator Blaine. It would be splendid if we could get up as big an excitement and produce as much of an effect with this demand as we did with the one that they should strike out “sex.” With love to Nan, and a Merry Christmas to both of you, and to all assembled at your home, I am Affectionately yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Smith Family Papers, Manuscript Division, NN. Directed to Geneva, N.Y. 1. Louise Gates Willard Miller (1863–1927) was the widow of Charles Dudley Miller II who was killed by a streetcar in Syracuse in 1894. 2. 58th Cong., 3d sess., An Act to enable the people of Oklahoma and of the Indian Territory to form a constitution and State government, in the Senate, 20 April 1904, with amendments 16 December 1904, H.R. 14749. Voting for delegates to a constitutional convention was still limited to males. 3. Num. 14:33. 4. SBA again recalls Senator James Blaine’s efforts to punish disfranchisement in the South by reducing the congressional representation of offending states. At the time, ECS reminded Blaine that his own state of Maine inflated its representation by counting women while leaving them disfranchised. The National Woman Suffrage Association meeting in January 1879 agreed, “Whereas, as announced by Senator Blaine, it is the very essence of tyranny to count any citizens in the basis of representation who are denied a voice in their laws and a choice in their rulers; therefore “Resolved, That counting women in the basis of representation, while denying them the right of suffrage, is compelling them to swell the number of their tyrants and is an unwarrantable usurpation of power over one-half the citizens of this Republic.” (Papers, 3:427–29, 431n; National Citizen and Ballot Box, February 1879, Film, 20:644–51.)
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Thomas C. Platt to SBA Washington [D.C.] January 3, 1905.
My dear Miss Anthony: Your letter of December the 21st reached me duly, and should have received an earlier acknowledgment except that my time has been so completely engrossed with business and politics, and your letter did not call 1 for an immediate response. You know, of course, what my feeling and attitude are on the question concerning which you write. I should be glad to pursue a course that would be pleasing to you and your associates, but I am only one of a large number of gentlemen who would be concerned in such legislation, and I am frank to admit that the majority is against me. Perhaps some time in the future, after you and I are dead, the ideal for which you have so heartily contended may be realized. Very truly yours, U T. C Platt Y TLS, on letterhead of U.S. Senate, HM 10707, Ida Harper Collection, CSmH. 1. Presumably she wrote him her thoughts on the bill he introduced to reduce the representation of states that barred African-American men from voting. •••••••••
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SBA to Mary McHenry Keith Rochester, N.Y. January 28th, 1905.
My dear Friend— ¶1 I have received your article in the Berkeley Gazette. It is good. I notice that you gave $500 towards the campaign at the Los Angeles Convention. It was splendid of you. Every time I pass through the parlor I take a look at the beautiful picture of the Yosemite Valley that hangs over the fire-place, and send a good thought to Mr. Keith and you over in Cal. It is a lovely picture and I am glad enough that he sent it to me. It is so 1 comforting to look at it and think that nature stands firm.
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I am glad that the big trees of the Calaveres group are to be “fathered” 2 by the government of Roosevelt. The time will come perhaps when we can say “mothered” too, but I fear it is not yet. Rumor says that your 3 legislature has voted down the amendment. Is that so? Who managed it and what was the cause? It seems to me they were very quick in their saying “No.” It is too bad. Can’t some man who voted for putting it out move a reconsideration? I think you women should go up to Sacramento and make that legislature hum. It is wicked that it has refused to submit the question after the glorious work that has been done by Miss 4 Laughlin and others and the amount of money that has been spent. It is a shame and a disgrace that the legislature gave it no more consideration, that is, if it is true that it has voted it down. I believe thoroughly that you could carry it with the people, if you could only get it past the politicians, but we have come now to meet the political necessities of the times. It is because the politicians know it is very likely to be carried that they object to submitting it. ¶3 Mrs. Shafter Howard has sent me the “Bulletin” of San Francisco, 5 which says “Wheeler Wrestles with Co-Ed Problems.” He talks as if the women were forcing the men out of the culture colleges. Doesn’t he see that the establishment of the six special technical colleges draws the men off to study in them instead of to the literary and culture studies, as he calls the regular old-fashioned college course. It will not be women’s fault if the men study only the technical. The rage for money nowadays drives them to the study of those branches, while women have time for the study of literature, history, philosophy and language. It is not women’s fault but it is the fault of the times when men must make money fast and women must be cultured and rounded out. I do wish men were more philosophical and could see why things are as they are, but I think Mr. Ide Wheeler does see, and he deplores the fact. A man, nowadays, who studies just pure literature, history, philosophy and language is considered a “Miss Nancy.” To be a man he must study the technical sciences!! ¶4 I see you have my cousin, Miss Jessie Anthony of Los Angeles, for 6 State Secretary. She is a lovely bright woman and I hope you will train her for good work. Would it not be nice if she could be developed into a real leader of high order? I believe she has the grit of the right sort. 7 How is your dear mother? Well, I hope, and Mr. Keith is making good pictures still, I hope. Are you going to be at our National Convention
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in Portland, Ore., the 29th of June next? I expect to be there if alive and well. I am very well now, though the deep snow and zero weather are very severe and I go out but little. We have had a terrible blizzard here but not as bad as in New York and other places. We escape the worst of the storms but have very little sunshine in the winter. Well, if you are beaten in the legislature, go forward again and make so much public sentiment and so strong that the legislature will not dare to say you “Nay” again. I wish you had the sand (I don’t mean you, for you have it; Your $500 shows that) but I mean the women of the state—I wish they had the courage and the perseverance to go ahead and employ Miss Laughlin for another two years right steadily along, and if she should do as good work as she has the last year, she would certainly get public sentiment strong enough so that every Legislator that would be sent to Sacramento would be sure to vote in favor of an amendment. Our trouble is, we don’t stick to it. I have always felt that if we had stuck to it after the campaign of 1896, and Miss Shaw and I had stayed there through the winter and gone up to the Legislature and Miss Shaw made her grand speeches before it, we should have succeeded at getting it re-submitted then, but we lack sticktoitiveness. I hope, thereofore,that your society will employ Gail up to the Portland Convention, and then right on to the next legislature. It would be the best thing that could possibly be done. If you can’t get the question re-submitted now, you would in two years time get public sentiment so strong they couldn’t help but pass it. Sincerely yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Keith-McHenry-Pond Family Papers, C-B 595, CU-BANC. Directed to Berkeley, Cal. 1. William Keith’s gift of his painting “Yosemite Valley” disappeared from 17 Madison Street. At this date, he was at work on a portrait of SBA, completed after her death. 2. After Theodore Roosevelt’s expedition into Yosemite National Park with John Muir in 1903, a bill was introduced in both houses of California’s legislature on 11 January 1905 to recede the Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Big Tree Grove to the federal government. In March, the governor signed the bill, and at year’s end, Roosevelt urged Congress to accept the gift. (San Francisco Call, 12, 19, 25 January, 24 February, 4 March 1905; Fred L. Israel, ed., The State of the Union Messages of the Presidents, 1790–1966 [New York, 1967], 3:2183–84.) 3. California’s suffragists had been organizing for two years in anticipation of
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getting an amendment through the legislature in 1905. Opponents in both houses worked hard to block a favorable vote on such a measure. SBA may have seen a recent report of rumor from Sacramento about an agreement to get the bill defeated, headlined in the press “Suffrage Bill to be Bagged.” In fact, the vote was delayed until mid-February, when a majority vote in the senate fell short of the required two-thirds majority, and the measure failed in the house. (Report of the Thirtyseventh Annual Convention, 1905, pp. 104–6, Film, 44:569ff; San Francisco Call, 23 January 1905.) 4. Gail Laughlin (1868–1952), after graduating from Wellesley College and the law school of Cornell University, worked for the United States Industrial Commission investigating domestic labor for two years and then fulltime as an organizer for the National-American Woman Suffrage Association from 1902 to 1906. She was assigned principally to western states. During her work in California, beginning in 1903, she succeeded where many before her failed, in uniting the state’s rival morthern and southern suffrage societies. (NAW Modern Period; History, 6:30–32; Gullett, Becoming Citizens, 147–49.) 5. Benjamin Ide Wheeler (1854–1927) trained in classical philology and was teaching Greek at Cornell University when he was appointed president of the University of California in 1899. Although the article sent to SBA is unidentified, her reaction points to known themes in Wheeler’s administration: women’s dominance in the College of Letters, a de facto segregation of men into such schools as Mining, Mechanics, and Chemistry, and low expectations for female students, encapsulated in Wheeler’s admonition to students at the start of the fall semester in 1904, that “you are here for the preparation of marriage and motherhood.” (ANB; Maresi Nerad, The Academic Kitchen: A Social History of Gender Stratification at the University of California, Berkeley [Albany, N.Y., 1999], 1–33; Gordon, Gender and Higher Education, 52–84.) 6. Jessie Anthony was made recording secretary at the state meeting held in Los Angeles 6 October 1904. 7. That is, Ellen McHenry.
Textual Notes ¶2
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women should go up to Los Angeles nSacramentop and make
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SBA to George W. Martin1 Rochester, N.Y. January 28, 1905.
My dear Mr. Martin— I have your letter of the 27th, and now I have an answer from Mr. Wilder, 2 which I enclose to you. You know better than I what is best to say to him. Do you think that money would move him to get some one to do the editing of his paper, or so that he could be released to do this other work, or do you think he had better be let alone, and that you had better undertake it? I have not broached to D. R., Jr., the question of his undertaking the task, but I do not believe he would be equal to it. Mr. Wilder has no idea of the different kinds of employments that have come upon Dan now. I doubt very much if he could do it, because he is of an entirely different organization from his father, and would be likely not to exploit the father’s peculiar traits as they should be. Now, I don’t know what to say or what to do, but I think that if you talk with Mr. Wilder, and find he will not write the article, you will have to do it yourself. There certainly should be a good one written,—one worthy of the early history or the entire fifty years of Kansas, from the settlement at Lawrence down to the time of my brother’s death. He was always a foremost figure in every question that went to make Kansas a free state. Please return this letter of Mr. Wilder’s. Mr. Herbert Putnam wrote me that he had sent you the books that you 3 named as wishing to have in your library. Have you received them? Now I understand that you have all the works that I have in my possession. He has returned to me twelve copies of Vol. 3 of the old “Revolution.” It is bound up separately because it has Mary Woolstencraft’s “Vindication of the Rights of Women.” The book is not now in print, but this volume contains it complete. I am not going to keep scrap books any longer, in order to write the History of Woman Suffrage. From the year 1900 I declared off and Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton is doing that now and she will doubtless be the historian of Volume 5. I hope we shall see women enfranchised before that score of years is rounded out. Five years of the score are already gone.
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Hoping that you will have received the box of books, and that you will 4 go forward and write the article, I am Sincerely yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Records of the Kansas State Historical Society, Correspondence Received, Department of Archives, KHi. Directed to Topeka, Kas. 1. George Washington Martin (1841–1914) became secretary of the Kansas State Historical Society in 1899, after a career as newspaper editor and Republican politician. (NCAB, 15:267; WWW1.) 2. Martin first answered her (missing) letter of 27 December 1904 on 14 January 1905, when he declined her invitation to write a biography of D. R. Anthony. “Web Wilder is the man to do it,” he wrote then, because Wilder knew Anthony better and through more history. But he also complained that Wilder was “letting down ten years before he should.” Before responding to Martin on January 20, SBA appealed directly to Web Wilder and “urged upon him the importance of his writing what he thought was the truth about my brother.” While awaiting his reply, she asked Martin if Wilder might agree “to block out what he thinks is the proper thing to be said of my brother D. R., and submit it to you to complete.” (Film, 44:426, 433.) 3. Two transactions with Martin were underway at the same time. Ready to donate more historical sources to the Kansas State Historical Society, SBA sent Martin a list provided her by Herbert Putnam indicating books from her donation that duplicated holdings at the Library of Congress. Martin returned a list showing which of those duplicates the society wanted, and the forty-six books and seventeen pamphlets were shipped from Washington to Topeka. (G. W. Martin to SBA, 6, 14 January, 1 February 1905, SBA to H. Putnam, 10 January 1905, H. Putnam to SBA, 17, 18 January 1905, SBA to G. W. Martin, 20 January 1905, Film, 44:416–21, 426, 431–33, 450–51.) 4. Martin later reported that Dan, Jr., agreed to find someone to write about his father. (G. W. Martin to SBA, 1 February 1905, Film, 44:450–51.) •••••••••
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SBA to Julia Dodson Sheppard1 [Rochester,] February 11, 1905.
My Dear Friend:—I was glad enough to hear from you, and glad to hear that you are going to celebrate the 15th of February, my birthday. I am glad that so many of your women will be pleased to attend the reception at your house, whether they believe in suffrage or not.
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I was before the House Judiciary Committee at Washington a few years 2 ago, when Speaker Henderson, of Iowa, who was then Chairman of the committee said to me, “Now, Miss Anthony, at the hotel where I live I don’t know of a woman who is in favor of suffrage; my wife, even, doesn’t want to vote.” She whispered to me that she had told him twenty years ago, that she didn’t want to vote, but she had told him many and many a time since that she did. The committee of fifteen were all present and I said to her, “Now, Mrs. Henderson, I want you to tell the committee exactly what you have whispered to me.” She said, “I can’t, but you may,” so I told the committee of it and Senator Henderson just laughed at the story. 3 Now, I hear that Delegate Rodey, of New Mexico, says that his wife doesn’t want to vote, and yet I have a letter from that same wife, from Albuquerque, saying that a club, of which she is president, is going to celebrate my birthday and would like a letter from me. Isn’t that pretty good? The men take up with something a woman said years ago, but they never hear her speak of the subject after she is converted and believes in woman suffrage. Now I trust that many of your friends that come to your house on the 15th will really believe in woman suffrage. I do not think there is a woman under the shining sun, who, if the question were put to her as to how she would vote on any given moral or social question, wouldn’t tell you how she would vote on it, and she would never vote in favor of whiskey, in favor of loose morals, etc., etc. Your town has voted upon some tax question of late, I saw, and the tax4 paying women went out and voted. Would it be any more for them to go and vote for mayor, for governor, or for President? Now I hope the women of Penn Yan will look at this whole question in the light of facts and not of prejudice. With kind regards to all the people assembled, I am affectionately yours, U Susan B. Anthony. Y Unidentified and undated clipping, in Emma B. Sweet Papers, NRU. Directed to Penn Yan, N.Y. 1. Julia Morton Dodson Sheppard (1841–1918) was a prominent citizen of Penn Yan in Yates County, New York, with whom SBA stayed during the amendment campaign of 1894 in a house she described as “palatial.” At that time, she had charge of the county for the New York State Woman Suffrage Association. Her husband, John S. Sheppard, served as a Republican in the state senate from 1896 to 1899. Sheppard asked SBA for a letter to the reception planned by the Political
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Equality Club of Penn Yan to mark SBA’s birthday. (Lewis Cass Aldrich, ed., History of Yates County, N.Y., With Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Some of the Prominent Men and Pioneers [Syracuse, N.Y., 1892], 284, 342, 525; Thompson P. Ege, Dodson Genealogy, 1600–1907 [Philadelphia, 1908], 47–48; New York Times, 7 July 1918; Papers, 5:579.) 2. David Bremner Henderson (1840–1906), Republican of Iowa, served in the House of Representatives from 1883 to 1903 and chaired the Committee on the Judiciary from 1895 to 1899. In 1884, he was one of the six Republicans who joined Democrats to defeat a continuation of the House’s Committee on Woman Suffrage. SBA refers to the hearing before Henderson’s committee on 15 February 1898, made notable by the number of committee members in attendance. The press did not take note of the presence of his wife, Augusta A. Fox Henderson (1843–1931), or her exchange with SBA. (BDAC; American Woman; Elgin Echo with the Clermont Enterprise and Wadena News [Iowa], 3 December 1931; Washington Evening Star, 15 February 1898, Film, 38:243–44; Papers, 4:362, 365n.) 3. Bernard Shandon Rodey (1856–1927), a Republican, served as delegate to Congress from the Territory of New Mexico from March 1901 to March 1905. Minnie Coddington Rodey (1867–1918) moved from Topeka to Albuquerque with her father before her marriage. (BDAC; Daughters of the American Revolution, Lineage Book, 1904, 50: 69–70; Fairview Cemetery, Albuquerque, N.M., Bernalillo County Cemetery Project, records on-line.) 4. In 1901, women who owned property in New York State’s villages acquired a right to vote on local proposals to increase taxes or assessments. Women in Penn Yan exercised this right. (History, 6:454; New York Times, 22, 24 April 1901.) •••••••••
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SBA to Lucy Browne Johnston1 Rochester, N.Y. Feb. 20, 1905.
My dear Friend— ¶1 I received your note of congratulation and sent you the newspaper containing an account of the celebration at Mr. and Mrs. Gannett’s. It was all very nice, and the letters and telegrams have been numerous and cannot half be mentioned. ¶2 Your defeat in the Senate was to be expected when the bill was car2 ried in the House. Politicians have a way of making a bargain with each other to let our bills go through one House and defeat them in the 3 other, but if your Senate had passed it and the Governor had signed it, as he undoubtedly would, you would then have had to run the gauntlet of the courts of your own state and of the Supreme Court of the U.S.
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before it was settled that the Legislature had the right to pass such a bill, so I consider it lost time to work away at such a measure. I hope now you will begin an appeal to the Legislature for an Amendment for full suffrage. It is eleven years now since you voted upon the question, and you know then the Republican party was divided half and half with the Populists. Had they been united and put a good suffrage plank in their platform that year of 1894, as they did two years before when they submitted the question, it would undoubtedly have carried then and been a law now,—so I beg of you, don’t trifle with any fractional bit of the suffrage after this but just ask for the elimination of the word “male” 4 from the suffrage clause of your Constitution. Now suppose you had presidential suffrage. You would still not have the power to elect the County Judge, and he has to do with your liquor traffic, mainly. You would have no power to elect your Governor or the members of your legislature, so it would be but a very small affair. I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good thing, so long as you have so many friends in the Assembly, for you to push in an amendment resolution. If you should carry it by a large majority through the House, and it should still be lost in the Senate, you would know then that you had two or three years to work upon the Senate. I think it would be really a good thing if you had a square vote upon the question of full suffrage. But you must act upon your own judgment. This matter of presidential suffrage has been pushed by H. B. Blackwell for twenty years and more, and always when it fails I feel that the men who voted for it might be in favor of full suffrage. I think it is a fool of a measure. Yours sincerely, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Lucy B. Johnston Collection, Manuscript Department, KHi. Envelope addressed to Topeka, Kansas. 1. Lucy Browne Johnston (1846–1937) was a prominent leader among clubwomen in Kansas and the wife of William Agnew Johnston, chief justice of the Supreme Court of Kansas. A social reformer, she explored the ways that women could shape the politics and culture of their communities before their full enfranchisement. She had served on her local school board, presided over the Kansas Federation of Women’s Clubs, worked for traveling libraries in the state, and she would later lead the Kansas Equal Suffrage Association to victory in 1912. (Woman’s Who’s Who 1914; WWW1; finding aid, Lucy B. Johnston Papers, Manuscript Department, KHi.) 2. On February 9, by a vote of sixty-five to forty-nine, the Kansas House of
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Representatives approved a bill to grant women presidential suffrage, or the right to vote for presidential electors. The Senate killed the bill without debate on February 14. (Report of the Thirty-seventh Annual Convention, 1905, pp. 111–13, Film, 44:569ff; Woman’s Journal, 25 February 1905.) 3. Edward Wallis Hoch (1849–1925), a reform Republican and owner of the Marion Record, was governor of Kansas from 1905 to 1909. (BDGov.) 4. The Kansas Republican party endorsed woman suffrage in its platform of 1892, and on that basis, SBA campaigned with Republican candidates. Two years later, the party reversed itself and omitted any mention of the constitutional amendment for suffrage on the ballot. In the three-party race of 1894, the Kansas amendment campaign was itself divided among Democrats, Populists, and Republicans. See Papers 5.
Textual notes ¶2
l. 10 l. 30
It is twelve nelevenp years now the men who voted for it might not be in favor of full suffrage. •••••••••
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SBA to Fannie Rosenberg Bigelow Rochester, N.Y. February 24, 1905.
My dear Friend— Your lovely “American Beauties” came duly. I admired them greatly and sent them over to Mrs. Gannett’s that they might be seen of all who attended my reception. I felt that they too should be honored there. I saw Mrs. Montgomery’s article on the University Fund. It was very 1 good. I am so glad that Mrs. Eastwood and you have done with the hard work that you must have performed in taking care of those hundreds of infinitesimal subscriptions. I shall never cease to rejoice that you came for me and took me in a carriage around to see the different people to get the last $8000 subscribed for that fund. I consider that you, who thought that it ought to be done and did the thing by coming for me, should have a great deal more credit for the getting of that last money than I should. Affectionately yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, SBA Collection, NR. Directed to Rochester, N.Y. 1. Ellen Clara Bigelow Eastwood (1840–1911), the wife of a Rochester merchant,
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was one of the city’s busiest activists, involved with the Ethical Club, Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, and Daughters of the Revolution, to name a few of her affiliations. She also served as treasurer of the crusade for coeducation at the university. In later years, she held office in the state federation of women’s clubs. (Gilman Bigelow Howe, Genealogy of the Bigelow Family of America [Worcester, Mass., 1890], 318; Peck, History of Rochester and Monroe County, N.Y., 1:464; Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 4 & 6 July 1911; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records.) •••••••••
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SBA to the Political Equality Club of Rochester Rochester, N.Y. February 24th, 1905.
My dear Friends— You were looking out for something that would be a joy forever when you selected the Morris chair and foot-rest, and now I understand that you are to get a couch for me to lie down on, so between the easy chair and the sofa I shall be well provided for, and when my invalid friends come to visit me they shall share the pleasures of both. I am very greatly obliged to each and every member of the club. It was a very nice idea that you should ask each one to give a little and so each be a participant in the gift. I hope you are all working with might and main to get the full suffrage, but, alas, we live in the Empire State, and you might as well expect rivers to run up-hill as to expect a state, fully one-half of the population of which were born under a monarchial government,—which denies to men, even, the privilege of voting,—to grant the suffrage to women. But still we must work on to educate every man, native or foreign, black or white, to recognize woman as an individual factor in the government, so wishing you all—not rest—but work, I am Very sincerely yours, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Emma B. Sweet Papers, NRU.
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SBA to Ida Husted Harper Rochester, N.Y. April 24, 1905.
My dear Mrs. Harper— I arrived home yesterday afternoon and found your note of the 21st. You did wisely with that syndicate letter. I shall laugh, though, if you get your price, but all right—stick your head up high. I am very sorry that Mrs. 1 Fairbanks lost her head in the last moments of her administration. I had heard that the new hall was inadequate, but then, maybe when it comes to be seated it will answer the purpose. When they get their D.A.R. basis of representation cut down to so many per hundred in each state they will not be such an unwieldy body. I wish you would come here and rest a while. Our house is as clean as a pink from garret to cellar and we are as quiet and still as may be. It is delightful weather here now—just cool enough to be pleasant. Yes, I remember telling you that Mrs. Stanford, when I was at her house at Palo Alto, in 1896, told me that at a meeting of the Trustees of the University, she had the box of bonds or certificates, that represented a certain number of millions of dollars (I don’t remember how many) unlocked and showed them the bonds, and proved to them that the money was no myth, and then she took the key and turned it in the lock, saying something to the effect that so long as her hand could turn the key she would cut off the 2 coupons and present them to the trustees. She told this to me with her own lips, together with many other incidents that she had met with since that immense property had fallen into her possession. The men seemed anxious to control things themselves, especially the Union-Pacific men. I joined nephew D. R. A., Jr. and wife in New York. We lunched at 3 Cousin Lizzie’s, John’s wife. Then I dined and spent the night with Cousin Louis Lapham, and cousin Carrie Vail Ladd came in and spent an hour with me. On Friday night we went up to Albany, and Saturday morning went over to Greenwich by train,—then took a two-horse rig and drove four miles to Battenville. It is the loveliest scenery I ever saw. We called on 4 Mrs. Abigail Fitch McLean, whose next birthday will be her 93rd. Then
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we went into the new brick house, as I call it. It is now owned by a grand5 daughter of Elijah and Candice Hyatt, who were our best friends in the old days. I was glad enough to find it in the possession of their grand-daughter. I took Dan and Bessie into it and showed them the old dining-room where we used to sit and study, and all the different bedrooms upstairs, and the old room over the wood-shed, where we went to Daniel Somebody’s 6 7 school, and where Sarah Anthony and Mary Perkins taught, and then showed them at last into the bedroom off the parlor, and beyond Father and Mother’s bedroom, in the north-west corner of the brick house, the little room in which Grandfather and Grandmother Read spent their last days, Grandfather dying in 1838 and Grandmother in 1839, at the age of 8 84. The burying ground is across the kiln, and past where Judge McLean used to live, and opposite the old district school-house, and there are buried Grandfather and Grandmother, with little Eliza Anthony, the only 9 child of mothers that died in infancy, and Anthony McLean, the son of Aaron and sister Guelma Anthony McLean, who died at one year. I am not sure yet where the monument will be placed, because the man did not come while we were there, so we left it a good deal uncertain, but it will 10 probably be placed on the ground where the brick church stood. It has all been taken into the graveyard, and the ground there is much higher and 11 prettier, and the President of the Cemetery, the Hon. Mr. Hobbie, wants the monument placed up there facing the road, so that the people who go by can see it, and we left it to his judgment. We did not see the monument because it was still crated in the freight yard, and would not be taken out until it is drawn up to Battenville, four miles, which will occur today. When I got home I found a letter from the man saying he would be there Monday, that is this morning, and I was so sorry I didn’t stay, but we hadn’t heard a word from him and it seemed as if he had gone into other business,—but then I think it will be all right because Mr. Hobbie seems a very nice man, and his wife is the grand-daughter of Grandmother Welch, as we called her, the wife of David Welch, the saw-mill tender in the old days. I guess I have told you all I can, but I think you have got “Adams” in your mind. 12 Remember that Read is spelled “Read”. I think Mary and I will go down there by and by when the weather gets a little more settled. I shall send the books you wanted to the man when I can get about it tomorrow. Sincerely yours, U Susan B. Anthony
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Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, David Starr Jordan Papers, Archives, CSt. Directed to Washington, D.C. 1. Cornelia Cole Fairbanks (1852–1913) was outgoing president-general of the Daughters of the American Revolution. During the annual Continental Congress, the society dedicated its new Continental Hall and held a hotly contested election for new officers. (WWW1; New York Times, 25 October 1913; gravestone, Crown Hill Cemetery, Indianapolis; Washington Post, 18, 19 April 1905.) 2. Jane Stanford died in February 1905. This story belonged to the years after her husband’s death in 1893 and before his estate was settled in 1898. In her column in the New York Sun, 2 April 1905, Ida Harper recounted this as a dramatic moment in Stanford University’s history, when Jane Stanford reasserted her control of the money that kept the school afloat. She did not credit SBA with the story, but she described SBA as a major influence on several of Jane Stanford’s decisions. David Starr Jordan asked Harper for her source on taking the strongbox to a meeting of the trustees. In forwarding this letter to Jordan, Harper explained, “At the time the news of Mrs. Stanford’s death was cabled, Miss Anthony and I happened to be visiting together in Philadelphia and she told me the story just as I related it. I did not ask her any further questions regarding it, but the moment I received your letter I wrote her asking her authority.” Harper continued by saying that she “better not attempt any correction of this [inaccuracy] under the circumstances.” (David Starr Jordan, “Jane Lathrop Stanford: A Eulogy,” Popular Science Monthly 75 [August 1909]: 157–73; Nagel, Iron Will, 51–83; Ida H. Harper to D. S. Jordan, 26 April 1905, David Starr Jordan Papers, Archives, CSt, with assistance from Aimee L. Morgan.) 3. Previously identified are Lewis Lapham and his cousin Carrie Ladd. John Jesse Lapham (1852–1911), older brother of Lewis, worked with him in their father’s firm, Henry G. Lapham & Co. His wife, Mary Elizabeth Walker Lapham (1852–1930), was known as Lizzie. (Albridge, Laphams in America, 182–83, 256; New York Times, 12 February 1911; SBA to Emilie Van Biel, 19 December 1894, Film, 33:44–45; family genealogical notes, in editor’s files.) 4. Abigail Fitch McLean (1812–1914) was the widow of John Conger McLean, from a branch of the McLean family other than those related to the Anthony family. (Gravestone, Evergreen Cemetery, Salem, N.Y.) 5. Elijah Hyatt (c. 1804–1884), a brother of James Hyatt and Sally Ann Hyatt, worked for a time at Daniel Anthony’s mill and later went into business with Aaron McLean. By 1880, he described himself as a machinist. Candace Monson Hyatt (c. 1812–1899) was a Quaker from Danby, Vermont. (Federal Census, 1880; Friends’ Intelligencer 19 [15 November 1862]: 569; “Graveyard Inscriptions from the Towns of Easton and Greenwich, N.Y.,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 49 [April 1918]: 121.) 6. SBA had no luck remembering this man’s name when aiding Ida Harper with her biography. See Anthony, 1:22. 7. Mary Perkins became Mary Randall, already identified. Sarah Anthony Burtis
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(1810–1900) was a distant cousin of SBA who taught in the family’s school in Battenville, while she lived in eastern New York, and preceded the Anthony family to Rochester, where she became a part of the radical Quaker community engaged with abolition, spiritualism, and woman’s rights. (Anthony, Anthony Genealogy, 123; Records of Saratoga Monthly Meeting, PSC-Hi; Garrison, Letters, 4:259n; Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change, 61, 170; H. D. Barrett and A. W. McCoy, eds., Cassadaga: Its History and Teachings [Meadville, Pa., 1891], 232; Anthony, 1:22–23.) 8. John McLean, Jr., (1793–1858), known as Judge McLean for his time as first judge of the county court, was in the second generation of McLeans living in Washington County and an uncle of SBA’s brother-in-law Aaron McLean. A lawyer as well as an investor, McLean partnered with Daniel Anthony in running the family’s mill. He also served two terms in the state senate. (Crisfield Johnson, History of Washington County, New York [Philadelphia, 1878], 112, 114; gravestone, Evergreen Cemetery, Salem, N.Y.) 9. These were Eliza Tefft Anthony (1832–1834) and Anthony McLean (1842– 1843). (“Graveyard Inscriptions from the Towns of Easton and Greenwich, N.Y.,” 120, 122.) 10. D. R. Anthony left money in his will for a monument to his Read grandparents in the Battenville Cemetery. The inscription identifies Daniel Read as a “Patriot of the Revolutionary War” who fought “in the battles of Quebec, Stoney Arabia, Bennington, & Ticonderoga.” 11. William Roscoe Hobbie (1838–1924) graduated from Amherst College in 1869 and in 1872 became a partner in the Phoenix Paper Company, conducted in the building that once held the mill of Daniel Anthony in Battenville. He also served in New York’s state assembly. (Amherst College. Biographical Record of the Graduates and Non-Graduates, Centennial Edition [Amherst, Mass., 1939.) As SBA notes, Hobbie married Phebe Walsh (c. 1862–?), a granddaughter of David Walsh (1796–1883) and Phebe Rhodes Walsh (1802–1882), also known by the name Welch. (Federal Census, 1880; “Graveyard Inscriptions from the Towns of Easton and Greenwich, N.Y.,” 123; Carl F. Prince, ed., Who’s Who in American Methodism [New York, 1916], s.v. “Walsh, John D.”) 12. Ida Harper may have been at work already on the third volume of her Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony; this letter is the obvious source for a paragraph, though she revised its story in such a way as to mislead readers into thinking that SBA oversaw the monument’s placement on her vist. (Anthony, 3:1357.)
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Interview with SBA [25 April 1905]
“Ridiculous! Pure fol-de-rol,” is the comment Miss Susan B. Anthony made this morning on ex-President Grover Cleveland’s article in the current number of the Ladies’ Home Journal, on women’s clubs and woman’s 1 suffrage. That the sentiments which Mr. Cleveland gave voice to were entirely at variance with her own was very evident from her manner as she read the article aloud. At various points, Miss Anthony would stop and re-read some particular statement in a tone of voice which might mean anything from absolute irony to incredulous disbelief. After one, to her, particularly atrocious statement by the only living ex-President, the single word “Well!” with all the wealth of sarcasm which the violation of deep-rooted convictions can call forth, expressed better than a column what Miss Anthony’s feelings on the matters in question were. Woman the Best Judge. The ominous silence which she maintained for a brief spell after finishing the article, was even more impressive—and expressive—than any of her previous remarks had been. “Well,” she finally exclaimed, “what does Grover Cleveland know about 2 ‘sanctity of the home’ and ‘woman’s sphere,’ I should like to know?” “Why isn’t the woman herself the best judge of what woman’s sphere should be? The men have been trying to tell us for years. We have no desire to vote if the men would do their duty. Why are not the laws enforced in regard to saloons, gambling places and houses of ill repute? The women want a chance to see what they can do in making present laws effective. “Mr. Cleveland remarks that the ‘hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.’ That would be all right if you could keep the boys in the cradle always.”
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2 5 a p r i l 19 05 Temptations to Boys.
“But the minute they are able to go to school temptations beset them on all sides. They have to pass any number of saloons and gambling places on their way to and from school. And all of these places are stretching out their iniquitous arms to call in the boys. The men will do nothing about it and the women can’t. How helpless we are is well shown in our own ward, where a saloon may be placed every 200 feet if wished, against the most strenuous objections we can offer. It is no wonder the women demand a vote. Out in Colorado, where equal suffrage now prevails, nearly every town in the state has gone ‘dry.’ “Even Denver, one of the most corrupt cities in America a few years back, has almost been cleansed. It is from just such men as Grover Cleveland, who writes such ‘gush’ merely because the magazine will pay him well for it, that most of the objections to woman suffrage come.” “Men are Responsible.” “Mr. Cleveland,” continued Miss Anthony, “is inspired to a tirade on women’s clubs and organizations. Did he ever stop to think that the men are responsible for these even. Why should a woman settle down to the ‘hum-drum’ as he calls it, of home any more than a man? The men are content to leave their money in some saloon and then go home drunk to abuse their wives and children. In many cases the wife supports the husband. Why then shouldn’t the women spend as much time at the clubs as the men? “The few who are married to good husbands are as a rule too well educated to be content with a life of inactivity and of mental stagnation. Besides, present day inventions have so far reduced the woman’s work at home that she must needs go somewhere to pass her leisure time. “I think,” concluded Miss Anthony, “that Mr. Cleveland is a very poor one to attempt to point out the proper conduct of the women.” Y Rochester Evening Times, 25 April 1905, scrapbook 1906, SBA Papers, DLC. 1. Reporters and cartoonists delighted in a conflict set off by Grover Cleveland’s article, “Woman’s Mission and Woman’s Clubs,” published in the Ladies’ Home Journal 22 (May 1905): 3–4. Of the suffrage movement, he wrote, “It is its dangerous, undermining effect on the characters of the wives and mothers of our land that we fear.” As for clubs, they created “a club habit” that eroded devotion to “home duties.” “I am persuaded,” he droned on, “that there are woman’s clubs
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whose objects and intents are not only harmful, but harmful in a way that directly menaces the integrity of our homes and the benign disposition and character of our wifehood and motherhood.” 2. SBA alludes to Cleveland’s reputation for sexual impropriety that loomed large in the presidential election of 1884. He was said to have an illegitimate child with a paramour in Buffalo. Whether private moral failings should determine public, political fortunes was a topic hotly debated in the campaign. •••••••••
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SBA to Charles K. Gallup1 Rochester, N.Y. May 3rd, 1905.
My dear Friend— Yes, I have a photograph fac-similie of Mrs. Stanton’s autograph, which 2 I enclose to you. So many people have a penchant for collecting autographs, and yours, it seems, has lasted for fifty years. I have not Mrs. Stanton’s signature other than this. All of her letters to me I sent to her daughter, Mrs. Harriot Stanton Blatch, 10 Gramercy Park, New York, and I think she has destroyed all that she has not copied, so you will probably have to be content with this. I enclose you Mrs. Stanton’s last speech made 3 before a Congressional Committee. It is of a good deal more consequence to read this and follow in her footsteps than simply to have her autograph. Her daughter is getting out a book out of her letters. It will be ready in the fall. I enclose circulars of the History of Woman Suffrage and of my Life and 4 Work. Yours sincerely, U Susan B. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Papers of SBA, NPV. Directed to Overlook, Coxsackie-on-the-Hudson, N.Y. 1. Despite the typist’s direction on this letter to “Miss C. Gallop,” it is probable that SBA answered a letter from Charles K. Gallup (1845–1923). The address, “Overlook, Coxsackie-on-Hudson, N.Y.,” was his and so was the lifetime habit of collecting autographs. Judging by catalogues of manuscript sales and finding aids of manuscript collections, Gallup’s extensive collection of autographs was later dispersed. Gallup was a traveling salesman for a shirtwaist company. (Federal Census, Brooklyn, 1880, Coxsackie, 1900, 1910, 1920; Riverside Cemetery, Coxsackie, N.Y., on-line transcription of tombstones.)
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2. Enclosure missing. 3. Enclosure missing. SBA may refer to the “Solitude of Self,” the last speech ECS presented in person to a congressional committee. See Papers, 5:423–36. The text was reprinted for the ECS birthday celebration in 1903, when suffragists were urged to read her speeches. 4. Enclosures missing. •••••••••
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SBA to Ida Husted Harper Rochester, N.Y. May 25, 1905 1
Dear Mrs Harper—(Palmer) But I reckon everybody will know what name is meant— right away after breakfast—as I was just turning over from reading the editorials in the morning Dem. & Chron—the Telephone Bell rang— I left my reading—and it was Mrs Eastwood—she said [“]have you seen the morning Dem & Chron—Mrs Harper has the best thing on Mr Cleveland—it is so 2 good—I couldn’t help calling you up”— Now what namp I to do with them— I have ordered 20 copies sent to you— I shall leave the Grand Rapids papers to you— I will send to Mrs Babcock—Upton—Blackwell— Mrs Catt—Shaw—and as many as I can think of—but we want to make the article tell— If it rouses Mrs Eastwood so—it must strike the run of women the same— Have you seen the Literary Digest Caricatures—they 3 are rich— I guess the old fellow thinks the Devil is after him— 4 It is good of Mr Willard —to publish it—he hesitated a good deal—but finally said he would do any thing I asked him to do— I said I don’t want to urge you—but I should be very much pleased if you would publish it— So he said I will do it the first day I can squeeze in such a long article— If I would only consent to his cutting—I said my orders were peremptory—the whole or nothing— So here goes the whole of it— Tell me what to do with more than to send it round— U Susan B Anthony Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, Ida Harper Woman Suffrage Scrapbook 6, Rare Books, DLC. 1. The byline for an article by Ida Harper read, “Written for the Democrat and Chronicle by Ida Husted Palmer.”
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2. Harper’s sarcastic article, “Cleveland and Women’s Clubs: Hot Shot Fired at the Ex-President,” filled three columns of the Democrat and Chronicle, 25 May 1905. 3. Literary Digest 30 (13 May 1905): 697, and (20 May 1905): 735–36. 4. Ernest Russell Willard (1854–1937) was editor-in-chief of the Democrat and Chronicle from 1891 to 1910. (New York Times, 7 May 1937; Mt. Hope and Riverside Cemetery Interment Records.) •••••••••
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SBA to Ellen Clark Sargent [Rochester, c. 12 June 1905]
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It seems very queer that I shall start again for the Pacific Coast. I thought I had made my last trip there. I believe it is now pretty much decided that after the convention at Portland is over with we are to go to San Francisco and Oakland for mass-meetings, or something which the women are getting up. I give myself over entirely to Miss Shaw. Wherever she goes, I shall probably go. Mrs. Catt said in a letter some time since that she thought likely that she would hang onto the band wagon, but I guess she will go in the front seat with Anna Shaw. I am going to San Francisco principally to see you. You needn’t worry about your table, or about anything in the world so long as you are there. That is all we shall care for. I shall be very happy to convey your love to all the friends and delegates at Portland, but my, how much better it would be if they could have you there in person. But then each one knows her own limitations best, and I suppose if I paid much attention to mine I should stay at home altogether, but I think it will be just as well if I come to the end on the cars, or anywhere, as to be at home. It will make a little more trouble for outsiders, but I cannot afford to give up going to the Portland convention because of the fear of that. I 2 forgot to mention that there is an invitation from Benj. Fay Mills at Los Angeles to attend what is called “The Venice Assembly.” We have accepted the invitation. I do hope they are getting their 3000 names in Oregon, so that we can say that the question is submitted to the men of the State while 3 we are there. Y San Jose Mercury, 6 August 1905, in “Clippings” scrapbook 2, SBA Memorial Library Collection, Rare Books Department, CSmH.
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1. SBA left Rochester for the West Coast on 20 June 1905. In its details of her itinerary, this letter is very like one she dictated to Jessie Anthony on 12 June 1905, Film, 44:551. 2. Benjamin Fay Mills (1857–1916), an independent preacher with a national reputation, had moved recently to Los Angeles, and for the summer, he had charge of the Venice Assembly, a series of sociological reform congresses held in the new auditorium, built over the water offshore from the new resort “Venice in America.” (ANB; “Venice Assembly,” Fellowship 6 [March 1905]: 1–36; “Venice in California,” Pacific Monthly 14 [July 1905]: 295–96.) 3. Oregon amended its constitution in 1902 in order to reserve for the people “power to propose laws and amendments to the constitution and to enact or reject the same at the polls, independent of the legislative assembly.” The initiative and referendum opened a new path to woman suffrage, if suffragists obtained signatures from eight percent of the state’s legal voters. SBA refers to hopes to place an amendment on the ballot in June 1906. (Oregon Const. of 1857, art. IV, sec. 1, as amended 2 June 1902; History, 6:539.) •••••••••
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SBA to Anna Dann Mason 1
[Chicago] June 22, 1905— Dear Anna We arrived yesterday morning at 8.30 after a pleasant nights ride— I can see you as we parted at the station—how good it was of you to come down and stay with us—and go with us to the station— It does seem as if you belonged to us more than ever— I trust Gilbert will not feel a twinge of jealousy—but then we have to thank him and like him, too, in that he is loved by you—and for his own sake as well—and now that you have the tie that binds—the sweet little Leonora—may you both always love and honor each other—and that nothing may ever come between you but the love that now exists—and to make sure that there does not—always speak when you feel kindly—and when, if ever, you have a ugly feeling come across your mind—shut your teeth together—until it passes of—which it surely will, if you have no spoken words to remember— Well you will see that I have written to Charlotte my proposal— I am sure that the plan will work if only both you & she can have the patience and perseverance to study & teach that will be required of both of you— Mrs Gross remembers you very well—and sends love to you—and would
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I am sure do the same to Gilbert & the wee one—and to Charlotte—if she had ever seen them— She is working to get ready to go with us tomorrow night at 11 Oclock—to the Portland Hotel—Portland—Oregon— Write us there—and later at San Francisco—California but I will write again— You 2 remember that there is a key at Mrs Cooks —as of old—I think so—at least— 3 But Carrie will be there this week—and may be longer— Gilbert can telephone and make sure she is there— I shall be so happy to hear that Charlotte makes up her mind to stay with you—to learn type writing and stenography—and to work hard & steadily to the end of the next five years— Who knows but she may make herself so valuable to me— that I may get her away from you altogether— What a strife that would be— With best of Love U Susan B. Anthony I put this to Charlotte into the one envelope—for I want you to see what I have said to her— Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, place uncorrected, SBA Collection, NR. Envelope addressed to 202 Wellington Avenue, Rochester, N.Y. 1. At Chicago, delegates heading west for the convention in Portland, Oregon, assembled to ride the train together. SBA and Mary Anthony visited the Dickinson family and Emily Gross, and the Chicago Woman’s Club hosted a reception for SBA. (Film, 44:566.) 2. That is, Magdalena Cook, SBA’s neighbor on Madison Street. 3. That is, Carrie Bahl, the housekeeper. •••••••••
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Interview with SBA in Portland, Oregon [3 July 1905]
“We would have won the campaign in California,” said Miss Anthony, “had it not been for the fact that a few of the rural counties were not covered in the plan for a house to house canvass. Wherever we made such a canvass we won. For instance, in Los Angeles county the majority was 4,600, and in every other locality wherein the field was well covered we had a like result.”
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“This will be the manner in which Oregon will be handled, as I am informed by the local workers. We purpose organizing the state in every 1 part, and will strive to see that no portion fails to hear our arguments. “What do I think of the prospects? Well, in view of the advancement that was made up to the last election when a vote was taken here, when the majority was only about 2,000 against, and when this is compared with the vote of 1884, when it was lost by a majority of two thirds of the total vote, I believe that [I a]m justified in saying that the sky is rosy with hope and 2 that I am confident that we will receive the guerdon of victory. “The difference between the receptivity of people now and in the years when they branded us as social iconoclasts is so marked that the belief in victory this time seems to me to be reasonable.” Miss Anthony, with nearly 60 years of battling to her credit, more than 80 years old, and yet leading the suffrage hosts with strong grasp on the situation, talked of the coming fight with the ardor of a cadet and revealed the mild-mannered, sweet, womanly character she has, in which also are found the qualities of true generalship. Clad in soft blacks, appropriate to her advanced age, yet made into a gown of good style, she discussed the issues that are to stir a commonwealth and compel every voter to decide next year what he thinks of the woman’s propaganda.” Contest Will Be in the Open. “I stand for the fight in the open,” she said with a glee of hope on her countenance, “and am not in sympathy with those who argue [fo]r the still hunt. With them I have had many contests, and with more than half a century behind me whence to select material for my controversy, I pronounce unhesitatingly for openly carrying the battle into Africa, and for attacking the strongholds of our opponents. “This is not to be interpreted as meaning that we purpose to mix up with our campaign the economic issues that pertain to the political parties. Often have I been invited to take part in partisan campaigns, but I have invariably refused. The idea of equal suffrage is the one to which I have devoted my life, and that I hold up as the most important of all that are before the people. “ ‘No entangling alliances’ might be said to be our watchword, hence we accept no proffers of alignment with this or that party, but keep our matters separate from them all. “Here in Oregon, where the people have broken away from the control
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of the political bosses, it is wise to make the next stand for the rights of women. The initiative and referendum gives the people a free hand to vote on any question they choose to take up.” Bosses Fighting Equal Suffrage. “In other states it is different. In some the bosses know that, were they to allow it to come to a vote, the people would carry our fight for us. So they refuse to allow the legislatures to submit the question, and therefore we have been unable often to bring the issue to final determination. “But the people of Oregon have inaugurated the initiative and referendum, perhaps the most salient movement of modern times for the emancipation of the masses from the power of the bosses. And this institution, we are sure, is the hope of the women, and the many men who are with us. “Women will manage the campaign. The headquarters will be in their charge. They will attend to the correspondence, the newspaper bureau, the canvassing of the state and the house-to-house visitation which we hope will carry the day. Of course, we look for the assistance of the men, for without them we can do nothing. But, in order to prove the capability of women, we will place the vast work in their hands and expect them to give a good account of themselves.” Miss Anthony’s Message to Oregon. “Please carry to the people of Oregon my message—the recognition of our rights will do more to enhance the good of the commonwealth than any other one step which the wisdom of man could contrive. It will establish the real freedom and equality guaranteed by the national constitution to the citizens. It will inject into the electorate of the state an element that in the main will stand for the better things in government and it will raise the women themselves to a higher position and give them a complete realization of the duties and responsibilities that rest upon all who owe allegiance to our common flag.” Y Portland Oregon Daily Journal, 3 July 1905. Letters in square brackets obscured in original. 1. This interview reportedly took place on 3 July 1905 in the morning, shortly after the National-American association’s convention adopted a Plan of Work that included cooperation with the Oregon Equal Suffrage Association in the coming campaign for a constitutional amendment. 2. On the vote in 1884, see Papers, 4:422, 428n, and McPherson, Hand-Book of Politics for 1884, 103. On the vote in 1900, see above at 5 June 1900.
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Remarks by SBA at the Woman’s Clubhouse, Los Angeles
Editorial note: Estimates placed the number of women at the Woman’s Clubhouse to greet SBA and Anna Shaw at one thousand on the afternoon of 28 July 1905. “The clubhouse bloomed with fair women and flowers,” reported the Los Angeles Times. Once the receiving line reached its end, calls were made for SBA to make a few remarks.
[28 July 1905] “It’s just nine years ago,” said Miss Anthony, “since you had your suffrage campaign in this State. “Just nine years ago since 110,000 of your men voted that woman should have suffrage and vote. There were 110,000 men who said ‘yes’ to that question—but—there were 137,000 who said ‘no,’ and that’s why you are not voting now. “I witnessed an—er—” here Miss Anthony hesitated, “well, for want of a better name, an exhibition last evening; I believe they called it an investiga1 tion of a library board.” Here applause stopped her for a few moments. Women of the clubs evidently felt strongly in the matter. “As long as you women say you have rights and are satisfied,” said she, “just so long will you continue to be displaced. Here is a position, some man wants it. The woman as well as man will be taxed, but in the end how will it be? Of course the man will win because there’s only men to settle it. “Everything has always been a he or his or him, and if a woman is sent to the gallows, or taxed, or anything else, it’s always been done with a he, his or him. “In fact, in all legal documents we women have been classed with idiots, lunatics, children and criminals. Not long ago some of the women of Colorado petitioned Congress to remove them from that category and the favor was granted. “What do women do? They are constantly repairing the damage done by men, constantly reforming and bettering conditions. Yet they must beg for the money which should be given by the government. In Denver, where
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women vote, it is simple enough, for after deciding on the reform the money is appropriated by the city and the rest is easy. “Really,” said Miss Anthony, “I didn’t expect to speak today, but I know you would have been disappointed if I hadn’t spoken about suffrage, as that’s always the subject nearest my heart.” Y Los Angeles Times, 29 July 1905, Scrapbook 1905–1906, SBA Papers, DLC. 1. She attended a hearing in the city council chamber called by the mayor of Los Angeles to investigate why the public library’s board of directors had in June fired Mary L. Jones, its professionally trained head librarian, and named a man without credentials to replace her. The city’s clubwomen, who had rallied around Jones and pressed the mayor to investigate, showed up in force for the hearing, bringing their famous guests along. The hearing was short: when the board refused to provide any evidence, the mayor adjourned the meeting. The merits of the case are still contested among historians of libraries. See, for example, Margaret F. Maxwell, “The Lion and the Lady: The Firing of Miss Mary Jones,” American Libraries 9 (May 1978): 268–72; and Wayne A. Wiegand, “The Lion and the Lady Revisited: Another Look at the Firing of Mary L. Jones as Los Angeles Public Librarian in 1905,” Library and Information Science and Research: An International Journal 5 (Fall 1983): 273–90. •••••••••
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Conversation between SBA and Celia Coyle1 [30 July 1905]
“You’ll never get what you are after until you get the ballot.” Such was one of the expressions of Miss Susan B. Anthony in an interview yesterday afternoon with Miss Celia Coyle, secretary of local Laundry 2 Workers No. 52, at the home of Mrs. Charlotte Wills, 501 Buena Vista street, regarding the nine-hour movement which is being agitated in Los Angeles by the union laundry workers. Miss Anthony did not mean by her terse remark that the nine-hour movement would prove a failure. She simply meant to emphasize the fact that the working women, in her opinion, will never be a real power until the right of suffrage has been given them. That Miss Anthony is in sympathy with the working girls and women of the country, none will deny, and at the close of the interview yesterday
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afternoon she drew Miss Coyle to her, patted the girl in an endearing manner and advised her to keep up the fight until the point at argument had been won. Miss Coyle sought the interview, believing that Miss Anthony could give her much good counsel and encouragement, nor was she mistaken. Not only did Miss Anthony speak words of cheer, but her companion and fellow-champion for woman suffrage, the Rev. Anna Shaw, added much good advice and suggestion. Both were greatly interested in the movement among the local laundry workers for a nine-hour day and showed by their questioning that the movement was one in which the striking girls had their full sympathy. “In San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland and Fresno,” said Miss Coyle, “the laundry workers are working only nine hours, and we think we should have the same here. Most of the women in the strike are widows who have small children to support.” “Nine hours a day, at the kind of work which you laundry girls are doing, is too much,” exclaimed Miss Shaw. “Talk about the ‘Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave!’ It’s the land of the free man and the home of the slave woman, in my estimation. You are working one hour, at least, too long if you get the nine hours you ask. Eight hours at the hot, close work, over those machines is a good day’s work.” “How many girls are employed?” inquired Miss Anthony. “About sixty girls and thirty-five men,” answered Miss Coyle. “And what do the men do?” queried the venerable champion of woman’s rights. “Well,” replied Miss Coyle, “they work in the washhouse, distribute the bundles, and such work. Their work is easier than that of the women.” “Yes, I suppose so,” grimly responded Miss Anthony. Miss Coyle then explained the present plan of the strikers—to build a union laundry. The movement was heartily seconded by both Miss Shaw and Miss Anthony. “And when you start out to sell stock in the plant, don’t let some grasping man get the control of the whole thing,” added Miss Shaw. “Don’t let the plant get away from you when you once get started. Hang onto it yourselves. The stock will increase in value. The only trouble is, the laboring men and women, as a rule, are not accustomed to business matters of this kind, sufficiently to know the value of such an undertaking. They should be trained to know how to talk and act in a business deal. I can easily see from
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your conversation that you are thoroughly posted in this laundry strike, and know how it should be handled. If all the others were as familiar with the matter as you are it would be settled and settled right.” Miss Coyle was invited by both Miss Anthony and Miss Shaw to correspond with them at their eastern homes regarding the outcome of the difficulty. “We certainly are very heartily in favor of organized labor,” said Miss Anthony. Then she closed by saying: “But you’ll never get what you are after until you get the ballot.” Y Unidentified clipping, 31 July 1905, Scrapbook 1905–1906, SBA Papers, DLC. 1. This was probably Celia Coyle (c. 1880–?), born in England of Irish parents and brought to the United States in 1885. As of 1900, her father was a farmer in Ballona Township, Los Angeles County, but after his death and before 1910, her widowed mother settled with her children in the city. (Federal Census, 1900, 1910.) On 1 July 1905, after employers refused to adopt the nine-hour day and the union’s contract expired, one hundred and two women and eighty-seven men of Laundry Workers Union No. 52 struck three commercial laundries in Los Angeles. One firm settled with the union on July 5. The situation on July 30 is unclear: local newspapers described a lengthier strike than the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. A benefit held on July 15 aided the remaining strikers, but news of the special attention accorded laundry workers in the Labor Day parade in September made no reference to a strike. The strike may have faded away as laundries reopened with replacement workers. (Los Angeles Herald, 2, 3, 6, 7, 16 July, 5 September 1905; Twelfth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of California, 1905–1906 [Sacramento, Calif., 1906], 206–7; Eileen V. Wallis, Earning Power: Women and Work in Los Angeles, 1880–1930 [Reno, Nev., 2010], 76–83.) 2. Charlotte LeMoyne Wills (1825–1908) hosted SBA. A wealthy widow and close friend of Caroline Severance, Wills married in Pennsylvania in 1848 and relocated to Los Angeles with her husband, John A. Wills, an attorney, in 1884. She and SBA shared friends in the national capital and in Chicago, and it is likely that they knew each other before collaborating during the amendment campaign of 1896. Wills founded the Friday Morning Club and was known for her philanthropy, but she gained equal fame for her part in promoting cremation. In 1876, her father built the first modern crematory in the United States, in Washington, Pennsylvania, and Wills, her husband, and her son took the idea west and oversaw the building of Rosedale Crematory in Los Angeles. (Federal Census, 1900; Los Angeles Herald, 7 October 1908; James Miller Guinn, A History of California and an Extended History of Los Angeles and Environs [Los Angeles, 1915], 3:930–32; Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853–1913, Containing the Reminiscences of Harris Newmark, eds. Maurice H. Newmark and Marco R. Newmark [New York, 1916], 567; Ella Giles Ruddy, ed., Mother of Clubs. Caroline M. Seymour Severance: An Estimate and an Appreciation [Los Angeles, 1906], 139–40.)
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Henry A. Baker to SBA New York, Oct 20/05
My dear Aunt Susan: At a regular meeting of the Board of Directors on Oct 17th, I was ap1 pointed the Medical Director of this Company. To say that I am pleased does not express all of my feelings—I am overjoyed, for the position is one of great honor and very great responsibility. I cannot help but feel, at this time, that your precept & teachings & those of Aunt Mary have helped to make me capable of holding such a position. I shall do all that lays within me to make my services satisfactory to those who have entrusted me with the office and I feel sure that I shall be successful. We are all well and send best love Your nephew U H. A. Baker Y ALS, on letterhead of Washington Life Insurance Company, SBA Papers, MCR-S. 1. The Washington Life Insurance Company, based in New York City. Baker wrote on letterhead that announced his new title. •••••••••
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SBA to Booker T. Washington Rochester, N.Y. Nov. 6, 1905.
My dear Friend— ¶1 Your letter of Oct. 20th is received. Your last Annual Report is splen1 did. The visit of the President at your Institute was most timely and 2 it has had a splendid effect upon the south. I don’t know but what the southern papers are scolding about it but I have seen nothing of it. Your school has set the example and Normal and Industrial schools are starting up all over the south. They are all splendid in that they are helping to educate the colored people and they are rapidly becoming an educated class.
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Since the receipt of your letter we have held the annual meeting of the N.Y. State Suffrage Society. Miss Emily Howland of Sherwood, Cayuga Co. and Mrs. Elizabeth Smith Miller of Geneva, N.Y., were present. They both had received your letter, I think, and your annual report, and I said to them that it would be splendid if we three, with Mrs. Eliza Wright Osborn a sister of dear Lucretia Mott—of Auburn, 3 N.Y., could go to your 25th anniversary in April, or whenever you hold it. Mrs. Smith Miller is 83, and she failed to go with us when we were at Tuskegee three years ago and she has regretted it ever since. You will remember she is the daughter of Gerritt Smith, who was always the true friend of the colored people. I shall be 86 when that time comes. Now haven’t you a hotel or some place where we could go during our stay in Tuskegee, for we shouldn’t want to go there without making a good visit to you and Mrs. Washington, and the school in general. With love to Mrs. Washington and Mrs. Logan, Sincerely yours, U Susan B. Anthony
Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Booker T. Washington Papers, DLC. Directed to Tuskegee Institute, Ala. 1. The Twenty-fourth Annual Report of the Principal, Tuskegee Normal & Industrial Institute, Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, For the Year Ending May 30, 1905 (Tuskegee Institute, Ala., 1905). In it, Washington expressed hope that the coming twenty-fifth anniversary would be “celebrated in a befitting manner; that is, in a way that shall prove useful to the whole South” (14). (With assistance from the Tuskegee University Archives.) 2. Theodore Roosevelt visited the Tuskegee Institute on 24 October 1905. 3. SBA confuses generations: Eliza Osborne was a niece of Lucretia Mott. The same disorientation occurs in SBA to Jessie Anthony, 26 August 1905, Film, 44:705–6; a visit to her nephew in Leavenworth is described as a visit to her late brother.
Textual Notes ¶2
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Samuel Gompers to SBA [Washington, D.C.] December 2, 1905.
My dear Miss Anthony: I just want to write you a line to express my sincere regret that I was out of the city when you and Miss Upton were recently here, for it would have afforded me great pleasure to have had the opportunity of greeting you, and 1 having a talk with you upon matters of mutual interest. Since my return from the Pittsburg convention I have received a number of letters from the officials of local branches of the Womans Suffrage Association in various parts of the country, all expressing their gratitude and appreciation for the action taken by the American Federation of Labor at 2 the Pittsburg convention. I need scarcely say to you that I shall continue in the future as I have done in the past, to give my influence toward the movement which you have so nobly represented. With assurances of high regard, and trusting that I may have the opportunity in the near future of meeting you, I am, Sincerely yours, U Samuel Gompers President, American Federation of Labor. Y TLS, letterbook copy, American Federation of Labor Papers, DLC. 1. SBA traveled to Washington a few days early for a meeting with Theodore Roosevelt at the White House on 15 November 1905. She was accompanied by Harriet Upton and Ida Harper. For an account of their conversation, see Anthony, 3:1375–78. 2. The American Federation of Labor met in Pittsburgh from 13 to 25 November 1905. Noting in its resolution on equal suffrage that suffragists in Oregon intended to use the direct initiative to get their question before the voters, the federation “welcome[d] the Equal Suffrage Association’s co-operation for the establishment of the people’s sovereignty in place of machine rule—the only system that enables the voters to rule.” (Report of Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labor, Held at Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, November 13 to 25 Inclusive, 1905 [Washington, D.C., 1905], 78–79.)
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SBA to Elizabeth Smith Miller Rochester, N.Y. Dec. 8, 1905.
My dear Friend— ¶1 I have a letter from Mr. Stafford of Canestota saying that he has recieved the books safely and I return the bill of $16.40 receipted. I am 1 glad also that Nannie’s Society has received their set of the volumes. ¶2 About the express charges, I always prepay them when I send books out. It comes out of the balance of the money so you do not have anything to pay. If you find that an expressman charges at the other end of the line, I want you to inform me, because, as in the case before, it is always the expressman that is at fault. ¶3 It is funny that Gat Stanton has been writing a book but it is on the subject in which, as I should think, he would be most interested—noth2 ing serious but something for sport. ¶4 Well, I have been to Washington and to Philadelphia. Was ill in the 3 latter place for two weeks and got home last Monday. Glad to be here and glad to be in my own bed again. Home is the best place, after all. When our people get settled upon the day in February for the reception in honor of my 86th birthday, we want you and Nannie to come up and be our guests. We have tried a great many times to get you but we always fail, but I bespeak your presence now. The reception is to be at Mr. Wil4 liam Gleason’s, who has a beautiful house, and whose daughter, Kate Gleason, was the only graduate from Cornell in Civil Engineering 20 or more years ago. She is now associated with her father and brothers in a factory that manufactures everything that belongs to machinery that is made of iron, I think. She attends to business, goes to New Orleans, San Francisco and London, to make sales and to purchase. She is a wonderful woman, so I shall be glad to introduce you to her on Nora’s account. I think Nora called on her when she was here in February last year. You remember she came up to attend the reception at Mr. Gannett’s. Yours very affectionately, U Susan B. Anthony
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Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Smith Family Papers, Manuscript Division, NN. Directed to Geneva, N.Y. 1. SBA and Elizabeth Miller were once again shipping books paid for by Miller. 2. G. Smith Stanton, “Where the Sportsman Loves to Linger.” A Narrative of the Most Popular Canoe Trips in Maine. The Allagash, the East and West Branches of the Penobscot, was published in New York City in 1905. 3. After her meeting with Theodore Roosevelt, SBA stopped in Philadelphia, called at Bryn Mawr College for a talk with Mary Garrett and Carey Thomas about the upcoming suffrage convention in Baltimore, and then collapsed. She spent the two weeks with her niece Louise James. From their conversation at the college, Carey Thomas took away the idea of College Evening at the suffrage convention. (Woman’s Tribune, 31 March 1906; M. Carey Thomas to Mary E. Woolley, 21 December 1905, in Papers of M. Carey Thomas in the Bryn Mawr College Archives, Microfilm Collection, ed. Lucy Fisher West, [Woodbridge, Conn., 1981], 109:333–35.) 4. William Gleason (1836–1922) arrived from Ireland as a teenager, apprenticed to a machinist, and worked at Colt’s Armory during the Civil War. He then founded a company that became Rochester’s Gleason Tool Company in 1890 and the Gleason Works in 1903, a leading machine tool maker with an international business. He and his daughter hosted SBA’s birthday party at their house at 7 Lake View Park. (Joseph W. Barnes, “Rochester and the Automobile Industry,” Rochester History 43 [April & July 1981]: 31–34; New York Times, 25 May 1922.) Kate Gleason (1865–1933) was secretary and treasurer of Gleason Works and involved with the firm’s marketing. She studied engineering at Cornell but without earning a degree, acquiring her knowledge of machinery and manufacturing on the job. (NAW; ANB.)
Textual Notes ¶4
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SBA to Rush Rhees Rochester, N.Y. Jan. 3rd, 1906.
My dear President Rhees— 1 I have your letter of Dec. 14th, in answer to mine of the 13th. You will see that I have waited to consult with the President of the State Society, Mrs. Crossett, and she likes very much the subject, “The Practical Workings of Woman Suffrage.” I don’t know that it will be necessary to state
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Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Smith Family Papers, Manuscript Division, NN. Directed to Geneva, N.Y. 1. SBA and Elizabeth Miller were once again shipping books paid for by Miller. 2. G. Smith Stanton, “Where the Sportsman Loves to Linger.” A Narrative of the Most Popular Canoe Trips in Maine. The Allagash, the East and West Branches of the Penobscot, was published in New York City in 1905. 3. After her meeting with Theodore Roosevelt, SBA stopped in Philadelphia, called at Bryn Mawr College for a talk with Mary Garrett and Carey Thomas about the upcoming suffrage convention in Baltimore, and then collapsed. She spent the two weeks with her niece Louise James. From their conversation at the college, Carey Thomas took away the idea of College Evening at the suffrage convention. (Woman’s Tribune, 31 March 1906; M. Carey Thomas to Mary E. Woolley, 21 December 1905, in Papers of M. Carey Thomas in the Bryn Mawr College Archives, Microfilm Collection, ed. Lucy Fisher West, [Woodbridge, Conn., 1981], 109:333–35.) 4. William Gleason (1836–1922) arrived from Ireland as a teenager, apprenticed to a machinist, and worked at Colt’s Armory during the Civil War. He then founded a company that became Rochester’s Gleason Tool Company in 1890 and the Gleason Works in 1903, a leading machine tool maker with an international business. He and his daughter hosted SBA’s birthday party at their house at 7 Lake View Park. (Joseph W. Barnes, “Rochester and the Automobile Industry,” Rochester History 43 [April & July 1981]: 31–34; New York Times, 25 May 1922.) Kate Gleason (1865–1933) was secretary and treasurer of Gleason Works and involved with the firm’s marketing. She studied engineering at Cornell but without earning a degree, acquiring her knowledge of machinery and manufacturing on the job. (NAW; ANB.)
Textual Notes ¶4
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SBA to Rush Rhees Rochester, N.Y. Jan. 3rd, 1906.
My dear President Rhees— 1 I have your letter of Dec. 14th, in answer to mine of the 13th. You will see that I have waited to consult with the President of the State Society, Mrs. Crossett, and she likes very much the subject, “The Practical Workings of Woman Suffrage.” I don’t know that it will be necessary to state
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where. Of course there are the four states in this Union and New Zealand and Australia, where full suffrage exists, and then there are various states and countries where they have municipal, tax and school suffrage. I enclose 2 Mrs. Crossett’s letter, and you will see she prefers to have the subject cover all places. I thought first we would confine it simply to what suffrage has done in the United States—full suffrage, municipal, tax and school suffrage. But on the whole I think it is better to take the other two countries. It will give the student a better chance to study and learn the facts in the case. Of course the main object in giving the prizes is to stimulate the student to study up the facts. There are a great many theories about the ill effects of Woman Suffrage, all of which they will disprove if they study the matter carefully. I prefer to add $25 to the State’s $25, but I agree with your suggestion that the two prizes of $30 and $20 should not be given unle[ss] at least ten or twelve persons enter the competition. I am uncertain whether it would be better to have two prizes or to put the whole amount in one—whether striving to get $50 wouldn’t stimulate the boys and girls to do their level best in gathering up the facts. Of course if it comes down to one writing, and that should be a slipshod affair, I wouldn’t feel very much like giving any prize, but I should think the subject was of sufficient important to warrant close study and careful writing. Nearly all the facts of the voting in the different states and different countries will be found in Vol. 4 of the History of Woman Suffrage, but then, since 1900 there have been a good many steps so the student will have to look beyond the facts of written history and learn those of recent date. 3 When is the time that the papers should be handed in? I suppose it must be before June 6th, 1906. I say this because at that time the men of Oregon vote upon the question of extending full suffrage to women. Of course there would be no facts to record except that the law was passed, but even that would be a good note of information for the winding up of an essay. 4 If you have any further suggestions to make or Professor Gilmore has any, for I believe he has charge of the essays, has he not?, I would be very glad to receive them. With the hope that there will be lots of girls and boys who will compete for the prizes, I am Very sincerely yours, U Susan B. Anthony
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[in SBA’s hand] p.s. The inevitable Postscript—how long would be best to allow the essays—how many words— Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Rush Rhees Papers, NRU. Square brackets surround letters that ran off the page. 1. Film, 44:791–93. They discussed plans for the third year of competition for the Susan B. Anthony Prize, sponsored by the New York State Woman Suffrage Association, for the student or students at the University of Rochester who submitted the best essay on an aspect of woman suffrage. The topic and terms described in this letter were published in Fifty-sixth Annual Catalogue of the University of Rochester, A College of Liberal Arts, 1905–1906 (Rochester, 1906), 127. 2. Enclosure was SBA to Ella H. Crossett, 28 December 1905, Film, 44:804. 3. See Rush Rhees to SBA, 4 January 1906, Film, 44:866–67. 4. Joseph Henry Gilmore (1834–1918), once a Baptist minister, was professor of rhetoric, logic, and English at the University of Rochester from 1868 until 1908. (DAB.) •••••••••
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SBA to Grace A. Woodworth1 Rochester, N.Y. Jan. 8, [1906]—
Dear Miss Woodworth The photo are received—also your beautiful letter putting down the price to the lowest figure— I want to do a little more than accept your lowest price for this dozzen— I add $5— for those you have given me heretofore—or if you prefer call the V a new years present—any way so you have the extra $5— The pictures are very nice—and I thank you very much for them— I do wish I could sit—or stand for some pictures full length—but I am too lazy to get dressed & go down to your Studio—but may be if I live till warm weather comes—I will accomplish the feat— With my wishes for your success—I am Sincerely yours U Susan B. Anthony Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead, SBA Papers, Seneca Falls Historical Society. Envelope addressed to 30 Main street East, Rochester. SBA wrote 1905. 1. Grace Adelle Woodworth (1872–1967), a photographer with a studio in Rochester, took pictures of SBA and Mary Anthony both alone and together on 8 February 1905, in advance of SBA’s birthday celebration. Writing an endorsement of Woodworth’s talent, SBA expressed a preference for the pictures of the sisters
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together: “those taken separately, it seems to me—are not so perfect— the fault was in both of ourselves—not in the picture taker.” She went on to say, “but they please all the friends exceedingly—and it is the friends who are the best judges— after all.” Woodworth grew up in Seneca Falls, where an uncle had attended the woman’s rights convention and signed the Declaration of Sentiments. (Amy S. Doherty, “Grace Woodworth’s Portrait of Susan B. Anthony: ‘Outside the Common Lines,’” in Prints and Printmakers of New York State, 1825–1940, ed. David Tatham [Syracuse, N.Y., 1986], 243–51; program for SBA’s eighty-fifth birthday, 15 February 1905, SBA Collection, NRM; SBA to G. A. Woodworth, 14 June 1905, Film, 44:559–60.) •••••••••
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Jenkin Lloyd Jones to SBA [Chicago] January 20, 1906.
My Dear Friend:— Greetings. It was good to get word from you and heart-warming to know that I carry your continued sympathies. A day or two after your letter arrived the Lincoln Centre hall was well filled with men and women 1 summoned to promote the woman suffrage plank in the new charter. We mean to push it for all it is worth. There is a bare fighting chance that it will succeed. Very cordially yours, Y TL, carbon, Jenkin Lloyd Jones Papers, ICMe. 1. On 18 January 1906, a coalition of reformers in Chicago rallied to launch a campaign for municipal suffrage for women. SBA sent a message to the event, quoted in the Tribune: “O, do what you can in Chicago now. It is your great oppportunity. If you miss it, it will be a grief to the whole world.” A commission to draft a new charter for the city of Chicago began work in committees in December 1905, while advocates of women’s municipal suffrage organized. Clubs, temperance groups, social settlements, professional societies, and suffrage associations collaborated through the Women’s Committee for the Extension of Municipal Suffrage to Women. In addressing the mass meeting, Jenkin Lloyd Jones and Jane Addams were joined by other local notables. The Abraham Lincoln Center, a kind of social settlement building with an auditorium on its second floor, sat at the corner of Oakwood Boulevard and Langley Avenue on Chicago’s South Side, across from All Souls’ Church where Jones was pastor. (Chicago Daily Tribune, 19 January 1906; Woman’s Journal, 27 January 1906; Ida Husted Harper, “Status of Woman Suffrage in the United States,” North American Review 189 [April 1909]: 511–12; Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the
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Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933 [Princeton, N.J., 2002], 73–84; Joseph Siry, “The Abraham Lincoln Center in Chicago,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 50 [September 1991]: 235–65.) •••••••••
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College Evening of the NationalAmerican Woman Suffrage Association
Editorial note: M. Carey Thomas organized this special program of college students, alumnae, faculty, and presidents as a tribute to SBA. “I feel that college women and women’s colleges owe a great deal to pioneers like Miss Anthony,” Thomas wrote to the president of Mount Holyoke College, “and I should be delighted if we could make some recognition of this while she is able to take pleasure in it.” Newspapers sampled speeches that were later published in full, and in this text, the Baltimore American favored Thomas as a native daughter. SBA was very ill in Baltimore, and College Evening was one of the few events of the National-American’s convention that she attended. (M. C. Thomas to Mary E. Woolley, 21 December 1905, in Papers of M. Carey Thomas in the Bryn Mawr College Archives, Microfilm Collection, ed. Lucy Fisher West, [Woodbridge, Conn., 1981], 109:333–35; The College Evening of the Thirty-eighth Annual Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Held in Baltimore, February 8, 1906 [Baltimore, 1906].)
[8 February 1906] With the great pioneer suffrage worker, Susan B. Anthony, upon the platform, surrounded by women noted in the college world for their brilliant attainments, as well as those famed for social work, and in other professions, and with a large audience, the session of the woman suffrage convention opened last evening. If the veteran suffragist thought of more than the pleasure of the event, it must have been to contrast the occasion with the times past when, unhonored and unsung, she fought what must often have seemed a losing fight for principles for which the presence of these women proclaimed victory. 1 Miss Anthony was escorted to the stage by Dr. Ira Remsen, of the Johns Hopkins University, who presided during the evening and introduced the 2 speakers. In a box with Miss Mary Garrett was Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, while upon the stage, in addition to the college women who made ad3 dresses, were Miss Clara Barton, Rev. Anna Shaw, the president of the
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association, and Mrs. Florence Kelley, whose work against child labor has 4 made her famous. The addresses were made by Mary E. Woolley, presi5 dent of Mount Holyoke College; Lucy M. Salmon, professor of history, 6 Vassar College; Mary A. Jordan, professor of English, Smith College; 7 Mary W. Calkins, professor of philosophy and psychology, Wellesley 8 College; Eva Perry Moore, A.B., and trustee of Vassar College, president of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (over 3,000 college women); 9 Maud Wood Park, A.B., Radcliffe College, president Boston Branch of the Equal Suffrage League in Woman’s Colleges and founder of the league; M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College. College Evening. The evening had been announced as “college evening,” but it might just as well have been called “Susan B. Anthony evening,” for, while the addresses dealt with phases of the woman question, all evolved into one great tribute to Susan Anthony. At the close when she came forward to answer the addresses, the audience with one accord rose and greeted her standing, many giving the Chautauqua salute. “If there was any proof needed of the progress of the cause for which I have worked I have it tonight,” she said. “The presence here on this stage of these college women, and of the young college girls who are acting as 10 pages, and will some day be the world’s greatest strength, is a great encouragement and joy to me. But I am not going to make a long speech, so I will say good night.” Miss Anthony looked well, and her voice was strong and very full for a person who will in a few days celebrate her eighty-sixth birthday. She wore a soft black silk gown, with white yoke and trimmed with white lace. One of the most interesting addresses of the evening was made by Miss Lucy M. Salmon, professor of history at Vassar College. She began by giving a short history of the various stages of development through which she had reached a conviction of the virtue of woman suffrage, and of the final acceptance of the college woman of the doctrine, because “we have come to realize all the movement means.” Enemy to Society. “The college women are learning,” she said, “that the enemy to society is not the woman in Colorado who votes, but the woman in New York who plays bridge. The enemy to society is not the woman who works in the
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various branches where she may earn a living, but the woman who hangs over the bargain counter trying to get things as cheap as possible. It is not the woman who earns money, but the woman who wastes it in foolish ways, or who sells chances at church fairs. We are beginning to wonder if it is worth while to keep account of the number of women who vote and pay no attention to the number of women who frequent the racetracks. Is it worth while to inquire into the character of the feminine voters when the once, twice and sometimes thrice divorced are received into society without question, and who without question can gamble, play the races and indulge in other pastimes?” In conclusion, the speaker paid a tribute to Miss Anthony, who has, she said, “made it possible for women to work rather than to weep.” Tribute to Miss Anthony. The address delivered by the president of Bryn Mawr College, M. Carey Thomas, received the most enthusiastic applause, and especially in conclusion when, turning to Miss Anthony, she paid her the following beautiful tribute: To most women it is given to have returned them in double measure the love of the children they have nurtured. To you, Miss Anthony, belongs by right, as to no other woman in the world’s history, the love and gratitude of all women in every country of the civilized globe. We, your daughters in the spirit, rise up today and call you blessed. In those far off days when our mother’s mothers sat contented in darkness you, our champion, sprang forth to battle for us, equipped and shining in the prophetic vision of the apostle and martyrs, and the heat of your battle has lasted 50 years. From the time when, in the early fifties, you and Mrs. Cady Stanton sat together in New York state writing over the cradles of her babies those trumpet calls to freedom that began and carried forward the emancipation of women. And the day, 18 months ago, when that great audience in Berlin rose to do you honor, silent because thousands of women stood with full eyes and lumps in their throats because of what they 11 owed you. Of such as you were the lines of the poet Yeats written: They shall be remembered forever, They shall be alive forever, They shall be speaking forever, The people shall hear them forever.
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Woman Suffrage. Miss Thomas’ remarks upon the general question of woman suffrage were as follows: In the year 1903 there were in the United States, according to the report of the Commissioner of Education, 5,749 women studying in women’s colleges and 24,863 women studying in coeducational colleges. If the annual rate for increase has continued the same (as it undoubtedly has during the past three years), there are in colleges at the present time 38,400 women students. Although there are in the United States about 2,000,000 less women than men, women already constitute considerably over one-third of the entire student body and are steadily gaining on men. This means that in another generation one-half of all the people who have been to college in the United States will be women, and just as surely as the seasons of the year succeed one another, or the law of gravitation works, just so surely will this great body of educated women wish to use their trained intelligence in making the towns, cities and states of their native country better places for themselves and their children to live in; just so surely will the men, with whom they have worked side by side in college classes, claim and receive their aid in political, as well as in home life. The logic of events does not lie. It is unthinkable that women who have learned to act for themselves in college, and have become awakened there to civic duties, should not care for the ballot to enforce their wishes. The same is true of every woman’s club and every individual woman that tries to obtain laws to save little children from working cruel hours in cotton mills, or to open summer gardens for homeless little waifs on the streets of a great city. These women, too, are being irresistibly driven to demand equal suffrage for the sake of the wrongs they try to right. The Woman’s Club of Chicago only the other day sent delegates to ask the legislature to give woman municipal suffrage in the new Chicago charter. Fate of Poor Girls. 12
In the early 70’s my mother was profoundly stirred by the terrible fate of poor girls in Baltimore, arrested, perhaps, on false charges, confined over night in police stations, and subjected to the brutalities of policemen and men prisoners. She begged in vain through many months for women matrons. One day when she was being driven fruitlessly about from one ward leader to another, she had to stop at a polling-booth to let her ignorant
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negro coachman, who could neither read nor write, vote for these very men whom she had implored in vain. She often told me that from that moment of bitter humiliation in which she, a woman, who could not vote, held the reins for the ignorant man who could, she never again doubted that women must vote in order to protect the interests of other women. Sooner or later every sensitive woman finds herself face to face with conditions that degrade her womanhood. It is in truth as degrading, though perhaps grotesque, for an ignorant white coachman or butler to decide by his vote how his mistress shall be taxed or how much or how little she and her children shall be protected from disease and crime. I confidently believe that equal suffrage is coming far more swiftly than most of us suspect. Educated, public-spirited women will refuse to subject themselves to such humiliating conditions. Educated, public-spirited men will recoil in their turn before the sheer unreason of the position that the opinions and wishes of their wives and mothers are to be consulted upon every question except upon the laws and government under which they must live and die. Equal Suffrage Inevitable. Equal suffrage thus seems to me to be an inevitable and logical consequence of the higher education of women. And the higher education of women itself is, if possible, a still more inevitable result of the agitation of the early woman suffragists. The education of girls, controlled as it is by the densest conservatism, is intimately affected by liberalizing public opinion. The first Woman’s Rights Convention was held in 1848, and during the 20 years, until 1868, when women’s college education may be said to begin, the early woman suffragists, including also some of the ablest and most eloquent men, completely altered public opinion in regard to women. By this time every legislature and convention and body of men had refused their petitions every year, and many times each year for these 20 years there came a time when everyone began to believe in the higher education for women. We who are guiding this movement today owe the profoundest debt of gratitude to the early pioneers—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe and, above all, Miss Susan B. Anthony. Other women reformers, like men reformers, have given part of their time and energy. She has given her whole life to the cause and she has earned thousands and begged thousands more.
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What She Has Accomplished. In opening her address Miss Woolley said: “There are deeds that speak for themselves—that need no eulogy. The best tribute that I can pay Miss Anthony tonight is a simple recital of some of the things that she has accomplished.” And, continuing, she gave a few of the interesting points in Miss Anthony’s career. In conclusion, she said: “The emphasis upon woman as an individual and not simply as a member of a sex carries with it the imputation that education should be for her as well as for her brothers. The great questions of temperance, politics and social reform affect woman as well as man, and she should be entitled to work along these lines. Efficiency in work means training and higher education. “Women have given proof that they can be wise and womanly, can be graduated from coeducational institutions without losing any of their womanly charm. They are better home makers and home lovers because of their broader interests.” Mary A. Jordan spoke of the fraternal spirit which infused the suffrage movement, and in conclusion said that “the aim of all education is three fold—the ascertaining of power, the training of power and the expression of that power in some form of wise activity. The person who can’t think is a fool, the one who will not think is a bigot, and the one who dares not think is a slave.” Miss Mary W. Calkins referred in detail to the debatable points of the suffrage question, concluding with the statement that: “Neither social settlement work, medicine, psychology or suffrage can make a woman less than a woman. The claim is always made that woman suffrage will give the ballot to a host of ignorant. In this I have become convinced the argument is with woman suffragists. It is a fact that the ignorant masculine immigrants far outnumber the women, and the girls in our public schools outnumber the boys. Consequently, the ignorant class will be proportionately decreased. What we ask is that men and women will cast away the curse of self-satisfied society—the ignorant satisfaction with things as they are.” Mrs. Park gave a short history of the organization of which she is the founder, and Mrs. Moore also gave an interesting account of several phases of the suffrage question. Both speakers paid their tribute to Miss Anthony.
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Y Baltimore American, 9 February 1906, Ida Boyer Scrapbooks, NAWSA Papers, DLC. 1. Ira Remsen (1846–1927) was a leading chemist known for his research and his teaching. He became president of the Johns Hopkins University in 1901. (ANB.) 2. Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910), author most famously of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was the first president of the New England Woman Suffrage Association and a staunch ally of Lucy Stone for two decades. (NAW; ANB.) 3. Clara Barton (1821–1911), an old friend of SBA, prodded the United States to sign the Geneva agreement about the conduct of war before she founded and presided over the American Red Cross. (NAW; ANB.) 4. Mary Emma Woolley (1863–1947), a graduate of Brown University and former professor at Wellesley College, became president of Mount Holyoke College in 1901. (NAW; ANB.) 5. Lucy Maynard Salmon (1853–1927), a graduate of the University of Michigan, was professor of history at Vassar College. (NAW.) 6. Mary Augusta Jordan (1855–1941), a graduate of Vassar College, was professor of English at Smith College. (ANB.) 7. Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930), a graduate of Smith College, was professor of psychology and philosophy at Wellesley College. (NAW; ANB.) 8. Eva Perry Moore (1852–1931), a graduate and trustee of Vassar College living in St. Louis, presided over the Association of Collegiate Alumnae from 1903 to 1907 and was vice president of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs from 1904 to 1908. (ANB.) 9. Maud Wood Park (1871–1955), a graduate of Radcliffe College and already noted for suffrage work while a student, cofounded the College Equal Suffrage League of Boston in 1900, and then worked to expand the league to other cities. (ANB.) 10. Students of the Women’s College of Baltimore (Goucher College) donned academic robes and acted as ushers for the event. See Lilian Welsh, Reminiscences of Thirty Years in Baltimore [Baltimore, 1925], 101–7. 11. William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), Irish poet and playwright. In his one-act play Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the lines are sung by The Poor Old Woman about those who will join the long and difficult fight for an Irish nation. 12. Mary Whitall Thomas (1836–1888), sister of Hannah Whitall Smith and mother of M. Carey Thomas.
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Remarks by SBA at Birthday Celebration in Washington
Editorial note: SBA’s birthday party took place in Washington. Officers and delegates journeyed from Baltimore not only to party but also to testify before committees of the new Congress. After reporting all the speeches, the press paraphrased some parting words from SBA about “aid” for the cause and faith in Anna Shaw’s leadership.
[15 February 1906] Miss Susan B. Anthony, ensconsed in a big, easy chair upon the platform at the Church of Our Father, surrounded by the officers of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and others and confronted by an audience of men and women that completely filled the first floor and galleries, last evening received hearty congratulations upon the occasion of her eighty-sixth birthday anniversary and high praise for her long life work in behalf of women. Letters from President Roosevelt, senators, representatives in Congress and prominent persons all over the country were read. Those who extended congratulations in person were Senator Fred T. Du1 2 Bois of Idaho, Representative J. Warren Keifer of Iowa, Commissioner 3 4 Macfarland of the District of Columbia, Rev. John Van Schaick, pastor of the Church of Our Father, Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell of New Jersey, 5 6 Mrs. Alexander Kent of this city, Rev. Charles Ames of Boston and Rev. Anna Shaw, president of the national organization. Miss Anthony has been ill from a severe cold during the past week, and it was feared that she might be unable to be present last evening, but by remaining in her room all day yesterday under the care of a trained nurse her condition improved. She took very little part in the meeting, except to smile and nod as things were said that pleased her. Twice, however, she rose from her chair and said a few words. Once she took occasion to comment upon the President’s letter of congratulation. This communication was addressed to Rev. Anna H. Shaw, and was as follows: “Pray let me join you in congratulating Miss Anthony upon her eightysixth birthday and extending to her the most hearty good wishes for the continuation of her useful and honorable life.”
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15 f e b rua ry 19 0 6 Hope Men Will Do Something.
“I hope the men will do something besides send congratulations,” Miss Anthony said, after this and many other letters had been read. “President Roosevelt’s letter is very good. But I want him to force Congress to pass an amendment to the Constitution granting women their rights. I would rather have him say one word to Congress on this question than give all the praise in the world to me personally.” Y Washington Evening Star, 16 February 1906. 1. Fred Thomas DuBois (1851–1930) of Idaho was the territorial delegate to Congress and one of the new state’s first senators, serving from 1891 to 1897 and again from 1901 to 1907. Originally a Silver Republican, DuBois had left the party and become a Democrat by this date. (BDAC.) 2. Joseph Warren Keifer (1836–1932), Republican of Ohio, was returned to the House of Representatives in 1905 and served until 1911. While he was Speaker of the House in the Forty-seventh Congress from 1881 to 1883, he joined suffragists in their unsuccessful effort to restore a select committee for woman suffrage. (BDAC. See also Papers 4.) 3. Henry Brown Floyd Macfarland (1861–1921), a journalist, was appointed a commissioner of the District of Columbia in 1900 and served for nine years. He also held office in the District’s woman suffrage association. (NCAB, 19:226; WWW1; History, 6:105n.) 4. John van Schaick, Jr., (1873–1949) was minister of the Universalist Church of Our Father, where the birthday celebration took place. (Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography, on-line publication of the Unitarian Universalist Historical Society.) 5. Caroline or Carrie E. Gove Kent (1843–1918), wife of Alexander Kent, pastor of the People’s Church in Washington, was active in the District of Columbia Equal Suffrage Association and, according to the History of Woman Suffrage, “served in some official capacity from 1898 until her death in 1918.” She was the group’s president in 1900, 1902, 1903, and 1914. (Federal Census, 1880, 1900; History, 4:568n, 6:105, 106n.) 6. Charles Gordon Ames (1828–1912), long active in work for woman suffrage in California, Pennsylvania, and Massachsetts, was at this time minister of Boston’s Unitarian Church of the Disciples. (NCAB, 23:317–18. See also Papers 2 & 5.)
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Lucy E. Anthony to Ida Husted Harper Rochester, N.Y. Feb. 28, 1906.
1
My dear Mrs. Harper— I am glad to tell you that Aunt Susan is again better. It seems to be a very steady gain and of course that is the best kind. I do not know whether I have told you that she has had a temperature of 103 but it was down to 99 yesterday and is today a little over 100, but of course it would naturally 2 go up and down somewhat for a time, I suppose. She is much better, you may know, because she occasionally asks a question and I am making it a point to go in three or four times a day and read her bright little bits from letters and tell her all the good news that I can think of or make up. Today I read her the part of your letter in which you said that you would never again refuse to speak when you were asked. She laughed right out at what you said of the stage presence of the college women, always excepting Miss Thomas, of course, and she said she was delighted that you had come to your senses. She said that your voice always carried well and that everybody liked to hear you and that she did very much indeed. She says she is so glad that you are beginning to feel your responsibility in that line. She thinks that her bringing up of you has not been in vain. Now if you have any more nice things like that to write, just send them on. Y TL incomplete, on NAWSA letterhead, Ida Harper Woman Suffrage Scrapbook 6, Rare Books, DLC. Not in Film. Directed to Washington, D.C. In margins, in hand of I. H. Harper, “Letter from Lucy Anthony. My last message to nfrompMiss Anthony, who died at 12.40 a.m. Mar. 13.” 1. Lucy Anthony did not accompany her aunt on the trip from Washington to Rochester, according to Ida Harper’s biography, but arrived sometime later. (Anthony, 3:1415.) 2. In the first phase of her illness, the press reported “facial neuralgia,” “extreme weakness,” and “a stroke of paralysis.” See, for example, New York Times, 21 February 1906.
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Lucy E. Anthony to Elizabeth Smith Miller Rochester, N.Y. March 2nd, 1906
My dear Mrs. Miller— I am glad to tell you that Aunt Susan is better, although she is quite weak and will of course have to be just as careful as it is possible for a 1 sick person to be. She is having the best of care and the Doctor thinks that within a week she will be able to sit up in a chair. I now plan to go to 2 Philadelphia tomorrow, so you may not hear for a few days. Aunt Mary is better although she still suffers from a little dizziness. That was a most awkward fall that she had. Any message which you might wish to send to Aunt Susan will be gratefully received by her. She loves to have the loving words from her friends and I am still reading little extracts to her several times a day. But it is the progress of the Cause that touches her most deeply every time. We have received word from Chicago that Jane Addams was greatly enthused by the Baltimore meeting and the friend writes that that means that all the committee in Chicago will become enthused also. Aunt Susan was delighted over this and felt that was but one of the many things we should feel grateful to Miss Garrett and Miss Thomas for, because, you know, it was the generosity and friendship of those women which made it possible for us to have Miss Addams with us. Yours, with love, U Lucy E. Anthony Y TLS, on NAWSA letterhead, Smith Family Papers, Manuscript Division, NN. Not in Film. Directed to Geneva, N.Y. 1. That is, Marcena Ricker. 2. Relatives were summoned on March 11, bringing Lucy Anthony back to Rochester on March 12, with her cousins Louise Mosher James and Guelma McLean Baker. (New York Evening World, 12 March 1906.)
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Statement to the press about SBA’s health [6 March 1906]
Regarding the condition of Miss Susan B. Anthony, her physician, Dr. Marcena Sherman-Ricker, said this morning: “I was at the Anthony home at 8 o’clock this morning. Miss Anthony’s left lung is now affected by pneumonia. Her right lung has practically cleared. As the result of nausea last night she became very weak; but she rested well from 1 until 5 o’clock this morning. She is still unable to retain nourishment and consequently is very weak. “Of course, these conditions in Miss Anthony’s case are serious,” continued Dr. Ricker. “We hope that her constitution which has been vigorous even in old age, will carry her through to an improved condition soon. It is difficult to say now what the change may be. This morning she was able to breathe with less labor than yesterday.” Y Rochester Post Express, 6 March 1906.
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Mabel Nichols to Maude Nichols1 Rochester N.Y. Homeopathic Hosp. March 13th, 06
Dear Sister My patient passed away this morning after laying in a comatose state for two nights & a day. Dear old soul rather hated to die. She wanted to live to gain just one more victory. We learned to love her very dearly and was sorry she could not be spared. Yesterday the Anthony house was in a bedlam by reporters, telegrams, telephones & friends. So many come & ask to be allowed to remain so as to get every change that might take place. They were refused admittance so they just promenaded the street from one end to the other all day long. In town there were hourly reports on the
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bulletin. I am sending you the news paper reports. Also one of Miss Anthony’s handkershief ’s that she probably blown her nose on many a time. I am takeing a picture of her & pasting it on one of her handkerchiefs to 2 paspatoo. Why don’t you do the same. You will find a very good picture of her in this news paper clipping. Her dear old sister gave me a plaster 3 The paper gives the names of the parties medallion bust of Miss Susan that were at the death bed, but to tell the truth Maude I was all alone with 4 the dear old soul. Write & tell me if you receive this allright. Love to all U Sister Mabel Y ALS, in private hands. Envelope addressed [88?] Kidder Ave, West Somerville, Mass. Not in Film. 1. Mabel Nichols served as night nurse during SBA’s final illness. According to local newspapers, she graduated from the Training School for Nurses at Union Hospital in Lynn, Massachusetts, and only happened to be in Rochester on a visit to a friend, a recent graduate of the Rochester Homeopathic Training School for Nurses. Maude Nichols was likely a schoolteacher in Somerville, Massachusetts. 2. Passe-partout is a technique for matting pictures or objects while framing them. It keeps the glass separated from the object’s surface, and, like any mat, delimits what can be seen. 3. This was probably the medallion made by Sidney Morse and sold in great numbers by the Political Equality Club. 4. Most newspapers reported that Mary and Lucy Anthony, Anna Shaw, two nurses, and Marcena Ricker were at her side.
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Index
Abbot, Willis John, 104n; letter from ecs, 103–4 Abbott, Lyman, 391–92n; antisuffrage activism of, 390, 468 Adams, John, 347 Adams, Mass.: sba’s residence in, 24–25, 152–54 Addams, Jane, 51, 52–53n; at suffrage meeting, 580 Addison, Kate Rowen, 21–22n; at suffrage meeting, 16 African Americans: and Calif. campaign, 68–70; education for, 413–14 African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (San Francisco), 68–70 agnosticism, 380 Alden, Cynthia May Westover, 255n, 262; and sba’s biography, 254 Amerian Congress of Liberal Religious Societies, 84–85 American Church (Berlin), 507 American Federation of Labor: and empire, xxviii, 310–11; endorses woman suffrage, 564; and opposition to working women, 257; petitions for woman suffrage, 310, 334; sba to attend, 316; and woman suffrage, 310 Ames, Charles Gordon, 577, 578n Ames, Julia, 132n Andrée, Salomon August, 183, 183n “An Answer to Bishop Stevens” (ecs), 452–53 Anthony, Anna E. Osborne, 143n; and Anthony reunion, 142; hosts sba, 514, 516, 523; and husband’s death, 518; letter from sba, 524–27; in Rochester, 361 Anthony, Anna Osborne, 352n; engagement of, 351–52; letter from sba, 351–52. See also Bacon, Anna Osborne Anthony Anthony, Annette, 523 Anthony, Daniel, 37n, 484, 525; in Adams, 24–25, 142; in Battenville, 546; business of, 25–26, 153, 154, 155; and Rochester convention, 189 Anthony, Daniel Read, 40n; and Anthony reunion, 141–42; attempted murder of, 353; biography of, 538–39; and brother’s death, 353; death of, 521, 531; funeral of, 522; health of, 514, 518; hosts sba, 514–16, 518; letter from sba, 141–43; meets S. Gompers, 316; mentioned, 36, 525; and monument
at Battenville, 546, 548n; quoted, 520; in Rochester, 361; on sba’s leadership, 257 Anthony, Daniel Read, Jr., 143n; in Battenville, 546; and biography of his father, 538, 539n; and father’s businesses, 523, 524; and father’s health, 518; in Leavenworth, 514; mentioned, 142, 379; in New York, 545 Anthony, Eleanor Havens, 516, 516n Anthony, Elizabeth Havens, 514, 515n, 523; in Battenville, 546; in New York, 545 Anthony, Eliza Tefft, 546, 548n Anthony, Elmina Maria Eddy, 157n; and Anthony reunion, 152 Anthony, Hannah Lapham, 153, 157n Anthony, Helen Chase, 524–25, 526n Anthony, Henry Bowen, 325n; quoted, 323 Anthony, Humphrey, 141, 142n, 153, 154 Anthony, Jacob Merritt, 36, 40n, 378, 523; and Anthony reunion, 143; death of, 350–51n, 353; and Grand Army of the Republic, 158; in Rochester, 158 Anthony, Jessie, 54–55n; and Calif. association, 535; letters from sba, 83–84, 94; in Rochester, 409; sba visits, 54, 57 Anthony, Joseph, 54–55n, 57 Anthony, Lucy Elmina, 94n, 378; as aide to A. H. Shaw, 161; and Calif. campaign, 58, 94; as executor of sba’s will, 500–501; health of, 432; hosts sba, 348; letter to E. S. Miller, 580; letter to I. H. Harper, 579; in London, 300, 512; at suffrage meetings, 227, 308 Anthony, Lucy Read, 37n, 484, 524, 525; in Adams, 24–25, 152–53; in Battenville, 26, 546; and Rochester convention, 189 Anthony, Luther Burt, 164n; letter from sba, 378–79; in Philadelphia, 162 Anthony, Mary Almina Luther, 143n, 378–79; and Anthony reunion, 142 Anthony, Mary Stafford, 6n; activities of, 7, 163, 409; assists sba, 25, 360; and death of H. P. Douglass, 497; as executor of sba’s will, 500–501; and family members, 351, 379, 546, 562; friends of, 5, 117, 140, 405, 496; greetings for, 169, 172, 435; health of, 267, 580; home of, 36, 129, 406, 478, 525; in Leavenworth, 514–16, 523; letter from sba, 106–7; letter to A. D. Mason, 475–76; letter to ecs, 104–5; letter to sba, 176–77; and local
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(Anthony, Mary Stafford, continued) council, 529; mentioned, 6, 158, 407, 435, 496; as pioneer, 189; sails to England, 291; sails to Germany, 504–5; and sba’s health, 436; on sba’s leadership, 47–48, 257; and sister’s death, 582; at Tuskegee, 475, 479; and University of Rochester, 238, 357, 362 Anthony, Susan B.: birthdays of, 320, 325–27, 338, 342, 343n, 387, 389, 389n, 427–28, 539, 541, 543, 544, 565, 577–78; childhood of, 24–26, 152–54; comments upon, by ecs, 13, 42, 436; death of, 581–82; early reform work of, 27–31, 174; ecs comments about, 90–91, 273; ecs resents help for, 403–4; employees of, 129, 163, 267, 405, 500; funeral of, xxx; health of, xxix–xxx, 343n, 355n, 360–61, 363, 364; illnesses of, 565, 577, 579, 580, 581; letters from ecs, 124–26, 183, 253, 433–34; letters to ecs, 47–48, 61–62, 95–97, 101–3, 118–19, 160–61, 179–81, 250–53, 352–53, 363–64, 451; in perpetual motion, 436; religious views of, 61–62, 85, 501–2; retirement of, xxvii, 257, 307–9, 320, 338–39; teaching career of, 25, 26–27; weight of, 35; will of, 500–501 Anthony, Susie B., 523 antisuffragists, 489, 490–91n; how to counter, 231; in Mass., 390–91 appeals: “Petition for the Women of Hawaii” (ecs and sba), 270–71 apples: varieties of, 496 Appo, Elizabeth Brady, 203, 205n “Are Homogeneous Divorce Laws in All the States Desirable?” (ecs), 276, 327–33 Arena (Boston): ecs writes for, 143–50, 217 Arizona, Territory of: organizing in, 279, 280n; statehood protested, 516, 519–20, 528–29; suffrage defeated in, 284. See also Woman’s Protest Committee Armstrong, Jane L. Bennett, 528, 529–30n Arnold, Matthew, 149n; quoted, 143–44n Arnold, Thomas, 325n; quoted, 322–23 Arroyo Grande, Calif.: sba visits, 108 articles: “An Answer to Bishop Stevens” (ecs), 452–53; “Are Homogeneous Divorce Laws in All the States Desirable?” (ecs), 327–33; “A Defence of Woman’s Tears” (ecs), 430–32; “Education Will Do It” (ecs), 413–15; “How Shall We Solve the Divorce Problem?” (ecs), 441–46; “M’Kinley and the Women” (ecs), 346–48; “Reading the Bible in the Public Schools” (ecs), 143–50; “Recalled by the Grant Pageant” (ecs), 137–39; review of Life and Letters of Thomas Huxley (ecs), 380–81; “Rich and Poor” (ecs), 398–99; “Specially Inspired Men” (ecs), 92–93; “A Trailing Dress and No Pocket” (ecs), 300–302; “Two Valuable Gifts” (ecs), 174–75; “War and Peace”
(ecs), 218–22; “What Would You Substitute for the Bible as a Moral Guide?” (ecs), 239–41; “The Woman’s Bible” (ecs), 113–15; “Woman’s Position in the Bible” (ecs), 243–44; “The Woman’s Suffrage Association” (ecs), 303–6; “Woman Suffrage Must Be Non-Partisan” (sba), 81–83 Atlantic City, N.J.: fire in, 429–30; sba in, 427–28, 429–30 Auburn, N.Y.: sba speaks in, 132, 133n, 349 Australia: where suffrage won, 198 Australia, South: where suffrage won, 282 Avery, Rachel G. Foster, 11–12n; in Boston, 109; at Business Committee, 259–61, 342; as critic of Woman’s Bible, 10–11, 13–14, 15, 41, 109; as executor of sba’s will, 500–501; family in Johnstown, N.Y., 41, 42–43n; hosts sba, 36; and international conference, 438; letters from sba, 128–32, 184–85, 291–94; mentioned, 187, 308, 505; and National-American, 96, 184, 227, 229, 257, 316, 335; at suffrage meeting, 15 Avery, Susan Howes Look, 140, 141n Babcock, Elnora E. Monroe, 287n, 552; and National-American, 285 Bacon, Anna Osborne Anthony: hosts sba, 378–79, 409. See also Anthony, Anna Osborne Bacon, Augustus Octavius, 423, 424n Bacon, Esther Delila Munger, 409, 409n Bacon, Leon Brooks, 351–52, 352n Bahl, Caroline Mathilda, 501n, 505, 525, 555; witnesses sba’s will, 500 Baker, Clara Lucretia Anderson, 411, 412n Baker, George L., 411, 412n Baker, Guelma Lawrence, 264n; in New York, 264; stage career of, 411 Baker, Henry Anthony, 116n; letter from sba, 411–12; letter to sba, 562; marriage of, 411; in New York, 264, 265; sba visits, 115 Baker, Lawrence McLean, 411, 412n Baker, Margaret McLean, 54n; and daughter’s career, 411; sba visits, 54 Baker, Page Mercer, 471n; letter from Business Committee, 469–73 Baker, Thomas King, 411, 412n Ballot Box (Toledo), 484 Ballou, Harriett A. Whitcher, 54, 54n Baptist church, 246; in Calif., 101 Bard, Thomas Robert, 423, 424n Barnes, William Henry Linow, 86, 88n Barth, Harriet Bittman, 523, 523n Bartol, Emma Jemima Welchman, 349, 351n Barton, Clara, 422, 570, 576n Bascom, Ansel, 200–201n; and Seneca Falls, 195 Basingstoke, England: sba in, 298–300 basketball, 392
index Battenville, N.Y.: sba in, 545–46; sba’s residence in, 25–26, 152, 154–55 Baum, Maud Gage, 64, 65n Beach, Robert K., 238n; letter to sba, 238–39 Bebel, August, 277, 278n Bedell, Adelaide L., 525, 526n Beecher, Henry Ward, 28, 39n, 250 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 192, 199n Bellamy, Edward, 221, 222n Bemis, Julia Brown, 494–95, 496n Bennett, Sarah Lewis Clay, 170, 171n, 341 Benton, George Alden, 127, 128n Berith Kodesh Temple (Rochester), 400 Berkshire Historical and Scientific Society: honors sba, 141–42, 151–58 Berlin, Germany: sba in, 506–7 Berry, James Henderson, 423, 424n Besant, Annie Wood, 160n; in Rochester, 159; visits sba, 162 Beveridge, Albert Jeremiah, 521n; letter to sba, 527–28; and Woman’s Protest Committee, 520, 527, 532 Bible: banned from public schools, 440, 441n; as mythology, 239–40, 243; as reactionary influence, 144, 146–47; unsuitable for children, 144, 146, 440 biblical quotations and references: to Balaam’s ass, 11, 51; to daughters of Zelophehad, 323–24, 347; divorce in, 331; to Garden of Eden, 50; to Jonah, 146, 183; justice in, 150; loss in, 457; marriage in, 368; to Midianites, 243; to Pentateuch, 13–14, 41–42, 48, 49, 51, 315; polygamy in, 315; resistance to change in, 191; to Ruth, 134; simultaneous creation in, 253, 410; social distinctions in, 146; wandering in, 532 bicycles, 34, 77 Bigelow, Fannie Rosenberg, 358n; letters from sba, 364–65, 389, 543–44; and University of Rochester, 357, 358 Bird, Francis William, 102, 103n Birney, Alice Josephine McLellan, 426, 427n Birney, James Gillespie, 132–33, 133n Blackall, Gertrude C., 163, 164n Blackall, Sarah Colman, 498n, 524; and death of H. P. Douglass, 497 Black Diamond Express, 129 Blackwell, Alice Stone, 123n; at Business Committee, 259–61, 469–71; hosts sba, 348; mentioned, 224, 390, 468, 552; and National-American, 402; at suffrage meetings, 122, 304; and Woman’s Jornal, 256 Blackwell, Antoinette Louisa Brown, 141n; at ecs’s funeral, 457; marriage of, 140; mentioned, 250; and National-American, 335; as pioneer, 195; and sba’s biography, 265; at sba’s birthday, 577 Blackwell, Henry Browne, 22–23n; and Calif. campaign, 86; and dress reform, 301; and
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election of 1896, 100, 102; his own historian, 275; hosts sba, 348; interference by, 336, 344–45; is an ass, 102; letter to sba, 275; mentioned, 17; and National-American, 42; and Organization Committee, 341–42, 343n; on partisan politics, 120–22; and Republican party, 100; and sba’s biography, 275, 280–81; at suffrage meetings, 18, 120–22, 320; and Woman’s Bible, 18, 41; and Woman’s Journal, 91 Blackwell, Samuel Charles, 140, 141n Blaine, James Gillespie, 286n; and congressional representation, 283, 533 Blake, Grinfill, 65n; death of, 63–64 Blake, Katherine Devereux Muhlenbergh Umsted, 64, 65n Blake, Lillie Devereux, 4–5n; and Del. campaign, 45; at ecs’s funeral, 457; letters from ecs, 296–97, 335–36, 384–86; letters from sba, 63–66, 115–16; and National-American, 184, 184–85n, 296–97, 297n, 318–19, 489–90; and National Legislative League, 393–95, 396, 490; and N.Y. association, 394; and Pilgrim Mothers’ Dinner, 3; at suffrage meeting, 14, 15; and Woman’s Bible, 5n Blankenburg, Lucretia Longshore, 224, 232n, 308 Blatch, Alice, 71, 72, 72–73n, 75. See also Edwards, Alice Blatch Blatch, Harriot Eaton Stanton, xxxi; and Calif. campaign, 95, 102; and daughter’s death, 71–72, 74–76; factory investigations of, 220, 221n, 244; hosts sba, 298–300; letter from sba, 75–76; letters from ecs, 174, 392–93; letters to sba, 434–35, 452, 476; letter to ecs, 74–75; mentioned, 52, 104, 134, 179, 253, 436; and mother’s biography, 480; and mother’s death, 452, 455; and mother’s letters, 506, 551; and National-American, 161; in New York, 96, 262, 266–67, 339, 363, 433–35; and N.H. campaign, 465; and N.Y. association, 465; in Rochester, 495; on Venezuela, 10, 11n Blatch, Helen Stanton, 72n; death of, 71–76, 104 Blatch, Nora Stanton, 73n, 392–93, 565; in New York, xxxi, 363, 433; and sister’s death, 76; at sister’s funeral, 72; travels with sba, 298 Blatch, William Henry, Jr., 73n, 476; and daughter’s death, 71–72, 75, 76; in London, 298 Blinn, Ellen Gertrude Holbrook, 67n; and Calif. campaign, 67, 78, 79, 94n Bloomer, Amelia Jenks, 195, 201n Bly, Nellie, 37n; interviews sba, 24–40 Bok, Edward William, 186, 188n Bolton, England: sba in, 508–10 Bond, Isabella Bacon, 110–11; hosts sba, 110 Book of Martyrs, 484 Borland, Sarah C., 67n; and Calif. campaign, 66
586
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Bosschieter, Jennie: murdered, 367, 369n Boston: sba in, 109–12; sba speaks in, 111–12, 345–46, 348 Boston Investigator, 90, 250; ecs writes for, 113–14, 243, 276, 303–6; to publish Woman’s Bible, 114–15n Bradburn, George, 194, 200n Bradford, Mary Carroll Craig, 131n; as organizer, 129 Bradstreet Company (Philadelphia), 162 Bransom, Elizabeth, 72, 73–74n Bremner, Christina Sinclair, 298, 299n Bricklayers’ and Masons’ International Union: petitions for woman suffrage, 333, 334 Bright, Esther, 72, 73n, 75, 532 Bright, Jacob, 11, 12–13n, 179 Bright, John, 11, 12–13n Bright, Ursula Mellor, 12–13n, 179, 339; and death of ecs, 455; hosts sba, 512; and Woman’s Bible, 11 Brontë, Charlotte, 513n Brooklyn, N.Y.: sba in, 109, 259, 261 Brooklyn Woman Suffrage Association, 348 Brougham, Henry Peter (Baron Brougham and Vaux), 201n; quoted, 196, 276, 329, 368, 444 Brown, Arthur, 31, 39n Brown, Jean, 494–95, 496n Brown, John, 176, 177n, 387–88 Brown, Olympia, 17, 23n, 519 Brownell, Susannah Anthony, 27, 38n Browning, Robert, 240, 241n Brownlow, Jane Macnaughton Egerton Morgan, 244, 245n Brummell, George Bryan, 301, 302n Brunswick Hotel (Boston), 482 Bryan, William Jennings, 88n; as presidential candidate, 86; on voting rights, 103–4 Bryn Mawr College, 418–19 Bugbee, William Wallace, 377–78n; letter to sba, 374–75 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 513n Burdette, Clara Bradley Wheeler Baker, 473, 474n Burdette, Robert Jones, 57n; letter to sba, 473–74; in Los Angeles, 57 Burleigh, William Henry, 29, 39n Burns, Roberts: quoted, 326 Burr, Frances Ellen, 243n; and Woman’s Bible, 241 Burtis, Sarah Anthony, 546, 547–48n Butler, Irma B., 501n; witnesses sba’s will, 500 Byron, Lady (Anna Isabella Milbanke), 193, 199n Cady, Daniel, 192–93, 217 Cady, Eleazer Livingston, 193, 199n California: school suffrage defeated in, 286, 287n; woman suffrage and legislature, 128, 129–30n
California amendment campaign, 8–9n; funds for, 79, 96, 104–5; immigrants in, 105; leadership of, 8–9n, 54, 55n, 79n, 83, 94; lessons learned from, 116, 371, 536, 555; and liquor industry, 105, 105n, 112; meetings of, 106; mentioned, 493; petitions of, 59; plan of work for, 59, 60, 64, 82, 87, 101–2; political parties in, 60–61, 81–82, 83, 85–87, 101; sba joins, 54; sba speaks for, 55–57, 95; in southern counties, 54, 55n, 81–82, 83, 94; speakers for, 78–79, 85–87; and temperance union, 7–8, 9, 62; votes cast, 111–12, 112n; and Woman’s Bible, 61–62 California Democratic party: and amendment campaign, 106; sba speaks for, 95 California Joint Campaign Committee, 53n, 54, 55n California Republican party, 66; and amendment campaign, 78, 106, 107; endorses woman suffrage, 61n California Woman Suffrage Association: meetings of, 459, 534; and new amendment, 535, 536–37n Calkins, Mary Whiton, 571, 575, 576n Canajoharie, N.Y., 189 Cannon, Frank Jenne, 256, 257n capital punishment: ecs opposes, 272–73 Carey, Henry Charles, 221, 222n Carhart, Fannie E., 242n; hosts ecs, 241 Carhart, Lyman Beecher, 242n; hosts ecs, 241 Carlyle, Thomas, 380, 381n Carnegie, Andrew, 416, 418n, 436 Carpenter, Aurelius Ormond, 96–97n; hosts sba, 95 Carpenter, Julia Louise Gage, 64n, 65, 488–89 Cary, Cornelia Hull, 22n; at suffrage meeting, 17 Cary, Samuel Fenton, 221, 222n Catt, Carrie Clinton Lane Chapman, 1n; and Anthony reunion, 142; and Ariz. campaign, 279; in Berlin, 506, 507; and Business Committee, 226–31, 469–71; and Calif. campaign, 63, 78, 79, 95, 96, 102, 106; in Calif., 553; and Del. campaign, 45; disillusionment with, 341–42; and F. E. Willard, 187; and H. S. Blatch, 433; hosts Business Committee, 259, 261; and Idaho campaign, 45; and international suffrage, 438, 531; letter from sba, 370–74; letter to sba, 468–69; as likely successor to sba, 42, 307–9, 309n, 394; at Longwood meeting, 352; mentioned, 1, 224, 225, 316, 338, 348, 432, 552; and National-American, 257, 318–19; in New York, 407; and Okla. campaign, 279; and Organization Committee, 341–42, 343n; organizing plans of, 128–29, 370–72; power of, 63, 64–65n; sba’s assessment of, 489; at suffrage meeting, 16; travels with sba, 107–8; and Woman’s Bible, 16, 43n
index Catt, George William, 259, 259n, 261 Chace, Elizabeth Buffum, 96, 97n Channing, Harold Stanley, 52, 53n Channing, Mary Jane Tarr, 52, 53n Channing, William Francis, 52, 53n; letter to ecs, 276–78 Channing-Stetson, Grace Ellery, 52n; letter to ecs, 51–54; and Woman’s Bible, 51–52 Chapin, Edwin Hubbell, 250, 252n Chapman, Mariana W. Wright, 22n; and National-American, 261; at suffrage meeting, 17 Chase, Florence Adele Strong, 397n; and History, 396–97 Chatfield, Elizabeth C. Browne, 495n; letter from sba, 494–96 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 240, 241n Chautauqua Assembly (N.Y.), 348 Chautauqua County, N.Y.: suffragists in, 59, 59–60n Cheever, George Barrell, 147, 149n, 250 Cheney, Ednah Dow Littlehale, 390, 392n Chicago, 179; municipal suffrage proposed in, 569–70; sba in, 521, 554–55. See also Woman’s Committee for the Extension of Municipal Suffrage to Women Chicago, University of: and coeducation, 459 Chicago and Northwestern Railroad: female employees of, 257 Chicago fire, 92 children: discipline of, 26–27; rights of, 213 Choate, Joseph Hodges, 495, 496n Chopin, Frédéric-François, 192, 199n Christian Ministers’ Association (Calif.), 101 churches: and Calif. campaign, 101 Church of Our Father (Washington), 577 Churchville, N.Y.: sba speaks in, 163 civil rights: of women, 197, 202n Civil Rights Act, 289, 366 Claflin, Tennessee Celeste. See Cook, Tennessee Celeste Claflin Clark, Helen Priestman Bright, 353n; hosts sba, 512; in U.S., 352, 353 Clark, Lemuel H., 265, 266n Clark, Roger, 352, 353, 353n Clark, Sarah Bancroft, 352, 353n Clark, William Stephens, 352, 353, 353n Clay, Alexander Stephens, 333, 335n Clay, Cassius Marcellus, 290, 290–91n Clay, Laura, 123n; and Business Committee, 224, 469–71; letter from sba, 340–43; mentioned, 259; and National-American, 417; at odds with ecs, 290, 291n; as organizer, 371; racial prejudice of, 170; at suffrage meetings, 120, 122, 290, 291n, 303 Clay, Mary Barr, 170, 171n, 341 Clay, Mary Jane Warfield, 340–41, 342n Cleveland, Grover, 6n; and Venezuela, 6, 6–7n; and woman’s clubs, 549–50
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587
Closz, Harriet Marie Bonebright, 466n; on canon law, 465, 466n Cobden, Richard, 511, 512n Coe, Emma Robinson, 190n; as pioneer, 189 coeducation, 573; under attack, 535; need for, 246–47, 355–57; at Stanford University, 300; at University of Chicago, 459; at University of Rochester, 432. See also Rochester, University of Coit, Fanny Adela Wetzlar, 512, 513n Coit, George Stanton, 512, 513n Coke, Edward, 323, 325n Colby, Clara Dorothy Bewick, 11n, 62; and Calif. campaign, 78–79, 85–87, 91; ecs’s address read by, 190; letters from ecs, 10–13, 13–14, 41–43, 90–92, 165–68, 241–43; letters from sba, 44–47, 78–80, 85–88, 256–57, 280–81, 307–10, 396–97, 429–30, 457–58; mentioned, xxvii; and National-American, 118; and petitions, 317; at suffrage meeting, 15 Cole, Mrs. (Nellie’s employer), 406 Coleman, Lillian Blanche, 407, 408n Colenso, John William, 41, 43n Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 240, 241n Collins, Emily Parmely Peltier, 314n; letter to ecs, 314 Colorado: flowers from at ecs’s funeral, 457; where suffrage won, 56, 112, 282, 422, 550, 558–59 Colored Home and Hospital and Training School for Nurses (Bronx), 457 Committee of Work (Boston), 279 common law, 191, 193 Commonwealth (New York): ecs praises, 89–90; ecs writes for, 398–99 Congregational church: in Calif., 101 congressional representation, 467, 477; and black suffrage, 283–84, 321; reduced for disfranchisement, 529, 532–33; and woman suffrage, 283–84, 321, 385, 529, 532–33 Conran, Agnes Blatch, 72, 73n, 392 Conran, Edward Petman, 72, 73n Conran, Katherine Mary, 75, 75n constitutional amendment for woman suffrage: action urged on, 98, 578; denied, 323; ecs appeals for, 448, 449, 450; efficiency of, 423; hopes for, 377; in House, 317, 318; as the objective, 31, 292–93; opposed by G. F. Hoar, 337; organizing for, 371–72; origins of, 196; petitions for, 316; pleas for, 347; in Senate, 317, 318n; support for, 334 Conway, Moncure Daniel, 455n; at ecs’s funeral, 454, 457 Cook, Elizabeth Rebecca Abele, 204, 206n Cook, Helen Elizabeth Appo, 204n; letter to sba, 203–6 Cook, John Francis, III, 204, 206n Cook, John Francis, Jr., 203–4, 205n
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Cook, Magdalena Auer, 407, 408n, 505, 555 Cook, Tennessee Celeste Claflin, 245, 245n Cooley, George Elliott, 405, 406n, 435–36 Cooley, Winnifred Harper, 504; in Grand Rapids, 435–36; in New York, 405, 409. See also Harper, Winnifred Cooper, Harriet, 58n; and Calif. campaign, 57; death of, 118 Cooper, Sarah Brown Ingersoll, 58n; and Calif. campaign, 57; death of, 118 cooperation: as mission for women, 219–21; as social ideal, 219–21, 242 Corinthian Hall (Rochester): burns down, 250 Cortissoz, Ellen MacKay Hutchinson, 262, 262n Couzins, Phoebe Wilson, 84n; in Calif., 84; and marriage, 135; opposes woman suffrage, 135, 136n Cowper, William, 484, 485n Coyle, Celia, 561n; interview with sba, 559–61 Crane, Augustus Warren, 117, 117n Crane, Caroline Julia Bartlett, 117–18n; letter from sba, 117; visits sba, 497 Cratty, Thomas, 473, 474n cremation, 72, 75 The Critic: letter from ecs, 48–51 Crossett, Ella Hawley, 164n; and N.Y. association, 566–67; and Political Equality Club, 163 Cuba, 24; independence for, 127–28, 150, 235; male-only government in, 281–83 Cuban Hospital Relief Association of Rochester, 127–28 Cuningham, Catherine Campbell, 373n; and National-American, 370 Curtis, George William, 250, 252n custody of children: in Ill., 401, 402n Dana, Paul, 262n; and Hawaii petition, 267, 271; and I. H. Harper, 348; letters from ecs, 272–73, 367–70, 381–83; sba visits, 261 Daniel, John Warwick, 424, 425n Dann, Anna Elizabeth, 267n; at Anthony house, 267; letter from sba, 405–9; in New York, 405–9. See also Mason, Anna Elizabeth Dann Dann, Charlotte M., 408n; at Anthony house, 407; plans for, 504, 554–55 Dansville Sanitarium, 349 Dante, 240, 241n, 366, 367n Darwin, Charles Robert, 380, 381n Daughters of the American Revolution, 545 Davies, Charles, 29, 39n Davis, Cushman Kellogg, 424, 425n Davis, Edward Morris, 102, 103n Davis, Noah, 217, 218n, 441–43, 446n Davis, Paulina Kellogg Wright, 200n; as pioneer, 194 death: of C. D. Miller, 76; of C. Mann, 416; of D. R. Anthony, 521; of ecs, 452; of F. E.
Willard, 206–8; of Frank Wright, 481; of G. A. Pierce, 386; of G. Blake, 63; of H. B. Stanton, Jr., 494; of H. B. Stowe, 75–76; of H. P. Douglass, 497; of Helen Blatch, 71–72, 74–76; of J. M. Anthony, 350–51n, 353; of Jacob Bright, 338; of L. A. Hatch, 456; of M. Grew, 118; of P. Pillsbury, 288; of R. G. Ingersoll, 306; of R. Purvis, 288; of S. B. I. Cooper, 118; of sba, 581–82 deceased wife’s sister bill, 441 Declaration of Independence: and the American empire, 283 “A Defence of Woman’s Tears” (ecs), 430–32 Delaware: organizing in, 45, 46–47n, 63, 64–65n Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester), 135, 552 Democratic party: divides, 77, 77n. See also California Democratic party Denver, Colo.: effect of woman suffrage in, 550 Depew, Chauncey Mitchell, 86, 88n, 95 Des Moines, Iowa: National-American meets in, 115–16, 119–23 Desperation (card game), 266 Dickens, Charles, 378, 379n Dickinson, Albert, 522n; hosts sba, 521 Dickinson, Anna Elizabeth, 33, 40n Dickinson, Frances, 521–22n; hosts sba, 521 Dickinson, Mary Lowe, 110, 111n Dickinson, Melissa, 516n, 521, 525; hosts sba, 516 Diggs, Annie LePorte, 21n; and People’s party, 78, 86, 87; at suffrage meeting, 16 disfranchisement: of black voters, 283–84, 467, 477; in empire, 281–83; of women, 283–84 District of Columbia: and History, 396–97 divorce: for drunkenness, 18; in France, 328, 441; men’s control of, 274, 327; a secular institution, 452–53; and social reconstruction, 276; uniform laws of, 327, 329–30, 333n, 441, 445 Dooly, Isma M., 415n; and education of blacks, 414 Douglass, Charles Remond, 497, 498–99n Douglass, Frederick, 126n, 414; birthday of, 124–26; ecs recalls, 124–25; and Jim Crow, 251; mentioned, 176, 250, 497; and National-American, 170; in Paris, xxxi, 124–25; and Seneca Falls, 194–95, 235, 236 Douglass, Helen Pitts, 126n; death of, 497; and National-American, 236; in Paris, 124–25 Douglass, Joseph Henry, 237n; at suffrage meeting, 235 Douglass, Lewis Henry, 497, 498–99n Douglass Monument Committee, 124–25, 125–26n dress: of Quakers, 137; reform in, 27, 33–34, 300–301 Drewson, Gudrun Løchen, 438, 440n
index Dreyfus Affair, 185 DuBois, Fred Thomas, 577, 578n Dumas, Alexandre, fils, 414, 415n Dumas, Alexandre, père, 414, 415n Duniway, Abigail Jane Scott, 234n, 349–50; and National-American, 227 Dupuy, Maria Richardson Wilder, 524, 526n “Early Letters of Elizabeth Cady Stanton” (Harper), 480 Eastman, George, 359n; no donation from,358 Eastwood, Ellen Clara Bigelow, 543–44n; and G. Cleveland, 552; and University of Rochester, 543 Eddy, Eliza F. Jackson Merriam, 36, 40n Edgeworth, Maria, 484, 485n “Education Will Do It” (ecs), 413–15 Edwards, Alice Blatch, 392–93. See also Blatch, Alice Eighty Years and More (ecs), 392; awaited, 185; ecs distributes, 209, 213; praise for, 247–48, 410, 460; reviews of, 209, 209n, 216–17; unappreciated, 296 El Dorado, Kan., 374–75 Eldridge House (Lawrence, Kan.), 515 election of 1896: Democratic party in, 77, 103; and ecs, 122–23 election of 1900, 346–47, 349 Elizabeth Cady Stanton Political Equality League (Brooklyn), 457 Ellis, Clara Spalding Brown, 502n; letter from sba, 501–2 Ellis, Miss (dressmaker), 393 Elmy, Elizabeth Clarke Wolstenholme, 510n, 512; interviews sba, 508–10 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 240, 241n, 250; quoted, 442 Enforcement Act of 1870, 283 Episcopal church: and divorce, 274, 274–75n, 328, 368; male dominance of, 274, 328, 368; and prostitution, 367 Etchison, Georgia A., 276, 278n European Publishing Company: publishes Eighty Years, 185; publishes Woman’s Bible, 2–3n Evald, Emmy Christina Carlsson, 438, 439n Evening Post (New York): letters from ecs, 365–67, 420–21, 440–41 Evening Post (San Francisco): ecs writes for, 92–93 Evening Telegram (New York): and death of ecs, 455 Everett, Florence M. Beeton, 446–47n; letter to ecs, 446–47 evolution, 380–81 Fahy, John, 359n; no donation from, 358 “Failure is impossible,” xxx Fairbanks, Cornelia Cole, 545, 547n
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Fall River, Mass.: factory conditions in, 220, 221n, 244 Fall River Line, 109 Farrington, Silas, 72, 73n, 75 Fawcett, Millicent Garrett, 298, 299n; in Berlin, 506, 507; visits sba, 299 federalism: as obstacle to woman suffrage, 509 Federal Suffrage Association, 227 feminine element, 356, 420–21 Fenner, Mandana D. Smith, 505, 506n Fifteenth Amendment, 196, 283, 289, 366; and black suffrage, 69, 322; and woman suffrage, 467 Fitch, Charles Elliot, 164n, 235; and A. W. Besant, 162 Fitzgerald, Oscar Penn, 447, 447n FitzSimons, Caroline Vernon, 359n; no donation from, 358 Fort Leavenworth: sba visits, 523 Foster, Abigail Kelley, 27, 38n Foster, Julia Manuel, 42–43n Fourteenth Amendment, 196, 283, 289, 366; and black suffrage, 68–69, 322; and congressional representation, 467, 477; and manhood suffrage, 510; and woman suffrage, 68–69, 99, 467, 479 Fourth of July: how to celebrate, 150 Fowler and Wells: and History, 416 Fox, George, 137, 139n France: divorce law in, 328 Free Thought Magazine: on Woman’s Bible, 43n Friday Morning Club (Los Angeles), 57, 473 Friedrich der Grosse (steamship): sba sails on, 504–5 Friend, Emma Rogers Babson, 107n; hosts sba, 106 Friends, Society of (Quakers): and sba’s family, 25, 26 Fry, Elizabeth Gurney, 193, 199n Gaffney, Fannie Humphreys, 425 Gage, Frances Dana Barker, 198–99n, 250; as pioneer, 191, 196 Gage, Helen Leslie Gage, 64, 65n; letter from sba, 488–92 Gage, Henry Tifft, 286, 287n Gage, Leslie, 490, 492n Gage, Matilda Joslyn, 65n, 489, 490–91n; and History, 151–52; illness of, 64; as pioneer, 196 Gage, Sophie Taylor Jewell, 490, 490n Gage, Thomas Clarkson, 488, 490, 490n Galignani’s New Paris Guide, 137 Gallup, Charles K., 551n; letter from sba, 551–52 Galpin, Kate Tupper, 107n; and Calif. campaign, 106 Gandhi, Virchand Raghavji, 118, 119n Gannett, Charlotte Katharine, 507, 508n Gannett, Mary Thorn Lewis, 140, 141n, 497,
59 0
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(Gannett, Mary Thorn Lewis, continued) 525; and B. H. Roberts, 313; hosts sba, 541, 543; letter from sba, 506–8; and University of Rochester, 358, 363 Gannett, William Channing, 6n, 85, 565; and death of H. P. Douglass, 497; hosts sba, 541; letter from sba, 413; and peace day, 400; sermons of, 6; and Thanksgiving, 413; and University of Rochester, 358, 362–63 Garfield, James Abram, 203, 205n Garrett, Mary Elizabeth, 432–33n; and gift to University of Rochester, 432; and National-American, 580; at suffrage meeting, 570 Garrison, Agnes, 109, 109–10n, 307 Garrison, Ellen Wright, 109–10n, 302, 307, 481; hosts sba, 109, 110, 348 Garrison, Wendell Phillips, 217n; letter from ecs, 216–18 Garrison, William Lloyd, 125, 126n, 200n, 250, 305; and woman’s rights, 194 Garrison, William Lloyd, Jr., 109–10n; as anti-imperialist, 303n; hosts sba, 109, 110, 348; letter from ecs, 302–3; letter to ecs, 306–7; letter to sba, 481; at Longwood meeting, 352 Gates, Susa Amelia Young Dunford, 463, 464–65n Geddes, Margaret Airis, 519, 520n General Federation of Women’s Clubs, 224; racial practices of, 365–66, 470 Geneva, N.Y.: ecs in, 76, 158–59, 160–61; sba in, 160–61; suffragists in, 177–78 George, Alice Nelson Vant, 470, 472n George, Henry, 221, 222n George III (king of England), 69, 70n Gilbert, Charles A., 400 Gilder, Jeannette Leonard, 50n; letter from ecs, 48–51 Gilder, Joseph Benson, 50n; letter from ecs, 48–51 Gilman, Charlotte Ann Perkins Stetson. See Stetson, Charlotte Ann Perkins Gilmore, Joseph Henry, 567, 568n Gleason, Kate, 565, 566n Gleason, William, 565, 566n Goldstein, Vida Jane Mary, 438, 439n Gompers, Samuel, 311n; letter from sba, 315–17; letters from sba, xxviii; letters to sba, xxviii, 310–12, 564 Gordon, Anna Adams, 135, 136n, 186, 187 Gordon, Kate M., 457, 458n; at Business Committee, 469–71; at suffrage meeting, 470 Gordon, Laura De Force, 79–80n; and Calif. campaign, 78 Gould, Helen Miller, 417–18n; opposes Mormons, 462; as philanthropist, 416 Grand Army of the Republic: encampment of, 158, 159–60n
Grand Rapids, Mich., 179; National-American meets in, 281–87 Grange. See Patrons of Husbandry Grant, Charles Rollin, 148–49n; ecs disputes, 143–48 Grant, Julia Dent, 138, 139n Grant, Ulysses S., 138n; reburial of, 137–38 Grant, Zilpah Polly, 26, 37n Grant’s Tomb (New York), 137–38, 265 Greeley, Horace, 27, 28, 38n, 254 Green, Beriah, 132–33, 133n Greenleaf, Halbert Stevens, 505, 506n Greenleaf, Jean Frances Brooks, 140, 140–41n, 505, 525; hosts sba, 497 Grew, Mary, 118, 119n Griffin, Charlotte S. Wilbur, 525, 526n Griffing, Josephine Sophia White, 198–99n; as pioneer, 191 Griggs, Emily Clark, 265, 266n Gross, Emily Maude Brown, 339, 340n, 379; hosts sba, 401, 554–55 guardianship. See custody of children Haggard, Henry Rider, 113, 115n Hague Conference, First, 291; anniversary of, 400 Hair, Minnette E. Cheshire, 154, 157n Haley, Margaret Angela, 483n; letter from sba, 482–83 Hall, Olivia Bigelow, 209n; letter from ecs, 209 Hallock, Sarah Hull, 352, 353n Hallowell, Mary H. Post, 7n, 104, 524; sba visits, 6 Hanaford, Phebe Ann Coffin, 458n; at ecs’s funeral, 457 Hancock, John, 347 Harbert, Corinne Boynton, 403, 404n Harbert, Elizabeth Boynton, 403, 404n Harbert, Elizabeth Morrison Boynton, 404n; letter from ecs, 403–5 Harbert, William Soesbe, 403, 404n Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 171n; and National-American, 170 Harper, Ida A. Husted, 67n; as amanuensis, 66, 67, 102; and Calif. campaign, 66; and ecs’s biography, 480; as editor, 480, 503; and History, 365, 395, 396–97, 434, 481; letters from ecs, 421, 435–37; letters from sba, 253–55, 455–56, 545–48, 552–53; letters to ecs, 348–51, 393–96; mentioned, 169, 256, 418, 419, 435, 531; and National-American, 176, 232, 261, 320; in New York, 405–9; in Rochester, 238, 348–50, 352; sails to Germany, 504; and sba’s biography, xxx, 132–33, 140, 210, 253, 275, 280, 395; writes for N.Y. Sun, 271, 285, 348, 421 Harper, William Rainey, 258–59n; and Chicago public schools, xxvi, 257; undermines coeducation, 459
index Harper, Winnifred, 239n; in Rochester, 238. See also Cooley, Winnifred Harper Harrison, Ella, 131n; as organizer, 129 Hatch, Lavina Allen, 22n; letter to sba, 456; at suffrage meeting, 17 Hauser, Elizabeth J., 234–35n; and National-American, 230 Havens, Paul Egbert, 516, 516n Hawaii: calls for equality in, 253–54, 256, 257, 263, 266, 267, 268, 270, 271, 333, 336; male-only government in, xxv–xxvi, xxvi– xxviii, 279, 281–83, 335n, 387; organic act for, 344–45 Hawaiian Commission, xxv, xxvii Hay, Mary Garrett, 58n; ambitions of, 417; and Business Committee, 341–42; and Calif. campaign, 58, 64, 78, 79, 85–87, 94, 106; and H. S. Blatch, 434; mentioned, 101, 231; and Organization Committee, 341–42, 343n; as organizer, 370–71; resignation of, 373–74n Hayes, James H.: and black suffrage, 467, 468n, 477 Hearst, Phoebe Apperson, 354n; and higher education, 459; and woman suffrage, 354 Hearst, William Randolph, 70, 71n; letter from ecs, 447 Heath, Ophelia J., 505, 505–6n Hedenberg, J. W.: petition campaign of, 310–11, 311–12n, 315, 317 Helmuth, Fannie Ida Pritchard, 312, 313n Henderson, Augusta A. Fox, 540, 541n Henderson, Christina Kirk, 462n; letter to sba, 461–62 Henderson, David Bremner, 540, 541n Henrotin, Ellen Martin, 225, 232n Henry, Josephine Kirby Williamson, 465, 466n Herbert S. Stone and Company: letter from sba, 295–96 Hirst, Helena Mary Carroll Cobden, 511, 512, 513n History of the Warfare of Science with Theology (White), 114, 144 History of Woman Suffrage, 151–52, 551; bequest of plates for, 500; distribution of, 36, 416, 460, 478, 488, 511–12, 565; as record of ecs’s work, 503 History of Woman Suffrage, volume four, 395, 396, 434, 435, 567; acknowledged, 481; distribution of, 480, 520, 531; funds for, 364–65; praised by ecs, 436; preparation of, 349; publication of delayed, 465; sent to press, 459–60 Hitt, Robert Roberts, 263–64n; letter from sba, 263–64 Hoar, George Frisbie, 334n; and Hawaii, 344; letter from sba, 333–35; letter to sba, 336–38 Hobbie, Phebe Walsh, 546, 548n Hobbie, William Roscoe, 546, 548n
^
591
Hoch, Edward Wallis, 541, 543n Holland, Josiah Gilbert, 489, 491n Hollenbeck Hotel (Los Angeles), 94 Holley, Marietta, 158, 159n; letter from ecs, 213; letter to ecs, 247–48; praises Eighty Years, 247–48 Holley, Myron, 497, 499n Holley, Sallie, 497, 499n Holley, Sylphinia, 158, 159n Hollister, Granger A., 359–60n; no donation from, 358 Holmes, Mary Jane Hawes, 1n; guest of sba, 1, 2; and Woman’s Bible, 2 Homer, 240, 241n Hooker, Isabella Beecher, 95, 96n Hotel Berkshire (San Francisco), 57, 58 Hôtel des Invalides (Paris), 137–38 Howard, Emma Lovell Shafter, 109, 110, 110n, 535 Howe, Annie E. Holland, 489, 491n Howe, John Kasson, 489, 491n Howe, Julia Ward, 390, 570, 574, 576n Howell, Mary Catherine Seymour, 177n; and National-American, 176 Howitt, Mary Botham, 193, 199n, 484 Howland, Emily, 171–72n; letter from sba, 416–18; mentioned, 172, 236, 349; and N.Y. association, 563; as philanthropist, 170–71, 416; at Tuskegee, 475, 479 Howland, Hannah Letchworth, 171, 172n, 417 Howland, Herbert Slocum, 417, 418n Howland, Isabel, 169n; letter from sba, 170–72; letters to sba, 168–69, 172–73; mentioned, 417 Howland, William, 171, 172n, 417 “How Shall We Solve the Divorce Problem?” (ecs), 441–46 Hoxie, Hannah Anthony, 153, 157n Hoxie, Isaac Upton, 153, 157n Hughes, Catherine Matteson, 401, 402–3n Hughes, John, 401, 402–3n Huidobro, Carolina Frances Holman, 438, 439–40n Hull, Dorcas, 353n; hosts ecs, 352 Humanitarian (London, Eng.), 244 human rights: and woman’s rights, 93 Hunt, Henry Alexander, 168, 169n Hunt, Jane C. Master, 200n; and Seneca Falls, 194, 195 Hunt, Leigh: quoted, 289 Hunt, Richard Pell, 200n; and Seneca Falls, 194, 195 Huntington, Mrs. (Steuben, N.Y.), 312 Hussey, Mary Dudley, 479–80n; and gifts of History, 479 Huxley, Leonard, 380, 381n Huxley, Thomas Henry, 380–81, 381n Hyatt, Candace Monson, 546, 547n
592
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Hyatt, Elijah, 546, 547n Hyatt, James K., 155, 157–58n Hyatt, Sally Ann, 155, 157–58n Ibsen, Hendrik, 11 Idaho: amendment campaign in, 45, 47n, 96; where suffrage won, 204, 282, 422 Ignota. See Elmy, Elizabeth Clarke Wolstenholme immigrants: in Calif., 105; ignorance of, 99–100, 165–67; as opponents of woman suffrage, 509 Imperialism: Address of William Lloyd Garrison, 302 income inequality, 145, 150; and Christianity, 145–46 Independent (New York), 480 Indianapolis: sba in, 341 Ingersoll, Adele Remington, 528, 530n Ingersoll, Robert Green, 248n; letter to ecs, 248–49 International Council of Women: in Berlin, 506–7, 572; in London, 300; plans for 1899, 291; and woman suffrage, 291, 293–94n, 299 International Peace and Arbitration Committee: and Hague Conference, 291 international suffrage association: proposed, 422 International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 531 International Woman Suffrage Conference (1902): principles of, 437–40; sba addresses, 422–23 interviews: ecs in New York, 273–75, 289–91; ecs on National-American leadership, 318–19; sba in Portland, Ore., 555–57; sba in Rochester, 374–78, 549–51; sba in San Francisco, 59–60; sba in Santa Barbara, 107–8; sba with Celia Coyle, 559–61; sba with Ignota, 508–10; sba with Nellie Bly, 24–40 Iowa: A. H. Shaw tours in, 161–63; National-American plans for, 128–29, 130–31n, 161–63, 370–71, 374n Ireland, 150 Irvin, Ellen M., 523, 523–24nIrving, Henry, 335, 336n Jackson, Lottie Wilson Huggart, 290n, 303–4; at suffrage meetings, 289–90 Jacobi, Mary Corinna Putnam, 490, 491n Jacobs, Aletta Henriëtte, 531–32n; letter from sba, 531–32 James, Helen Louise Mosher, 131–32n; cares for sba, 428, 429–30, 429n; visits sba, 129 Jameson, Anna Brownell Murphy, 484, 485n Jane Eyre (Brontë), 511 Jefferson, Thomas, 347 Jeffrey, Hester C., 477; and F. Douglass birthday, 125–26n
Jennison, Florence Birney, 132–33, 133n Johns, Laura Lucretia Mitchell, 20n; at suffrage meetings, 15–16 Johnson, Charles O., 108n; and Calif. campaign, 107–8 Johnston, Lucy Browne, 542n; letter from sba, 541–43 Johnstown, Pa., 473 Jones, Jenkin Lloyd, 85n; letter from sba, 84–85; letter to sba, 569–70 Jordan, David Starr, 210, 212n Jordan, Mary Augusta, 571, 575, 576n Judean Club (Rochester): sba addresses, 493–94 Kansas: municipal suffrage in, 382; presidential suffrage defeated in, 541–42, 542–43n; prohibition in, 381–82 Kansas Republican party: endorses woman suffrage (1892), 542; ignores woman suffrage (1894), 542 Kansas State Historical Society: sba’s donations to, 538–39 Keifer, Joseph Warren, 577, 578n Keith, Mary McHenry, 61n; letters from sba, 60–61, 354–55, 459–61, 534–37; at suffrage meeting, 459 Keith, William, 354, 460, 461n; paintings of, 534, 535 Kelley, Albert Bartram, 222–23, 223–24n Kelley, Caroline Bartram Bonsall, 222, 223n Kelley, Florence, 223n; letter to ecs, 222–24; and Spanish-American War, 222–23; at suffrage meetings, 571 Kelly, Howard Atwood, 418–19, 419n Kent, Carrie E. Gove, 577, 578n Kent, John Howe, 2, 2n Kent, Julia Ainsworth, 2, 2n Keyser, Harriette Amelia, 20–21n; at suffrage meeting, 16 Kimber, Abby, 137, 139n King, Anna Stevens, 50n; criticizes Woman’s Bible, 48 King, Annie Bronson. See King, Anna Stevens King, Thomas Starr, 68, 70n, 250 Kingsley, Charles, 201–2n; quoted, 197, 368, 444 Kirschner, Martin, 506–7, 507n Knox-Goodrich, Sarah Louise Browning, 80n; and Calif. campaign, 79 Koehler, Lewis M., 514–15n; in Leavenworth, 514 Koehler, Maude Anthony, 142, 143n, 525; in Leavenworth, 514 Ladd, Caroline Ruth Elizabeth Vail, 262, 262n, 265, 545 Ladies’ Home Journal: and G. Cleveland, 549–50; marriage vows in, 186
index Lamennais, Hugues Félicité Robert de, 297n; quoted, 297 Landsberg, Max, 400, 413n Lapham, Anson, 525, 527n Lapham, Antoinette Dearborn, 265, 265n Lapham, Elinor, 265, 265n Lapham, John Jesse, 545, 547n Lapham, Lewis Henry, 265, 265n; hosts sba, 545 Lapham, Mary Elizabeth Walker, 545, 547n Lapham, Semantha Lapham Vail, 116n, 299; hosts sba, 115, 259, 262, 264–67, 503 The Last Days of Pompeii (Bulwer-Lytton), 511 Laughlin, Gail, 537n; as organizer, 535, 536 laundry workers: in Los Angeles, 559–61 Lawrence, Kan.: sba speaks in, 515, 516; semicentennial of, 515, 516 Lawrence, Margaret Livingston Stanton, xxxi, 392–93; birthday of, 173, 174; cares for mother, 434; ecs’s verse for, 173; and F. Kelley, 222; in Geneva, N.Y., 76; mentioned, 75, 134, 161, 349, 363, 435; and mother’s death, 452; writes sba, 132 Leavenworth, Kan.: sba in, 514–16, 518, 522–24 Leo XIII (pope), 488, 488n Let Crushed Cuba Arise! (G. Smith), 235 Lewis, Helen Morris, 21n; at suffrage meeting, 16 Liberator (Boston), 484 Library of Congress: sba’s donations to, 465, 483–85, 486, 487–88, 503 Life and Work of Susan B. Anthonyf (Harper), 395, 551; in Bryn Mawr College Library, 419; distribution of, 460, 511–12; ecs in, 502–3; H. B. Blackwell attacks, 275, 280–81; praised by ecs, 253; responses to, 265; reviews of, 256; sent to press, 210; work on, 132–33, 133n Lincoln, Abraham, 39n, 68, 99, 448; quoted, 31, 129, 385 Literary Digest, 552 Livermore, Mary Ashton Rice, 390, 392n Lockwood, Belva Ann Bennett McNall, 397n Logan, Adella Hunt, 169n, 563; inscriptions from sba, 479–80; and National-American, 168–69, 170–72, 172–73 London, England: sba in, 298 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 240, 241n Lord, Henrietta Frances, 12n; and Woman’s Bible, 11 Los Alamos, Calif.: sba visits, 108 Los Angeles: sba in, 54–57, 558–61; sba speaks in, 55–57 Los Angeles Public Library: librarian fired from, 558, 559n Lowell, James Russell, 123n; quoted, 121 Lozier, Clemence Sophia Harned, 36, 40n
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Lyon, Mary, 26, 37n Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 240, 241n, 379 McClintock, Elizabeth Wilson, 200n; and Seneca Falls, 194 McClintock, Julia, 174, 175n McClintock, Mary Ann, 200n; and Seneca Falls, 194 McClintock, Mary Ann Wilson, 175n; and Seneca Falls, 175, 194, 195 McClintock, Thomas, 200n; and Seneca Falls, 194 McComas, Alice Moore, 56–57n, 57; and Calif. campaign, 55, 55n, 83 McCulloch, Catharine Gouger Waugh, 232n; and Business Committee, 230–31; letters from sba, 401–3, 516–17; mentioned, 224, 259; and National-American, 401–3 Macfarland, Henry Brown Floyd, 577, 578n McHenry, Ellen Josephine Metcalfe, 460, 461n, 535 McKinley, William, 100n; and election of 1900, 346–47; and Hawaii, xxv; letter from ecs, 98–101; as presidential candidate, 98–100; and war, 307 “M’Kinley and the Women” (ecs), 346–48 McLaren, Agnes, 339, 340n McLaren, Charles Benjamin Bright, 339, 340n McLaren, Eva Maria Müller, 339, 339n McLaren, Laura Elizabeth Pochin, 339, 340n McLaren, Priscilla Bright, 12–13n; hosts sba, 512; letter from sba, 338–40; and Woman’s Bible, 11 McLaren, Walter Stowe Bright, 338, 339n McLean, Aaron M., 546 McLean, Abigail Fitch, 545, 547n McLean, Anthony, 546, 548n McLean, Guelma Penn Anthony, 36, 40n, 152, 153, 546 McLean, John, Jr., 546, 548n Madison, Wis., 176, 179 Mail and Express (New York), 116 Maine (battleship), xxvi, 226 Mann, Charles, 416, 418n Mann, Frances A, 418n; and History, 416 Mansfield, Lord. See Murray, William (earl of Mansfield) Marholm, Laura, 276–77, 278n, 295 marriage: of A. E. D. Mason, 504–6; of A. L. B. Blackwell, 140; of A. O. Anthony, 351–52; and age of consent, 217; of C. J. B. Crane, 117; as civil contract, 329, 331; of H. A. Baker, 411; of L. A. A. C. Ward, 140; a private matter, 443; sba on proposals of, 32–33 married women: legal disabilities of, 282–83. See also names Married Women’s Property Act (1848), 194, 195 Married Women’s Property Act (1860), 30–31
59 4
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Married Women’s Property Act (1862), 31 Martin, George Washington, 539n; letter from sba, 538–39 Martin, Victoria Claflin Woodhull, 245n; letter from ecs, 244–45; memorial to Congress, 245 masculine element, 356, 420–21 Mason, Anna Elizabeth Dann: gives birth, 518; hosts sba, 478; letter from M. S. Anthony, 475–76; letters from sba, 474–76, 504–6, 554–55 Mason, Gilbert Turner, 407, 407–8n, 504, 554–55 Mason, Leonora Charlotte Turner, 554–55 mass meeting on disfranchisement (New York): letter from sba, 467–68 mass meeting on disfranchisement (Rochester): sba addresses, 477 Matthews, Victoria Earle, 125–26nn May, Joseph, 28, 38n May, Samuel Joseph, 28, 38n, 497; centennial celebration of, 171, 172; quoted, 178 Mazzini, Guiseppe, 221, 221–22n Meacham, J. P., 70, 70–71n Mélinand, Camille, 430, 431n Mendelssohn, Felix, 192, 199n Menominee (ship), 298 Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 413 Meriwether, Lide Parker Smith, 373n; and National-American, 370 Merwin, James Burtis, 19n; at suffrage meeting, 15, 16 Messer, Elizabeth Page, 498n; and death of H. P. Douglass, 497 Methodist church: in Calif., 101 Metropolitan Temple (San Francisco), 95 Michigan: amendment campaign in (1874), 181; and constitutional convention, 214 Mill, John Stuart, 113, 115n, 222n, 512; and cooperation, 221; quoted, 444 Miller, Anne Fitzhugh, 71, 73n, 478, 533, 565; and Christian Science, 393; hosts ecs, 76–77; and N.Y. association, 465; and Woman’s Bible, 3n Miller, Caroline Hallowell, 19n; at suffrage meeting, 15 Miller, Charles Dudley, 76n; death of, 76 Miller, Elizabeth Smith, 71, 73n; at ecs’s funeral, 457; hosts ecs, 76–77, 158–59, 160–61; letters from sba, 132–33, 158–60, 235–37, 465–67, 478–79, 496–99, 532–33, 565–66; and N.Y. association, 161, 563; and Woman’s Bible, 3n Miller, Florence Fenwick, 298, 299n, 438; in U.S., 418–19 Miller, Louise Gates Willard, 532, 533n Mills, Benjamin Fay, 553, 554n Mills, Harriet May, 65n, 169; and Calif. campaign, 64, 95; and National-American,
417; and N.Y. association, 161, 489; reads testimony of ecs, 321; in Rochester, 409; at Senate hearing, 424; at Tuskegee, 475, 479 Milton, John, 240, 241n Milton, N.Y.: ecs in, 352 Minor, Mrs. (Nellie’s employer), 406 Minor v. Happersett (1875), 99, 196, 322 Mitchell, John Hipple, 423, 424, 424n Monroe Doctrine, 242 Montana: suffrage defeated in, 128, 130n Montgomery, Ellen Clark Sargent, 52, 53–54n Montgomery, Helen Barrett, 360n; and peace day, 400; and University of Rochester, 358, 358n, 506, 543 Moore, Edward Mott, 363n; and University of Rochester, 363 Moore, Eva Perry, 571, 576n Moore, Rebecca Fisher, 512, 513n Morgan, John Pierpont, 416, 418n Morgan, John Tyler, 337, 338n Mormons, 274; and polygamy, 463–64 Morrell, Edward de Veaux, 530n; and congressional representation, 529 Morrison, Jessie Lee: tried for murder, 374–75 Morse, Frances Case, 524, 526n Morse, William B., 359n; no donation from, 358 Mosher, Arthur Anthony, 262, 262–63n, 264; hosts sba, 455 Mosher, Arthur Byron, 264, 264–65n Mosher, Frank Merritt, 360, 360n Mosher, Hannah Lapham Anthony, 36, 40n, 152, 523 Mosher, Laura Bodine, 264, 264–65n Mosher, Martha Beatrice Brown, 262, 262–63n, 264 Mosher, Wendell Phillips, 176–77n, 360; sba visits, 176 Mott, James, 28, 38n Mott, Lucretia Coffin, 23n, 250, 304, 345, 563; and abolition, 193, 203; quoted, 454; and Seneca Falls, 18, 27, 194 Mott, Lydia, 28, 38n Mount Greylock (Mass.), 153 Mount Hope Cemetery (Rochester), 405, 497 Mount Muncie Cemetery (Leavenworth), 522, 523 Mount Shasta (Calif.), 153 Mount Tacoma (Wash.), 153 Müller, Frances Henrietta, 393, 393n municipal suffrage: in Great Britain, 198; proposed in Chicago, 569, 569–70n Murray, Margaret Cady Livingston, 525, 526–27n Murray, William (earl of Mansfield), 99, 101n mythology: Old Testament as, 144, 145, 147 Nadeau Hotel (Los Angeles), 55 names: of married women, 17, 18, 494, 506
index Napoléon I (emperor of France), 139n; quoted, 427; reburial of, 137–38 Naquet, Alfred-Joseph, 328, 332n Nashville, Tenn.: sba in, 225 Nathan, Maud Nathan, 392, 393n The Nation: letter from ecs, 216–18 Nation, Carry Amelia Moore Gloyd, 388n; at work in Kansas, 381–82, 387–88 National-American Woman Suffrage Association: bazaar in New York, 363, 384; election of officers, 228–29, 318–19, 393–94, 401, 402n, 417; headquarters of, 257, 407; national conferences of, 176, 177n, 179, 210, 215, 292; need for lobbyists, 319–20; racial practices of, 469–71 National-American Woman Suffrage Association’s annual conventions: called out for prejudice, 203–4, 303–6; College Night, 570–76; cost of, 226–29, 230, 231, 233n; debates nonpartisanship, 119–23; debates Woman’s Bible, 10–11, 11–12n, 14–18; ecs addresses, 190–202; ecs criticized by, 403, 405n; ecs’s resolution for, 288–89; in Grand Rapids, 281–87, 289–91; location of, 96, 214, 224, 226–27, 291–93; in Minneapolis, 386; in New Orleans, 475; plans for 1897, 96, 115–16, 118; plans for 1898, 156, 160–61, 168–73, 174–75, 176, 179–80, 184, 185; plans for 1900, 293; plans for 1906, 566n, 570; in Portland, Ore., 536, 553, 555–57; and racial segregation, 289–91, 303–6; rejects Woman’s Bible, 91; resolutions for, 11–12n, 15–18; sba addresses, 17–18, 188–90, 281–87, 319–21; and side issues, 303–6; timing of, 224; in Washington, 319–21 National-American Woman Suffrage Association’s Business Committee: in Brooklyn, 259–61; in conflict with L. D. Blake, 296–97; in Indianapolis, 341–42, 342n, 343n; letters from sba, 213–16, 224–35; and National Suffrage Bulletin, 231; protests election of B. H. Roberts, 259–61; in Warren, Ohio, 514; in Washington, 341–42, 343n; and Woman’s Protest Committee, 516, 517n National-American Woman Suffrage Association’s Organization Committee: in Ariz., 279; in Del., 45; and focus on Iowa, 128–29, 130–31n, 162–63, 225, 233n; funds for, 225–26, 233nn, 279; in Idaho, 45; in Okla., 279; plans of, 128–29; plan to abolish, 341–42; in South, 129, 131n, 225 National Anti-Slavery Standard (New York), 484 National Building Trades Council: petitions for woman suffrage, 333, 334 National Citizen and Ballot Box (Syracuse), 484 National Congress of Mothers: sba addresses, 426–27; and woman suffrage, 349
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National Consumers’ League, 222 National Council of the Women of New Zealand, 461–62 National Council of Women: and F. E. Willard, 425; protests election of B. H. Roberts, 273–74; sba addresses, 111–12, 425; sba attends, 109–12 National Education Association, 482–83 National Federation of Teachers, 482–83 National Legislative League: ecs’s role in, 393–95, 396; founding of, 335; letter from ecs, 384–86 National Society of the Spanish American War: racial practices of, 251 National Suffrage Bulletin, 231 National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies: and International Council, 291, 293–94n, 299 National Woman’s Rights Convention, Fourth (1853), 30 National Woman’s Rights Convention, Third (1852), 189, 195 National Woman Suffrage Association: and congressional representation, 533 The Nation’s Shame, Sonnets by William Lloyd Garrison, 302 Neblett, Ann Viola Wright, 232–33n; bequest to National-American, 225–26 Nebraska: Bible banned in schools in, 440–41n Nebraska Woman Suffrage Association: ecs’s resolutions for, 165–67 “the negro’s hour,” xxix, 288 Nellie (young friend), 405–6, 407 New Century Club (Philadelphia), 428 New England Woman Suffrage Association: sba speaks to, 345–46 New Hampshire: amendment campaign in, 465, 467n, 468, 469n New Orleans: National-American meets in, 465, 469–71, 475 newspapers. See Press Bureau Newton, Richard Heber, 265, 265n New York, N.Y.: sba in, 261–67, 454, 455, 457 New York American and Journal: ecs writes for, 430–31, 441–46 New York Constitutional Convention (1916), 495 New York Herald, 254 New York Journal: letter from ecs, 103–4 New York State Federation of Women’s Clubs: in Rochester, 312–13; sba addresses, 313 New York State Teachers’ Association, 29–30 New York State Woman Suffrage Association: and Ambler bill, 465, 466n; annual meetings of, 96, 161, 433, 454, 563; essay prize of, 566–67; letter from ecs, 250, 252n New York Times: and death of ecs, 455 New York Tribune, 254, 263; and death of ecs, 455; letter from ecs, 355–57
596
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New Zealand: where suffrage won, 198, 282 Neymann, Clara Low, 91n; and Woman’s Bible, 90 Nicholas II (czar of Russia), 294n; and Hague Conference, 291 Nichols, Clarina Irene Howard, 95, 96–97n, 250, 345; as pioneer, 191, 196 Nichols, George Bainbridge, 95, 96–97n Nichols, Mabel, 582; letter to Maude Nichols, 581–82 Nipomo, Calif.: sba visits, 108 Noble, Francis Lester Hawks, 70, 71n nonpartisanship, 78; debated, 120–23; defended, 81–83, 85–87; explained, 60–61; in operation, 95–96 North American Review: ecs writes for, 217, 327–33 Norton, John Calvin, 411n; letter to ecs, 410–11 Oakland, Calif.: and amendment campaign, 66, 106; sba in, 66; sba speaks in, 106; voters in, 112 O’Connell, Daniel, 194, 200n Oklahoma, Territory of: organizing in, 279, 280n; statehood protested, 516, 519–20, 528–29, 531; suffrage defeated in, 284. See also Woman’s Protest Committee O’Neil, Margaret E., 406n, 407, 409; at Anthony house, 405 Opie, Amelia Alderson, 193, 199n Oregon: amendment campaign in (1884), 556; amendment campaign in (1900), 349–50, 350n, 556; amendment campaign in (1906), 556–57, 567; initiative and referendum in, 553, 557 Osborne, Eliza Wright, 160n; hosts ecs and sba, 158; hosts sba, 349; and National-American, 179; and N.Y. association, 563 O’Shea, Patrick, 494, 495–96n Othello (Shakespeare), 428 “Our Defeats and Our Triumphs” (ecs), 190–202 “Our Defeats and Our Triumps” (ecs), xxvi Outlook, 383–84 Owen, Robert Dale, 378, 379n Pacific Coast Railway, 107–8 Pacific Coast Woman’s Congress, 71 Page, Mary Hutcheson, 280n; letter from sba, 279–80 Page, William Noble, 522n; and D. R. Anthony’s funeral, 522 Paine, Thomas, 221, 221–22n Palast Hotel (Berlin), 505 Palmer, John McAuley, 102 Palmer, Lizzie Pitts Merrill, 179, 180n Pan-American Exposition (Buffalo), 409 Paris, France: news from, 185
Parish, Lydia Ann Apthorp, 164n; hosts sba, 163 Park, Maud Wood, 571, 575, 576n Parker, Theodore, 250, 252n Parnell, Charles Stewart, 273, 274n Paterson, N.J.: murder in, 367, 369n Patrons of Husbandry: and woman suffrage, 334 Patterson, Katherine Grafton, 225, 232n Peabody, George, 211, 212n Peabody Education Fund, 210 peace: as women’s cause, 354, 400 Peekskill, N.Y.: ecs in, 302 Pennsylvania Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends, 349, 352 People’s party: and woman suffrage, 100 Peoria, Ill.: sba speaks in, 473 Perkins, Frank L., 67, 68n Perkins, George Clement, 108n; and Calif. campaign, 107 Perry, Emma E. Thayer, 5, 6n Peterboro, N.Y.: ecs in, 76–77, 90–91 petitions to Congress: for equality in empire, 308, 310–11, 319–20, 333, 334; for equality in Hawaii, xxviii, 270; for sixteenth amendment, 308, 310, 319–20, 333 Philadelphia: sba in, 565 Philadelphia Woman Suffrage Society: meeting of, 307–8 Philippines: male-only government in, 281–83, 387, 388n; teachers for, 423 Phillips, Ann Terry Greene, 193, 200n Phillips, Wendell, 12n; and divorce, 217; and funds for organizing, 30; mentioned, 33, 250; quoted, 11, 459; and woman’s rights, xxix, 194 Phipps, Henry, Jr., 436, 437n Pickler, Alfred Alt, 386, 386–87n Pickler, Alice Mary Alt, 386–87n; letter from sba, 386–87 Pickler, Dale Alice, 386, 386–87n Pickler, John Alfred, 386, 386–87n Pickler, Lula Alberta, 386, 386–87n Pickler, Madge Emily, 386, 386–87n Pierce, Gilbert Ashville, 386, 387n Pierpont, John, 147, 149n Pierrepont, Edwards, 203, 205–6n Pilgrim Mothers’ Dinner, 116; letter from ecs, 3–5 Pillsbury, Parker, 250, 252n; death of, 288 Pitts, Gideon Wells, 497, 498n Place, Martha M. Garretson Savacool, 273n; condemned to death, 272–73 Platt, Thomas Collier, 530n; and congressional representation, 529, 532–33; letter to sba, 534; and woman suffrage, 534 Poe, Edgar Allan, 201n; quoted, 196, 305 Political Equality Club: of Geneva, N.Y.,
index 177–78; of Monroe County, N.Y., 163; of Penn Yan, N.Y., 539–40; of Rochester, 1, 163, 344–45, 495, 544; of Warsaw, N.Y., 163; of Wyoming County, N.Y., 163 Political Equality Club of Rochester: letter from sba, 544 political parties: roles of in state campaigns, 59, 60–61, 81–82, 85–87, 120–23 polygamy: among Mormons, 463–64; in Old Testament, 463; opposed, 260 Porter, Horace, 138, 139n Portinari, Beatrice, 366, 367n Portland, Ore.: National-American meets in, 536; sba in, 555–57 Portland Hotel (Ore.), 555 Post Express (Rochester), 135 Powell, Miss (housekeeper), 264 Powers Hotel (Rochester), 271 “Powers of Congress to Prohibit Inequality, Caste, and Oligarchy of the Skin” (Sumner), 93 Presbyterian church: in Calif., 101 “The Present Crisis” (Lowell), 121 presidential suffrage: advocated by H. B. Blackwell, 542; defeated in Kan., 541–42, 542–43n; opposed by sba, 541–42 Press Bureau: funds for, 232; plans for, 186, 210–11, 254. See also Sun (New York) Priestman, Anna Maria, 513n; hosts sba, 512 Priestman, Mary, 513n; hosts sba, 512 The Princess (Tennyson), 356 Probst, Anges Thayer, 1, 1n prohibition: in Kan., 381–82 Prohibition party: and woman suffrage, 100, 120 public spaces: women’s access to, 166, 197 Puerto Rico: male-only government in, 257, 258n, 281–83, 387, 388n Pugh, Sarah, 137, 139n Pullman cars: segregation of, 251 Puritans: and religious intolerance, 146–47 Purvis, Robert, 289n, 414; death of, 288 Putnam, Caroline F., 237n, 478; critic of sba, 235–36; and death of H. P. Douglass, 497 Putnam, Herbert, 485n, 486, 538; letter from sba, 483–86 Pyott, Isabella Hart, 6, 7n Raines, Agnes Butler, 2, 2n Raines, Thomas, 2, 2n Randall, Mary Perkins, 26, 37n, 546 Read, Daniel, 152, 156n, 546 Read, Susannah Richardson, 27, 38n, 152, 153, 484, 546 “Reading the Bible in the Public Schools” (ecs), 143–50 “Recalled by the Grant Pageant” (ecs), 137–39 Reed, Thomas Brackett, 269n; letter from ecs and sba, 268–69
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Reform Act of 1832: and manhood suffrage, 510 Reid, Elizabeth Jesser, 193, 199n Reid, Whitelaw, 357n; letter from ecs, 355–57 religion of humanity, 148 Remsen, Ira, 570, 576n Republican party: ecs criticizes, 98–100, 346–47, 349; election of 1900, 346–47, 349; platform of 1876, 98; platform of 1896, 86, 98–99, 100, 344. See also California Republican party Revolution (New York), 484, 495, 538; debts of cancelled, 525; offices of, 378 Rhees, Rush, 433n; and coeducation, 432; letter from sba, 566–68; and peace day, 400 Rhode Island: suffrage defeated in, 468 “Rich and Poor” (ecs), 398–99 Ricker, Marcena Sherman, 361n, 505, 518; cares for sba, 361, 580, 581; at Tuskegee, 475, 479 Riggs House (Washington), 179, 317 Robbins, Louise A. Barnum, 110, 111n Roberts, Brigham Henry, 249n; candidacy of, 249; election of protested, 259–61, 273–74, 312–13, 314–15; as opponent of woman suffrage, 260 Robinson, Elizabeth Johnson Devereux Umsted, 64, 65n Rochester: celebration of F. Douglass in, 124–25; Cuban Hospital Relief Association of, 127 Rochester, University of: coeducation in, 360, 362; female graduates of, 432, 433n; funds for coeducation in, 246–47, 357–58, 358–59n, 360–61, 362–63; M. E. Garrett gift to, 432; scholarships for, 506, 543; student recruitment for, 360–61, 389; and Susan B. Anthony Prize, 566–67; terms of coeducation, 238, 239–39n; trustees of, 238, 358, 358–59n, 360n, 362–63 Rochester convention of 1848: and Anthony family, 27, 189; commemorated, 210 Rochester Council of Women: sba addresses, 528–30; and school board elections, 493 Rochester Free Academy, 247 Rockefeller, John Davison, 416, 418n, 436 Rodenbeck, Adolph J., 477 Rodey, Bernard Shandon, 540, 541n Rodey, Minnie Coddington, 540, 541n Roman Catholic church: and divorce, 328 Roosevelt, Edith Kermit Carow, 450n; letter from ecs, 449–50 Roosevelt, Theodore, 415n; hosts B. T. Washington, 414; letter from ecs, 448–49; as N.Y. governor, 448, 450; in perpetual motion, 436; quoted, 450; and sba’s birthday, 577, 578; visits Tuskegee, 562; and Yosemite National Park, 535 Root, Elizabeth, 178n; letter from ecs, 177–78
598
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Rose, Ernestine Louise Siismondi Potowski, 17, 22n, 250, 304; as pioneer, 189, 194, 195 roses, 277 Ross, Finlay, 374, 377n Routt, Eliza Franklin Pickrell, 56, 57n Routt, John Long, 56, 57n Rouvroy, Claude-Henri de, comte de Saint-Simon, 221–22n; and cooperation, 221 Sage, Margaret Olivia Slocum, 490, 491n St. Cecilia Club House (Grand Rapids), 281 St. Ermin’s Hotel (London), 300 St. Patrick’s Cathedral (New York), 405 Saint-Simon, Henri de. See Rouvroy, Claude-Henri de, comte de Saint-Simon Salmon, Lucy Maynard, 571–72, 576n San Diego, Calif.: sba in, 54 San Diego Woman’s Club, 54 Sanford, Mary Thayer, 1n San Francisco: sba in, 57, 59–71, 75–76, 78–88, 94–97, 106–7; voters in, 112 San Francisco Call: endorses woman suffrage, 67, 69–70; sba writes for, 81–83 San Francisco Examiner: columns in, 66, 70, 86–87, 101–2 San Luis Obispo, Calif.: sba speaks in, 107 Santa Barbara, Calif.: sba interviewed in, 107–8 Santa Maria, Calif.: sba visits, 108 Sargent, Aaron Augustus, 53n Sargent, Elizabeth R. C., 52, 53–54n, 60, 93n; visits sba, 210 Sargent, Ellen Clark, 52, 53–54n, 75; and Calif. campaign, 54, 64, 66, 67, 79, 85, 104–5; hosts sba, 57–58; letter from sba, 553–54; visits sba, 210 Sargent, George Clark, 52, 53–54n, 57–58 Saunders, Mary A. Channing, 52, 53n Sausalito, Calif.: sba speaks in, 106 Savile, Sybilla, 72, 73n Saxe, Asa, 158, 159n, 413n Saxe, Celestine Holley, 158, 159n Schoelcher, Victor, 125, 126n schools: tax-supported, 145 school suffrage, 198; defeated in Calif., 286, 287n Schumann, Robert Alexander, 192, 199n Scott, Job, 484, 485n Seaman, Elizabeth Cochrane. See Bly, Nellie Sedgwick, Catherine Maria, 154, 157n segregation, racial, 289–90, 303–6; on railroads, 251; in women’s clubs, 365–66 Selden, Elise Massey, 373n; and National-American, 370 Seneca Falls convention of 1848, 18, 449; commemorated, xxvi, xxvii, 156, 160–61, 170–71, 172–73n, 174–75, 176, 179–80, 184, 185, 188–202, 226, 235–36, 574 Sewall, Arthur, 86, 88n Sewall, May Eliza Wright Thompson, 294n;
hosts sba, 341; and international peace movement, 291, 294n Shafroth, John Franklin, 317n; letter from sba, 317–18; letter to sba, 318 Shakespeare, William, 240, 241n; Merchant of Venice, 413; Othello, 428 Shatz, Josephine, 362n; letter to sba, 362 Shaw, Anna Howard, 23–24n; and Anthony reunion, 142; in Berlin, 506, 507; at Business Committee, 259–61, 469–71; and Calif. campaign, 58, 64, 78, 94, 95, 96, 106, 536; in Calif., 553; as executor of sba’s will, 500–501; hosts sba, 348; and international conference, 438; in Iowa, 161–63; and L. Marholm, 295; letters from sba, 161–64, 257–59, 432–33; in London, 300; at Longwood meeting, 352; in Los Angeles, 560–61; mentioned, xxv, xxvi, 111, 187, 189, 225, 291, 316, 321, 512, 552; and National-American, 417, 489; and N.Y. association, 489, 495; and Okla. statehood, 531; in Rochester, 409, 495; and sba’s birthday, 577; at sba’s funeral, xxx; at suffrage meetings, 18, 123, 454, 570–71; on trip to South America, 417; weight of, 162; and Woman’s Bible, 18; and Woman’s Protest Committee, 516 Shaw, Nicolas M., 234–35n, 257; and National-American, 230 She: A History of Adventure (Haggard), 113 Shelby, Margaret Cartwell Bryan, 151n; letter from ecs, 150–51 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 240, 241n Sheppard, Julia Morton Dodson, 540–41n; letter from sba, 539–41 Sibley, Mrs. (Rochester), 358 Sievwright, Margaret Home Richardson, 462n; letter to sba, 461–62 Silver Lake Assembly (N.Y.), 408 Silverman, Joseph, 391, 392n Simmons, Anna Rebecca Johnson, 19n; at suffrage meetings, 15 Sirrine, George William, 225, 232–33n “Skipper Ireson’s Ride” (Whittier), 376 Smith, Elizabeth Oakes Prince, 201n; as pioneer, 196 Smith, Gerrit, 126n, 133, 265, 563; and Cuba, 235; hosts F. Douglass, 124 Smith, Goldwin, 13, 14n, 41–42 Smith, Lewia C. Hannibal, 427–28, 428–29n, 505, 524, 525 Smoot, Reed Owen, 464n; elected to U.S. Senate, 462–63 “Solitude of Self ” (ecs), 403 Solomons, Selina, 64, 65–66n Somerby, Charles Pomeroy, 89–90n; letter from ecs, 89–90 Somerset, Lady Isabella Caroline Somers-Cocks, 188n, 189; and Contagious Diseases Act, 187, 188n; visits ecs, 207
index South Carolina: constructs segregation, 251, 252–55n South Dakota: amendment campaign in (1890), 105, 285, 287n; amendment campaign in (1898), 128, 129n, 285, 287n South Dakota Political Equality Association, 386 Southworth, Louisa Stark, 180n; and National-American, 179 Spanish-American War: begins, 214; ecs support for, 242; humanitarian purposes of, 219–20; and racial superiority, 251, 302, 306–7; and war of competition, 220, 222–23, 242; and women’s exclusion from politics, 218–19 “Specially Inspired Men” (ecs), 92–93 speeches and remarks: ecs, “Our Defeats and Our Triumphs,” xxvi, 190–202; ecs to Judiciary Committee hearing, 321–25; sba in Calif. amendment campaign, 55–57; sba to A.M.E. Zion Church, 68–70; sba to family reunion, 151–58; sba to International Suffrage Conference, 422–23; sba to Local Council of Women, 400, 528–30; sba to meeting about black disfranchisment, 477; sba to meeting about coeducation, 246–47; sba to meeting on Cuba, 127–28; sba to National-American, 281–87, 319–21; sba to National Congress of Mothers, 426–28; sba to National Council of Women, 111–12, 425; sba to Political Equality Club, 344–45; sba to reception in Los Angeles, 558–59; sba to Senate Committee hearing, 423–35 Spencer, Lilly Martin, 435n Sperry, Mary E. Simpson, 80n, 459; and Calif. campaign, 79; visits sba, 210 spiritualism, 95; fiftieth anniversary of, 236 Spofford, Ainsworth Rand, 487n; letter from sba, 487–88; letter to sba, 486–87 Spofford, Jane H. Snow, 181n, 396; and National-American, 179 Sprague, Rosetta Douglass, 497, 498–99n Springer, Esther Elmina Skiff, 517n; and Woman’s Protest Committee, 516, 521 Standing Fund: abandoned, 364; plans for, 211, 212n Stanford, Jane Eliza Lathrop, 97n; and Calif. campaign, 95, 102; and coeducation, 300; and International Council, 179; letter from sba, 210–13; as philanthropist, 416; and Stanford University, 459, 545 Stanford, Leland, 210, 211–12n Stanford University, 300, 545 Stanton, Augusta E. Hazleton, 363, 364n Stanton, Edwin McMasters, 383, 384n Stanton, Elizabeth Cady: birthdays of, xxxi, 42, 314, 363, 412, 451, 476, 521; death of, xxxi, 452; and Eighty Years, 185; eyesight of, xxix, 77, 181, 185, 242, 266–67; funeral
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of, 454, 457; letters from sba, 47–48, 61–62, 95–97, 101–3, 118–19, 160–61, 179–81, 250–53, 352–53, 363–64, 451; letters to sba, 124–26, 183, 253, 433–34; new residence of, 248; papers of, 488, 489; as pioneer, 574; publishing plans of, 403, 435–36; retirement of, xxvii; sba praises, 35; sba’s hopes for, 179–80; sba visits, 262, 265, 266, 339; summers of, 76–77, 132–33, 241, 302–3n, 352, 353n, 404n, 434; verse for sba, 325–27; weight of, 162 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Jr., 134, 135n Stanton, Gerrit Smith, xxxi, 363; publishes book, 565 Stanton, Hélène, 134, 135n, 480; visits sba, 518–19 Stanton, Henry Brewster, 139n; in Paris, 137–38; and woman’s rights, 194 Stanton, Henry Brewster, Jr., xxxi, 363; death of, 494 Stanton, Marguerite Marie Berry, 72, 74n Stanton, Mary O’Shea, 363, 364n, 494 Stanton, Robert Livingston (1859–1920), xxxi; letter from sba, 502–3; mentioned, 11, 134, 161, 241, 253, 363, 435, 465; and mother’s death, 455; publisher of Eighty Years, 502; publisher of Woman’s Bible, 45 Stanton, Robert Livingston (1885–1974), 134, 135n Stanton, Theodore Weld, xxxi; hosts B. T. Washington, 383–84; hosts F. Douglass, 125–26; letters from ecs, 76–77, 185–86, 412–13; letter to ecs, 71–74; letter to sba, 480–81; mentioned, 95, 104; and mother’s biography, 480; in New York, 434; and niece’s death, 71–72, 74–75; in Paris, 134; in Rochester, 518 Stark, Katherine Blatch, 72, 73n Stark, William Playters Wilkinson, 72, 73n states’ rights: extolled, 469 Stebbins, Martha J. Hadley, 164n; hosts sba, 163 Stetson, Charles Walker, 52, 52n Stetson, Charlotte Ann Perkins, 19n, 52; at suffrage meeting, 15; and Women and Economics, 277 Stetson, Katharine Beecher, 52, 52n Stevens, Peter Fayssoux, 452–53, 453n Still, Emma Robinson Coe. See Coe, Emma Robinson Stocker, Alice M. Howe, 66–67n; and Calif. campaign, 66 Stolle, Antonie, 438, 439n Stone, Lucinda Hinsdale, 182n; letter from ecs, 181–82 Stone, Lucy, 22–23n; mentioned, 17, 18, 203, 250, 304, 345; as pioneer, 30, 196, 574; and suffrage factions, 280 Stout, Edith Greenslage, 6, 7n Stout, William Hallowell, 6, 7n
600
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Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 76n; death of, 75–76 Stratton, Alice Tasheira Lee, 107n; hosts sba, 106 Stratton, Frederick Smith, 107n; hosts sba, 106; and resubmission, 128 strikes: sba encourages, 559–61 Stryker, Althea Briggs, 21n; at suffrage meetings, 16 Studies in the Psychology of Woman (Marholm), 276–77, 295 Sturge, Joseph, 194, 200n The Subjection of Women (Mill), 113; S. Coit’s new edition of, 512 suffrage: restrictions on, 470 suffrage, African-American: under attack, 321, 322, 337, 338n, 467, 477; in Calif. campaign, 68–70 suffrage, educated: ecs advocates, 99–100, 160, 161n, 165–67, 181–82, 197; sba opposes, 494 suffrage, manhood: English precedent for, 510 suffrage, partial: for tax-paying women, 540, 541n suffrage, universal: idea of, 69–70 suffrage, woman: and citizenship, 425; justice of, 69–70; precedents for, 99; and reforms, 428 Sumner, Charles, 40n; quoted, 33, 93 Sun (New York), 250, 254; arrange column in, 261; “Cause of Woman,” 271, 285, 348, 416, 417, 421; and death of ecs, 455; ecs writes for, 346–47; letters from ecs, 272–73, 367–70, 381–83; and southern disfranchisement, 283 Sunday closing, 146; and Columbian Exposition, 5, 44 Sweet, Emma Biddlecome, 1, 1–2n, 101, 299; and Calif. campaign, 57, 87, 96 Swift, Mary A. Wood, 212n; at suffrage meeting, 341; visits sba, 210 Swinton, John, 90n; ecs praises, 89; letter to ecs, 182 Swinton, Orsena Fowler Smith, 182, 182n Taft, Lorado Zadoc, 403, 405n Tallon, Daniel, 473n; quoted, 471 Talmage, Thomas De Witt, 115n; quoted, 113 Tanner, Margaret Priestman Wheeler, 298, 298–99n taxation: and political rights, 69 Taylor, Lucretia Estelle Watson, 427–28, 428–29n teachers: and discipline, 26–27; wages of, 26, 27, 482–83 tears: of women, 430–31 Teller, Henry Moore, 344 Temple Emanu-el (New York), 391 Tenafly, N.J.: F. E. Willard in, 207 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 240, 241n; quoted, 356 Terry, Alice Ellen, 335, 336n
Thanksgiving: union services in Rochester, 413 Thayer, Adeliza Severance, 2, 2n, 5 Thayer, John M., 1n, 2n; and Woman’s Bible, 5 Theosophy, 162 Thirteenth Amendment, 196, 289, 366 Thomas, Martha Carey, 419n, 432, 579; in Berlin, 507; letter to sba, 418–19; and National-American, 580; at suffrage meeting, 571, 572–74 Thomas, Mary Henrietta Bentley, 19n; at suffrage meeting, 15 Thomas, Mary Whitall, 573–74, 576n Thomasson, Katharine Lucas, 510n; hosts sba, 508, 512 Thompson, George, 194, 203, 250 Thompson, John W., 477; and F. Douglass birthday, 125–26n Thousand Islands, N.Y.: sba visits, 158 Tillotson, Helen Adell Hopkins, 489, 490n Tilton, Theodore, xxxi, 134n; letter to ecs, 134 Times-Democrat (New Orleans): letter from Business Committee, 469–73 Toledo, Ohio, 179 Toltec (Los Angeles), 54, 57 Topeka, Kan.: exclusion of Woman’s Bible in, 243 “A Trailing Dress and No Pocket” (ecs), 300–302 Train, George Francis, 503 Trumbo, Isaac, 67–68n; and woman suffrage, 67 Truth, Sojourner, 40n; quoted, 35 Tuskegee Institute, 168, 562–63; M. S. Anthony visits, 475; sba visits, 474–75, 479 twentieth century: arrival of, 376, 378, 379 “Two Valuable Gifts” (ecs), 174–75 Ukiah, Calif.: sba speaks in, 95–96 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 430 Underwood, Maria Deming Green, 132–33, 133n U.S. Congress: hearings of, 226, 292–93; and need for lobbying, 226; and petition for equality in Hawaii, xxviii, 270 U.S. Constitution: framers of, 92–93 U.S. House of Representatives: election of B. H. Roberts to, 259–61; hearings of, 10, 44, 180; Judiciary Committee, 321–25 U.S. Senate: hearings of, 44, 180, 423–35; Territorial Committee, 527, 531, 532 U.S. Supreme Court: and Minor v. Happersett, 99, 196 United States v. Susan B. Anthony (1873), 197 Unwin, Emma Jane Catherine Cobden, 512n; hosts sba, 511; letter from sba, 511–14 Unwin, Thomas Fisher, 511, 512, 512n Upton, Harriet Taylor, 5, 6n; and Business Committee, 225–26, 228, 229–30, 231,
index 291–92; at Business Committee, 259–61, 341–42, 469–71; mentioned, 538, 552; and National-American, 279, 417, 489; in Washington, 564 Usher, Leila: sba medallion by, 418–19, 432 Utah: sba and ecs in, 1871, 463; where suffrage won, 249, 260, 282, 422, 509 Vail, George Aaron, 264, 265n Van Benthuysen, William C., 388n; letter from sba, 387–88 Van Schaick, John, Jr., 577, 578n Vedder, Elihu, 486, 487n Vendome Hotel (Boston), 109, 110 Venice Assembly (Calif.), 553 Ventura, Calif.: sba visits, 108 Victoria (queen of England), 198, 202n, 391 Villard, Fanny Garrison, 412, 412–13n Vincent, George Edgar, 348, 350n A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Wollstonecraft), 484, 538 violence: women’s capacity for, 375–76 Virgil, 240, 241n wage slavery, 219–21, 242 Walbridge, Louise Rachel Castle, 357n; on coeducation, 355–57 Walsh, David, 546, 548n Walsh, Phebe Rhodes, 546, 548n war: causes of, 302; as masculine expression, 354 “War and Peace” (ecs), 218–22 Ward, Henry Augustus, 140, 140n Ward, Lydia Arms Avery Coonley, 140n; letter from sba, 140–41; marriage of, 140; sba visits, 409 Wardenclyffe, N.Y.: ecs in, 403–5 Warren, Francis Emory, 256, 257n; and woman suffrage in Hawaii, 335n, 336, 337–38n, 344 Washington, Booker Taliaferro, 169n; dines with president, 414; and Jim Crow, 251; letter from ecs, 383–84; letter from sba, 562–63; in Paris, xxxi, 384 Washington, Conn.: ecs in, 241–42 Washington, D.C.: sba in, 317–18, 564, 564n, 565, 577–78 Washington, Ernest Davidson, 474, 475n Washington, George, 183, 183n; Farewell Address of, 242 Washington, Margaret James Murray, 169n, 563; hosts sba, 474–75; mentioned, 169, 383, 384 Washington Life Insurance Company, 562 Washington Post, 204 Washington State: amendment campaign in (1889), 286, 287n; amendment campaign in (1898), 128, 130n, 286, 287n
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Watkeys, Zerviah Temple Colman, 524, 525–26n Watson, Elizabeth Lowe, 428–29n; letter from sba, 427–29 wealth: concentration of, 89, 90n, 398–99 Webber, Lydia Lucy Ricker, 475, 476n, 479 Webster, Daniel, 386n; quoted, 385 Weed, Thurlow, 28, 38n Weld, Angelina Emily Grimké, 304, 306n, 383 Weld, Theodore Dwight, 383, 384n Wells, Daniel Hanmer, 463, 464n Wells, Emmeline Blanche Woodward, 249n; letter from sba, 249 Wells, Heber Manning, 463, 464n Wendell, Benjamin Rush, 77, 77n Westhampton, N.Y.: ecs in, 352 Wetmore, George Peabody, 423, 424n “What Would You Substitute for the Bible as a Moral Guide?” (ecs), 239–41 Wheeler, Benjamin Ide, 535, 537n “Where the Sportsman Loves to Linger” (G. S. Stanton), 565 Whipple, Alden Bradford, 152, 156n White, Andrew Dickson, 114, 115n, 144 White, Grace, 347–48n; letter to ecs, 346 White, Horace, 366n; letters from ecs, 365–67, 420–21, 440–41 White, Nettie Lovisa, 44, 46n, 343n Whitney, Victoria Geraldine Conkling, 20n; at suffrage meeting, 15 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 240, 241n; quoted, 376 Wianno, Mass., 348 Wichita, Kan., 374 Wilbour, Charlotte Beebe, 458n; at ecs’s funeral, 457 Wilder, Clara, 358, 359n Wilder, Daniel Webster, 523–24n; and biography of D. R. Anthony, 538–39, 539n; sba visits, 523 Wilder, Mary Elizabeth Irvin, 523, 523–24n Wilder, Samuel, 359n; and University of Rochester, 358, 363 Wilder, Sarah A., 523, 523–24n Wilhelmina (queen of the Netherlands), 391, 392n Wilkinson, Charlotte Coffin May, 497, 499n Willard, Amelia, 174, 174n Willard, Ernest Russell, 552, 553n Willard, Frances Elizabeth Caroline, 8n, 111, 189; and Calif. campaign, 7–8, 9, 62; death of, 206–8; ecs’s obituary of, 206–8; and International Council, 425; letters from sba, 7–8, 135–36; letters to sba, 9–10, 186–88; visits ecs, 207; and Woman’s Bible, 207, 208n Willard, Mary Thompson Hill, 206, 208n William II (emperor of Germany), 507, 508n Williams, Anna L. Osborn: letter from sba, 454–55
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Williams, Charles Miller, 360, 361n Willis, Sarah L. Kirby Hallowell, 6, 7n, 104, 524; and University of Rochester, 357, 362 Wills, Charlotte LeMoyne, 561n; hosts sba, 559 Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association: letter from sba, 519–21 Wolcott, Ann Eliza Follett, 405, 406n Wollstonecraft, Mary, 484, 486n, 538 Woman’s Bible: criticized, 296; praised, 410 Woman’s Bible, Part I: barred from library, 243; criticized, 4, 5n, 48, 113–14; discussed, 2; explained, 48–50; and National-American, 10–11, 13–18, 41–42, 44–45, 47–48; praised, 51–52; published, 2–3n; and R. G. F. Avery, 10–11, 13–14, 15, 109; and R. G. Ingersoll, 248; sales of, 45; sba’s views of, 2, 3n, 91; and women’s subordination, 114 Woman’s Bible, Part II: in Boston Investigator, 113–14, 114–15n; commentaries for, 241; plans for, 11, 114–15n; in Woman’s Tribune, 90 “The Woman’s Bible” (ecs), 113–15 Woman’s Bible Committee, 48–49 Woman’s Bureau (New York), 64 Woman’s Christian Temperance Union: and Calif. campaign, 62; in N.Y., 381, 382–83n; opposes R. O. Smoot, 462; racial practices of, 470; in Richmond, Va., 4, 5n; in Rochester, 7; and Woman’s Bible, 4, 5n Woman’s Clubhouse (Los Angeles), 558 Woman’s Committee for the Extension of Municipal Suffrage to Women (Chicago), 569, 573, 580 Woman’s Crusade, 382 Woman’s Era Club (Boston), 365–66, 366–67n Woman’s Journal (Boston), 86, 181, 256, 484; ecs comments on, 90–91; ecs writes for, 300–301; as family organ, 275; letters from ecs, 206–8, 390–92; mentioned, 102, 118; rejects ecs, 250, 296, 305–6, 335–36; and Woman’s Bible debate, 41, 43n, 44 “Woman’s Position in the Bible” (ecs), 243–44 Woman’s Protest Committee, 516, 517n, 519–20, 527, 528–29, 531, 532
“The Woman’s Suffrage Association” (ecs), 303–6 Woman’s Tribune, 45, 86, 256, 396, 484; and ecs, 10–11, 14, 165; ecs comments on, 90–91; location of, 42; rejects ecs, 296, 305–6; sba comments on, 118 “Woman Suffrage Must Be Non-Partisan” (sba), 81–83 Women and Economics (Stetson), 277 Women’s Loyal National League, 270, 378 Women’s New York State Temperance Society, 28–29, 250 Wood, Annie Eliza Rogers, 459, 461n Woodhull, Victoria Claflin. See Martin, Victoria Claflin Woodhull Woods, Frances Jane, 372–73n; as organizer, 370–71 Woodworth, Chauncey B., 359n; no donation from, 358 Woodworth, Grace Adelle, 568–69n; letter from sba, 568–69 Woolley, Mary Emma, 571, 575, 576n Wordsworth, William, 240, 241n World (New York), 387 World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, 193, 305 Wright, David, 28, 38n Wright, Martha Coffin Pelham, 189, 190n; and Seneca Falls, 194 Wyoming: where suffrage won, 192, 282, 422, 509 Yates, Elizabeth Upham, 21n; and Calif. campaign, 64, 79; at suffrage meeting, 16 Yeats, William Butler, 576n; quoted, 572 York Hotel (London), 298 Yosemite National Park, 535 Young, Brigham, 463, 464n Young, Edward, 484, 485n Young, Virginia Durant Covington, 170, 171n Young Men’s Christian Association Hall (Boston), 110 Zintka, 91, 92n