Part 48

"We do rejoice in the success, thus far, of our experiment of self-government," she began. "Our faith is firm and unwavering in the broad principles of human rights proclaimed in 1776, not only as abstract truths, but as the cornerstones of a republic. Yet we cannot forget, even in this glad hour, that while all men of every race, and clime, and condition, have been invested with the full rights of citizenship under our hospitable flag, all women still suffer the degradation of disfranchisement."

Then she enumerated women's grievances and the crowd applauded as she drove home point after point.

"Woman," she continued, "has shown equal devotion with man to the cause of freedom and has stood firmly by his side in its defense. Together they have made this country what it is.... We ask our rulers, at this hour, no special favors, no special privileges.... We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all civil and political rights that belong to the citizens of the United States be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever."

Stepping down from the platform into the applauding crowd which eagerly reached for printed copies of the declaration, she and her four companions hurried to the First Unitarian Church where an eager audience awaited their report and hailed their courage.

The New York Tribune, commenting on Susan's militancy, prophesied that it foreshadowed "the new forms of violence and disregard of order which may accompany the participation of women in active partisan politics."

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Nor was Congress impressed by Susan's centennial publicity demanding a federal woman suffrage amendment. She had gathered petitions from twenty-six states with 10,000 signatures which were presented to the Senate in 1877. The majority of the Senators found these petitions uproariously funny, and Susan in the visitors' gallery at the time of their presentation was infuriated by the mirth and disrespect of these men. "A few read the petitions as they would any other, with dignity and without comment," reported the popular journalist, Mary Clemmer, in her weekly Washington column, "but the majority seemed intensely conscious of holding something unutterably funny in their hands.... The entire Senate presented the appearance of a laughing school practicing sidesplitting and ear-extended grins." After a few humorous and sarcastic remarks the petitions were referred to the Committee on Public Lands. Only one Senator, Aaron A. Sargent of California, was "man enough and gentleman enough to lift the petitions from this insulting proposition.... He ... demanded for the petition of more than 10,000 women at least the courtesy which would be given any other."

Although his words did not deter the Senators, Susan was proud of this tall vigorous white-haired Californian and grateful for his spontaneous support in this humiliating situation. He had been a trusted friend and counselor ever since she had shared with him and his family the long snowy journey from Nevada in 1872. She looked forward to the time when woman suffrage would have more such advocates in the Congress and when she would find there new faces and a more liberal spirit.

Disappointment only drove Susan into more intensive activity. Between lectures she now nursed her sister Hannah who was critically ill in Daniel's home in Leavenworth. After Hannah's death in May 1877, Susan worked off her grief in Colorado, where the question of votes for women was being referred to the people of the state.

The suffragists in Colorado were headed by Dr. Alida Avery, who had left her post as resident physician at the new woman's college, Vassar, to practice medicine in Denver. Making Dr. Avery's home her headquarters, Susan carried her plea for the ballot to settlements far from the railroads, traveling by stagecoach over rough lonely roads through magnificent scenery. Holding meetings wherever she could, she spoke in schoolhouses, in hotel dining rooms, and even in saloons, when no other place was available, and always she was treated with respect and listened to with interest. Occasionally only a mere handful gathered to hear her, but in Lake City she spoke to an audience of a thousand or more from a dry-goods box on the court-house steps. She was equal to anything, but the mining towns depressed her, for they were swarming with foreigners who had been welcomed as naturalized, enfranchised citizens and who almost to a man opposed extending the vote to women. This precedence of foreign-born men over American women was not only galling to her but menaced, she believed, the growth of American democracy.

Woman suffrage was defeated in Colorado in 1877, two to one. With the Chinese coming into the state in great numbers to work in the mines, the specter that stalked through this campaign was the fear of putting the ballot into the hands of Chinese women.

From Colorado, Susan moved on to Nebraska with a new lecture, "The Homes of Single Women." Although she much preferred to speak on "Woman and the Sixteenth Amendment" or "Bread and the Ballot," she realized that, in order to be assured of return engagements, she must occasionally vary her subjects, but she was unwilling to wander far afield while women's needs still were so great. By means of this new lecture she hoped to dispel the widespread, deeply ingrained fallacy that single women were unwanted helpless creatures wholly dependent upon some male relative for a home and support. Aware that this mistaken estimate was slowly yielding in the face of a changing economic order, she believed she could help lessen its hold by presenting concrete examples of independent self-supporting single women who had proved that marriage was not the only road to security and a home. She told of Alice and Phoebe Cary, whose home in New York City was a rendezvous for writers, artists, musicians, and reformers; of Dr. Clemence Lozier, the friend of women medical students; of Mary L. Booth, well established through her income as editor of Harper's Bazaar; and of her beloved Lydia Mott, whose home had been a refuge for fugitive slaves and reformers.

In Nebraska, she made a valuable new friend for the cause, Clara Bewick Colby, whose zeal and earnest, intelligent face at once attracted her. Within a few years, Mrs. Colby established in Beatrice, Nebraska, a magazine for women, the Woman's Tribune, which to Susan's joy spoke out for a federal woman suffrage amendment.

Because Susan's contract with the Slayton Lecture Bureau allowed no break in her engagements, she was obliged to leave the Washington convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association in the hands of others in 1878. It was much on her mind as she traveled through Dakota, Minnesota, Missouri, and Kansas, and she sent a check for $100 to help with the expenses of the convention. Particularly on her mind was a federal woman suffrage amendment, for since 1869 when a Sixteenth Amendment enfranchising women had been introduced in Congress and ignored, no further efforts along that line had been made. Now good news came from Mrs. Stanton, who had attended the convention. She had persuaded Senator Sargent to introduce in the Senate, on January 10, 1878, a new draft of a Sixteenth Amendment, following the wording of the Fifteenth. It read, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."

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During the next few years the Sixteenth Amendment made little headway, although the complexion of Congress changed, the Democrats breaking the Republicans' hold and winning a substantial majority. Encouraging as was the more liberal spirit of the new Congress and the defeat of several implacable enemies, Susan found California's failure to return Senator Sargent an irreparable loss. In addition she now had to face a newly formed group of anti-suffragists under the leadership of Mrs. Dahlgren, Mrs. Sherman, and Almira Lincoln Phelps, who sang the refrain which Congressmen loved to hear, that women did not want the vote because it would wreck marriage and the home.

Hoping to counteract this adverse influence by increased pressure for the Sixteenth Amendment, Susan once more appealed for help to the American Woman Suffrage Association through her old friends, William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. Garrison replied that her efforts for a federal amendment were premature and "would bring the movement into needless contempt." This she found strange advice from the man who had fearlessly defied public opinion to crusade against slavery. Wendell Phillips did better, writing, "I think you are on the right track--the best method to agitate the question, and I am with you, though between you and me, I still think the individual States must lead off, and that this reform must advance piecemeal, State by State. But I mean always to help everywhere and everyone."

The American Association continued to follow the state-by-state method, and this holding back aroused Susan to the boiling point, for experience had taught her that in state elections woman suffrage faced the prejudiced opposition of an ever-increasing number of naturalized immigrants, who had little understanding of democratic government or sympathy with the rights of women. A federal amendment, on the other hand, depending for its adoption upon Congress and ratifying legislatures, was in the hands of a far more liberal, intelligent, and preponderantly American group. "We have puttered with State rights for thirty years," she sputtered, "without a foothold except in the territories."

Year by year she continued her Washington conventions, convinced that these gatherings in the national capital could not fail to impress Congressmen with the seriousness of their purpose. As women from many states lobbied for the Sixteenth Amendment, reporting a growing sentiment everywhere for woman suffrage, as they received in the press respectful friendly publicity, Congressmen began to take notice. At the large receptions held at the Riggs House, through the generosity of the proprietors, Jane Spofford and her husband, Congressmen became better acquainted with the suffragists, finding that they were not cranks, as they had supposed, but intelligent women and socially charming.

Mrs. Stanton's poise as presiding officer and the warmth of her personality made her the natural choice for president of the National Woman Suffrage Association through the years. Her popularity, now well established throughout the country after her ten years of lecturing on the Lyceum circuit, lent prestige to the cause. To Susan, her presence brought strength and the assurance that "the brave and true word" would be spoken. A new office had been created for Susan, that of vice-president at large, and in that capacity she guided, steadied, and prodded her flock.

The subjects which the conventions discussed covered a wide field going far beyond their persistent demands for a federal woman suffrage amendment. Not only did they at this time urge an educational qualification for voters to combat the argument that woman suffrage would increase the ignorant vote, but they also protested the counting of women in the basis of representation so long as they were disfranchised. They criticized the church for barring women from the ministry and from a share in church government. They took up the case of Anna Ella Carroll, who had been denied recognition and a pension for her services to her country during the Civil War, and they urged pensions for all women who had nursed soldiers during the war. They welcomed to their conventions Mormon women from Utah who came to Washington to protest efforts to disfranchise them as a means of discouraging polygamy.

Susan injected international interest into these conventions by reading Alexander Dumas's arguments for woman suffrage, letters from Victor Hugo and English suffragists, and a report by Mrs. Stanton's son, Theodore, now a journalist, of the International Congress in Paris in 1878, which discussed the rights of women. Occasionally foreign-born women, now making new homes for themselves in this country, joined the ranks of the suffragists, and a few of them, like Madam Anneke and Clara Heyman from Germany contributed a great deal through their eloquence and wider perspective. These contacts with the thoughts and aspirations of men and women of other countries led Susan to dream of an international conference of women in the not too distant future.

FOOTNOTES:

Ms., Diary, June 18, 1876.

Katherine D. Blake and Margaret Wallace, Champion of Women, The Life of Lillie Devereux Blake (New York, 1943), pp. 124-126.

History of Woman Suffrage, III, pp. 31, 34. The Woman's Journal surprised Susan with a friendly editorial, "Good Use of the Fourth of July," written by Lucy Stone, July 15, 1876.

History of Woman Suffrage, III, p. 43. The Philadelphia Press praised the Declaration of Rights and the women in the suffrage movement. The report of the New York Post was patronizingly favorable, pointing out the indifference of the public to the subject.

Harper, Anthony, I, pp. 485-486.