Part 50

Back in London again, she allowed herself a few luxuries, such as an expensive India shawl and more social life than she had had in many a year, and she longed to have Mary enjoy it all with her. She visited suffragists in Scotland and Ireland as well as in England and occasionally spoke at their meetings. Here as in America suffragists differed over the best way to win the vote, and even the most radical among them were more conservative and cautious than American women, but she admired them all and tried to understand the very different problems they faced. Gradually she interested a few of them in an international conference of women, and before she sailed back to America with Mrs. Stanton in November 1883, she had their promise of cooperation.

The newspapers welcomed her home. "Susan B. Anthony is back from Europe," announced the Cleveland Leader, "and is here for a winter's fight on behalf of woman suffrage. She seems remarkably well, and has gained fifteen pounds since she left last spring. She is sixty-three, but looks just the same as twenty years ago. There is perhaps an extra wrinkle in her face, a little more silver in her hair, but her blue eyes are just as bright, her mouth as serious and her step as active as when she was forty. She would attract attention in any crowd."

Susan came back to an indifferent Congress. "All would fall flat and dead if someone were not here to keep them in mind of their duty to us," she wrote a friend at this time, and to her diary she confided, "It is perfectly disheartening that no member feels any especial interest or earnest determination in pushing this question of woman suffrage, to all men only a side issue."

FOOTNOTES:

The only such history available was the History of the National Woman's Rights Movement for Twenty Years (New York, 1871), written by Paulina Wright Davis to commemorate the first national woman's rights convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850. This brief record, ending with Victoria Woodhull's Memorial to Congress, was inadequate and placed too much emphasis on Victoria Woodhull who had flashed through the movement like a meteor, leaving behind her a trail of discord and little that was constructive.

Aaron McLean, Eugene Mosher, his daughter Louise, Merritt's daughter, Lucy E. Anthony from Fort Scott, Kansas, and later Lucy's sister "Anna O."

Mrs. Stanton moved to the new home she had built in Tenafly, New Jersey, in 1868.

Fowler & Wells furnished the paper, press work, and advertising and paid the authors 12-1/2% commission on sales. They did not look askance at such a controversial subject, having published the Fowler family's phrenological books. In addition the women of the family were suffragists.

In 1855, at the instigation of her father. Miss Anthony began to preserve her press clippings. She now found them a valuable record, and she hired a young girl to paste them in six large account books. Thirty-two of her scrapbooks are now in the Library of Congress.

Aug. 30, 1876, Ida Husted Harper Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library. The history of the American Woman Suffrage Association was compiled for Volume II from the Woman's Journal and Mary Livermore's The Agitator by Harriot Stanton.

Nov. 30, 1880, Amelia Bloomer Papers, Seneca Falls Historical Society, Seneca Falls, N. Y.

Harper, Anthony, II, p. 531. The History received friendly and complimentary reviews, the New York Tribune and Sun giving it two columns.

June 28, 1881, Amelia Bloomer Papers, Seneca Falls Historical Society, Seneca Falls, N. Y. The cost of a cloth copy of the History was $3.

Dec. 19, 1880, Susan B. Anthony Papers, Library of Congress. Rachel Foster's mother was a life-long friend of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and sympathetic to her work for women. The widow of a wealthy Pittsburgh newspaperman, she was now active in Pennsylvania suffrage organizations. Her daughters, Rachel and Julia, early became interested in the cause.

E. C. Stanton to Laura Collier, Jan. 21, 1886, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Vassar College Library. Mary Livermore criticized the History as poorly edited.

After her marriage in 1882, to William Henry Blatch of Basingstoke, Harriot made her home in England for the next 20 years.

Harper, Anthony, II, p. 549.

Ibid., pp. 553, 558, 562. Miss Anthony spent a week with her old friends, Ellen and Aaron Sargent in Berlin where Aaron was serving as American Minister to Germany. In Paris she visited Theodore Stanton and his French wife.

Lydia Becker, Mrs. Jacob Bright, Helen Taylor, Priscilla Bright McLaren, Margaret Bright Lucas, Alice Scatcherd, and Elizabeth Pease Nichol. A bill to enfranchise widows and spinsters was pending in Parliament. Only a few women were courageous enough to demand votes for married women as well.

Harper, Anthony, II, p. 582.

Ibid., pp. 591, 583.

IMPETUS FROM THE WEST

"My heart almost stands still. I hope against hope, but still I hope," Susan wrote in her diary in 1885, as she waited for news from Oregon Territory regarding the vote of the people on a woman suffrage amendment. Woman suffrage was defeated in Oregon; and in Washington Territory, where in 1883 it had carried, a contest was being waged in the courts to invalidate it. In Nebraska it had also been defeated in 1882. Since the victories in Wyoming and Utah in 1869 and 1870, not another state or territory had written woman suffrage into law.

In spite of these setbacks, Susan still saw great promise in the West and resumed her lecturing there. She knew the rapidly growing young western states and territories as few easterners did, and she understood their people. Here women were making themselves indispensable as teachers, and state universities, now open to them, graduated over two thousand women a year. The Farmers' Alliance, the Grange, and the Prohibition party, all distinctly western in origin, admitted women to membership and were friendly to woman suffrage. School suffrage had been won in twelve western states as against five in the East, and Kansas women were now voting in municipal elections. In a sense, woman suffrage was becoming respectable in the West, and a woman was no longer ostracized by her friends for working with Susan B. Anthony.

Still critical of her own speaking, Susan was often discouraged over her lectures, but her vitality, her naturalness, and her flashes of wit seldom failed to win over her audiences. Her nephew, Daniel Jr., a student at the University of Michigan, hearing her speak, wrote his parents, "At the beginning of her lecture, Aunt Susan does not do so well; but when she is in the midst of her argument and all her energies brought into play, I think she is a very powerful speaker."

On these trips through the West, she kept in close touch with her brothers Daniel and Merritt in Kansas, frequently visiting in their homes and taking her numerous nieces to Rochester. She valued Daniel's judgment highly, and he, well-to-do and influential, was a great help to her in many ways, investing her savings and furnishing her with railroad passes which greatly reduced her ever-increasing traveling expenses.

Everywhere she met active zealous members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Since the Civil War, temperance had become a vigorous movement in the Middle West, doing its utmost to counteract the influence of the many large new breweries and saloons. Through the Prohibition party, organized on a national basis in 1872, temperance was now a political issue in Kansas, Iowa, and the Territory of Dakota, and through the W.C.T.U. women waged an effective total-abstinence campaign. Brought into the suffrage movement by Frances Willard under the slogan, "For God and Home and Country," these women quickly sensed the value of their votes to the temperance cause. Nor was Susan slow to recognize their importance to her and her work, for they represented an entirely new group, churchwomen, who heretofore had been suspicious of and hostile toward woman's rights. Through them, she anticipated a powerful impetus for her cause.

With admiration she had watched Frances Willard's career. This vivid consecrated young woman was a born leader, quick to understand woman's need of the vote and eager to lead women forward. It was a disappointment, however, when she joined the American rather than the National Woman Suffrage Association. The reasons for this, Susan readily understood, were Frances Willard's warm friendship with Mary Livermore and her own preference for the American's state-by-state method, similar to that she had so successfully followed in her W.C.T.U. Yet Frances Willard, whenever she could, cooperated with Susan whom she admired and loved; and through the years these two great leaders valued and respected each other, even though they frequently differed over policy and method.