Part 60

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Still keeping her watchful eye on the National American Association, Susan traveled to Minneapolis in the spring of 1901 for the first annual convention under the new administration. There was talk of an "entire new deal," the retirement of all who had served under Miss Anthony, and the election of a "new cabinet of officers," and Susan was so concerned that there might also be a change in the presidency that she felt she must be on hand to guide and steady the proceedings.

Mrs. Catt was re-elected and Susan returned to Rochester well satisfied and ready to devote herself to completing the fourth volume of the History of Woman Suffrage on which she and Mrs. Harper had been working intermittently for the past year. It was published late in 1902. While working on the History, Susan, although more than satisfied with Mrs. Harper's work, often thought nostalgically of her happy stimulating years of collaboration with Mrs. Stanton. She seldom saw Mrs. Stanton now, but they kept in touch with each other by letter.

In the spring of 1902, she visited Mrs. Stanton twice in New York, and planned to return in November to celebrate Mrs. Stanton's eighty-seventh birthday. In anticipation, she wrote Mrs. Stanton, "It is fifty-one years since we first met and we have been busy through every one of them, stirring up the world to recognize the rights of women.... We little dreamed when we began this contest ... that half a century later we would be compelled to leave the finish of the battle to another generation of women. But our hearts are filled with joy to know that they enter upon this task equipped with a college education, with business experience, with the freely admitted right to speak in public--all of which were denied to women fifty years ago.... These strong, courageous, capable, young women will take our place and complete our work. There is an army of them where we were but a handful...."

Two weeks before Mrs. Stanton's birthday, Susan was stunned by a telegram announcing that her old comrade had passed away in her chair. Bewildered and desolate, she sat alone in her study for several hours, trying bravely to endure her grief. Then came the reporters for copy which only this heartbroken woman could give. "I cannot express myself at all as I feel," she haltingly told them. "I am too crushed to speak. If I had died first, she would have found beautiful phrases to describe our friendship, but I cannot put it into words."

From New York, where she had gone for the funeral, she wrote in anguish to Mrs. Harper, "Oh, the voice is stilled which I have loved to hear for fifty years. Always I have felt that I must have Mrs. Stanton's opinion of things before I knew where I stood myself. I am all at sea--but the Laws of Nature are still going on--with no shadow or turning--what a wonder it is--it goes right on and on--no matter who lives or who dies."

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National woman suffrage conventions were still red-letter events to Susan and she attended them no matter how great the physical effort, traveling to New Orleans in 1903. Of particular concern was the 1904 convention because of Mrs. Catt's decision at the very last moment not to stand for re-election on account of her health. Looking over the field, Susan saw no one capable of taking her place but Anna Howard Shaw. Not to be able to turn to Mrs. Stanton's capable daughter, Harriot Stanton Blatch, at this time was disappointing, but Harriot's long absence in England had made her more or less of a stranger to the membership of the National American Association, and for some reason she did not seem to fit in, lacking her mother's warmth and appeal.

"I don't see anybody in the whole rank of our suffrage movement to take her [Mrs. Catt's] place but you," Susan now wrote Anna Howard Shaw. "If you will take it with a salary of say, $2,000, I will go ahead and try to see what I can do. We must not let the society down into feeble hands.... Don't say no, for the life of you, for if Mrs. Catt persists in going out, we shall simply have to accept it and we must tide over with the best material that we have, and you are the best, and would you have taken office four years ago, you would have been elected over-whelmingly."

Anna could not refuse Aunt Susan, and when she was elected with Mrs. Catt as vice-president, Susan breathed freely again.

It warmed Susan's heart to enter the convention on her eighty-fourth birthday to a thundering welcome, to banter with Mrs. Upton who called her to the platform, and to stop the applause with a smile and "There now, girls, that's enough." Nothing could have been more appropriate for her birthday than the Colorado jubilee over which she presided and which gave irrefutable evidence of the success of woman suffrage in that state. There was rejoicing too over Australia, where women had been voting since 1902 and over the new hope in Europe, in Denmark, where women had chosen her birthday to stage a demonstration in favor of the pending franchise bill.

For the last time, she spoke to a Senate committee on the woman suffrage amendment. Standing before these indifferent men, a tired warrior at the end of a long hard campaign, she reminded them that she alone remained of those who thirty-five years before, in 1869, had appealed to Congress for justice. "And I," she added, "shall not be able to come much longer.

"We have waited," she told them. "We stood aside for the Negro; we waited for the millions of immigrants; now we must wait till the Hawaiians, the Filipinos, and the Puerto Ricans are enfranchised; then no doubt the Cubans will have their turn. For all these ignorant, alien peoples, educated women have been compelled to stand aside and wait!" Then with mounting impatience, she asked them, "How long will this injustice, this outrage continue?"

Their answer to her was silence. They sent no report to the Senate on the woman suffrage amendment. Yet she was able to say to a reporter of the New York Sun, "I have never lost my faith, not for a moment in fifty years."

FOOTNOTES:

Rachel Foster Avery, Ed., National Council of Women, 1891 (Philadelphia, 1891), p. 229.

Dec. 1, 1898, Anthony Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library. Mrs. Elnora Babcock of New York was in charge of the press bureau.

Miss Anthony was enrolled as a member of the Knights of Labor and invited this organization to send delegates to the International Council of Women in 1888.

To Ellen Wright Garrison, 1900, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.

Harper, Anthony, III, p. 1137. A few years later, militant suffragists, led by Emmeline Pankhurst, were active in London. Mrs. Pankhurst heard Miss Anthony speak in Manchester in 1904.

Ida Husted Harper Ms., Catharine Waugh McCulloch Papers, Radcliffe Women's Archives.

Nov. 20, 1899, Anthony Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library.

History of Woman Suffrage, IV, p. 385. Miss Anthony was "moved up," as she expressed it, to Honorary President.

Peck, Catt, p. 107, Washington Post quotation.

To Laura Clay, April 15, 1900, University of Kentucky Library, Lexington, Kentucky.

Ibid., March 15, 1900.

Ibid.

Ibid., Sept. 7, 1900.