Aaron A. SargentAaron A. Sargent
The New YorkTribune, commenting on Susan's militancy, prophesied that it foreshadowed "the new forms of violence and disregard of order which may accompany the participation of women in active partisan politics."[330]
Nor was Congress impressed by Susan's centennial publicity demanding a federal woman suffrage amendment. She had gathered petitions from twenty-six states with 10,000 signatures which were presented to the Senate in 1877. The majority of the Senators found these petitions uproariously funny, and Susan in the visitors' gallery at the time of their presentation was infuriated by the mirth and disrespect of these men. "A few read the petitions as they would any other, with dignity and without comment," reported the popular journalist, Mary Clemmer, in her weekly Washington column, "but the majority seemed intensely conscious of holding something unutterably funny in their hands.... The entire Senate presented the appearance of a laughing school practicing sidesplitting and ear-extended grins." After a few humorous and sarcastic remarks the petitions were referred to the Committee on PublicLands. Only one Senator, Aaron A. Sargent of California, was "man enough and gentleman enough to lift the petitions from this insulting proposition.... He ... demanded for the petition of more than 10,000 women at least the courtesy which would be given any other."[331]
Although his words did not deter the Senators, Susan was proud of this tall vigorous white-haired Californian and grateful for his spontaneous support in this humiliating situation. He had been a trusted friend and counselor ever since she had shared with him and his family the long snowy journey from Nevada in 1872. She looked forward to the time when woman suffrage would have more such advocates in the Congress and when she would find there new faces and a more liberal spirit.
Disappointment only drove Susan into more intensive activity. Between lectures she now nursed her sister Hannah who was critically ill in Daniel's home in Leavenworth. After Hannah's death in May 1877, Susan worked off her grief in Colorado, where the question of votes for women was being referred to the people of the state.
The suffragists in Colorado were headed by Dr. Alida Avery, who had left her post as resident physician at the new woman's college, Vassar, to practice medicine in Denver. Making Dr. Avery's home her headquarters, Susan carried her plea for the ballot to settlements far from the railroads, traveling by stagecoach over rough lonely roads through magnificent scenery. Holding meetings wherever she could, she spoke in schoolhouses, in hotel dining rooms, and even in saloons, when no other place was available, and always she was treated with respect and listened to with interest. Occasionally only a mere handful gathered to hear her, but in Lake City she spoke to an audience of a thousand or more from a dry-goods box on the court-house steps. She was equal to anything, but the mining towns depressed her, for they were swarming with foreigners who had been welcomed as naturalized, enfranchised citizens and who almost to a man opposed extending the vote to women. This precedence of foreign-born men over American women was not only galling to her but menaced, she believed, the growth of American democracy.
Woman suffrage was defeated in Colorado in 1877, two to one.With the Chinese coming into the state in great numbers to work in the mines, the specter that stalked through this campaign was the fear of putting the ballot into the hands of Chinese women.
From Colorado, Susan moved on to Nebraska with a new lecture, "The Homes of Single Women." Although she much preferred to speak on "Woman and the Sixteenth Amendment" or "Bread and the Ballot," she realized that, in order to be assured of return engagements, she must occasionally vary her subjects, but she was unwilling to wander far afield while women's needs still were so great. By means of this new lecture she hoped to dispel the widespread, deeply ingrained fallacy that single women were unwanted helpless creatures wholly dependent upon some male relative for a home and support. Aware that this mistaken estimate was slowly yielding in the face of a changing economic order, she believed she could help lessen its hold by presenting concrete examples of independent self-supporting single women who had proved that marriage was not the only road to security and a home. She told of Alice and Phoebe Cary, whose home in New York City was a rendezvous for writers, artists, musicians, and reformers; of Dr. Clemence Lozier, the friend of women medical students; of Mary L. Booth, well established through her income as editor ofHarper's Bazaar; and of her beloved Lydia Mott, whose home had been a refuge for fugitive slaves and reformers.[332]
In Nebraska, she made a valuable new friend for the cause, Clara Bewick Colby, whose zeal and earnest, intelligent face at once attracted her. Within a few years, Mrs. Colby established in Beatrice, Nebraska, a magazine for women, theWoman's Tribune, which to Susan's joy spoke out for a federal woman suffrage amendment.
Because Susan's contract with the Slayton Lecture Bureau allowed no break in her engagements, she was obliged to leave the Washington convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association in the hands of others in 1878. It was much on her mind as she traveled through Dakota, Minnesota, Missouri, and Kansas, and she sent a check for $100 to help with the expenses of the convention. Particularly on her mind was a federal woman suffrage amendment, for since 1869 when a Sixteenth Amendment enfranchising women had been introduced in Congress and ignored, no further efforts along that line had been made. Now good news came from Mrs. Stanton,who had attended the convention. She had persuaded Senator Sargent to introduce in the Senate, on January 10, 1878, a new draft of a Sixteenth Amendment, following the wording of the Fifteenth. It read, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."[333]
Clara Bewick ColbyClara Bewick Colby
During the next few years the Sixteenth Amendment made little headway, although the complexion of Congress changed, the Democrats breaking the Republicans' hold and winning a substantial majority. Encouraging as was the more liberal spirit of the new Congress and the defeat of several implacable enemies, Susan found California's failure to return Senator Sargent an irreparable loss. In addition she now had to face a newly formed group of anti-suffragists under the leadership of Mrs. Dahlgren, Mrs. Sherman, and Almira Lincoln Phelps, who sang the refrain which Congressmen loved to hear, that women did not want the vote because it would wreck marriage and the home.
Hoping to counteract this adverse influence by increased pressurefor the Sixteenth Amendment, Susan once more appealed for help to the American Woman Suffrage Association through her old friends, William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. Garrison replied that her efforts for a federal amendment were premature and "would bring the movement into needless contempt." This she found strange advice from the man who had fearlessly defied public opinion to crusade against slavery. Wendell Phillips did better, writing, "I think you are on the right track—the best method to agitate the question, and I am with you, though between you and me, I still think the individual States must lead off, and that this reform must advance piecemeal, State by State. But I mean always to help everywhere and everyone."[334]
The American Association continued to follow the state-by-state method, and this holding back aroused Susan to the boiling point, for experience had taught her that in state elections woman suffrage faced the prejudiced opposition of an ever-increasing number of naturalized immigrants, who had little understanding of democratic government or sympathy with the rights of women. A federal amendment, on the other hand, depending for its adoption upon Congress and ratifying legislatures, was in the hands of a far more liberal, intelligent, and preponderantly American group. "We have puttered with State rights for thirty years," she sputtered, "without a foothold except in the territories."[335]
Year by year she continued her Washington conventions, convinced that these gatherings in the national capital could not fail to impress Congressmen with the seriousness of their purpose. As women from many states lobbied for the Sixteenth Amendment, reporting a growing sentiment everywhere for woman suffrage, as they received in the press respectful friendly publicity, Congressmen began to take notice. At the large receptions held at the Riggs House, through the generosity of the proprietors, Jane Spofford and her husband, Congressmen became better acquainted with the suffragists, finding that they were not cranks, as they had supposed, but intelligent women and socially charming.
Mrs. Stanton's poise as presiding officer and the warmth of her personality made her the natural choice for president of the National Woman Suffrage Association through the years. Her popularity, now well established throughout the country after her tenyears of lecturing on the Lyceum circuit, lent prestige to the cause. To Susan, her presence brought strength and the assurance that "the brave and true word" would be spoken.[336]A new office had been created for Susan, that of vice-president at large, and in that capacity she guided, steadied, and prodded her flock.
The subjects which the conventions discussed covered a wide field going far beyond their persistent demands for a federal woman suffrage amendment. Not only did they at this time urge an educational qualification for voters to combat the argument that woman suffrage would increase the ignorant vote, but they also protested the counting of women in the basis of representation so long as they were disfranchised. They criticized the church for barring women from the ministry and from a share in church government. They took up the case of Anna Ella Carroll,[337]who had been denied recognition and a pension for her services to her country during the Civil War, and they urged pensions for all women who had nursed soldiers during the war. They welcomed to their conventions Mormon women from Utah who came to Washington to protest efforts to disfranchise them as a means of discouraging polygamy.
Susan injected international interest into these conventions by reading Alexander Dumas's arguments for woman suffrage, letters from Victor Hugo and English suffragists, and a report by Mrs. Stanton's son, Theodore, now a journalist, of the International Congress in Paris in 1878, which discussed the rights of women. Occasionally foreign-born women, now making new homes for themselves in this country, joined the ranks of the suffragists, and a few of them, like Madam Anneké and Clara Heyman from Germany contributed a great deal through their eloquence and wider perspective. These contacts with the thoughts and aspirations of men and women of other countries led Susan to dream of an international conference of women in the not too distant future.[338]
Recording women's history for future generations was a project that had been in the minds of both Susan and Mrs. Stanton for a long time. Both looked upon women's struggle for a share in government as a potent force in strengthening democracy and one to be emphasized in history. Men had always been the historians and had as a matter of course extolled men's exploits, passing over women's record as negligible. Susan intended to remedy this and she was convinced that if women close to the facts did not record them now, they would be forgotten or misinterpreted by future historians. Already many of the old workers had died, Martha C. Wright, Lydia Mott, whom Susan had nursed in her last illness, Lucretia Mott, and William Lloyd Garrison. There was no time to be lost.[339]
In the spring of 1880, Susan's mother died, and it was no longer necessary for her to fit into her schedule frequent visits in Rochester. Her sister Mary, busy with her teaching, was sharing her home with her two widowed brothers-in-law and two nieces whose education she was supervising.[340]Mrs. Stanton had just given up the strenuous life of a Lyceum lecturer and welcomed work that would keep her at home. Susan, who had managed to save $4,500 out of her lecture fees, felt she could afford to devote at least a year to the history.
She now shipped several boxes of letters, clippings, and documents to the Stanton home in Tenafly, New Jersey.[341]As they planned their book, it soon became obvious that the one volume which they had hoped to finish in a few months would extend to two or three volumes and take many years to write. They called in Matilda Joslyn Gage to help them, and the three of them signed a contract to share the work and the profits.
The history presented a publishing problem as well as a writing ordeal, and Susan, interviewing New York publishers, found the subject had little appeal. Finally, however, she signed a contract with Fowler & Wells under which the authors agreed to pay the cost of composition, stereotyping, and engravings; and as usual she raised the necessary funds.[342]
Matilda Joslyn GageMatilda Joslyn Gage
Returning to Tenafly as to a second home, Susan usually found Mrs. Stanton beaming a welcome from the piazza and Margaret and Harriot running to the gate to meet her. The Stanton children were fond of Susan. It was a comfortable happy household, and Susan, thoroughly enjoying Mrs. Stanton's companionship, attacked the history with vigor. Sitting opposite each other at a big table in the sunny tower room, they spent long hours at work. Susan, thin and wiry, her graying hair neatly smoothed back over her ears, sat up very straight as she rapidly sorted old clippings and letters and outlined chapters, while Mrs. Stanton, stout and placid, her white curls beautifully arranged, wrote steadily and happily, transforming masses of notes into readable easy prose.[343]
Having sent appeals for information to colleagues in all parts of the country, Susan, as the contributions began to come in, struggled to decipher the often almost illegible, handwritten manuscripts, many of them careless and inexact about dates and facts. To their request for data about her, Lucy Stone curtly replied, "I have never kept a diary or any record of my work, and so am unable to furnish you the required dates.... You say 'I' must be referredto in the history you are writing.... I cannot furnish a biographical sketch and trust you will not try to make one. Yours with ceaseless regret that any 'wing' of suffragists should attempt to write the history of the other."[344]
The greater part of the writing fell upon Mrs. Stanton, but Matilda Joslyn Gage contributed the chapters, "Preceding Causes," "Women in Newspapers," and "Women, Church, and State." Susan carefully selected the material and checked the facts. She helped with the copying of the handwritten manuscript and with the proofreading. Believing that pictures of the early workers were almost as important for theHistoryas the subject matter itself, she tried to provide them, but they presented a financial problem with which it was hard to cope, for each engraving cost $100.[345]
When the first volume of theHistory of Woman Suffragecame off the press in May 1881, she proudly and lovingly scanned its 878 pages which told the story of women's progress in the United States up to the Civil War.
She was well aware that theHistorywas not a literary achievement, but the facts were there, as accurate as humanly possible; all the eloquent, stirring speeches were there, a proof of the caliber and high intelligence of the pioneers; and out of the otherwise dull record of meetings, conventions, and petitions, a spirit of independence and zeal for freedom shone forth, highlighted occasionally by dramatic episodes. As Mrs. Stanton so aptly expressed it, "We have furnished the bricks and mortar for some future architect to rear a beautiful edifice."[346]
The distribution of the book was very much on Susan's mind, for she realized that it would not be in great demand because of its cost, bulk, and subject matter. Nor could she at this time present it to libraries, as she wished, for she had already spent her savings on the illustrations. "It ought to be in every school library," she wrote Amelia Bloomer, "where every boy and girl of the nation could see and read and learn what women have done to secure equality of rights and chances for girls and women...."[347]
So much material had been collected while Volume I was in preparation that both Susan and Mrs. Stanton felt they should immediately undertake Volume II. After a summer of lecturing to help finance its publication, Susan returned to Tenafly to the monotonouswork of compilation. "I am just sick to death of it," she wrote her young friend Rachel Foster. "I had rather wash or whitewash or do any possible hard work than sit here and go there digging into the dusty records of the past—that is, rathermakehistory than write it."[348]
Yet she never entirely gave up making history, for she was always planning for the future and Rachel Foster was now her able lieutenant, relieving her of details, doing the spade work for the annual Washington conventions, and arranging for an occasional lecture engagement. Susan would not leave Tenafly for a lecture fee of less than $50.
She took this intelligent young girl to her heart as she had Anna E. Dickinson in the past. Rachel, however, had none of Anna's dramatic temperament or love of the limelight, but in her orderly businesslike way was eager to serve Susan, whom she had admired ever since as a child she had heard her speak for woman suffrage in her mother's drawing room.
While Susan was pondering the ways and means of financing another volume of theHistory, the light broke through in a letter from Wendell Phillips, announcing the astonishing news that she and Lucy Stone had inherited approximately $25,000 each for "the woman's cause" under the will of Eliza Eddy, the daughter of their former benefactor, Francis Jackson. Although the legacy was not paid until 1885 because of litigation, its promise lightened considerably Susan's financial burden and she knew that Volumes II and III were assured. Her gratitude to Eliza Eddy was unbounded, and better still, she read between the lines the good will of Wendell Phillips who had been Eliza Eddy's legal advisor. That he, whom she admired above all men, should after their many differences still regard her as worthy of this trust, meant as much to her as the legacy itself.
In May 1882 she had the satisfaction of seeing the second volume of theHistory of Woman Suffragein print, carrying women's record through 1875. Volume III was not completed until 1885.
Women's response to their own history was a disappointment. Only a few realized its value for the future, among them Mary L. Booth, editor ofHarper's Bazaar. The majority were indifferent and some even critical. When Mrs. Stanton offered the three volumesto the Vassar College library, they were refused.[349]Nevertheless, every time Susan looked at the three large volumes on her shelves, she was happy, for now she was assured that women's struggle for citizenship and freedom would live in print through the years. To libraries in the United States and Europe, she presented well over a thousand copies, grateful that the Eliza Eddy legacy now made this possible.
In 1883, Susan surprised everyone by taking a vacation in Europe. Soon after Volume II of theHistoryhad been completed, Mrs. Stanton had left for Europe with her daughter Harriot.[350]Her letters to Susan reported not only Harriot's marriage to an Englishman, William Henry Blatch, but also encouraging talks with the forward-looking women of England and France whom she hoped to interest in an international organization. Repeatedly she urged Susan to join her, to meet these women, and to rest for a while from her strenuous labors. The possibility of forming an international organization of women was a greater attraction to Susan than Europe itself, and when Rachel Foster suggested that she make the journey with her, she readily consented.
"She goes abroad a republican Queen," observed the Kansas CityJournal, "uncrowned to be sure, but none the less of the blood royal, and we have faith that the noblest men and women of Europe will at once recognize and welcome her as their equal."[351]
In London, Susan met Mrs. Stanton, "her face beaming and her white curls as lovely as ever." Then after talking with English suffragists and her two old friends, William Henry Channing and Ernestine Rose, now living in England, Susan traveled with Rachel through Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and France, where a whole new world opened before her. She thoroughly enjoyed its beauty; yet there was much that distressed her and she found herself far more interested in the people, their customs and living conditions than in the treasures of art. "It is good for our young civilization," she wrote Daniel, "to see and study that of the old world and observe the hopelessness of lifting the masses into freedom and freedom's industry, honesty and integrity. How any American, any lover of our free institutions, based on equality of rights for all, can settle down and live here is more than I can comprehend. Itwill only be by overturning the powers that education and equal chances ever can come to the rank and file. The hope of the world is indeed our republic...." To a friend she reported, "Amidst it all my head and heart turn to our battle for women at home. Here in the old world, with ... its utter blotting out of women as an equal, there is no hope, no possibility of changing her condition; so I look to our own land of equality for men, and partial equality for women, as the only one for hope or work."[352]
Back in London again, she allowed herself a few luxuries, such as an expensive India shawl and more social life than she had had in many a year, and she longed to have Mary enjoy it all with her. She visited suffragists in Scotland and Ireland as well as in England and occasionally spoke at their meetings.[353]Here as in America suffragists differed over the best way to win the vote, and even the most radical among them were more conservative and cautious than American women, but she admired them all and tried to understand the very different problems they faced. Gradually she interested a few of them in an international conference of women, and before she sailed back to America with Mrs. Stanton in November 1883, she had their promise of cooperation.
The newspapers welcomed her home. "Susan B. Anthony is back from Europe," announced the ClevelandLeader, "and is here for a winter's fight on behalf of woman suffrage. She seems remarkably well, and has gained fifteen pounds since she left last spring. She is sixty-three, but looks just the same as twenty years ago. There is perhaps an extra wrinkle in her face, a little more silver in her hair, but her blue eyes are just as bright, her mouth as serious and her step as active as when she was forty. She would attract attention in any crowd."[354]
Susan came back to an indifferent Congress. "All would fall flat and dead if someone were not here to keep them in mind of their duty to us," she wrote a friend at this time, and to her diary she confided, "It is perfectly disheartening that no member feels any especial interest or earnest determination in pushing this question of woman suffrage, to all men only a side issue."[355]
"My heart almost stands still. I hope against hope, but still I hope," Susan wrote in her diary in 1885, as she waited for news from Oregon Territory regarding the vote of the people on a woman suffrage amendment.[356]Woman suffrage was defeated in Oregon; and in Washington Territory, where in 1883 it had carried, a contest was being waged in the courts to invalidate it. In Nebraska it had also been defeated in 1882. Since the victories in Wyoming and Utah in 1869 and 1870, not another state or territory had written woman suffrage into law.
In spite of these setbacks, Susan still saw great promise in the West and resumed her lecturing there. She knew the rapidly growing young western states and territories as few easterners did, and she understood their people. Here women were making themselves indispensable as teachers, and state universities, now open to them, graduated over two thousand women a year. The Farmers' Alliance, the Grange, and the Prohibition party, all distinctly western in origin, admitted women to membership and were friendly to woman suffrage. School suffrage had been won in twelve western states as against five in the East, and Kansas women were now voting in municipal elections. In a sense, woman suffrage was becoming respectable in the West, and a woman was no longer ostracized by her friends for working with Susan B. Anthony.
Still critical of her own speaking, Susan was often discouraged over her lectures, but her vitality, her naturalness, and her flashes of wit seldom failed to win over her audiences. Her nephew, Daniel Jr., a student at the University of Michigan, hearing her speak, wrote his parents, "At the beginning of her lecture, Aunt Susan does not do so well; but when she is in the midst of her argument and all her energies brought into play, I think she is a very powerful speaker."[357]
On these trips through the West, she kept in close touch with her brothers Daniel and Merritt in Kansas, frequently visiting in their homes and taking her numerous nieces to Rochester. Shevalued Daniel's judgment highly, and he, well-to-do and influential, was a great help to her in many ways, investing her savings and furnishing her with railroad passes which greatly reduced her ever-increasing traveling expenses.
Everywhere she met active zealous members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Since the Civil War, temperance had become a vigorous movement in the Middle West, doing its utmost to counteract the influence of the many large new breweries and saloons. Through the Prohibition party, organized on a national basis in 1872, temperance was now a political issue in Kansas, Iowa, and the Territory of Dakota, and through the W.C.T.U. women waged an effective total-abstinence campaign. Brought into the suffrage movement by Frances Willard under the slogan, "For God and Home and Country," these women quickly sensed the value of their votes to the temperance cause. Nor was Susan slow to recognize their importance to her and her work, for they represented an entirely new group, churchwomen, who heretofore had been suspicious of and hostile toward woman's rights. Through them, she anticipated a powerful impetus for her cause.
With admiration she had watched Frances Willard's career.[358]This vivid consecrated young woman was a born leader, quick to understand woman's need of the vote and eager to lead women forward. It was a disappointment, however, when she joined the American rather than the National Woman Suffrage Association. The reasons for this, Susan readily understood, were Frances Willard's warm friendship with Mary Livermore and her own preference for the American's state-by-state method, similar to that she had so successfully followed in her W.C.T.U. Yet Frances Willard, whenever she could, cooperated with Susan whom she admired and loved; and through the years these two great leaders valued and respected each other, even though they frequently differed over policy and method.
Susan, for example, was often troubled because women suffrage and temperance were more and more linked together in the public mind, thus confusing the issues and arousing the hostility of those who might have been friendly toward woman suffrage had they not feared that women's votes would bring in prohibition. She did her best to make it clear to her audiences that she did not ask for the ballot in order that women might vote against saloons andfor prohibition. She demanded only that women have the same right as men to express their opinions at the polls. Such an attitude was hard for many temperance women to understand and to forgive.
Over women's support of specific political parties, Susan and Frances Willard were never able to agree. Susan had never been willing to ally herself with a minority party. Therefore, to Frances Willard's disappointment, she withheld her support from the Prohibition party in 1880, although their platform acknowledged woman's need of the ballot and directed them to use it to settle the liquor question, and in 1884 when they recommended state suffrage for women. Finding women eager to support the Prohibitionists in gratitude for these inadequate planks, Susan even issued a statement urging them to support the Republicans, who held out the most hope to them even if woman suffrage had not been mentioned in their platform. Her experience in Washington had proved to her the friendliness and loyalty of individual Republicans, and she was unwilling to jeopardize their support.
Her judgment was confirmed during the next few years when friendly Republicans spoke for woman suffrage in the Senate, and when in 1887 the woman suffrage amendment was debated and voted on in the Senate. In the Senate gallery eagerly listening, Susan took notice that the sixteen votes cast for the amendment were those of Republicans.[359]
Still hoping to win Susan's endorsement of the Prohibition party in 1888, Frances Willard asked her to outline what kind of plank would satisfy her.
"Do you mean so satisfy me," Susan replied, "that I would work, and recommend to all women to work ... for the success of the third party ticket?... Not until a third party gets into power ... which promises a larger per cent of representatives, on the floor of Congress, and in the several State legislatures, who will speak and vote for women's enfranchisement, than does the Republican, shall I work for it. You see, as yet there is not a single Prohibitionist in Congress while there are at least twenty Republicans on the floor of the United States Senate, besides fully one-half of the members of the House of Representatives who are in favor of woman suffrage.... I do not propose to work for the defeat of the party which thus far has furnished nearly every vote in that direction."[360]
Nor was she lured away when, in 1888, the Prohibition party endorsed woman suffrage and granted Frances Willard the honor of addressing its convention and serving on the resolutions committee.
The temperance issue also cropped up in the annual Washington conventions of the National Woman Suffrage Association, preparations for which Susan now left to Rachel Foster, May Wright Sewall, a capable young recruit from Indiana, and Jane Spofford. However, she still supervised these conventions, prodding and interfering, in what she called her most Andrew Jackson-like manner. She always returned to Washington with excitement and pleasure, and with the hope of some outstanding victory, and the suite at the Riggs House, given her by generous Jane Spofford, was a delight after months of hard travel in the West. "I shall come both ragged and dirty," she wrote Mrs. Spofford in 1887. "Though the apparel will be tattered and torn, the mind, the essence of me, is sound to the core. Please tell the little milliner to have a bonnet picked out for me, and get a dressmaker who will patch me together so that I shall be presentable."[361]
Open to all women irrespective of race or creed, the National Woman Suffrage Association attracted fearless independent devoted members. They welcomed Mormon women into the fold, and when the bill to disfranchise Mormon women as a punishment for polygamy was before Congress in 1887, they did their utmost to help Mormon women retain the vote, but were defeated.
They welcomed as well many temperance advocates. A few delegates, however, among them Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Gage, and Mrs. Colby, scorned what they called the "singing and praying" temperance group and protested that temperance and religion were getting too strong a hold on the organization. Abigail Duniway from Oregon contended that suffragists should not join forces with temperance groups and blamed the defeat of woman suffrage in Oregon, Idaho, and Washington, in 1887, on men's fear that women would vote for prohibition.
Often Susan was obliged to act as arbiter between the temperance and nontemperance groups. She did not underestimate the momentum which the well-organized W.C.T.U. had already given the suffrage cause, particularly in states where the National Associationhad only a few and scattered workers. She needed and wanted the help of these temperance women and of Frances Willard's forceful and winning personality. She also saw the importance of breaking down with Frances Willard's aid the slow-yielding opposition of the church.
Occasionally enthusiastic workers undertook projects which to her seemed unwise. She told them frankly how she felt and left it at that, but most of them had to learn by experience. When Belva Lockwood, one of her most able colleagues in Washington, accepted the nomination for President of the United States, offered her by the women of California in 1884 and by the women of Iowa in 1888 through their Equal Rights party, she did not lend her support or that of the National Association, but followed her consistent policy of no alignment with a minority party. Nevertheless, she heartily believed in women's right and ability to hold the highest office in the land.
Ever since her trip to Europe in 1883, Susan had been planning for an international gathering of women. Interest in this project was kept alive among European women by Mrs. Stanton during her frequent visits with her daughter Harriot in England and her son Theodore in France. It was Susan, however, who put the machinery in motion through the National Woman Suffrage Association and issued a call for an international conference in Washington, in March 1888, to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the first woman's rights convention. Ten thousand invitations were sent out to organizations of women in all parts of the world, to professional, business, and reform groups as well as to those advocating political and civil rights for women, and an ambitious program was prepared. Most of the work for the conference and the raising of $13,000 to finance it fell upon the shoulders of Susan, Rachel Foster, and May Wright Sewall, but they also had the enthusiastic cooperation of Frances Willard, who, with her nation-wide contacts, was of inestimable value in arousing interest among the many and varied women's organizations and the labor groups. Another happy development was Clara Colby's decision to publish herWoman's Tribunein Washington during the conference. Mrs. Colby'sTribune, established in Beatrice, Nebraska, in 1883, hadsince then met in a measure Susan's need for a paper for the National Association and she welcomed its transfer to Washington.[362]
Women from all parts of the world assembled in Albaugh's Opera House in Washington for the epoch-making international conference which opened on Sunday, March 25, 1888, with religious services conducted entirely by women, as if to prove to the world that women in the pulpit were appropriate and adequate. Fifty-three national organizations sent representatives, and delegates came from England, France, Norway, Denmark, Finland, India, and Canada.
Presiding over all sixteen sessions, Susan rejoiced over a record attendance. Her thoughts went back to the winter of 1854 when she and Ernestine Rose had held their first woman's rights meetings in Washington, finding only a handful ready to listen. The intervening thirty-four years had worked wonders. Now women were willing to travel not only across the continent but from Europe and Asia to discuss and demand equal educational advantages, equal opportunities for training in the professions and in business, equal pay for equal work, equal suffrage, and the same standard of morals for all. Aware of their responsibility to their countries, they asked for the tools, education and the franchise, to help solve the world's problems. They were listened to with interest and respect, and were received at the White House by President and Mrs. Cleveland.
Through it all, a dynamic, gray-haired woman in a black silk dress with a red shawl about her shoulders was without question the heroine of the occasion. "This lady," observed the BaltimoreSun, "daily grows upon all present; the woman suffragists love her for her good works, the audience for her brightness and wit, and the multitude of press representatives for her frank, plain, open, business-like way of doing everything connected with the council.... Her word is the parliamentary law of the meeting. Whatever she says is done without murmur or dissent."[363]
A permanent International Council of Women to meet once every five years was organized with Millicent Garrett Fawcett of England as president, and a National Council to meet every three years was formed as an affiliate with Frances Willard as president and Susan as vice-president at large. Emphasizing education and social and moral reform, the International Council did not rank suffragefirst as Susan had hoped. Nevertheless, she was happy that an international movement of enterprising women was well on its way. They would learn by experience.
Of all the favorable results of the International Council of Women, two were of special importance to Susan, meeting Anna Howard Shaw and overtures from Lucy Stone for a union of the National and American Woman Suffrage Associations.
Prejudiced against Anna Howard Shaw, who had aligned herself with Mary Livermore and Lucy Stone, and who she assumed, was a narrow Methodist minister, Susan was unprepared to find that the pleasing young woman in the pulpit on the first day of the conference, holding her audience spellbound with her oratory, was Anna Howard Shaw. Here was a warm personality, a crusader eager to right human wrongs, and above all a matchless public speaker. Anna too had heard much criticism of Susan and had formed a distorted opinion of her which was quickly dispelled as she watched her preside. They liked each other the moment they met.
Anna Howard Shaw had grown up on the Michigan frontier, her indomitable spirit and her eagerness for learning conquering the hardships and the limitations of her surroundings. Encouraged by Mary Livermore, who by chance lectured in her little town, she worked her way through Albion College and Boston University Theological School, from which she graduated in 1878. She then served as the pastor of two Cape Cod churches, but was refused ordination by the Methodist Episcopal church because of her sex. Eventually she was ordained by the Methodist Protestant church. During her pastorate, she studied medicine at Boston University, and because of her ability as a speaker was in demand as a lecturer for temperance and woman suffrage groups. Through the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, she met an inspiring group of reformers, and their influence and that of Frances Willard, in whose work she was intensely interested, led her to leave the ministry for active work in the temperance and woman suffrage movements. After several years as a lecturer and organizer for the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, she was placed at the head of the franchise department of the W.C.T.U. This was her work when she met Susan B. Anthony.