Part 52

Susan did not want the presidency. She wanted it for Mrs. Stanton, who had headed the National Association so ably for so many years. She pleaded earnestly with the delegates of the National Association: "I will say to every woman who is a National and who has any love for the old Association, or for Susan B. Anthony, that I hope you will not vote for her for president.... Don't you vote for any human being but Mrs. Stanton.... When the division was made 22 years ago it was because our platform was too broad, because Mrs. Stanton was too radical.... And now ... if Mrs. Stanton shall be deposed ... you virtually degrade her.... I want our platform to be kept broad enough for the infidel, the atheist, the Mohammedan, or the Christian.... These are the broad principles I want you to stand upon."

When the two organizations met in February 1890 to effect formal union as the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was elected president by a majority of 41 votes, while Susan was the almost unanimous choice for vice-president at large. With Lucy Stone chosen chairman of the executive committee, Jane Spofford treasurer, and Rachel Foster and Alice Stone Blackwell secretaries, the new organization was well equipped with able leaders for the work ahead. It was dedicated to work for both state and federal woman suffrage amendments and its official organ would be the Woman's Journal.

Susan now faced the future with gratitude that a strong unified organization could be handed down to the younger women who would gradually take over the work she had started, and her confidence in these young women grew day by day. Working closely with Rachel Foster and May Wright Sewall, she knew their caliber. Anna Howard Shaw and Alice Stone Blackwell showed great promise, and Harriot Stanton Blatch was living up to her expectations. In England where Harriot had made her home since her marriage in 1882, she was active in the cause, and on her visits to her mother in New York, she kept in touch with the suffrage movement in the United States. She took part in the union meeting, and in her diary, Susan recorded these words of commendation, "Harriot said but a few words, yet showed herself worthy of her mother and her mother's lifelong friend and co-worker. It was a proud moment for me."

To such she could entrust her beloved cause.

FOOTNOTES:

Harper, Anthony, II, p. 592.

Ibid., p. 658.

Miss Anthony first met Frances Willard in 1875 when she lectured in Rochester. Invited to sit on the platform, by her side, she thoughtfully refused, adding "You have a heavy enough load to carry without me." Harper, Anthony, I, p. 472. When Frances Willard took her stand for woman suffrage in the W.C.T.U. in 1876, Miss Anthony wrote her, "Now you are to go forward. I wish I could see you and make you feel my gladness." Mary Earhart, Frances Willard (Chicago, 1944), p. 153.

During the debate, Frances Willard rendered valuable aid with a petition for woman suffrage, signed by 200,000 women. This counteracted in a measure the protests against woman suffrage by President Eliot of Harvard and 200 New England clergymen.

Harper, Anthony, II, pp. 622-623.

Ibid., p. 612.

So successful was Mrs. Colby's Washington venture that she continued to publish her Woman's Tribune there for the next 16 years

Harper, Anthony, II, p. 637.

Woman's Tribune, Feb. 22, 1890.

The credit for achieving union after two years of patient negotiation goes to Rachel Foster Avery, secretary of the National Association, and to Lucy Stone's daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, secretary of the American Association.

Harper, Anthony, II, p. 675.

VICTORIES IN THE WEST

New western states were coming into the Union, North and South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming, and in Susan's opinion it was highly important that they be admitted as woman suffrage states, for she had not forgotten that disturbing line of the Supreme Court decision in the Virginia Minor case which read, "No new State has ever been admitted to the Union which has conferred the right of suffrage on women, and this has never been considered a valid objection to her admission." Susan wanted to start a new trend.

Opposition to Wyoming's woman suffrage provision was strong in Congress in spite of the fact that it had the unanimous approval of Wyoming's constitutional convention. To Susan in the gallery of the House of Representatives, listening anxiously to the debate on the admission of Wyoming, defeat was unthinkable after women had voted in the Territory of Wyoming for twenty years; but Democrats, wishing to block the admission of a preponderantly Republican state, used woman suffrage as an excuse. With a sinking heart, she heard an amendment offered, limiting suffrage in Wyoming to males. At the crucial moment, however, the tide was turned by a telegram from the Wyoming legislature, the words of which rejoiced Susan, "We will remain out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without woman suffrage." After this, the House voted to admit Wyoming, 139 to 127, but the Senate delayed, renewing the attack on the woman suffrage provision. Not until July 1890, while she was speaking to a large audience in the opera house at Madison, South Dakota, did the good news of the admission of Wyoming reach her. Jubilant as she commented on this great victory, she spoke as one inspired, for she saw this as the turning point in her forty long years of uphill work.

Neither North Dakota nor South Dakota had wanted to risk their chances of statehood by incorporating woman suffrage in their constitutions. Yet public opinion in both states was friendly, South Dakota directing its first legislature to submit the question to the voters. It was this that brought Susan to South Dakota in 1890. Sentiment for woman suffrage in South Dakota had previously been created almost entirely by the W.C.T.U., and this had linked woman suffrage and prohibition together. Now, the liquor interests made prohibition an issue in this woman suffrage campaign, as they rallied their forces for the repeal of prohibition which had been adopted when South Dakota was admitted to statehood. Through the propaganda of the liquor interests the 30,000 foreign-born voters became formidable opponents, and newly naturalized Russians, Scandinavians, and Poles, given the vote before American women, wore badges carrying the slogan, "Against Woman Suffrage and Susan B. Anthony." Both Republicans and Democrats cultivated these foreign-born voters, turning a cold shoulder to the woman suffrage amendment and refusing to endorse it in their state conventions. Even the Farmers' Alliance and the Knights of Labor, previously friendly to woman suffrage, now joined with the Prohibitionists to form a third political party which also failed to endorse the woman suffrage amendment. On top of all this, anti-suffragists from Massachusetts, calling themselves Remonstrants, flooded South Dakota with their leaflets.

It now seemed to Susan as if every clever politician had lined up against women. During these trying days, Anna Howard Shaw joined her, and together they covered the state, hoping by the truth and sincerity of their statements to quash the propaganda against woman suffrage. Often they traveled in freight cars, as transportation was limited, or drove long distances in wagons over the sun-baked prairie. The heat was intense and the hot winds, blowing incessantly, seared everything they touched. After two years of drouth, the farmers were desperately poor, and Susan, concerned over their plight, wondered why Congress could not have appropriated the money for artesian wells to help these honest earnest people, instead of voting $40,000 for an investigating commission.

Occasionally Susan and Anna spent the night in isolated sod houses where ingenious pioneer women cooked their scant meals over burning chips of buffalo bones gathered on the prairie. Glorying in the valiant spirit of these women, who in loneliness and hardship played an important but unheralded role in the conquest of this new country, Susan was generous with her praise. To them her words of commendation were like a benediction, and few of them ever forgot a visit from Susan B. Anthony.

By this time life on the frontier was an old story to her, for she had campaigned under similar conditions in Kansas and in the far West. Nonetheless, the hardships were trying. Yet this plucky woman of seventy wrote friends in the East, "Tell everybody that I am perfectly well in body and in mind, never better, and never doing more work.... O, the lack of modern comforts and conveniences! But I can put up with it better than any of the young folks.... I shall push ahead and do my level best to carry this State, come weal or woe to me personally.... I never felt so buoyed up with the love and sympathy and confidence of the good people everywhere...."

Young vigorous Anna Howard Shaw proved to be a campaigner after Susan's own heart, tireless, uncomplaining, and good-tempered, an exceptional speaker, witty and quick to say the right word at the right time. It was a joy to find in Anna the same devotion to the cause that she herself felt, the same crusading fervor and reliability. During the long drives over the prairie, she talked to Anna of the work that must be done, of what it would mean to the women of the future, and she fired Anna's soul "with the flame that burned in her own."

Another young western woman, Carrie Chapman Catt, also attracted Susan's attention at this time. She had volunteered for the South Dakota campaign, after attending her first national woman suffrage convention; and Susan, meeting her in Huron, South Dakota, to map out a speaking tour for her, found a tall handsome confident young woman ready to attack the work and see it through, in spite of the hardships which confronted her.

Carrie Lane, a graduate of Iowa State College, had briefly studied law and taught school before her marriage to Lee Chapman. Now, four years after his death, she had married George W. Catt of Seattle, a promising young engineer and a former fellow-student at Iowa State College. What particularly impressed Susan was that Carrie, in spite of her marriage in June, had kept her pledge to come to South Dakota. She was pleased with the way Carrie not only heroically filled every difficult engagement, but sized up the campaign for herself and planned for the future. In Carrie's report of her work there was a ruthless practicality which was rare and which instantly won Susan's approval. Here was a young woman to watch and to keep in the work.

The visible result of six months of campaigning was defeat, with the vote 22,972 for woman suffrage and 45,632 opposed, and as Susan remembered the maneuvers of the politicians, the trading of votes for the location of the state capital, and the scheming of the liquor interests, she felt she was championing a lonely cause.

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