Susan B. Anthony Part 35

The attic had been remodeled for workrooms and here Susan now spent her days with Mrs. Harper, trying to reconstruct the past. She had definite ideas about how the book should be written, holding up as a model the biography of William Lloyd Garrison recently written by his children. Mrs. Harper also had high standards, and influenced by the formalities of the day, edited Susan's vivid brusque letters--hurriedly written and punctuated with dashes--so that they conformed with her own easy but more formal style. To this Susan readily consented, for she always depreciated her own writing ability.

On one point, however, she was adamant, that her story be told without dwelling upon the disagreements among the old workers.

The household was geared to the "bog," as they called the biography.

Mary, supervising as usual, watched over their meals and the housework with the aid of a young rosy-cheeked Canadian girl, Anna Dann, who had recently come to work for them and whom they at once took to their hearts, making her one of the family. Soon another young girl, Genevieve Hawley from Fort Scott, Kansas, was employed to help with the endless copying, sorting of letters, and pasting of sc.r.a.pbooks, and with the current correspondence which piled up and diverted Susan from the book.[413] Through 1897 and 1898, they worked at top speed.

_The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, A Story of the Evolution of the Status of Women_, in two volumes, by Ida Husted Harper, was published by the Bowen Merrill Company of Indianapolis just before Christmas 1898. Happy as a young girl out of school, Susan inscribed copies for her many friends and eagerly watched for reviews, pleased with the favorable comments in newspapers and magazines throughout this country and Europe.[414]

By this time the Cuban rebellion was crowding all other news out of the papers, and Susan followed it closely, for this struggle for freedom instantly won her sympathy. She hoped that Spain under pressure from the United States might be persuaded to give Cuba her independence, but the blowing up of the battles.h.i.+p _Maine_ and the war cries of the press and of a faction in Congress led to armed intervention in April 1898. Always opposed to war as a means of settling disputes, she wrote Rachel, "To think of the mothers of this nation sitting back in silence without even the power of a legal protest--while their sons are taken without a by-your-leave! Well all through--it is barbarous ... and I hope you and all our young women will rouse to work as never before--and get the women of the Republic clothed with the power of control of conditions in peace--or when it shall come again--which Heaven forbid--in war."[415]

Not only did she express these sentiments in letters to her friends, but in a public meeting, where only patriotic fervor and flag-waving were welcome, she dared criticize the unsanitary army camps and the greed and graft which deprived soldiers of wholesome food. "There isn't a mother in the land," she declared, "who wouldn't know that a s.h.i.+pload of typhoid stricken soldiers would need cots to lie on and fuel to cook with, and that a swamp was not a desirable place in which to pitch a camp.... What the government needs at such a time is not alone bacteriologists and army officers but also women who know how to take care of sick boys and have the common sense to surround them with sanitary conditions."[416] At this her audience, at first hostile, burst into applause.

More and more disturbed by the inefficient care of the wounded and the feeding of enlisted men, she wrote Rachel, "Every day's reports and comments about the war only show the need of women at the front--not as employees permitted to be there because they begged to be--but there by right--as managers and dictators in all departments in which women have been trained--those of feeding and caring for in health and nursing the sick."[417]

The war over, the problem of governing the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii was of great interest to her, and she at once asked for the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the women of these newly won island possessions.

She regarded it as an outrage for the most democratic nation in the world to foist upon them an exclusively masculine government, a "male oligarchy," as she called it. "I really believe I shall explode," she wrote Clara Colby, "if some of you young women don't wake up and raise your voice in protest.... I wonder if when I am under the sod--or cremated and floating in the air--I shall have to stir you and others up. How can you not be all on fire?"[418]

The unwillingness of her "girls" to relate woman suffrage to contemporary public affairs such as this, repeatedly disappointed her.

Yet she was well aware that the younger generation would never see the work through her eyes, or exactly follow her pattern.

Disappointed that her National American Woman Suffrage a.s.sociation did not attract members as did the W.C.T.U. or the General Federation of Women's Clubs, she confessed to Clara Colby, "It is the disheartening part of my life that so very few women will work for the emanc.i.p.ation of their own half of the race."[419] Watching women flock into these other organizations and contributing to all sorts of charities, she was obliged to admit that "very few are capable of seeing that the cause of nine-tenths of all the misfortunes which come to women, and to men also, lies in the subjection of women, and therefore the important thing is to lay the ax at the root."[420]

She also discovered that it was one thing to build up a large organization and another to keep women so busy with pressing work for the cause that they did not find time to expend their energies on the mechanics of organization. Not only did she chafe at the red tape most of them spun, but she often felt that they were too p.r.o.ne to linger in academic by-ways, listening to speeches and holding pleasant conventions. Since the California campaign of 1896, only one state, Was.h.i.+ngton, had been roused to vote on a woman suffrage amendment, which was defeated and only one more state Delaware had granted women the right to vote for members of school boards.

Again and again she warned her "girls" that some kind of action on woman suffrage by Congress every year was important. A hearing, a committee report, a debate, or even an unfavorable vote would, she was convinced, do more to stir up the whole nation than all the speakers and organizers that could be sent through the country.

Such thoughts as these, relative to the work which was always on her mind, she dashed off to one after another of her young colleagues.

"Your letters sound like a trumpet blast," wrote Anna Howard Shaw, grateful for her counsel. "They read like St. Paul's Epistles to the Romans, so strong, so clear, so full of courage."[421]

At seventy-eight, Susan realized that the time was approaching when she must make up her mind to turn over to a younger woman the presidency of the National American a.s.sociation, and during the summer of 1898 she announced to her executive committee that she would retire on her eightieth birthday in 1900.

FOOTNOTES:

[400] Ms., Diary, Nov. 7, 1895

[401] Mary Gray Peck, _Carrie Chapman Catt_ (New York, 1944), p. 84.

[402] Ms., Diary, Nov. 27, 1895.

[403] To Mrs. Upton, Sept. 5, 1890, University of Rochester Library, Rochester, New York.

[404] Feb. 10, 1894, Anthony Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library.

[405] Harper, _Anthony_, III, p. 1113.

[406] Miss Anthony's first attempt to win Southern women to suffrage was at the time of the New Orleans Exposition in 1885. Because of her reputation as an abolitionist, she had much resistance to overcome in the South.

[407] Dec. 18, 1895, Anthony Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library.

[408] _Woman's Tribune_, Feb. 1, 1896.

[409] _History of Woman Suffrage_, IV, p. 264.

[410] Harper, _Anthony_, II, p. 855. The action of the National American Woman Suffrage a.s.sociation on the Woman's Bible was never reversed.

[411] _Ibid._, p. 856.

[412] Susan thought seriously of Clara Colby as a collaborator but concluded she was too involved with the _Woman's Tribune_. Susan agreed to share royalties with Mrs. Harper on the biography and any other work on which they might collaborate. On her 75th birthday Susan's girls had presented her with an annuity of $800 a year. This made it possible for her to give up lecturing and concentrate on her book.

[413] Genevieve Hawley left an interesting record of these years in letters to her aunt, many of which are preserved in the Susan B.

Anthony Memorial Collection in Rochester, New York.

[414] Both the New York _Herald_ and Chicago _Inter-Ocean_ gave the book full-page reviews. A third volume was published in 1908.

[415] Aug. 10, 1898, Susan B. Anthony Papers, Library of Congress.

[416] Harper, _Anthony_, III, p. 1121.

[417] Aug. 10, 1898, Susan B. Anthony Papers, Library of Congress.

[418] Dec. 17, 1898, Anthony Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library.

Clara Colby, making her headquarters in Was.h.i.+ngton, kept Susan informed on developments and they carried on an animated, voluminous correspondence during these years.

[419] March 12, 1894, Anthony Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library.

[420] Harper, _Anthony_, II, p. 920.

[421] Harper, _Anthony_, II, p. 924.

Pa.s.sING ON THE TORCH

The last year of Susan's presidency was particularly precious to her.

In a sense it represented her farewell to the work she had carried on most of her life, and at the same time it was also the hopeful beginning of the period leading to victory. Yet she had no illusion of speedy or easy success for her "girls" and she did her best to prepare them for the obstacles they would inevitably meet. She warned them not to expect their cause to triumph merely because it was just.

"Governments," she told them, "never do any great good things from mere principle, from mere love of justice.... You expect too much of human nature when you expect that."[422]

The movement had reached an impa.s.se. The temper of Congress, as shown by the admission of Hawaii as a territory without woman suffrage, was both indifferent and hostile. That this att.i.tude did not express the will of the American people, she was firmly convinced. It was due, she believed, to the political influence of powerful groups opposed to woman suffrage--the liquor interests controlling the votes of increasing numbers of immigrants, machine politicians fearful of losing their power, and financial interests whose conservatism resisted any measure which might upset the status quo. How to undermine this opposition was now her main problem, and she saw no other way but persistent agitation through a more active, more effective, ever-growing woman suffrage organization, reaching a wider cross section of the people. She herself had established a press bureau which was feeding interesting factual articles on woman suffrage to newspapers throughout the country, for as she wrote Mrs.

Colby, the suffrage cause "needs to picture its demands in the daily papers where the unconverted can see them rather than in special papers where only those already converted can see them."[423]

Of greatest importance to her was winning the support of organized labor. Samuel Gompers, the president of the American Federation of Labor, had already shown his friendliness toward equal pay and votes for women and was putting women organizers in the field to speed the unionization of women. Even so she was surprised at the enthusiasm with which she was received at the American Federation of Labor convention in 1899, when the four hundred delegates by a rising vote adopted a strong resolution urging favorable action on a federal woman suffrage amendment.