Susan B. Anthony Part 9

among them woman's rights, and not less than $8,000 a year to be spent to promote these reforms. With all this financial help available, Susan expected great things to happen.

During the winter of 1860 while the legislature was in session, Susan spent six weeks in Albany with Lydia Mott, and day after day she climbed the long hill to the capitol to interview legislators on amendments to the married women's property laws. When these amendments were pa.s.sed by the Senate, a.s.semblyman Anson Bingham urged her to bring their mutual friend, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to Albany to speak before his committee to a.s.sure pa.s.sage by the a.s.sembly.

Once again Susan hurried to Seneca Falls, and unpacking her little portmanteau stuffed with papers and statistics, discussed the subject with Mrs. Stanton in front of the open fire late into the night. Then the next morning while Mrs. Stanton shut herself up in the quietest room in the house to write her speech, Susan gave the children their breakfast, sent the older ones off to school, watched over the babies, prepared the desserts, and made herself generally useful. By this time the children regarded her affectionately as "Aunt Thusan," and they knew they must obey her, for she was a stern disciplinarian whom even the mischievous Stanton boys dared not defy.

These visits of Susan's were happy, satisfying times for both these young women. A few days' respite from travel in a well-run home with a friend she admired did wonders for Susan, giving her perspective on the work she had already done and courage to tackle new problems, while for Mrs. Stanton this short period of stimulating companions.h.i.+p and freedom from household cares was a G.o.dsend. "Miss Anthony" had long ago become Susan to Elizabeth, but Susan all through her life called her very best friend "Mrs. Stanton," playfully to be sure, but with a remnant of that formality which it was hard for her to cast off.

The speech was soon finished. Mrs. Stanton's imagination, fired by her sympathetic understanding of women's problems, had turned Susan's cold hard facts into moving prose, while Susan, the best of critics, detected every weak argument or faltering phrase. They both felt they had achieved a masterpiece.

Mrs. Stanton delivered this address before a joint session of the New York legislature in March 1860. Susan beamed with pride as she watched the large audience crowd even the galleries and heard the long loud applause for the speech which she was convinced could not have been surpa.s.sed by any man in the United States.

The next day the a.s.sembly pa.s.sed the Married Women's Property Bill, and when shortly it was signed by the governor, Susan and Mrs. Stanton scored their first big victory, winning a legal revolution for the women of New York State. This new law was a challenge to women everywhere. Under it a married woman had the right to hold property, real and personal, without the interference of her husband, the right to carry on any trade or perform any service on her own account and to collect and use her own earnings; a married woman might now buy, sell, and make contracts, and if her husband had abandoned her or was insane, a convict, or a habitual drunkard, his consent was unnecessary; a married woman might sue and be sued, she was the joint guardian with her husband of her children, and on the decease of her husband the wife had the same rights that her husband would have at her death.

Susan did not then realize the full significance of what she had accomplished--that she had unleashed a new movement for freedom which would be the means of strengthening the democratic government of her country.

FOOTNOTES:

[90] Harper, _Anthony_, I, pp. 173-174, 198.

[91] _Ibid._, p. 160.

[92] May 26, 1856, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Va.s.sar College Library.

[93] _Ibid._, June 5, 1856. Antoinette Brown Blackwell was often called Nette.

[94] Ms., Susan B. Anthony Papers, Library of Congress.

[95] 1856, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of Congress.

[96] Ms., Susan B. Anthony Papers, Library of Congress. A notation on this ms. reads, "Written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton--Delivered by Susan B. Anthony."

[97] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 143.

[98] Stanton and Blatch, _Stanton_, II, p. 71.

[99] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 162.

[100] June 10, 1856, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of Congress.

[101] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 171.

[102] Sept. 27, 1857, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of Congress.

[103] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 175.

[104] Ms., Diary, 1855.

[105] Sept. 27, 1857, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of Congress.

[106] Elizabeth Barrett Browning, _Aurora Leigh_ (New York, 1857), p.

316; quotations following, pp. 53-54, pp. 364-365.

[107] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 170.

[108] _Ibid._, p. 177. Mary Hallowell, a liberal Rochester Quaker, always interested in Susan B. Anthony and her work.

THE ZEALOT

With a spirit of confidence inspired by her victory in New York State, Susan looked forward to the tenth national woman's rights convention in New York City in May 1860. At this convention she reported progress everywhere. Four thousand dollars from the Jackson and Hovey funds had been spent in the successful New York campaign, and similar work was scheduled for Ohio. In Kansas, women had won from the const.i.tutional convention equal rights and privileges in state-controlled schools and in the management of the public schools, including the right to vote for members of school boards; mothers had been granted equal rights with fathers in the control and custody of their children, and married women had been given property rights. In Indiana, Maine, Missouri, and Ohio, married women could now control their own earnings.

"Each year we hail with pleasure," she continued, "new accessions to our faith. Brave men and true from the higher walks of literature and art, from the bar, the bench, the pulpit, and legislative halls are now ready to help woman wherever she claims to stand." She was thinking of the aid given her by Andrew J. Colvin and Anson Bingham of the New York legislature, of the young journalist, George William Curtis, just recently speaking for women, of Samuel Longfellow at his first woman's rights convention, and of the popular Henry Ward Beecher who, just a few months before, had delivered his great woman's rights speech, thereby identifying himself irrevocably with the cause. She announced with great satisfaction the news, which the papers had carried a few days before, that Matthew Va.s.sar of Poughkeepsie had set aside $400,000 to found a college for women equal in all respects to Harvard and Yale.[109]

Progress and good feeling were in the air, and the speakers were not heckled as in past years by the rowdies who had made it a practice to follow abolitionists into woman's rights meetings to bait them. Into this atmosphere of good will and rejoicing, Susan and Elizabeth Stanton now injected a more serious note, bringing before the convention the controversial question of marriage and divorce which heretofore had been handled with kid gloves at all woman's rights meetings, but which they sincerely believed demanded solution.

Divorce had been much in the news because several leading families in America and in England were involved in lawsuits complicated by stringent divorce laws. Invariably the wife bore the burden of censure and hards.h.i.+p, for no matter how unprincipled her husband might be, he was ent.i.tled to her children and her earnings under the property laws of most states.

In New York efforts were now being made to gain support for a liberal divorce bill, patterned after the Indiana law, and a variety of proposals were before the legislature, making drunkenness, insanity, desertion, and cruel and abusive treatment grounds for divorce. Horace Greeley in his _Tribune_ had been vigorously opposing a more liberal law for New York, while Robert Dale Owen of Indiana wrote in its defense. Everywhere people were reading the Greeley-Owen debates in the _Tribune_. Through his widely circulated paper, Horace Greeley had in a sense become an oracle for the people who felt he was safe and good; while Robert Dale Owen, because of his youthful a.s.sociation with the New Harmony community and Frances Wright, was branded with radicalism which even his valuable service in the Indiana legislature and his two terms in Congress could not blot out.

Susan and Mrs. Stanton had no patience with Horace Greeley's smug old-fas.h.i.+oned opinions on marriage and divorce. In fact these Greeley-Owen debates in the _Tribune_ were the direct cause of their decision to bring this subject before the convention, where they hoped for support from their liberal friends. They counted especially on Lucy Stone, who seemed to give her approval when she wrote, "I am glad you will speak on the divorce question, provided you yourself are clear on the subject. It is a great grave topic that one shudders to grapple, but its hour is coming.... G.o.d touch your lips if you speak on it."[110]

Neither Susan nor Mrs. Stanton shuddered to grapple with any subject which they believed needed attention. In fact, the discussion of marriage and divorce in woman's rights conventions had been on their minds for some time. Three years before Susan had written Lucy, "I have thought with you until of late that the Social Question must be kept separate from Woman's Rights, but we have always claimed that our movement was _Human Rights_, not Woman's specially.... It seems to me we have played on the surface of things quite long enough. Getting the right to hold property, to vote, to wear what dress we please, etc., are all to the good, but _Social Freedom_, after all, lies at the bottom of all, and unless woman gets that she must continue the slave of man in all other things."[111]

Consternation spread through the genial ranks of the convention as Mrs. Stanton now offered resolutions calling for more liberal divorce laws. Quick to sense the temper of an audience, Susan felt its resistance to being jolted out of the pleasant contemplation of past successes to the unpleasant recognition that there were still difficult ugly problems ahead. She was conscious at once of a stir of astonishment and disapproval when Mrs. Stanton in her clear compelling voice read, "Resolved, That an unfortunate or ill-a.s.sorted marriage is ever a calamity, but not ever, perhaps never a crime--and when society or government, by its laws or customs, compels its continuance, always to the grief of one of the parties, and the actual loss and damage of both, it usurps an authority never delegated to man, nor exercised by G.o.d, Himself...."[112]

Listening to Mrs. Stanton's speech in defense of her ten bold resolutions on marriage and divorce, Susan felt that her brave colleague was speaking for women everywhere, for wives of the present and the future. As the hearty applause rang out, she concluded that even the disapproving admired her courage; but before the applause ceased, she saw Antoinette Blackwell on her feet, waiting to be heard.

She knew that Antoinette, like Horace Greeley, preferred to think of all marriages as made in heaven, and true to form Antoinette contended that the marriage relation "must be lifelong" and "as permanent and indissoluble as the relation of parent and child."[113] At once Ernestine Rose came to the rescue in support of Mrs. Stanton.

Then Wendell Phillips showed his displeasure by moving that Mrs.

Stanton's resolutions be laid on the table and expunged from the record because they had no more to do with this convention than slavery in Kansas or temperance. "This convention," he a.s.serted, "as I understand it, a.s.sembles to discuss the laws that rest unequally upon men and women, not those that rest equally on men and women."[114]

Aghast at this statement, Susan was totally unprepared to have his views supported by that other champion of liberty, William Lloyd Garrison, who, however, did not favor expunging the resolutions from the record.

It was incomprehensible to Susan that neither Garrison nor Phillips recognized woman's subservient status in marriage under prevailing laws and traditions, and she now stated her own views with firmness: "As to the point that this question does not belong to this platform--from that I totally dissent. Marriage has ever been a one-sided matter, resting most unequally upon the s.e.xes. By it, man gains all--woman loses all; tyrant law and l.u.s.t reign supreme with him--meek submission and ready obedience alone befit her."[115]

Warming to the subject, she continued, "By law, public sentiment, and religion from the time of Moses down to the present day, woman has never been thought of other than as a piece of property, to be disposed of at the will and pleasure of man. And this very hour, by our statute books, by our so-called enlightened Christian civilization, she has no voice in saying what shall be the basis of the relation. She must accept marriage as man proffers it or not at all...."

When finally the vote was taken, Mrs. Stanton's resolutions were laid on the table, but not expunged from the record, and the convention adjourned with much to talk about and think about for some time to come.