Part 29

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."

"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 is a party in power which is likely to remain in power, and if it will give its endorsement to our movement, we want it."

This explanation, however, did not satisfy her critics, and as the Republican press circulated false stories about her enthusiasm for the Populist party, letters of protest poured in, among them one from Henry Blackwell. To him, she replied, "I shall not praise the Republicans of Kansas, or wish or work for their success, when I know by their own confessions to me that the rights of the women of their state have been traded by them in cold blood for the votes of the lager beer foreigners and 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."

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.

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 help during the most difficult years of her career and whom she probably trusted more completely than any other man. The other from her dearest friend, Elizabeth Stanton, read, "I never realized how desolate the world would be to me without you until I heard of your sudden illness. Let me urge you with all the strength I have, and all the love I bear you, to stay at home and rest and save your precious self."

She now realized that rest was imperative for a time, but it troubled her that people thought of her as old and ill, and she wrote Clara Colby never to mention anyone's illness in her Woman's Tribune, adding, "It is so dreadful to get public thought centered on one as ill—as I have had it the last two months."

She had no intention of retiring from the field. She knew her own strength and that her life must be one of action. "I am able to endure the strain of daily traveling and lecturing at over three-score and ten," she observed, "mainly because I have always worked and loved work.... As machinery in motion lasts longer than when lying idle, so a body and soul in active exercise escapes the corroding rust of physical and mental laziness, which prematurely cuts off the life of so many women."

Yet she did slow up a little, refusing an offer from the Slayton Lecture Bureau for a series of lectures at $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 the moment she takes her seat; and away she goes, the picture of untrammeled womanhood."

Susan returned to California in February 1896. Through the generosity and interest of two young Rochester friends, her Unitarian minister, William C. Gannett, and his wife, Mary Gannett, she was able to take her secretary with her. Making her home in San Francisco with her devoted friend, Ellen Sargent, she at once began to plan speaking tours for herself and her "girls," many of whom, including her niece Lucy, had come West to help her. She appealed successfully to Frances Willard to transfer the national W.C.T.U. convention to another state, for she was determined to keep the issue of prohibition out of the California campaign.

With the press more than friendly and several San Francisco dailies running woman suffrage departments, she realized the importance of keeping newspapers fed with readable factual material and enlisted the aid of a young journalist, Ida Husted Harper, whom she had met in 1878 while lecturing in Terre Haute, Indiana, and who was in California that winter. When the San Francisco Examiner, William Randolph Hearst's powerful Democratic paper, offered Susan a column on the editorial page if she would write it and sign it, she dictated her thoughts to Mrs. Harper, who smoothed them out for the column, helping her as Mrs. Stanton had in the past, for writing was still a great hardship. Grateful to Mrs. Harper, she sang her praises: "The moment I give the idea—the point—she formulates it into a good sentence—while I should have to haggle over it half an hour."

California women had won suffrage planks from Republicans, Populists, and Prohibitionists, and the prospects looked bright. Rich women came to their aid, Mrs. Leland Stanford, with her railroad fortune, furnishing passes for all the speakers and organizers, and Mrs. Phoebe Hearst contributing $1,000 to their campaign. What warmed Susan's heart, however, was the spirit of the rank and file, the seamstresses and washerwomen, paying their two-dollar pledges in twenty-five-cent installments, the poorly clad women bringing in fifty cents or a dollar which they had saved by going without tea, and the women who had worked all day at their jobs, stopping at headquarters for a package of circulars to fold and address at night. The working women of California made it plain that they wanted to vote.

Susan insisted upon carrying out what she called her "wild goose chase" over the state. People crowded to hear her at farmers' picnics in the mountains, in schoolhouses in small towns, and in poolrooms where chalked up on the blackboard she often found "Welcome Susan B. Anthony." She was at home everywhere and ready for anything. The men liked her short matter-of-fact speeches and her flashes of wit. Her hopes were high that the friendly people she met would not fail to vote justice to women.

She grew apprehensive, however, when the newspapers, pressured by their advertisers, one by one began to ignore woman suffrage. The Liquor Dealers' League had been sending letters to hotel owners, grocers, and druggists, as well as to saloons, warning that votes for women would mean prohibition and would threaten their livelihood. Word was spread that if women voted not one glass of beer would be sold in San Francisco. As in Kansas, liquor interests had persuaded naturalized Irish, Germans, and Swedes to oppose woman suffrage, so now in California, they appealed to the Chinese.

On election day Susan was in San Francisco with Anna Howard Shaw and Ellen Sargent, watching and anxiously waiting for the returns. Telling the story of those last tense hours when women's fate hung in the balance, Anna Howard Shaw reported, "I shall always remember the picture of Miss Anthony and the wife of Senator Sargent wandering around the polls arm in arm at eleven o'clock at night, their tired faces taking on lines of deeper depression with every minute, for the count was against us.... When the final counts came in, we found that we had won the state from the north down to Oakland and from the south up to San Francisco; but there was not sufficient majority to overcome the adverse votes of San Francisco and Oakland. In San Francisco the saloon element and the most aristocratic section ... made an equal showing against us.... Every Chinese vote was against us."

In spite of defeat in California, Susan had the joy of marking up two more states for woman suffrage in 1896. Utah was granted statehood with a woman suffrage provision in its constitution and Idaho's favorable vote, though contested in the courts, was upheld by the State Supreme Court. Now women in Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah were voters.

FOOTNOTES:

Harper, Anthony, II, p. 763.

To Elizabeth Smith Miller, July 25, 1894, Elizabeth Smith Miller Papers, New York Public Library.

Harper, Anthony, II, p. 788.

Ibid., p. 791.

Ibid., p. 794.

To Clara Colby, July 22, 1895, Anthony Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library.

Harper, Anthony, II, p. 842.

N.d., Anthony Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library.

Harper, Anthony, II, p. 843.

Ibid., pp. 844, 859.

Ms., Diary, July 10, 1896.

Sept. 8, 1896, Anthony Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library.

Shaw, The Story of a Pioneer, pp. 274-275.

AUNT SUSAN AND HER GIRLS

The future of the National American Woman Suffrage Association was much on Susan's mind. This organization which she had conceived and nursed through its struggling infancy had grown in numbers and prestige, and she understood, as no one else could, the importance of leaving it in the right hands so that it could function successfully without her.

The young women now in the work, many of them just out of college, were intelligent, efficient, and confident, and yet as she compared them with the vivid consecrated women active in the early days of the movement, she observed in her diary, "[Clarina] Nichols—Paulina Davis—Lucy Stone—Frances D. Gage—Lucretia Mott & E. C. Stanton—each without peer among any of our college graduates—young women of today."

Even so, she appreciated the "young women of today" whom she affectionately called her girls or her adopted nieces, but she still held the reins tightly, although they often champed at the bit. Recognizing, however, that she must choose between personal power and progress for her cause, she characteristically chose progress. Quick to appreciate ability and zeal when she saw it, she seldom failed to make use of it. When Carrie Chapman Catt presented a detailed plan for a thorough overhauling of the mechanics of the organization, she gave her approval, remarking drily, "There never yet was a young woman who did not feel that if she had had the management of the work from the beginning, the cause would have been carried long ago. I felt just that way when I was young."

On four of her adopted nieces, Rachel Foster Avery, Anna Howard Shaw, Harriet Taylor Upton, and Carrie Chapman Catt, Susan felt that the greater part of her work would fall and be "worthily done." Yet she feared that in their enthusiasm for efficient organization they might lose the higher concepts of freedom and justice which had been the driving force behind her work. Not having learned the lessons of leadership when the cause was unpopular, they lacked the discipline of adversity, which bred in the consecrated reformer the wisdom, tolerance, and vision so necessary for the success of her task. What they did understand far better than the highly individualistic pioneers was the value of teamwork, which grew in importance as the National American Association expanded far beyond the ability of one person to cope with it.

Probably first in her affections was Rachel Foster Avery, who had been like a daughter to her since their trip to Europe together in 1883. The confidence she felt in their friendship was always a comfort. Rachel's intelligent approach to problems made her an asset at every meeting, and Susan relied much on her judgment.

In Anna Howard Shaw, ten years older than Rachel, Susan had found the hardy campaigner and orator for whom she had longed. Anna expressed a warmth and understanding that most of the younger women lacked, and best of all she loved the cause as Susan herself loved it. Because of her close friendship with Susan's niece Lucy, she was regarded as one of the family, and whenever possible between lectures she stopped over in Rochester for a good talk with "Aunt Susan."

Harriet Taylor Upton of Warren, Ohio, had enlisted in the ranks in the 1880s when her father was a member of Congress. Because of her influence in Washington and Ohio, Harriet was invaluable, and Susan speedily brought her into the official circle of the National American Association as treasurer, even thinking of her as a possible president. Harriet's jovial irrepressible personality readily won friends, and Susan found her a refreshing and comfortable companion, able to see a bit of humor in almost every situation. When differences of opinion at meetings threatened to get out of hand, Harriet could always be relied on to break the tension with a few witty remarks.

Carrie Chapman Catt gave every indication of developing into an outstanding executive. Not another one of Susan's "girls" could so quickly or so intelligently size up a situation as Carrie, nor could they so effectively put into action well-thought-out plans. Not as popular a speaker as the more emotional Anna Howard Shaw, she held her audiences by her appeal to their intelligence. Tall, handsome, and well dressed, she never failed to leave a favorable impression. Only her name irked Susan, and as Susan wrote Clara Colby, "If Catt it must be then I insist, she should keep her own father's name—Lane—and not her first husband's name—Chapman," but the three Cs intrigued Carrie and she continued to be known as Carrie Chapman Catt. Now living in the East because her husband's expanding business had brought him to New York, she was easily accessible, and from her beautiful new home at Bensonhurst, a suburb of Brooklyn, she carried on the rapidly growing work of the organization committee until a New York City office became imperative. In Carrie, Susan recognized qualities demanded of a leader at this stage of the campaign when suffragists must learn to be as keen as politicians and as well organized.

"Spring is not heralded in Washington by the arrival of the robin," commented a Washington newspaper, "but by the appearance of Miss Anthony's red shawl." Susan was still the dominating figure at the annual woman suffrage conventions. Everyone looked eagerly for the tall lithe gray-haired woman with a red shawl on her arm or around her shoulders. Once when Susan appeared on the platform with a new white crepe shawl, the reporters immediately registered their displeasure by putting down their pencils. This did not escape her, and always on good terms with the newsmen and informal with her audiences, she called out, "Boys, what is the matter?"

"Where is the red shawl?" one of them asked. "No red shawl, no report."

Enjoying this little by-play, she sent her niece Lucy back to the hotel for the red shawl, and when Lucy brought it up to the platform and put it about her shoulders, the audience burst into applause, for the red shawl, like Susan herself, had become the well-loved symbol of woman suffrage.

Susan was convinced that the annual national convention should always be held in Washington, where Congress could see and feel the growing strength and influence of the movement. Her "girls," on the other hand, wanted to take their conventions to different parts of the country to widen their influence. Not as certain as Susan that work for a federal amendment must come first, many of them contended that a few more states won for woman suffrage would best help the cause at this time. The southern women, now active, were firm believers in states' rights and supported state work. Susan's experience had taught her the impracticability of direct appeal to the voters in the states, now that foreign-born men in increasing numbers were arrayed against votes for women. In spite of her arguments and her pleas, the National American Association voted in 1894 to hold conventions in different parts of the country in alternate years. Disappointed, but trying her best graciously to follow the will of the majority, she traveled to Atlanta and to Des Moines for the conventions of 1895 and 1897.

Nor did the younger women welcome the messages which Mrs. Stanton, at Susan's insistence, sent to every convention. Susan herself often wished her good friend would stick more closely to woman suffrage instead of introducing extraneous subjects, such as "Educated Suffrage," "The Matriarchate," or "Women and the Church," but nevertheless she proudly read her papers to successive conventions. Insisting that the conventions were too academic, Mrs. Stanton urged Susan to inject more vitality into them by broadening their platform. Susan, however, had come to the conclusion that concentration on woman suffrage was imperative in order to unite all women under one banner and build up numbers which Congressmen were bound to respect. With this her "girls" agreed 100 per cent. While all of them were convinced suffragists, they were divided on other issues, and few of them were wholehearted feminists, as were Susan and Mrs. Stanton.

With the publication of The Woman's Bible in 1895, Mrs. Stanton almost upset the applecart, stirring up heated controversy in the National American Woman Suffrage Association. The Woman's Bible was a keen and sometimes biting commentary on passages in the Bible relating to women. It questioned the traditional interpretation which for centuries has fastened the stigma of inferiority upon women, and pointed out that the female as well as the male was created in the image of God. To those who regarded every word of the Bible as inspired by God, The Woman's Bible was heresy, and both the clergy and the press stirred up a storm of protest against it. Suffragists were condemned for compiling a new Bible and were obliged to explain again and again that The Woman's Bible expressed Mrs. Stanton's personal views and not those of the movement.