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).
We have a drawing-room all to ourselves, and here we are just as cozy and happy as lovers.  We look at the prairie schooners slowly moving along with ox-teams, or notice the one lone cabin-light on the endless plains, and Mrs. Stanton will say:  “In all that there is real bliss, if only the two are perfect equals, two loving people, neither assuming to control the other.”  Yes, after all, life is about one and the same thing, whether in the prairie schooner and sod cabin, or the Fifth Avenue palace.  Love for and faith in each other alone can make either a heaven, and without these any home is a hell.  It is not the outside things which make life, but the inner, the spirit of love which casteth out all devils and bringeth in all angels.
Ever since 4 o’clock this morning we have been moving over the soil that is really the land of the free and the home of the brave—­Wyoming, the Territory in which women are the recognized political equals of men.  Women here can say:  “What a magnificent country is ours, where every class and caste, color and sex, may find equal freedom, and every woman sit under her own vine and fig tree.”  What a blessed attainment at last; and that it should be here among these everlasting mountains, midway between the Atlantic and Pacific, seems significant of the true growth of the individual—­the center pure, the heart-beats free and equal.

At Salt Lake City they were the guests of Mr. and Mrs. W.S.  Godbe, and were presented to their audience by Mayor Wells, who afterward took them to call on his five wives.  The second evening they were introduced by Bishop Orson Pratt.  From here Miss Anthony writes to The Revolution: 

If I were a believer in special providences, I should say that our being in Salt Lake City at the dedication of the New Liberal Institute was one.  On Sunday morning, July 2, this beautiful hall of the Liberal party—­Apostate party, the Saints call it—­was well filled.  The services consisted of invocations, hymns and brief addresses.  Messrs. Godbe, Harrison, Lyman and Lawrence seem to be the advance-guard—­the high priests of the new order—­and as they sang their songs of freedom, poured out their rejoicings over their emancipation from the Theocracy of Brigham, and told of the beatitudes of soul-to-soul communion with the All-Father, my heart was steeped in deepest sympathy with the women around me and, rising at an opportune pause, I asked if a woman and a stranger might be permitted to say a word.  At once the entire circle of men on the platform arose and beckoned me forward; and, with a Quaker inspiration not to be repeated, much less put on paper, I asked those men, bubbling over with the divine spirit of freedom for themselves, if they had thought whether the women of their households were today rejoicing in like manner?  I can not tell what I said—­only this I know, that young and beautiful, old and wrinkled women alike wept, and men said, “I wanted to get out
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The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.