Anna Howard ShawAnna Howard Shaw
The more Susan talked with Anna, the better she liked her, and the feeling was mutual. This wholesome woman of forty-one, with abundant vitality, unmarried and without pressing family ties to divert her, seemed particularly well fitted to assist Susan in the arduous campaigns which lay ahead. A natural orator, she could in a measure take the place of Mrs. Stanton, who could no longer undertake western tours. Before the International Council adjourned, Susan had Anna's promise that she would lecture for the National Association.
One of Susan's nieces, Lucy E. Anthony, also felt drawn to Anna after meeting her at the International Council. A warm friendship quickly developed and continued throughout their lives. Within a few years they were living together, Lucy serving as Anna's secretary and planning her lecture tours and campaign trips. Educated in Rochester through the help of her aunts, Susan and Mary, living in their home and loving them both, Lucy readily made their interests her own and devoted her life to the suffrage movement. Neither a public speaker nor a campaigner, she put her executive ability to work, and her tasks, though less spectacular,were important and freed both Susan and Anna from many details.
Just as the International Council of Women had broken down Anna Howard Shaw's prejudice regarding Susan B. Anthony and her National Woman Suffrage Association, just so it clarified the opinions of other young women, now aligning themselves with the cause. Admiring the leaders of both factions, these young women saw no reason why the two groups should not work together in one large strong organization, and this seemed increasingly important as they welcomed women from other countries to this first international conference. Unfamiliar with the personal antagonisms and the sincere differences in policy which had caused the separation after the Civil War, they did not understand the difficulties still in the way of union. So strongly, however, did they press for a united front that the leaders of both groups felt themselves swept along toward that goal. Susan herself had long looked forward to the time when all suffragists would again work together, but since the unsuccessful overtures of her group in 1870, she had made no further efforts in that direction. She was completely taken by surprise when in the fall of 1887 the American Association proposed that she and Lucy Stone confer regarding union.
The negotiations revived old arguments in the minds of zealous partisans, and in theWoman's Journal, theWoman's Tribune, and elsewhere, attempts were made to fasten the blame for the twenty-year-old rift upon this one and that one; but so strong ran the tide for union among the younger women that this excursion into the past aroused little interest.
The election of the president of the merged organizations was the most difficult hurdle. Lucy Stone suggested that neither she, Mrs. Stanton, nor Susan allow their names to be proposed, since they had been blamed for the division, but this was easier said than done. The clamor for Susan and Mrs. Stanton was so strong and continuous among the younger members that it soon became apparent that unless one or the other were chosen, there would be no hope of union. The odds were in Susan's favor. Her popularity in the National Association was tremendous. Although Mrs. Stanton was revered as the mother of woman suffrage and admired for her brilliant mind and her poise as presiding officer, she now spent somuch time in Europe with her daughter Harriot that many who might otherwise have voted for her felt that the office should go to Susan, who was always on the job.
Harriot Stanton BlatchHarriot Stanton Blatch
Most of the American Association regarded Susan as safer and less radical than Mrs. Stanton, less likely to stray from the straight path of woman suffrage, and Henry Blackwell recommended her election.
Susan did not want the presidency. She wanted it for Mrs. Stanton, who had headed the National Association so ably for so many years. She pleaded earnestly with the delegates of the National Association: "I will say to every woman who is a National and who has any love for the old Association, or for Susan B. Anthony, that I hope you will not vote for her for president.... Don't you vote for any human being but Mrs. Stanton.... When the division was made 22 years ago it was because our platform was too broad, because Mrs. Stanton was too radical.... And now ... if Mrs. Stanton shall be deposed ... you virtually degrade her.... I want our platform to be kept broad enough for the infidel, theatheist, the Mohammedan, or the Christian.... These are the broad principles I want you to stand upon."[364]
When the two organizations met in February 1890 to effect formal union as the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was elected president by a majority of 41 votes, while Susan was the almost unanimous choice for vice-president at large. With Lucy Stone chosen chairman of the executive committee, Jane Spofford treasurer, and Rachel Foster and Alice Stone Blackwell secretaries,[365]the new organization was well equipped with able leaders for the work ahead. It was dedicated to work for both state and federal woman suffrage amendments and its official organ would be theWoman's Journal.
Susan now faced the future with gratitude that a strong unified organization could be handed down to the younger women who would gradually take over the work she had started, and her confidence in these young women grew day by day. Working closely with Rachel Foster and May Wright Sewall, she knew their caliber. Anna Howard Shaw and Alice Stone Blackwell showed great promise, and Harriot Stanton Blatch was living up to her expectations. In England where Harriot had made her home since her marriage in 1882, she was active in the cause, and on her visits to her mother in New York, she kept in touch with the suffrage movement in the United States. She took part in the union meeting, and in her diary, Susan recorded these words of commendation, "Harriot said but a few words, yet showed herself worthy of her mother and her mother's lifelong friend and co-worker. It was a proud moment for me."[366]
To such she could entrust her beloved cause.
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 woman 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."[367]Susan wanted to start a new trend.
Opposition to Wyoming's woman suffrage provision was strong in Congress in spite of the fact that it had the unanimous approval of Wyoming's constitutional convention. To Susan in 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 woman 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 woman suffrage."[368]After this, the House voted to admit Wyoming, 139 to 127, but the Senate delayed, renewing the attack on the woman suffrage provision. Not until July 1890, 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 woman suffrage in their constitutions.[369]Yet public opinion in both states was friendly, South Dakota directing its first legislature to submit the question to thevoters. It was this that brought Susan to South Dakota in 1890. Sentiment for woman suffrage in South Dakota had previously been created almost entirely by the W.C.T.U., and this had linked woman suffrage and prohibition together. Now, the liquor interests made prohibition an issue in this woman 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 30,000 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 Woman Suffrage and Susan B. Anthony."[370]Both Republicans and Democrats cultivated these foreign-born voters, turning a cold shoulder to the woman suffrage amendment and refusing to endorse it in their state conventions. Even the Farmers' Alliance and the Knights of Labor, previously friendly to woman suffrage, now joined with the Prohibitionists to form a third political party which also failed to endorse the woman 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 woman 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 drouth, 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 $40,000 for an investigating commission.[371]
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 herwords 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.... O, 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 weal or woe to me personally.... I never felt so buoyed up with the love and sympathy and confidence of the good people everywhere...."[372]
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 women of the future, and she fired Anna's soul "with the flame that burned in her own."[373]
Another young western woman, Carrie Chapman Catt, 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. Catt 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 ofher 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 Anthony home, Rochester, New YorkThe Anthony home, Rochester, New York
The visible result of six months of campaigning was defeat, with the vote 22,972 for woman suffrage and 45,632 opposed, and as Susan remembered the maneuvers of the politicians, the trading of votes for the location of the state 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 women much of the lecturing and organizing in the West, and she needed an anchorage, a home of her own from which she could direct the 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 becautious 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 in 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 mail box 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 theDemocrat and Chroniclecalled "a fitting recognition of one of the ablest and best women in the commonwealth."[374]
One of her first acts as trustee was a practical one for the girls."Spent entire day at State Industrial School," she wrote in her diary, "getting the laundry girls—who had always washed for the entire institution by hand and ironed that old way—transferred to the boys' laundry room to use its machinery—am sure it will work well—girls 12 of them delighted."[375]She also taught the boys to patch and darn, and later asked for coeducation.
Susan B. Anthony at her deskSusan B. Anthony at her desk
Susan looked forward to welcoming Mrs. Stanton at 17 Madison Street when she returned to this country in 1891, particularly because she had sold her home in Tenafly after her husband's death, in 1887, and now had no home to go to. Susan hoped that as they again worked together she could persuade Mrs. Stanton to concentrate on more serious writing than the chatty reminiscences she had just published and which Susan felt were "not the greatest" of herself.[376]When she heard that Mrs. Stanton seriously contemplated living in New York with two of her children, she begged her to reconsider, writing, "This is the first time since 1850 that I have anchored myself to any particular spot, and in doing it my constant thought was that you would come here ... and stay for as long, atleast, as we must be together to put your writings into systematic shape to go down to posterity. I have no writings to go down, so my ambition is not for myself, but is for the one by the side of whom I have wrought these forty years, and to get whose speeches before audiences ... has been the delight of my life."[377]
Mrs. Stanton decided to make her home in New York, but first she visited Susan who found her as stimulating as ever and brimful of ideas. They plotted and planned as of old and managed to stir up public opinion on the question of admitting women to the University of Rochester. With women enrolled at the University of Michigan since 1870, and at Cornell since 1872, and with Columbia University yielding at last to women's entreaties by establishing Barnard College in 1889, they felt it their duty to awaken Rochester, and although their agitation produced no immediate results, it did start other women thinking and made news for the press. The cartoons on the subject delighted them both.[378]
Susan soon realized that the writing she had planned for Mrs. Stanton would never be done, for Mrs. Stanton had already made up her mind to write for magazines and newspapers on new and controversial subjects, feeling this was the best contribution she could make to the cause. Susan also found it increasingly difficult to hold her old friend to the straight path of woman suffrage, Mrs. Stanton insisting that too much concentration on this one subject was narrowing and left women unprepared for the intelligent use of the ballot. Women, Mrs. Stanton argued, needed to be stirred up to think, and this they would not do as long as their minds were dominated by the church, which, she believed, had for generations hampered their development by emphasizing their inferiority and subordination. She was determined to analyze and rebel, and Susan could in no way divert her. Completely absorbed in trying to prove that the Bible, accurately translated and interpreted, did not teach the inferiority or the subordination of women, she was writing a book which she calledThe Woman's Bible, chapters of which were already appearing in theWoman's Tribune.
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady StantonSusan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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 interestthen and her frank disapproval asThe Woman's Bibleprogressed 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 head the ever-growing organization which she had built up. This was the last convention which Mrs. Stanton attended, and it was the last for Lucy Stone who died the next year. Susan appreciated the eager young women who now took their places, but she did not yet feel completely at home with them. "Only think," she wrote an old-time colleague, "I shall not have a white-haired woman on the platform with me, and I shall be alone there of all the pioneer workers. Always with the 'old guard' I had perfect confidence that the wise and right thing would be said. What a platform ours then was of self-reliant strong women! I felt sure of you all.... I can not feel quite certain that our younger sisters will be equal to the emergency, yet they are each and all valiant, earnest, and talented, and will soon be left to manage the ship without even me."[379]
In 1892, the year of the presidential election, Susan hopefully attended the national political conventions. Again the Republicans made their proverbial excuses, explaining that they not only faced a formidable opponent in Grover Cleveland but also the threat of a new People's party. The familiar ring of their alibis, which they had repeated since Reconstruction days, made Susan wonder when and if ever the Republicans would feel able to bear the strain of woman suffrage. Their platform remembered the poor, the foreign-born, and male Negroes, but it still ignored women. Yet hope for the future stirred in her heart as she saw at the conventiontwo women serving as delegates from Wyoming. Here was the entering wedge.
The Democrats as usual were silent on woman suffrage, but undismayed by them or by the Prohibitionists, who this year failed to endorse votes for women, Susan moved on to Omaha with Anna Howard Shaw for the first national convention of the new People's party. Here she met representatives of the Farmers' Alliance and the Knights of Labor, both friendly to woman suffrage, and men from other groups, critical of the two major political parties for their failure to solve the pressing economic problems confronting the nation. Susan was sympathetic with many of the aims of the People's party, having seen with her own eyes the plight of debt-burdened, hard-working farmers and having crusaded in her own paper,The Revolution, for the rights of labor and for the control of industrial monopoly. However, she still viewed minor, reform parties with a highly critical eye. The People's party gave her no woman suffrage plank and she found them "quite as oblivious to the underlying principle of justice to women as either of the old parties...."[380]
With the election of Grover Cleveland, whose opposition to woman suffrage was well known, and with the Democrats in the saddle for another four years, Congressional action on the woman suffrage amendment was blocked. Nevertheless, the cause moved ahead in the states; Colorado was to vote on the question in 1893 and Kansas in 1894, and New York was revising its constitution. In addition, the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 offered endless opportunities to bring the subject before the people.
As soon as plans for the World's Fair were under way, Susan began to work indirectly through prominent women in Washington and Chicago for the appointment of women to the board of management. "Lady Managers" were appointed, 115 strong, who proved to be very much alive under the leadership of Mrs. Bertha Honoré Palmer. Susan found Mrs. Palmer almost as determined as she to secure equality of rights for women at the World's Fair, and nothing that she herself might have planned could have been more effective than the series of world congresses in which both men and women took part, or than the World's Congress of Representative Women.
Elizabeth Smith Miller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. AnthonyElizabeth Smith Miller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony
Two of Susan's "girls," as she liked to call them, Rachel Foster Avery[381]and May Wright Sewall, were appointed by Mrs. Palmer to take charge of the World's Congress of Representative Women, and they arranged a meeting of the International Council of Women as a part of this Congress.
Convening soon after the opening of the World's Fair, the Congress of Representative Women drew record crowds at its eighty-one sessions. Twenty-seven countries and 126 organizations were represented. Here Susan, to her joy, heard Negroes, American Indians, and Mormons tell of their progress and their problems, and saw them treated with as much respect as American millionaires, English nobility, or the most virtuous, conservative housewife. Watching these women assemble, talking with them, and listening to their well-delivered speeches, she felt richly rewarded for the lonely work she had undertaken forty years before, when scarcely a woman could be coaxed to a meeting or be persuaded to express her opinions in public. Although only one session of the congress was devoted to the civil and political rights of women, it was gratifying to her that women's need of the ballot was spontaneouslybrought up in meeting after meeting, showing that women, whatever their cause or whatever their organization, were recognizing that only by means of the vote could their reforms be achieved.
Speaking on the subject to which she had dedicated her life, Susan gave credit to the pioneering suffragists for the change which had taken place in public opinion regarding the position of women. She urged women's organizations to give suffrage their wholehearted support and pointed out the great power of some of the newer organizations, such as the W.C.T.U. with its membership of half a million and the young General Federation of Women's Clubs of 40,000 members. Confessing that her own National American Woman Suffrage Association in comparison was poor in numbers and limited in funds, she added, "I would philosophize on the reason why. It is because women have been taught always to work for something else than their own personal freedom; and the hardest thing in the world is to organize women for the one purpose of securing their political liberty and political equality."[382]Even so, the vital woman's rights organizations, she concluded, drew the whole world to them in spirit if not in person.
Her very presence among them without her words, in fact her very presence on the fair grounds, advertised her cause, for in the mind of the public she personified woman suffrage. This tall dignified woman with smooth gray hair, abundant in energy and spontaneous friendliness, was the center of attraction at the World's Congress of Representative Women. In her new black dress of Chinese silk, brightened with blue, and her small black bonnet, trimmed with lace and blue forget-me-nots, she was the perfect picture of everyone's grandmother, and the people took her to their hearts.[383]She was the one woman all wanted to see. Curious crowds jammed the hall and corridors when she was scheduled to speak, and often a policeman had to clear the way for her. At whatever meeting she appeared, the audience at once burst into applause and started calling for her, interrupting the speakers, and were not satisfied until she had mounted the platform so that all could see her and she had said a few words. Then they cheered her. After years of ridicule and unpopularity, she hardly knew what to make of all this, but she accepted it with happiness as a tribute to herbeloved cause. Many who had been critical and wary of her newfangled notions began to reverse their opinions after they saw her and heard her words of good common sense. Even those who still opposed woman suffrage left the World's Fair with a new respect for Susan B. Anthony.
She stayed on in Chicago for much of the summer and fall, for she was in demand as a speaker at several of the world congresses and had five speeches to read for Mrs. Stanton, who felt unable to brave the heat and the crowds. She felt at home in this bustling, rapidly growing city which for so many years had been the halfway station on her lecture and campaign trips through the West. Here she had always found a warm welcome, first from her cousins, the Dickinsons, then from the ever-widening circle of friends she won for her cause. Now she was literally swamped with hospitality.[384]She rejoiced that such great numbers of everyday people were able to enjoy the beauty of the fair grounds and the many interesting exhibits, and when a group of clergymen urged Sunday closing, she took issue with them, declaring that Sunday was the only day on which many were free to attend. Asked by a disapproving clergyman if she would like to have a son of hers attend Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show on Sunday, she promptly and bluntly replied, "Of course I would, and I think he would learn far more there than from the sermons in some churches!"[385]
Hearing of this, Buffalo Bill offered her a box at his popular Wild West Show, and she appeared the next day with twelve of her "girls." Dashing into the arena on his spirited horse while the band played and the spotlight flashed on him, Buffalo Bill rode directly up to Susan's box, reined his horse, and swept off his big western hat to salute her. Quick to respond, she rose and bowed, and beaming with pleasure, waved her handkerchief at him while the immense audience applauded and cheered.
She returned home early in November 1893, with happy memories of the World's Fair and to good news from Colorado. "Telegram ... from Denver—said woman suffrage carried by 5000 majority," she recorded in her diary.[386]This laconic comment in no way expressed the joy in her heart.
Her diaries, written hurriedly in small fine script, year after year, in black-covered notebooks about three inches by six, were abrief terse record of her work and her travels. Only occasionally a line of philosophizing shone out from the mass of routine detail, or an illuminating comment on a friend or a difficult situation, but she never failed to record a family anniversary, a birthday, or a death.
The Colorado victory, referred to so casually in her diary, was actually of great importance to her and her cause, for it carried forward the trend initiated by the admission of Wyoming as a woman suffrage state in 1890. Colorado also proved to her that her "girls" could take over her work. So busy had she been winning good will for the cause at the World's Fair that she had left Colorado in the capable hands of the women of the state and of young efficient Carrie Chapman Catt, to whom she now turned over the supervision of all state campaigns.
Encouragement also came from another part of the world, from New Zealand, where the vote was extended to women. This confirmed her growing conviction that equal citizenship was best understood on the frontier and that in her own country victory would come from the West.
"I am in the midst of as severe a treadmill as I ever experienced, traveling from fifty to one hundred miles every day and speaking five or six nights a week,"[387]Susan wrote a friend in 1894, during the campaign to wrest woman suffrage from the New York constitutional convention. She was now seventy-four years old. Political machines and financial interests were deeply intrenched in New York, and although two governors had recommended that women be represented in the constitutional convention and a bill had been passed making women eligible as delegates, neither Republicans nor Democrats had the slightest intention of allowing women to slip into men's stronghold. It was obvious to Susan that without representation at the convention and without power to enforce their demands, women's only hope was an intensive educational campaign which she now directed with vigor. Whenever she could, she conferred with Mrs. Stanton, whose judgment she valued, and there was zest in working together as they had during the previous constitutional convention in 1867.
The women of New York were aroused as never before. Young able speakers went through the state, piling up signatures on their petitions, but they had few influential friends among the delegates. Anti-suffragists were active, encouraged by Bishop Doane of the Protestant Episcopal church and Mrs. Lyman Abbott, whose name carried the prestige and influence of her husband's popular magazine,The Outlook.
With the election of Joseph Choate of New York as president of the convention, Susan knew that woman suffrage was doomed, for Choate had political aspirations and was not likely to let his sympathies for an unpopular cause jeopardize his chances of becoming governor. While he gave women every opportunity to be heard, at the same time he arranged for the defeat of woman suffrage by appointing men to consider the subject who were definitely opposed, and they submitted an adverse report. Here was a situation similarto that in 1867, when her one-time friend, Horace Greeley, had deserted women for political expediency.
"I am used to defeat every time and know how to pick up and push on for another attack," she wrote as she now turned her attention to Kansas.[388]
The Republicans in Kansas had sponsored school and municipal suffrage for women and had passed a woman suffrage amendment to be referred to the people in 1894. Yet they proved to be as great a disappointment to Susan as they were in 1867, when as a last resort she had been obliged to campaign with the Democrats and George Francis Train.
The population of Kansas had changed with the years, as immigrants from Europe had come into the state, and Susan was again confronted with the powerful opposition of foreign-born voters for whose support the political parties bargained. The liquor interests were also active, and the Republicans, who had brought prohibition to Kansas, now left the question discreetly alone, even making a deal with German Democrats for their votes by promising to ignore in their platform both prohibition and woman suffrage. Prohibition and woman suffrage were synonymous in the minds of voters, because women had generally voted for enforcement in municipal elections, and no matter how hard Susan tried, she found it impossible to have woman suffrage considered on its own merits.
Watching the straws in the wind, she saw Republican supremacy seriously threatened by the new Populist party. Convinced that she could no longer count on help from Kansas Republicans, she turned to the Populist party, ignoring the pleas of Republican women who warned her she would hurt the cause by association with such a radical group. The Populists were generally regarded as the party of social unrest, of a regulated economy, and unsound money, and they were looked upon with suspicion. To many they represented a threat to the American free-enterprise system, and they were blamed for the labor troubles which had flared up in the bloody Homestead strike in the steel mills of Pennsylvania and in the Pullman strike, defying the powerful railroads. Susan was never afraid to side with the underdog, and she could well understand why western farmers, in the hope of relief, were eagerlyflocking into the Populist party when their corn sold for ten cents a bushel and the products they bought were high-priced and their mortgage interest was never lower than 10 per cent.
To the Populist convention, she declared, "I have labored for women's enfranchisement for forty years and I have always said that for the party that endorsed it, whether Republican, Democratic, or Populist, I would wave my handkerchief."[389]
"We want more than the waving of your handkerchief, Miss Anthony," interrupted a delegate, who then asked her, "If the People's party put a woman suffrage plank in its platform, will you go before the voters of this state and tell them that because the People's party has espoused the cause of woman suffrage, it deserves the vote of every one who is a supporter of that cause?"
"I most certainly will," she replied, adding as the audience cheered her wildly, "for I would surely choose to ask votes for the party which stood for the principle of justice to women, though wrong on financial theories, rather than for the party which was sound on questions of money and tariff, and silent on the pending amendment to secure political equality to half of the people."
"I most certainly will" was the phrase which was remembered and was flashed through the country, and as a result, the Republican press and Susan's Republican friends harshly criticized her for taking her stand with the radicals.
Like all political parties, the Populists found it hard to comprehend justice for women, but after a four-hour debate, the convention endorsed the woman suffrage amendment, absolving, however, members who refused to support it. The rank and file rejoiced as if each and every one of them were heart and soul for the cause. They cheered, they waved their canes, they threw their hats high in the air, and then swarmed around Susan and Anna Shaw to shake their hands and welcome them into the Populist party.
With woman 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 suffrage plank.... Here isa party in power which is likely to remain in power, and if it will give its endorsement to our movement, we want it."[390]
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 whisky Democrats.... I never, in my whole forty years work, so utterly repudiated any set of politicians as I do those Republicans of Kansas.... I never was surer of my position that no self-respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party that ignores her political rights."[391]
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 Catt. 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.[392]
California was the next state to demand Susan's attention. A Republican legislature had submitted a woman 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 eighty-six, who had been an unfailing helpduring 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."[393]
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 herWoman's Tribune, adding, "It is so dreadful to get public thought centered on one as ill—as I have had it the last two months."[394]
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 in active exercise escapes the corroding rust of physical and mental laziness, which prematurely cuts off the life of so many women."[395]
Yet she did slow up a little, refusing an offer from the Slayton Lecture Bureau for a series of lectures at $100 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 woman 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 themoment she takes her seat; and away she goes, the picture of untrammeled womanhood."[396]