1 MISS ANTHONY
10 LUCRETIA MOTT “In the true marriage relation, the independence of the husband & wife is equal, their dependence mutual and their obligations reciprocal.”
2 SCHOOL DAYS
17 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “My heart was filled with grief and honest indignation, thus to see the minority of the Convention, simply because they were men, presuming that in them, was rooted all wisdom and knowledge … And what was most humiliating of all was to look into the faces of those women and see that by far the larger proportion were perfectly satisfied with the position assigned them.”
20 “The local newspaper wrote, “whatever the school-masters might think of Miss Anthony, it was evident that she hit the nail on the head.” But many of the women were shocked, some later remarking, “I was actually ashamed of my sex” or “I felt so mortified I really wished the floor would open and swallow me up” or “Who can that creature be?” “She must be a dreadful woman to get up that way and speak in public.” One woman understood exactly what had happened: “I was so mad at those three men making such a parade to shake hands with her; that will just encourage her to speak again.”
3 OH SLAVERY, HATEFUL THING
32 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “This noon I ate my dinner without once asking myself, are these human beings who minister to my wants Slaves who can be bought & sold & hired out at the will of a master? And when the thought first entered my mind, I said, even I am getting accustomed to Slavery, so much so that I have ceased continually to be made to feel its blighting, cursing influence, so much so that I can sit down and calmly eat from the hands of the bondsman, without being once mindful of the fact that he is such— Oh Slavery, hateful thing that thou art, thus to blunt the keen edge of mens conscience, even while they strive to shun thy poisonous touch.” —Diary, 1854
34 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “Great care has been taken, ever since the war began, to keep the negro and slavery out of sight and hearing. But my position has ever been, that instead of suppressing the real cause of the war, it should have been proclaimed, not only by the people, but by the President, Congress, Cabinet, and every military commander. And when the Government, military and civil, and the people, acknowledged slavery to be the cause of the war, they should have simultaneously, one and all, decreed its total overthrow. Instead of President Lincoln’s waiting two long years before calling into the field and to the side of the Government the four millions of allies whom we have had within the territory of rebeldom, it was the first duty of the first decree he sent forth. Every hour’s delay has been a sin and a shame registered against him, and every life sacrificed … to the proclamation that called the slave to freedom and to arms, was nothing less than downright murder by the Government. … We talked about returning to the old Union—“the Union as it was,” and “the Constitution as it is”—about “restoring our country to peace and prosperity—to the blessed conditions that existed before the war!” I ask you what sort of peace, what sort of prosperity, have we had? Since the first slave-ship sailed up the James River with its human cargo, and there, on the soil of the Old Dominion, it was sold to the highest bidder, we have had nothing but war.” —Speech, 1863
35 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “By the Constitution as it is—that is, as it has been interpreted and executed from the beginning—the North has stood pledged to protect slavery in the States where it existed. We have been bound, in case of slave insurrections, to go to the aid, not of those struggling for liberty, but of the oppressors.” —Speech, 1863
39 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “I see your speech is not The New Republic—is not Woman—but only the black man, whom, as I told you they would—The Republicans have thrown overboard […] How do the Republicans expect women & Negroes to work for them” —Letter, 1867
39 FREDRICK DOUGLASS “I do not see how any one can pretend that there is the same urgency in giving the ballot to woman as to the negro. With us, the matter is a question of life and death” —Debate, 1869
43 – 44 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “When men deliberately refused to include women in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the national constitution they left the way open for all forms of injustice to other and weaker men and peoples. Men who fail to be just to their mothers cannot be expected to be just to each other. The whole evil comes from the failure to apply equal justice to all mankind, male and female alike” —Letter read during mass meeting, 1903
4 WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?
48 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.” —Remarks, 1860
48 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “it is only through a wholesome discontent with things as they are, that we ever try to make them any better.” —Letter, 1883
55 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “it is very precious to the soul of man that he shall reign Supreme in intellect—and it will take Centuries if not ages to disposses him of the fancy that he is born to do so.” —Letter, 1857
57 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “From time immemorial the rule has been not to punish the male offender, but to get the victim out of his way. If a little girl is bullied and abused by a little boy while out in the yard at play the girl is taken into the house while the boy is left in full possession of the yard. If women are insulted on the street at night the authorities, instead of making the streets safe for them, insist that they remain indoors.” —Article, 1896
5 THE CAUSE
66 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “no right solution of any great question can be reached until the whole people have a voice in it—I give all of myself to the getting the whole people inside the body politic, so as to be able to begin making even the first equation of any of the problems.” —Letter, 1894
67 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “It is illogical and unphilosophical to complain of the conduct of men who are acting the will of the people who have elected them to the office they hold. All questions of reform of any kind are settled at the ballot box.” —Speech, 1897
6 GENERAL ANTHONY
74 NAPOLEON “Watch your enemy. Learn what he wants you not to do and do it.”
79 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “Men have exercised practically the full and limited franchise for a hundred years, and they have made politics so filthy, according to their statement, not ours, that they are not willing for any decent woman to enter. Is this a confession of success or failure? If women were willing to wait another century, can men give us any assurance that they will have this pool purified?” —Letter, 1883
8 THE YEARS OF THE WOMEN
95 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “Nobody ever gets anything done by Congress or by a State Legislature except by having some one on hand to look out for it. We need a Watching Committee.” —Speech to NAWSA, 1900
9 A FINE AGITATION
111 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “it is urged, the use of the masculine pronouns he, his, and him, in all the constitution and laws, is proof that only men were meant to be included in their provisions. If you insist on this version of the letter of the law, we shall insist that you be consistent, and accept the other horn of the dilemma, which would compel you to exempt women from taxation for the support of the government, and from penalties for the violations of laws.” —Speech, 1873
11 THE SPEAKERESS
137 – 138 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “disenfranchisement is not only political degradation, but also moral, social, educational and industrial degradation […] Wherever, on the face of the globe or on the page of history, you show me a disfranchised class, I will show you a degraded class of labor. … You remember the old adage, “Beggars must not be choosers;” they must take what they can get or nothing! That is exactly the position of women in the world of work today; they can not choose. If they could, do you for a moment believe they would take the subordinate places and the inferior pay? Nor it is a “new thing under the sun” for the disfranchised, the inferior classes weighed down with wrongs, to declare they “do not want to vote.” The rank and file are not philosophers, they are not educated to think for themselves, but simply to accept, unquestioned, whatever comes. Years ago in England when the workingmen, starving in the mines and factories, gathered in mobs and took bread wherever they could get it, their friends tried to educate them into a knowledge of the causes of their poverty and degradation. At one of these “monster bread meetings,” held in Manchester, John Bright said to them, “Workingmen, what you need to bring to you cheap bread and plenty of it, is the franchise;” but those ignorant men shouted back to Mr. Bright, precisely as the women of America do to us today, “It is not the vote we want, it is bread;” and they broke up the meeting, refusing to allow him, their best friend, to explain to them the powers of the franchise.”
139 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “There never was, there never can be a monopoly so fraught with injustice, tyranny and degradation as this monopoly of sex, of all men over all women.”
139 ABRAHAM LINCOLN “No man is good enough to govern another man without his consent”
12 THE ENEMY
142 GROVER CLEVELAND “To those of us who … cling to our faith in the saving grace of simple and unadulterated womanhood, any discontent on the part of woman with her ordained lot, or a restless desire on her part to be and to do something not within the sphere of her appointed ministrations, cannot appear otherwise than as perversions of a gift of God to the human race.” —Article, 1905
144 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “Mr. Cleveland remarks that the “hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.” That would be all right if you could keep the boys in the cradle always.” —Interview, 1905
145 – 146 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “We received a very unfavorable opinion of this Miss Anthony when she performed in this city on a former occasion, but we confess that after listening attentively to her discourse last evening, we were inexpressibly disgusted with the impudence and impiety evinced in her lecture. Personally repulsive, she seems to be laboring under feelings of strong hatred towards male men, the effect, we presume, of jealousy and neglect. … With a degree of impiety which was both startling and disgusting, this shrewish maiden counseled the numerous wives and mothers present to separate from their husbands whenever they become intemperate, and particularly not to allow the said husbands to add another child to the family; (probably no married advocate of Women’s Rights would have made this remark.) Think of such advice given in public by one who claims to be a maiden lady.” —Utica (N.Y.) Evening Telegraph, 1853
150 SENATOR GEORGE WILLIAMS “Women in this country, by their elevated social position, can exercise more influence upon public affairs than they could coerce by the use of the ballot.” —1866
150 SENATOR THOMAS F. BAYARD “You will no longer have that healthful and necessary subordination of wife to husband.” —1874
153 DEMOCRATIC PARTY “We oppose woman suffrage as tending to destroy the home and family, the true basis of political safety, and express the hope that the helpmeet and guardian of the family sanctuary may not be dragged from the modest purity of self-imposed seclusion to be thrown unwillingly into the unfeminine places of political strife.” —Resolution, 1894
13 GENTLEMEN, TAKE NOTICE
158 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “Vice and dissipation have already begun to tell upon the men. Hence we see, year by year, the physical and intellectual plane of women advancing. Look at the men and women passing in the crowded streets, and note the ever increasing proportion of well-formed, vigorous women—single women—women taller and more athletic than their male escorts. Observe the puny appearance of so many of the men. Man is going backward as an animal.” —Interview, 1903 ORLY?
161 SENATOR THOMAS W. PALMER “Life like insurance and the man who carried the first umbrella, the inception of this movement was greeted with derision. Born of an apparently hopeless revolt against unjust discrimination, unequal statutes, and cruel construction of courts, it has pressed on and over ridicule, malice, indifference, and conservatism” —Speech in Senate, 1885
15 WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE…
180 “To [Anthony’s] eternal frustration, most women did not want the right to vote, and their opposition—or at best, apathy—was a major obstacle in the path of the suffragists.”
185 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “In the class of those who oppose their own freedom as a result of ignorance, there are many who pass for highly educated and intelligent women. […] When a so-called educated woman is … found protesting against the enfranchisement of her sex, she will invariably be found to be a shallow and thoroughly selfish woman. There are, unhappily, millions of such women in this republic. They are usually the richer women, clothed in purple and fine linen, and who clasp their jeweled fingers complacently over silken robes, simpering, “I have all the rights I want, so long as I have my present privileges.”” —Article, 1894
186 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “[T]his great national suffrage movement that has made this immense revolution in this country … probably represents a smaller number of women, and especially represents a smaller amount of money to carry on its work than any organization under the shadow of the American flag.” —Speech, 1893
187 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “It is the disheartening part of all my life work—that so very few women will work for the emancipation of their own half of the race!” —Letter, 1894
16 DRESSING FOR SUCCESS
195 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “to be successful a person must attempt but one reform. By urging two, both are injured, as the average mind can grasp and assimilate but one idea at a time. I have felt ever since that experience that if I wished my hearers to consider the suffrage question I must not present the temperance, the religious, the dress, or any other besides, but must confine myself to suffrage.” —Remarks, date unknown
17 PUBLISH OR PERISH
199 “George Frances Train, a flamboyant and wealthy Democrat, offered to finance the newspaper [Anthony had] dreamed about to advocate suffrage. Although Train was condemned by many as a racist, Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, smarting from their betrayal by those who insisted that black men should get the vote first, refused to abandon this loyalist to their Cause. His money and dedication were welcome.”
204 ALEXANDER HAMILTON “Give to a man the right over my subsistence and he has power over my whole moral being.”
205 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “I would have them put in the background. I wouldn’t have a whole page blistered over with murders and criminal assaults and thefts. That sort of thing is doing more now than anything else to demoralize. […] I would not report murder or a theft any more than a news item. Why should an act of this kind be reported more than an act of an honest man?” —Interview, 1893
210 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “I have noticed that women especially gifted in one respect can never make a living. We want fewer extreme characters and ones more on the level. All abilities should be cultivated, or we lose them, and we are poor creatures when left with but one.” —Interview, 1896
18 CURRENT AFFAIRS
215 “Of all her ventures into the seedy underworld, nothing invited so much scorn as Susan B. Anthony’s lecture in support of a prostitute named Laura D. Fair. When Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton arrived for their California suffrage campaign in July 1871, one of their first stops in San Francisco was at a cold, dank cell with an iron-barred window in the county jail. There they visited Fair, who had been tried and convicted of shooting to death her lover, Alexander Crittenden, a prominent local attorney. According to reports, Fair had taken out her pistol when Crittenden abandoned her, pulling the trigger in broad daylight in front of his wife and children. Now she was scheduled to be hanged. The dauntless suffragists defended Fair as a victim of man’s uncontrolled sexual appetites. But they hadn’t counted on the intensity of anger among San Franciscans. Before twelve hundred people at Platt’s Hall (including, in the front row, Fair’s mother, who had brought along the prisoner’s little daughter), Anthony turned her suffrage speech, “The Power of the Ballot,” into a testimonial for Laura Fair. Challenging the popular notion that women are supported and protected by men, she said, “If all men had protected all women as they would have their own wives and daughters protected, you would have no Laura Fair in your jail tonight.” The hisses and boos were overwhelming. Anthony paused, then repeated her statement: “If all men had protected all women as they would have their own wives and daughters protected, you would have no Laura Fair in your jail tonight.” Again, the hisses—but this time, with a few cheers. Anthony said it again: “If all men had protected all women as they would have their own wives and daughters protected, you would have no Laura Fair in your jail tonight.” Now the applause drowned out the boos. She had prevailed! Anthony concluded: “I tell you, gentlemen, that wherever there is a woman wanting in self-respect, wanting in dignity of character, wanting in propriety of behavior, not as strong as possible in all the affairs of life, as strong as God can make her, there are twenty vultures in the shape of men willing to clutch her. … I don’t take sides on the Fair case; I have not read a column about it; I know nothing about it … except that so far as the fact is concerned that a woman never gets protection at the hands of man unless she protects herself. There I stand.” More applause followed, as Fair’s mother was seen to shed a few tears. “You women who have kind brothers and husbands and sons, I ask you to join with us in this movement, so that woman can protect herself.””
225 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “If a man’s public record be a clear one, if he has kept his pledges before the world, I do not inquire what his private life may have been. I judge a man by his convictions of right, for a man’s principles are the result of his better judgment, whilst his practice is influenced by his associations.” —Interview, 1872
229 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “Dear Emma Independent bread gives independent morals;—while pecuniary dependence makes moral subserviency;—So get money—get wealth” —Autograph message, 1874
232 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “The individual slaveholder was not a criminal—his system was a crime.” —Meeting, 1868
21 DIVINE DISCONTENT
252 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “And nobody can say for a moment that either the religious pulpit or the religious press was a leader in the great work of breaking the chains of the millions of slaves in this country; but on the other hand, church after church was rent in twain […] The religious press, instead of being a leader in the great moral reform, is usually a little behind.” —Speech, 1893
254 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “I shall not allow myself to act the bigot and persecute women who don’t believe about God, or Christ, or heaven or earth as I do—The trouble with so many is that they can’t see that so called Liberals are likely to become as bigoted and narrow as are the bigots of the various religions of the past and present” —Letter, 1888
255 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “The religious persecution of the ages has been carried on under what was claimed to be the command of God. I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” —Speech, 1896
22 THE PLEASURE OF HER COMPANY
271 THEODORE ROOSEVELT “I have always favored allowing women to vote, but I will say frankly, that I do not attach the importance to it that you do. I want to fight for what there is the most need of and the most chance of getting, at the moment. I think that, under the present laws, women can get all the rights she will take; while she is in many cases oppressed, the trouble is in her own attitude, which laws cannot alter.” —Letter to Susan B. Anthony, 1898
23 SPARROWS, SPOONS, AND SURNAMES
276 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “I consider the whole scheme of buying up people’s names to recommendations of all sorts of truck villainous, and do not wish to be one to encourage it” —Letter, 1899
24 FOREMOTHERS
287 “Eager to retain her status as the first—and most authoritative—Anthony biography, [Ida Husted] Harper, when she had finished, destroyed untold numbers of priceless letters and documents in a raging fire that burned for weeks.”
25 THE NEW WOMAN
295 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “I do not assume that woman is better than man. I do assume that she has a different way of looking at things. She is often called more angelic and so on, but I don’t know that woman would be and maybe she would not be more than what man is, if they both had the same code of morals. If a man were required to be just as refined as a woman you could not tell how refined that man would be. The man has made a code of morals for himself, but does not let the woman have the same code. There is no incentive for a man to be good as long as he can get an angel, even if he isn’t one himself. In the days of slavery the master made a code of morals for himself and another for his slaves. His slave was flogged, punished, and killed for the same crimes the master was allowed to commit and nothing was thought of it. The one who makes, shapes and controls the conditions, and who makes the social and moral code does not care to live up to it himself. The moment that woman has any voice in the matter it will mean that she will insist that man must be her equal, and then she will demand of him what she is herself and must be her highest ideal, what he wants her to be. Man is enabled to compel her to be his ideal, but a woman is not enabled to do the same with him. Just the moment that she is empowered with this then woman will demand that man come up to her ideal.” —Interview, 1893
305 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “The children will be better fed and clothed and schooled when the father, together with the mother, remains at home and takes part in their training.” —Article, 1900
26 SAINT SUSAN
312 PHILIDELPHIA SUNDAY REPUBLIC “Whatever may be the opinion of the conservative or fogy world with regard to Susan B. Anthony, those who know her well and have watched her career most attentively, know her to be rich in all the best and most tender of womanly virtues, and possessed of as brave and noble a spirit and as great integrity of character as ever fell to the lot of mortal woman.” 1877
314 ELLEN POWELL THOMPSON “We do not hail you, love you, as one who has made woman’s life easier, strewn it with more rose leaves of idleness, shielded it from more stress and storm, but as one who has taken the grander, truer view, that by equally sharing stress and storm, by equal effort and work, by equality in rights, privileges, powers and opportunities with man—her other self—woman will evolve and will reach her loftiest, loveliest development. Not as an apostle of ease, shrinking fear and parasitism do we regard you, but as the apostle, the incarnation of work, of high courage, of deathless endeavor.” 1900
315 CLARA BARTON “A few days ago some one said to me that every woman should stand with bared head before Susan B. Anthony. “Yes,” I answered, “and every man as well.” I would not retract those words. I believe that man has benefited by her work as much as woman. For ages he has been trying to carry the burden of life’s responsibilities alone and when he has the efficient help of woman he will be grateful. Just now it is new and strange and men cannot comprehend what it would mean but the change is not far away. The nation is soon to have woman suffrage and it will be a glad and proud day when it comes.” 1906
316 – 317 MAUDE WOOD PARK “I suppose it is true that all through history individual women have been able, sometimes by cajolery, sometimes by personal charm, sometimes by force of character, to get for themselves privileges far greater than any that the most radical advocates of woman’s rights have yet demanded. But in the case of Miss Anthony and the other early suffragists all that force of character was turned not to individual ends, not to getting great things for themselves, but to getting little gains, step by step, for the great mass of other women; not for the service of themselves, but for the service of the sex, and so of the whole human race” 1906
27 FAILURE IS IMPOSSIBLE
321 SUSAN B. ANTHONY “new conditions bring new duties.” —Speech, 1900
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
331 “I am thankful that Anthony lived long before the computer. While e-mail and fax modems might have facilitated the General’s command and hastened the accomplishment of her goal, it is stunning to realize the body of work that would thus have been lost in cyberspace.”