The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) eBook

Ida Husted Harper
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 732 pages of information about The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2).

The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) eBook

Ida Husted Harper
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 732 pages of information about The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2).
it in up to the head.  Indeed, it seems to me, that while Lucretia Mott may be said to be the soul of this movement, and Mrs. Stanton the mind, the “swift, keen intelligence,” Miss Anthony, alert, aggressive and indefatigable, is its nervous energy—­its propulsive force....
To see the three chief figures of this great movement sitting upon a stage in joint council, like the three Fates of a new dispensation—­dignity and the ever-acceptable grace of scholarly earnestness, intelligence and beneficence making them prominent—­is assurance that the women of our country, bereft of defenders or injured by false ones, have advocates equal to the great demands of their cause.

[Autograph: 

  Yours affectionately
  Grace Greenwood]

Immediately after this convention, Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton, by invitation of a number of State suffrage committees, made a tour of Chicago, Springfield, Bloomington, Galena, St. Louis, Madison, Milwaukee and Toledo, speaking to large audiences.  At St. Louis they were met by a delegation of ladies and escorted to the Southern Hotel, and then invited by the president of the State association, Mrs. Virginia L. Minor, to visit various points of interest in the city.  At Springfield, Ill., the lieutenant-governor presided over their convention, and Governor Palmer and many members of the legislature were in the audience.  With the Chicago delegation, Mrs. Livermore, Judge Waite, Judge Bradwell, Mrs. Myra Bradwell, editor of the Legal News, and others, they addressed the legislature.  At Chicago, in Crosby Music Hall, the meeting was decidedly aggressive.  Miss Anthony’s resolutions stirred up the politicians, but she defended them bravely, according to report: 

She stood outside of any party which threw itself across the path of complete suffrage to woman, and therefore she stood outside of the Republican party, where all her male relatives and friends were to be found.  Republican leaders had told them to wait; that the movement was inopportune; but all the time had continued to put up bars and barriers against its future success.  No woman should belong at present to either party; she should simply stand for suffrage....  She protested against any Republicans saying that Mrs. Stanton or herself had laid a straw in the way of the negro.  Because they insisted that the rights of women ought to have equal prominence with the rights of black men, it was assumed that they opposed the enfranchisement of the negro.  She repelled the assumption.  She arraigned the entire Republican party because they refused to see that all women, black and white, were as much in political servitude as the black men.

At this meeting Robert Laird Collyer (not the distinguished Robert Collyer) made a long address against the enfranchisement of women, mixing up purity, propriety and pedestals in the usual incoherent fashion.  He was so completely annihilated by Anna Dickinson that no further defense of the measure was necessary.  Suffrage societies were organized in Chicago, Milwaukee and Toledo.  In her account of this convention, Mrs. Livermore wrote of Miss Anthony: 

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The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.