 Chapter 22 of Susan B. Anthony by Alma Lutz New western states were coming into the Union, north and south Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming, and in Susan's opinion it was highly important that they be admitted as women's suffrage states, for she had not forgotten that disturbing line of the Supreme Court decision in the Virginia Minor case which read, no new state has ever been admitted to the Union which has conferred the right of suffrage on women, and this has never been considered a valid objection to her admission. Opposition to Wyoming's women's suffrage provision was strong in Congress in spite of the fact that it had the unanimous approval of Wyoming's constitutional convention. To Susan and the gallery of the House of Representatives listening anxiously to the debate on the admission of Wyoming, defeat was unthinkable after women had voted in the territory of Wyoming for twenty years. But Democrats, wishing to block the admission of a preponderantly Republican state, used women's suffrage as an excuse. With a sinking heart she heard an amendment offered, limiting suffrage in Wyoming to males. At the crucial moment, however, the tide was turned by a telegram from the Wyoming legislature, the words of which rejoiced Susan, we will remain out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without women's suffrage. After this the House voted to admit Wyoming one hundred thirty-nine to one hundred twenty-seven, but the Senate delayed renewing the attack on the women's suffrage provision. Not until July eighteen ninety, while she was speaking to a large audience in the opera house at Madison, South Dakota, did the good news of the admission of Wyoming reach her. Jubilant, as she commented on this great victory, she spoke as one inspired, for she saw this as the turning point in her forty long years of uphill work. Neither North Dakota nor South Dakota had wanted to risk their chances of statehood by incorporating women's suffrage in their constitutions. Yet public opinion in both states was friendly, South Dakota directing its first legislature to submit the question to the voters. It was this that brought Susan to South Dakota in eighteen ninety. Sentiment for women's suffrage in South Dakota had previously been created almost entirely by the WCTU, and this had linked women's suffrage and prohibition together. Now the liquor interests made prohibition an issue in this women's suffrage campaign, as they rallied their forces for the repeal of prohibition which had been adopted when South Dakota was admitted to statehood. Through the propaganda of the liquor interests, the thirty thousand foreign born voters became formidable opponents, and newly naturalized Russians, Scandinavians, and Poles, given the vote before American women, wore badges carrying the slogan, against women's suffrage and Susan B. Anthony. Both Republicans and Democrats cultivated these foreign born voters, turning a cold shoulder to the women's suffrage amendment and refusing to endorse it in their state conventions. Even the Farmers' Alliance and the Knights of Labor, previously friendly to women's suffrage, now joined with the prohibitionists to form a third political party which also failed to endorse the women's suffrage amendment. On top of all this, anti-suffragists from Massachusetts calling themselves remonstrants flooded South Dakota with their leaflets. It now seemed to Susan as if every clever politician had lined up against women. During these trying days Anna Howard Shaw joined her, and together they covered the state, hoping by the truth and sincerity of their statements to quash the propaganda against women's suffrage. Often they traveled in freight cars as transportation was limited, or drove long distances in wagons over the sun-baked prairie. The heat was intense, and the hot winds, blowing incessantly, seared everything they touched. After two years of drought the Farmers were desperately poor, and Susan, concerned over their plight, wondered why Congress could not have appropriated the money for artesian wells to help these honest earnest people, instead of voting forty thousand dollars for an investigating commission. Occasionally Susan and Anna spent the night in isolated sod-houses where ingenious pioneer women cooked their scant meals over burning chips of buffalo bones gathered on the prairie. Glorying in the valiant spirit of these women, who in loneliness and hardship played an important but unheralded role in the conquest of this new country, Susan was generous with her praise. To them her words of commendation were like a benediction, and few of them ever forgot a visit from Susan B. Anthony. By this time life on the frontier was an old story to her, for she had campaigned under similar conditions in Kansas and in the far west. Nonetheless the hardships were trying. Yet this plucky woman of seventy wrote friends in the East tell everybody that I am perfectly well in body and in mind, never better, and never doing more work. Oh, the lack of modern comforts and conveniences! But I can put up with it better than any of the young folks. I shall push ahead and do my level best to carry this state, come wheel or woe to me personally. I never felt so buoyed up with the love and sympathy and confidence of the good people everywhere. Young vigorous Anna Howard Shaw proved to be a campaigner after Susan's own heart, tireless, uncomplaining and good-tempered, an exceptional speaker witty and quick to say the right word at the right time. It was a joy to find in Anna the same devotion to the cause that she herself felt, the same crusading fervor and reliability. During the long drives over the prairie, she talked to Anna of the work that must be done, of what it would mean to the woman of the future, and she fired Anna's soul with the flame that burned in her own. Another young Western woman, Carrie Chapman Cat, also attracted Susan's attention at this time. She had volunteered for the South Dakota Campaign after attending her first National Woman Suffrage Convention, and Susan, meeting her in Huron, South Dakota, to map out a speaking tour for her, found a tall, handsome, confident young woman ready to attack the work and see it through, in spite of the hardships which confronted her. Carrie Lane, a graduate of Iowa State College, had briefly studied law and taught school before her marriage to Lee Chapman. Now, four years after his death, she had married George W. Cat of Seattle, a promising young engineer and a former fellow student at Iowa State College. What particularly impressed Susan was that Carrie, in spite of her marriage in June, had kept her pledge to come to South Dakota. She was pleased with the way Carrie not only heroically filled every difficult engagement, but sized up the campaign for herself and planned for the future. In Carrie's report of her work there was a ruthless practicality which was rare, and which instantly won Susan's approval. Here was a young woman to watch and to keep in the work. The visible result of six months of campaigning was defeat, with the vote 22,972 for women's suffrage, and 45,632 opposed. And as Susan remembered the maneuvers of the politicians, the trading of votes for the location of the stake capital, and the scheming of the liquor interests, she felt she was championing a lonely cause. From now on Susan hoped to turn over to the younger woman much of the lecturing and organizing in the West, and she needed an anchorage, a home of her own, from which she could direct her work. Her mother had willed 17 Madison Street to Mary, who had rented the first floor, and was living on the second where there was a room for Susan. Now that Susan planned to spend more time at home, and Mary had retired from teaching, they decided to take over the whole house, modernize and redecorate it, and enjoy it the rest of their lives. Mary as usual took charge, but Susan had definite ideas about what should be done. Mary, who had learned to be cautious and frugal, was more willing than Susan to make old furnishings do, but their friends came to the rescue, showering them with gifts. Freshly painted and papered, with new rugs on the floor, lace curtains at the windows, easy chairs and new furniture here and there, the house was all Susan had wished for, and everywhere were familiar touches, such as her mother's spinning wheel by the fireplace and the back parlor. She spent most of her time in her study on the second floor. Here she hung her pictures of the reformers she admired and loved, and right over her desk, looking down at her, was the comforting picture of her dearest friend Mrs. Stanton. Hour after hour she sat at this desk, writing letters, hurriedly dashing off one after another, writing just as the thoughts came, as if she were talking, bothering little with punctuation, using dashes instead, and vigorously underlining words and phrases for emphasis. Instructions to workers in all parts of the country, letters of friendship and sympathy, answers to the many questions which came in every mail, these were signed and sealed, one after another, and slipped into the mailbox when she took a brisk walk before going to bed. She started each day with the morning newspaper, stepping out on the front veranda to pick it up, taking a deep breath of fresh air, and enjoying the green grass and the tall graceful chestnut trees in front of the house. Then sitting down in the back parlor, beside the big table covered with magazines and mail, she carefully read her paper before beginning the work at her desk, for she must keep up to date on the news. Rochester was important to her, it was her city, and she was on hand with her colleagues whenever there was an opportunity for women to express interest in its government, progress, or welfare. Not only did she encourage women to make use of their newly won right to vote in school elections, she also urged municipal suffrage for women. Appealing to the governor to appoint a woman to fill a vacancy on the board of trustees of Rochester's state industrial school, she herself received the appointment, which the Democrat and Chronicle called a fitting recognition of one of the ablest and best women in the Commonwealth. One of her first acts as trustee was a practical one for the girls. Spent entire day at state industrial school, she wrote in her diary, getting the laundry girls, who had always washed for the entire institution by hand, and ironed that old way, transferred to the boy's laundry room to use its machinery. I'm sure it will work well. Girls, twelve of them, delighted. She also taught the boys to patch and darn, and later asked for coeducation. Susan looked forward to welcoming Mrs. Stanton at 17 Madison Street when she returned to this country in 1891, particularly because she had sold her home in Tenefly after her husband's death in 1887, and now had no home to go to. Susan hoped that as they again worked together she could persuade Mrs. Stanton to concentrate on more serious writing than the chatty reminiscences she had just published in which Susan felt were not the greatest of herself. When she heard that Mrs. Stanton seriously contemplated living in New York with two of her children, she begged her to reconsider, writing, This is the first time, since 1850, that I have anchored myself to any particular spot, and in doing it my constant thought was that you would come here, and stay for as long at least as we must be together to put your writings into systematic shape to go down to posterity. I have no writings to go down, so my ambition is not for myself, but is for the one by the side of whom I have wrought these forty years, and to get whose speeches before audiences has been the delight of my life. Mrs. Stanton decided to make her home in New York, but first she visited Susan who found her as stimulating as ever and brimful of ideas. They plotted and planned as of old, and managed to stir up public opinion on the question of admitting women to the University of Rochester, with women enrolled at the University of Michigan since 1870, and at Cornell since 1872, and with Columbia University yielding at last to women's entreaties by establishing Barnard College in 1889. They felt at their duty to awaken Rochester, and although their agitation produced no immediate results, it did start other women thinking, and made news for the press. The cartoons on the subject delighted them both. Susan soon realized that the writing she had planned for Mrs. Stanton would never be done, for Mrs. Stanton had already made up her mind to write for magazines and newspapers on new and controversial subjects, feeling this was the best contribution she could make to the cause. Susan also found it increasingly difficult to hold her old friend to the straight path of women's suffrage. Mrs. Stanton insisting that too much concentration on this one subject was narrowing and left women unprepared for the intelligent use of the ballot. Woman, Mrs. Stanton argued, needed to be stirred up to think, and this they would not do as long as their minds were dominated by the Church, which she believed had for generations hampered their development by emphasizing their inferiority and subordination. She was determined to analyze and rebel, and Susan could in no way divert her. Completely absorbed and trying to prove that the Bible, accurately translated and interpreted, did not teach the inferiority or the subordination of women. She was writing a book which she called the Woman's Bible, chapters of which were already appearing in the Woman's Tribune. Susan was not unsympathetic to Mrs. Stanton's ideas, but she opposed this excursion into religious controversy because she was sure it would stir up futile wrangles among the suffragists, and keep Mrs. Stanton from giving her best to the cause. Her lack of interest then, and her frank disapproval, as the Woman's Bible progressed, were a great disappointment to Mrs. Stanton, and these two old friends began to grow somewhat apart as they took different roads to reach their goal. The one intent on freeing women's minds, the other determined to establish their citizenship, yet their friendship endured. In 1892 Susan reluctantly consented to Mrs. Stanton's retirement as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Mrs. Stanton's request that she be followed by Susan, won unanimous approval, and Anna Howard Shaw was moved up to second place, vice president at large. For forty years Susan had watched Mrs. Stanton preside with a poise, warmth, and skill which few could equal. She knew she would miss her dynamic reassuring presence at the conventions, yet she was obliged to admit to herself that it was more than fitting that she should at last had the ever-growing organization which she had built up. This was the last convention which Mrs. Stanton attended, and it was the last for Lucy Stone, who died the next year. Susan appreciated the eager young woman who now took their places, but she did not yet feel completely at home with them. Only think, she wrote an old-time colleague, I shall not have a white-haired woman on the platform with me, and I shall be alone there of all the pioneer workers. Always with the old guard I had perfect confidence that the wise and right thing would be said. What a platform ours then was of self-reliant, strong woman. I felt sure of you all. I cannot feel quite certain that our younger sisters will be equal to the emergency. Yet they are each and all valiant, earnest, and talented, and will soon be left to manage the ship without even me. In 1892, the year of the presidential election, Susan hopefully attended the national political conventions. Again the Republicans made their proverbial excuses, explaining that they not only faced a formidable opponent in Grover Cleveland, but also the threat of a new people's party. The familiar ring of their alibis, which they had repeated since Reconstruction Days, made Susan wonder when, and if ever, the Republicans would feel able to bear the strain of women's suffrage. Their platform remembered the poor, the foreign-born, and male Negroes, but it still ignored women. Yet hope for the future stirred in her heart, as she saw at the convention two women serving as delegates from Wyoming. Here was the entering wedge. The Democrats as usual were silent on women's suffrage, but undismayed by them, or by the prohibitionists, who this year failed to endorse votes for women, Susan moved on to Omaha with Anna Howard Shaw for the first National Convention of the New People's Party. Here she met representatives of the Farmers' Alliance and the Knights of Labor, both friendly to women's suffrage, and men from other groups critical of the two major political parties for their failure to solve the pressing economic problems confronting the nation. Susan was sympathetic with many of the aims of the People's Party, having seen with her own eyes the plight of debt-burdened, hardworking Farmers, and having crusaded in her own paper the Revolution for the Rights of Labor and for the Control of Industrial Monopoly. However, she still viewed minor, reform parties with a highly critical eye. The People's Party gave her no women's suffrage plank, and she found them quite as obvious to the underlying principle of justice to women as either of the old parties. With the election of Grover Cleveland, whose opposition to women's suffrage was well known, and with the Democrats in the saddle for another four years, congressional action on the women's suffrage amendment was blocked. Nevertheless, the cause moved ahead in the States. Colorado was to vote on the question in 1893, and Kansas in 1894, and New York was revising its constitution. In addition, the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 offered endless opportunities to bring the subject before the people. As soon as plans for the World's Fair were underway, Susan began to work indirectly through prominent women in Washington and Chicago for the appointment of women to the Board of Management. Lady Managers were appointed, 115 strong, who proved to be very much alive under the leadership of Mrs. Bertha Anna-Rae Palmer. Susan found Mrs. Palmer almost as determined as she to secure equality of rights for women at the World's Fair, and nothing that she herself might have planned could have been more effective than the series of World Congresses in which both men and women took part, or than the World's Congress of Representative Women. Two of Susan's girls, as she liked to call them, Rachel Foster Avery and May Wright Sewell were appointed by Mrs. Palmer to take charge of the World's Congress of Representative Women, and they arranged a meeting of the International Council of Women as a part of this Congress. Convening soon after the opening of the World's Fair, the Congress of Representative Women drew record crowds at its 81 sessions. Twenty-seven countries and 126 organizations were represented. Here Susan, to her joy, heard Negroes, American Indians, and Mormons tell of their progress and their problems, and saw them treated with as much respect as American millionaires, English nobility, or the most virtuous conservative housewife. Watching these women assemble, talking with them, and listening to their well-delivered speeches, she felt richly rewarded for the lonely work she had undertaken 40 years before, when scarcely a woman could be coaxed to a meeting, or be persuaded to express her opinions in public. Although only one session of the Congress was devoted to the civil and political rights of women, it was gratifying to her that women's need of the ballot was spontaneously brought up in meeting after meeting, showing that women, whatever their cause or whatever their organization, were recognizing that only by means of the vote could their reforms be achieved. Speaking on the subject to which she had dedicated her life, Susan gave credit to the pioneering suffragists for the change which had taken place in public opinion regarding the position of women. She urged women's organizations to give suffrage their whole-hearted support, and pointed out the great power of some of the newer organizations, such as the WCTU, with its membership of half a million, and the Young General Federation of Women's Clubs of 40,000 members. Confessing that her own National American Women's Suffrage Association in comparison was poor in numbers and limited in funds, she added, I would philosophize on the reason why. It is because women have been taught always to work for something else than their own personal freedom, and the hardest thing in the world is to organize women for the one purpose of securing their political liberty and political equality. Even so, the vital women's rights organizations, she concluded, drew the whole world to them in spirit, if not in person. Her very presence among them, without her words, in fact her very presence on the fairgrounds, advertised her cause. For in the mind of the public she personified women's suffrage. This tall dignified woman with smooth gray hair, abundant in energy and spontaneous friendliness, was the center of attraction at the world's Congress of Representative Women. In her new black dress of Chinese silk, brightened with blue, and her small black bonnet, trimmed with lace and blue forget-me-nots, she was the perfect picture of everyone's grandmother, and the people took her to their hearts. She was the one woman all wanted to see. Curious crowds jammed the hall and corridors when she was scheduled to speak, and often a policeman had to clear the way for her. At whatever meeting she appeared, the audience at once burst into applause and started calling for her, interrupting the speakers, and were not satisfied until she had mounted the platform so that all could see her, and she had said a few words. Then they cheered her. After years of ridicule and unpopularity, she hardly knew what to make of all this, but she accepted it with happiness as a tribute to her beloved cause. Many who had been critical and wary of her new fangled notions began to reverse their opinions after they saw her and heard her words of good common sense. Even those who still opposed women's suffrage left the world's fair with a new respect for Susan B. Anthony. She stayed on in Chicago for much of the summer and fall, for she was in demand as a speaker at several of the world congresses, and had five speeches to read from a sustanton who felt unable to brave the heat and the crowds. She felt at home in this bustling, rapidly growing city, which for so many years had been the halfway station on her lecture and campaign trips through the West. Here she had always found a warm welcome, first from her cousins, the Dickensons, then from the ever-widening circle of friends she won for her cause. Now she was literally swamped with hospitality. She rejoiced that such great numbers of everyday people were able to enjoy the beauty of the fairgrounds and the many interesting exhibits, and when a group of clergymen urged Sunday closing, she took issue with them, declaring that Sunday was the only day on which many were free to attend. Asked by a disapproving clergyman, if she would like to have a son of hers attend Buffalo Bill's Wild West show on Sunday, she promptly and bluntly replied, of course I would, and I think he would learn far more there than from the sermons in some churches. Hearing of this, Buffalo Bill offered her a box at his popular Wild West show, and she appeared the next day with twelve of her girls, dashing into the arena on his spirited horse while the band played and the spotlight flashed on him, Buffalo Bill rode directly up to Susan's box, reigned his horse, and swept off his big western hat to salute her. Quick to respond, she rose and bowed, and beaming with pleasure, waved her handkerchief at him while the immense audience applauded and cheered. She returned home early in November, 1893, with happy memories of the world's fair and to good news from Colorado. Telegram, from Denver, said women's suffrage carried by five thousand majority, she recorded in her diary. This laconic comment in no way expressed the joy in her heart. Her diaries, written hurriedly in small fine script, year after year, in black-covered notebooks about three inches by six, were a brief, terse record of her work and her travels, only occasionally a line of philosophizing shown out from the massive routine detail, or an illuminating comment on a friend or a difficult situation, but she never failed to record a family anniversary, a birthday, or a death. The Colorado victory, referred to so casually in her diary, was actually of great importance to her and her cause, for it carried forward the trend initiated by the admission of Wyoming as a women's suffrage state in 1890. Colorado also proved to her that her girls could take over her work. So busy had she been winning goodwill for the cause at the world's fair, that she had left Colorado in the capable hands of the women of the state, and of young, efficient Carrie Chapman Cat, to whom she now turned over the supervision of all state campaigns. Encouragement also came from another part of the world, from New Zealand, where the vote was extended to women. This confirmed her growing conviction that equal citizenship was best understood on the frontier, and that in her own country victory would come from the West. End of Chapter 22 Chapter 23 of Susan B. Anthony by Alma Lutz This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 23 Liquor interests alert foreign-born voters against women's suffrage. I am in the midst of as severe a treadmill as I ever experienced, traveling from fifty to one hundred miles every day, and speaking five or six nights a week. Susan wrote a friend in 1894, during the campaign to arrest women's suffrage from the New York Constitutional Convention. She was now seventy-four years old. Political machines and financial interests were deeply entrenched in New York, and although two governors had recommended that women be represented in the Constitutional Convention, and a bill had been passed, making women eligible as delegates, neither Republicans nor Democrats had the slightest intention of allowing women to slip into men's stronghold. It was obvious to Susan that without representation at the Convention, and without power to enforce their demands, women's only hope was an intensive educational campaign which she now directed with vigor. Whenever she could, she conferred with Mrs. Stanton, whose judgment she valued, and there was zest in working together as they had during the previous Constitutional Convention in 1867. The women of New York were aroused as never before. Young, able speakers went through the state, piling up signatures on their petitions, but they had few influential friends among the delegates. Anti-suffragists were active, encouraged by Bishop Done of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and Mrs. Lyman Abbott, whose name carried the prestige and influence of her husband's popular magazine, The Outlook. With the election of Joseph Chowate of New York as President of the Convention, Susan knew that women's suffrage was doomed, for Chowate had political aspirations, and was not likely to let his sympathies for an unpopular cause jeopardize his chances of becoming governor. While he gave women every opportunity to be heard, at the same time he arranged for the defeat of women's suffrage by appointing men to consider the subject who were definitely opposed, and they submitted an adverse report. Here was a situation similar to that in 1867, when her one-time friend, Horace Greeley, had deserted women for political expediency. I'm used to defeat every time, and know how to pick up and push on for another attack, she wrote as she now turned her attention to Kansas. The Republicans in Kansas had sponsored school and municipal suffrage for women, and had passed a women's suffrage amendment to be referred to the people in 1894. Yet they proved to be as great a disappointment to Susan as they were in 1867, when as a last resort she had been obliged to campaign with the Democrats and George Francis Train. The population of Kansas had changed with the years, as immigrants from Europe had come into the state, and Susan was again confronted with a powerful opposition of foreign-born voters for who support the political parties bargained. The liquor interests were also active, and the Republicans, who had brought Prohibition to Kansas, now left the question discreetly alone, even making a deal with German Democrats for their votes, by promising to ignore in their platform both Prohibition and Women's Suffrage. Prohibition and Women's Suffrage were synonymous in the minds of voters, because women had generally voted for enforcement in municipal elections, and no matter how hard Susan tried, she found it impossible to have women's suffrage considered on its own merits. Watching the straws in the wind, she saw Republicans' supremacy seriously threatened by the new populist party. Convinced that she could no longer count on help from Kansas Republicans, she turned to the populist party, ignoring the pleas of Republican women who warned her she would hurt the cause by association with such a radical group. The populists were generally regarded as the party of social unrest, of a regulated economy, and unsound money, and they were looked upon with suspicion. To many they represented a threat to the American free enterprise system, and they were blamed for the labor troubles which had flared up in the bloody homestead strike in the steel mills of Pennsylvania and in the Pullman strike defying the powerful railroads. Susan was never afraid to side with the underdog, and she could well understand why Western farmers, in the hope of relief, were eagerly flocking into the populist party, when their corn sold for ten cents a bushel, and the products they bought were high priced, and their mortgage interest was never lower than ten percent. To the populist convention, she declared, I have labored for women's enfranchisement for forty years, and I have always said that for the party that endorsed it, whether Republican, Democratic, or populist, I would waive my handkerchief. We want more than the waving of your handkerchief, Miss Anthony, interrupted a delegate, who then asked her, If the people's party put a women's suffrage plank in its platform, will you go before the voters of this state, and tell them that because the people's party has espoused the cause of women's suffrage, it deserves the vote of everyone who is a supporter of that cause? I most certainly will, she replied, adding as the audience cheered her wildly, for I would surely choose to ask votes for the party which stood for the principle of justice to women, though wrong on financial theories, rather than for the party which was sound on questions of money and tariff, and silent on the pending amendment to secure political equality to half of the people. I most certainly will, was the phrase which was remembered and was flashed through the country. And as a result, the Republican press and Susan's Republican friends harshly criticized her for taking her stand with the radicals. Like all political parties, the populists found it hard to comprehend justice for women, but after a four-hour debate, the convention endorsed the women's suffrage amendment, absolving, however, members who refused to support it. The rank and file rejoiced as if each and every one of them were heart and soul for the cause. They cheered, they waved their canes, they threw their hats high in the air, and then swarmed around Susan and Anna Shaw to shake their hands and welcome them into the populist party. With women's suffrage at last a political issue in Kansas, Susan left the field to her girls. Her homecoming brought reporters to 17 Madison Street for the details about her alignment with the populist party. I didn't go over to the populists, she told them. I have been like a drowning man for a long time, waiting for someone to throw a plank in my direction. I didn't step on the whole platform, but just on the woman's suffrage plank. Here is a party in power, which is likely to remain in power, and if it will give its endorsement to our movement, we want it. This explanation, however, did not satisfy her critics, and as the Republican press circulated false stories about her enthusiasm for the populist party, letters of protest poured in, among them one from Henry Blackwell. To him, she replied, I shall not praise the Republicans of Kansas, or wish or work for their success, when I know by their own confessions to me that the rights of the women of their state have been traded by them in cold blood for the votes of the lager beer foreigners and whiskey Democrats. I never in my whole 40 years of work so utterly repudiated any set of politicians as I do those Republicans of Kansas. I never was sure of my position that no self-respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party that ignores her political rights. The contest in Kansas was close and bitter. Kansas women carried on an able campaign with the help of Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Katt. When Susan returned to the state in October, she not only found that the Democrats had entered the fight with an anti-suffrage plank, but the populists had noticeably lost ground since the Pullman strike riots, the court injunction against the strikers, and the arrest of Eugene V. Debs. Again this prairie state, from which she had hoped so much, refused to extend suffrage to women. Impulsively she recommended a little Patrick Henryism to the women of Kansas, suggesting that they fold their hands and refuse to help men run the churches, the charities, and the reform movements. California was the next state to demand Susan's attention. A Republican legislature had submitted a women's suffrage amendment to be voted on by the people in 1896, and the women of California asked for her help. She toured the state in the spring of 1895 with Anna Howard Shaw, and everywhere she won friends. The continuous travel and speaking, however, taxed her far more than she realized, and soon, after her return to the east, she collapsed. As this news flashed over the wires, letters poured in from her friends, begging her to spare herself. Two of these letters were especially precious. One in bold, vigorous script was from her good comrade, Parker Pillsbury. Now 86, who had been an unfailing help during the most difficult years of her career, and whom she probably trusted more completely than any other man. The other, from her dearest friend, Elizabeth Stanton, read, I never realized how desolate the world would be to me without you, until I heard of your sudden illness. Let me urge you with all the strength I have, and all the love I bear you, to stay at home, and rest, and save your precious self. She now realized that rest was imperative for a time, but it troubled her that people thought of her as old and ill, and she wrote Clara Colby never to mention anyone's illness in her woman's tribune, adding, It is so dreadful to get public thought centered on one as ill, as I have had it for the last two months. She had no intention of retiring from the field. She knew her own strength, and that her life must be one of action. I am able to endure the strain of daily traveling, and lecturing at over three score and ten, she observed, mainly because I have always worked and loved work, as machinery in motion lasts longer than when lying idle, so a body and soul, an active exercise, escapes the corroding rust of physical and mental laziness, which prematurely cuts off the life of so many women. Yet she did slow up a little, refusing an offer from the Slayton Lecture Bureau for a series of lectures at one hundred dollars a night, and she engaged a capable secretary, Emma B. Sweet, to help her with her tremendous correspondence. Dear Rachel had given her a typewriter, and now, instead of dashing off letters at her desk late at night, she learned to dictate them to Mrs. Sweet at regular hours. As requests came in from newspapers and magazines, for her comments on a wide variety of subjects, she answered those that made possible a word on the advancement of women. Bicycling had come into vogue, and women as well as men were taking it up. Some women, even riding their bicycles, in short skirts or bloomers. What did she think of this? If women ride the bicycle or climb mountains, she replied, they should don a costume which will permit them the use of their legs. Of bicycling, she said, I think it has done more to emancipate women than any one thing in the world. I rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives her a feeling of self-reliance and independence the moment she takes her seat, and away she goes, the picture of untrammeled womanhood. Susan returned to California in February 1896. Through the generosity and interest of two young Rochester friends, her Unitarian minister, William C. Gannett, and his wife, Mary Gannett, she was able to take her secretary with her. Making her home in San Francisco with her devoted friend, Ellen Sargent, she at once began to plan speaking tours for herself and her girls, many of whom, including her niece Lucy, had come west to help her. She appealed successfully to Francis Willard to transfer the national WCTU convention to another state, for she was determined to keep the issue of prohibition out of the California campaign. With the press more than friendly, and several San Francisco dailies running women's suffrage departments, she realized the importance of keeping newspapers fed with readable, factual material, and enlisted the aid of a young journalist, Ida Hustead Harper, whom she had met in 1878 while lecturing in Tara Hott, Indiana, and who was in California that winter. When the San Francisco examiner William Randolph Hurst's powerful Democratic paper offered Susan a column on the editorial page, if she would write it and sign it, she dictated her thoughts to Mrs. Harper, who smoothed them out for the column, helping her as Mrs. Stanton had in the past, for writing was still a great hardship. Grateful to Mrs. Harper, she sang her praises. The moment I give the idea, the point, she formulates it into a good sentence, while I should have to haggle over it half an hour. California women had won suffrage planks from Republicans, populists, and prohibitionists, and the prospects looked bright. Rich women came to their aid, Mrs. Leland Stanford, with her railroad fortune, furnishing passes for all the speakers and organizers, and Mrs. Phoebe Hurst contributing one thousand dollars to their campaign. What warmed Susan's heart, however, was the spirit of the rank and file, the seamstresses and washer women paying their two-dollar pledges and twenty-five-cent installments, the poorly clad women bringing in fifty cents or a dollar, which they had saved by going without tea, and the women who had worked all day at their jobs, stopping at headquarters for a package of circulars to fold and address at night. The working women of California made it plain that they wanted to vote. Susan insisted upon carrying out what she called her wild goose chase over the state. People crowded to hear her at farmers' picnics in the mountains, in school houses in small towns, and in pool rooms where chalked up on the blackboard she often found welcome Susan B. Anthony. She was at home everywhere and ready for anything. The men liked her short matter-of-fact speeches and her flashes of wit. Her hopes were high that the friendly people she met would not fail to vote justice to women. She grew apprehensive, however, when the newspapers, pressured by their advertisers, one by one began to ignore women's suffrage. The Liquor Dealers League had been sending letters to hotel owners, grocers, and drugists, as well as to saloons, warning that votes for women would mean prohibition and would threaten their livelihood. Word was spread that if women voted not one glass of beer would be sold in San Francisco. As in Kansas, liquor interests had persuaded naturalized Irish, Germans, and Swedes to oppose women's suffrage, so now in California they appealed to the Chinese. On election day Susan was in San Francisco with Anna Howard Shaw and Ellen Sargent, watching and anxiously waiting for the returns, telling the story of those last tense hours when women's fate hung in the balance, Anna Howard Shaw reported, I shall always remember the picture of Miss Anthony and the wife of Senator Sargent wandering around the polls arm in arm at eleven o'clock at night, their tired faces taking on lines of deeper depression with every minute, for the Count was against us. When the final counts came in we found that we had won the state from the north down to Oakland and from the south up to San Francisco, but there was not sufficient majority to overcome the adverse votes of San Francisco and Oakland. In San Francisco the saloon element and the most aristocratic section made an equal showing against us. Every Chinese vote was against us. In spite of defeat in California Susan had the joy of marking up two more states for women's suffrage in 1896. Utah was granted statehood with a woman's suffrage provision in its constitution and Idaho's favorable vote, though contested in the courts, was upheld by the state supreme court. Now women in Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho and Utah were voters. End of Chapter 23 Chapter 24 of Susan B. Anthony by Alma Lutz This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 24 Aunt Susan and Her Girls The future of the National American Woman's Suffrage Association was much on Susan's mind. This organization which she had conceived and nursed through its struggling infancy had grown in numbers and prestige, and she understood, as no one else could, the importance of leaving it in the right hands so that it could function successfully without her. The young women now in the work, many of them just out of college, were intelligent, efficient and confident, and yet as she compared them with the vivid consecrated women active in the early days of the movement, she observed in her diary, Clarina Nichols, Paulina Davis, Lucy Stone, Francis D. Gage, Lucretia Mott and E. C. Stanton, each without peer among any of our college graduates, young women of today. Even so, she appreciated the young women of today whom she affectionately called her girls or her adopted nieces, but she still held the reins tightly, although they often champed at the bit. Recognizing, however, that she must choose between personal power and progress for her cause, she characteristically chose progress. Quick to appreciate ability and zeal when she saw it, she seldom failed to make use of it. When Carrie Chapman Cat presented a detailed plan for a thorough overhauling of the mechanics of the organization, she gave her approval, remarking dryly, there never yet was a young woman who did not feel that if she had had the management of the work from the beginning, the cause would have been carried long ago. I felt just that way when I was young. On four of her adopted nieces, Rachel Foster Avery, Anna Howard Shaw, Harriet Taylor Upton, and Carrie Chapman Cat, Susan felt that the greater part of her work would fall and be worthily done. Yet she feared that in her enthusiasm for efficient organization they might lose the higher concepts of freedom and justice, which had been the driving force behind her work. Not having learned the lessons of leadership when the cause was unpopular, they lacked the discipline of adversity, which bred in the consecrated reformer the wisdom, tolerance, and vision so necessary for the success of her task. What they did understand far better than the highly individualistic pioneers was the value of teamwork, which grew in importance as the National American Association expanded far beyond the ability of one person to cope with it. Probably first in her affections was Rachel Foster Avery, who had been like a daughter to her since their trip to Europe together in 1883. The confidence she felt in their friendship was always a comfort. Rachel's intelligent approach to problems made her an asset at every meeting, and Susan relied much on her judgment. In Anna Howard Shaw, ten years older than Rachel, Susan had found the hardy campaigner and orator for whom she had longed. Anna expressed a warmth and understanding that most of the younger woman lacked, and best of all she loved the cause as Susan herself loved it. Because of her close friendship with Susan's niece Lucy, she was regarded as one of the family, and whenever possible between lectures she stopped over in Rochester for a good talk with Aunt Susan. Harriet Taylor Upton, of Warren, Ohio, had enlisted in the ranks in the 1880s when her father was a member of Congress. Because of her influence in Washington and Ohio, Harriet was invaluable, and Susan speedily brought her into the official circle of the National American Association as treasurer, even thinking of her as a possible president. Harriet's jovial, irrepressible personality readily won friends, and Susan found her a refreshing and comfortable companion, able to see a bit of humor in almost every situation. When differences of opinion at meetings threatened to get out of hand, Harriet could always be relied on to break the tension with a few witty remarks. Carrie Chapman Cat gave every indication of developing into an outstanding executive. Not another one of Susan's girls could so quickly or so intelligently size up a situation as Carrie. Nor could they so effectively put into action well-thought-out plans. Not as popular a speaker as the more emotional Anna Howard Shaw, she held her audiences by her appeal to their intelligence. Tall, handsome, and well-dressed, she never failed to leave a favorable impression. Only her name irked Susan, and as Susan wrote Clara Colby, if cat it must be, then I insist she should keep her own father's name, Lane, and not her first husband's name, Chapman. But the three C's intrigued Carrie, and she continued to be known as Carrie Chapman Cat. Now living in the East, because her husband's expanding business had brought him to New York, she was easily accessible, and from her beautiful new home at Bensonhurst, a suburb of Brooklyn, she carried on the rapidly growing work of the organization committee until a New York City office became imperative. In Carrie, Susan recognized qualities demanded of a leader at this stage of the campaign, when suffragists must learn to be as keen as politicians and as well organized. Spring is not heralded in Washington by the arrival of the Robin, commented a Washington newspaper, but by the appearance of Miss Anthony's red shawl. Susan was still the dominating figure at the annual women's suffrage conventions. Everyone looked eagerly for the tall, lith, gray-haired woman with a red shawl on her arm or around her shoulders. Once when Susan appeared on the platform with a new white crepe shawl, the reporters immediately registered their displeasure by putting down their pencils. This did not escape her, and always on good terms with the newsmen and informal with her audiences, she called out, boys, what is the matter? Where is the red shawl, one of them asked? No red shawl, no report. Enjoying this little by-play, she sent her niece Lucy back to the hotel for the red shawl. And when Lucy brought it up to the platform and put it about her shoulders, the audience burst into applause for the red shawl, like Susan herself, had become the well-loved symbol of women's suffrage. Susan was convinced that the annual national convention should always be held in Washington where Congress could see and feel the growing strength and influence of the movement. Her girls, on the other hand, wanted to take their conventions to different parts of the country, to widen their influence. Not as certain as Susan that work for a federal amendment must come first, many of them contended that a few more states won for women's suffrage would best help the cause at this time. The Southern women, now active, were firm believers in states' rights and supported state work. Susan's experience had taught her the impracticability of direct appeal to the voters in the states, now that foreign-born men in increasing numbers were arrayed against votes for women. In spite of her arguments and her pleas, the National American Association voted in 1894 to hold conventions in different parts of the country in alternate years. Disappointed, but trying her best graciously to follow the will of the majority, she traveled to Atlanta and to Des Moines for the conventions of 1895 and 1897. Nor did the younger women welcome the messages which Mrs. Stanton, at Susan's insistence, sent to every convention. Susan herself often wished her good friend would stick more closely to women's suffrage instead of introducing extraneous subjects such as educated suffrage, the matriarchate, or woman and the church. But nevertheless she proudly read her papers to successive conventions, insisting that the conventions were too academic, Mrs. Stanton urged Susan to inject more vitality into them by broadening their platform. Susan, however, had come to the conclusion that concentration on women's suffrage was imperative in order to unite all women under one banner and build up numbers which congressmen were bound to respect. With this her girls agreed one hundred percent. While all of them were convinced suffragists, they were divided on other issues and few of them were whole-hearted feminists were Susan and Mrs. Stanton. With the publication of the Women's Bible in 1895, Mrs. Stanton almost upset the apple cart, stirring up heated controversy in the National American Women's Suffrage Association. The Women's Bible was a keen and sometimes biting commentary on passages in the Bible relating to women. It questioned the traditional interpretation which for centuries has fastened the stigma of inferiority upon women and pointed out that the female as well as the male was created in the image of God. To those who regarded every word of the Bible as inspired by God, the Women's Bible was heresy and both the clergy and the press stirred up a storm of protest against it. Suffragists were condemned for compiling a new Bible and were obliged to explain again and again that the Women's Bible expressed Mrs. Stanton's personal views and not those of the movement. Susan regarded the Women's Bible as a futile questionable digression from the straight path of women's suffrage. To Clara Colby, who praised it in her Women's Tribune, she wrote, of all her great speeches, I am always proud, but of her Bible commentaries I am not proud, either of their spirit or letter. I could cry a heap every time I read or think if it would undo them or do anybody or myself or the cause or Mrs. Stanton any good. They are so entirely unlike her former self, so flippant and superficial, but she thinks I have gone over to the enemy, so counts my judgment worth nothing more than that of any narrow-sold body. But I shall love and honor her to the end, whether her Bible please me or not, so I hope she will do for me. She was, however, wholly unprepared for the rebellion staged by her girls at the Washington Convention of 1896, when, led by Rachel Foster Avery, they repudiated the Women's Bible and proposed a resolution declaring that their organization had no connection with it. This was clear proof to Susan that her girls lacked tolerance and wisdom. Listening to the debate, she was heart-sick. Anna Howard Shaw and Mrs. Cat, as well as Alice Stone Blackwell, spoke for the resolution. Only a few raised their voices against it, among them her sister Mary, Clara Colby, Mrs. Blake, and a young woman new to the ranks, Charlotte Perkins Stetson. Susan was presiding, and leaving the chair to express her opinions, she firmly declared, to pass such a resolution is to set back the hands on the dial of reform. We have all sorts of people in the association, and 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. Who is to set up a line? Neither you nor I can tell Mrs. Stanton will come out triumphant, and that this will be the great thing done in women's cause. Lucretia Mott at first thought Mrs. Stanton had injured the cause of women's rights by insisting on the demand for women's suffrage, but she had sense enough not to pass a resolution about it. Are you going to cater to the whims and prejudices of people? she asked them. 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 breath and toleration. You had better organize one woman on a broad platform than ten thousand on a narrow platform of intolerance and bigotry. Her voice tends with emotion, she concluded. This resolution adopted will be a vote of censure upon a woman who is without a peer in intellectual and statesman-like 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. When the resolution was adopted fifty-three to forty, she was so disappointed in her girls and so hurt by their defiance that she was tempted to resign. Hurrying to New York after the convention to talk with Mrs. Stanton, she found her highly indignant and insistent that they both resign from the ungrateful organization which had repudiated the woman to whom it owed its existence. The longer Susan considered taking this step, the less she felt able to make the break. She severely reprimanded Mrs. Cat, Rachel, Harriet Upton, and Anna, telling them they were setting up an inquisition. Finally she wrote Mrs. Stanton, No, my dear, instead of my resigning and leaving those half-fledged chickens without any mother, I think at 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. To a reporter who wanted her views on the woman's Bible, she made it plain that she had no part in writing the book, but added, I think women have just as good a right to interpret and twist the Bible to their own advantage as men have always twisted it and turned it to theirs. It was written by men, and therefore its reference to women reflects the light in which they were regarded in those days. In the same way the history of our revolutionary war was written, in which very little is said of the noble deeds of women, though we know how they stood by and helped the great work. It is so with history all through. For some years Susan's girls had been urging her to write the reminiscences, spurred on by the fact that Mrs. Stanton, Mary Livermore, and Julia Ward Howe were writing theirs. There were also other good reasons for putting her to work at this task. Writing would keep her safely at home and away from the strenuous work in the field which they feared was sapping her strength. It would keep her well occupied so that they could develop the work and the conventions in their own way. Susan put off this task from month to month and from year to year, torn between her desire to leave a true record of her work and her longing to be always in the thick of the suffrage fight. Finally she began looking about for a collaborator, convinced that she herself could never write an interesting line. Ida Houston Harper, with her newspaper experience and her interest in the cause, seemed the logical choice, and in the spring of 1897 she came to 17 Madison Street to work on the biography. The attic had been remodeled for workrooms, and here Susan now spent her days with Mrs. Harper, trying to reconstruct the past. She had definite ideas about how the book should be written, holding up as a model the biography of William Lloyd Garrison recently written by his children. Mrs. Harper always had high standards, and influenced by the formalities of the day, edited Susan's vivid brusque letters, hurriedly written and punctuated with dashes so that they conformed with her own easy but more formal style. To this Susan readily consented, for she always depreciated her own writing ability. On one point, however, she was adamant that her story be told without dwelling upon the disagreements among the old workers. The household was geared to the bog, as they call the biography. Mary, supervising as usual, watched over their meals and the housework with the aid of a young, rosy-cheeked Canadian girl, Anna Dan, who had recently come to work for them, and whom they at once took to their hearts, making her one of the family. Soon another young girl, Genevieve Hawley, from Fort Scott, Kansas, was employed to help with the endless copying, sorting of letters, and pasting of scrapbooks, and with the current correspondence which piled up and diverted Susan from the book. Through 1897 and 1898 they worked at top speed. The life and work of Susan B. Anthony, a story of the evolution of the status of women, in two volumes by Ida Houston Harper, was published by the Bowen Merrill Company of Indianapolis just before Christmas 1898. Happy as a young girl out of school, Susan inscribed copies for her many friends, and eagerly watched for reviews, pleased with the favorable comments in newspapers and magazines throughout this country and Europe. By this time the Cuban rebellion was crowding all other news out of the papers, and Susan followed it closely, for this struggle for freedom instantly won her sympathy. She hoped that Spain under pressure from the United States might be persuaded to give Cuba her independence, but the blowing up of the battleship main, and the war cries of the press, and of a faction in Congress led to the armed intervention in April 1898. Always opposed to war as a means of settling disputes, she wrote Rachel, To think of the mothers of this nation sitting back in silence without even the power of a legal protest, while their sons are taken without a by your leave. Well all through it is barbarous, and I hope you and all our young women will rouse to work as never before, and get the women of the Republic clothed with the power of control of conditions and peace, or when it shall come again, which heaven forbid in war. Not only did she express these sentiments in letters to her friends, but in a public meeting where only patriotic fervor and flag waving were welcome. She dared criticize the unsanitary army camps and the greed and graft which deprived soldiers of wholesome food. There isn't a mother in the land, she declared, who wouldn't know that a shipload of typhoid stricken soldiers would need cots to lie on and fuel to cook with, and that a swamp was not a desirable place in which to pitch a camp. What the government needs at such a time is not alone bacteriologists and army officers, but also women who know how to take care of sick boys and have the common sense to surround them with sanitary conditions. At this her audience, at first hostile, burst into applause. More and more disturbed by the inefficient care of the wounded and the feeding of enlisted men, she wrote Rachel, every day's reports and comments about the war only show the need of women at the front. Not as employees permitted to be there because they begged to be, but thereby right, as managers and dictators in all departments in which women have been trained, those of feeding and caring for in health and nursing the sick. The war over, the problem of governing the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii was of great interest to her, and she at once asked for the enfranchisement of the women of these newly won island possessions. She regarded it as an outrage for the most democratic nation in the world to foist upon them and exclusively masculine government, a male oligarchy, as she called it. I really believe I shall explode, she wrote Clara Colby, if some of you young women don't wake up and raise your voice in protest. I wonder if when I am under the sod or cremated and floating in the air, I shall have to stir you and others up. How can you not be all on fire? The unwillingness of her girls to relate women's suffrage to contemporary public affairs such as this repeatedly disappointed her. Yet she was well aware that the younger generation would never see the work through her eyes or exactly follow her pattern. Disappointed that her national American women's suffrage association did not attract members as did the WCTU or the General Federation of Women's Clubs, she confessed to Clara Colby, it is the disheartening part of my life that so very few women will work for the emancipation of their own half of the race. Watching women flock into these other organizations and contributing to all sorts of charities, she was obliged to admit that very few are capable of seeing that the cause of nine-tenths of all the misfortunes which come to women and to men also lies in the subjection of women, and therefore the important thing is to lay the ax at the root. She also discovered that it was one thing to build up a large organization and another to keep women so busy with pressing work for the cause that they did not find time to expend their energies on the mechanics of organization. Not only did she chafe at the red tape most of them spun, but she often felt that they were too prone to linger and academic by-ways, listening to speeches and holding pleasant conventions. Since the California Campaign of 1896, only one state, Washington, had been roused to vote on a women's suffrage amendment, which was defeated, and only one more state, Delaware, had granted women the right to vote for members of school boards. Again and again she warned her girls that some kind of action on women's suffrage by Congress every year was important. A hearing, a committee report, a debate, or even an unfavorable vote would, she was convinced, do more to stir up the whole nation than all the speakers and organizers that could be sent through the country. Such thoughts as these, relative to the work which was always on her mind, she dashed off to one after another of her young colleagues. Your letters sound like a trumpet blast, wrote Anna Howard Shaw, grateful for her counsel. They read like St. Paul's epistles to the Romans, so strong, so clear, so full of courage. At seventy-eight Susan realized that the time was approaching when she must make up her mind to turn over to a younger woman the presidency of the National American Association, and in the summer of 1898 she announced to her executive committee that she would retire on her eightieth birthday in 1900. End of chapter 24.