Born
200 years ago, on February 15, 1820, for nearly sixty years before her death at
the age of 86, Susan B. Anthony was an active agitator for change. In a letter
she wrote in 1883, Anthony (SBA) said,
SBA:
Agitator for Temperance
Because
of her concern for abused women and children, Anthony’s first public activity
as an agitator was in the temperance movement, which was the effort to outlaw
alcohol. (Many of you saw my related 2/9
blog article about Prohibition.)
In
1848 when she was 28 years old, Susan’s first public speech was given for
temperance.
In
her book Susan B. Anthony (2019), Teri Kanefield wrote about how Anthony
“spoke passionately about ‘the day when our brothers and sons shall no longer
be allured from the right by corrupting influence’ of alcohol so that ‘our
sisters and daughters shall no longer be exposed to the half-inebriated
seducer’” (p. 40).
In
1851 Anthony met Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, who became her lifelong friend and colleague, and the following year they
founded the Women's New York State Temperance Society.
(In 1999, Ken Burns
produced “Not For Ourselves Alone,” a splendid, 210-minute documentary about Anthony and Stanton; June
and I enjoyed watching it last year on PBS.)
The next year, 1853,
after being denied the opportunity to speak at a temperance convention because
she was a woman, Anthony realized that no one would take women in politics
seriously unless they had the right to vote. Thus, the seeds of her most
important work as an agitator for women’s rights were planted.
SBA: Agitator for Abolition
For
the next twelve years, however, Anthony worked for the abolition of slavery. In
1849, while still in her 20s, Susan met Frederick Douglass, who was two years
older than she, and they were friends and colleagues—and antagonists—in the
fight for equality until his death in 1895.
As
a Quaker, Anthony believed that all people were of equal worth and should be
treated equally. That belief undergirded her work for the rights of women. But
in the 1850s and early 1860s, she was focused primarily on eradicating slavery
in the U.S.
In
1856 Anthony became an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society, which William
Lloyd Garrison had co-founded in 1833. Drawing a small salary from the Society,
Susan began touring the country and making speeches about the evils of slavery.
After
Lincoln’s election as President in 1860, Anthony faced terrible opposition to
her work against slavery—even in New York. But she didn’t give up or quit being
an agitator.
In
1863 Anthony and Stanton formed the Women’s National Loyal League. In the largest petition drive in the
nation's history up to that time, the League collected nearly 400,000
signatures on petitions to abolish slavery and presented them to Congress.
That indefatigable work by Anthony and Stanton significantly
assisted the passage in 1865 of the Thirteenth Amendment, which ended
slavery in the U.S.
SBA:
Agitator for Suffrage
The next fight was for the right for women, both black and white, to vote. In the
early 1860s, white abolitionist men, such as William Lloyd Garrison, and black
men, such as Frederick Douglass, were all for black men obtaining the right to
vote. But they did not support the vote for women. Anthony and Stanton were
outraged.
Anthony
managed to register and even to vote in the election of 1872. She was
subsequently arrested and convicted—but refused to pay her fine of $100 plus
costs.
Even
though she was a Quaker woman, in 1893 she exclaimed. “Organize, agitate, educate,
must be our war cry!”
Anthony
spent the last forty years of her long life working for women’s right to vote.
Sadly, she never succeeded during her lifetime. But just a month before her death in
1906, she gave her last speech concluding with the rousing phrase, "Failure is
impossible!”
Nicknamed the "Anthony Amendment" in
honor of Susan, who had worked so long and so persistently, the
Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote was finally ratified
on August 18, 1920.
Now, 100 years later, there will be far more women
than men who will vote (and vote in the right way!) in the presidential
election of 2020.
*****
In 2019, the city of
Liberty (Mo.) where I live erected a life-size statue of Susan B. Anthony on
the southeast corner of the historic square. Toward the end of their successful
football season, she was sporting Chiefs’ apparel, as you see in the picture
.
As usual, I received much-appreciated comments from Thinking Friend Eric Dollard in Chicago:
ReplyDelete"Thanks, Leroy, for your comments about Susan B. Anthony.
"I think the key idea was Anthony's belief that "all people were of equal worth and should be treated equally." (I would prefer "are" to "were.") She was a courageous woman, who deserves our respect and admiration. At the time of her death, she had won some important battles in the fight for women's suffrage as Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho had given women the right to vote. A number of other states followed suit soon after Anthony's death. (Illinois in 1913 became the first state east of the Mississippi to grant women's suffrage.)
"And let's hope that enough women (and men) vote the right way in our next presidential election."
Thanks for your comments, Eric. And thanks for pointing out that there were, indeed, a few states that allowed women to vote before 1920; I knew that some western states had, but I hadn't realized that Illinois was the first state east of the Mississippi to grant women's suffrage.
DeleteExcellent blog! Thanks.
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading, Anton!
DeleteThinking Friend Jamea Crum in Springfield, Mo., sent this brief comment:
ReplyDeleteI loved this and the statue.
Thanks, Jamea!
DeleteComments from local Thinking Friend Temp Sparkman:
ReplyDelete"Morning Leroy. Thanks for another instructive and inspiring article. I did not know that the 19th amendment was passed after she died. Reading about her reminds me that we are responsible for being faithful, not in succeeding."
Thanks for your comments, Temp--especially for your concluding sentence. -- #27 in my book "Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now" is "The New Testament Word for Success Is Faithfulness."
DeleteThinking Friend Charles Kiker in Texas sent these brief comments:
ReplyDelete"I doubt she would be pleased with the Chiefs apparel. Informative article!"
Thanks for reading and responding, Charles. You are probably right about SBA not being pleased with the Chiefs apparel, and while I thought it was cute, I didn't particularly like it either--but, as you might guess, many people around town here seemed to love it.
DeleteI just received permission to post the following comments from local Thinking Friend Milton Horne. (Later in the day I will post my response to these thought-provoking comments.)
ReplyDelete"Thanks, Leroy, for this blog on Anthony. It strikes me that such pieces as yours create the impression that her positions were the logical outcomes of a morality that becomes evident to reasonable and reasoning people. Such inferences are increasingly suspicious to me, though. I always used to hear my father say, 'people don't know how to reason ethically.' I know he said that to inspire education (thinking that learning to reason was all one needed to do--much like many Xians' belief that 'reading the New Testament was all one needed to do to see that Jesus really was the Messiah'!).
"I'm wondering about Anthony's own personal, emotional agitations, though. Is agitation itself something that results from reasoned reflections or emotional leaps and jumps that have only a superficial grounding in reasoning? Scanning some of her bibliographical information, I take it she was not married, and the only relationships mentioned were ones associated with her causes. Are such things the origins of her agitation? And, given what we are learning about how brains work, how does such emotional experience as loneliness and self-loathing relate to these moral and ethical causes?"
Milton, I'm not sure what you are implying by your first paragraph. Susan grew up in a Quaker home, although her mother wasn't a Quaker. From her father and other Quakers, she came to believe in the basic equality of all people. That seemed to undergird her agitation against slavery and the subservience of women--and probably her work for temperance was because of the way she was opposed to women and children being mistreated by men who drank too much. I don't know what philosophical grounds she might have had for her belief in human equality, but since that is a basic religious/ethical belief of mine, I certainly agree with her lifelong commitment to acting on that basic principle.
DeleteIt seems that Anthony was single all her life by choice. As a young woman she had several opportunities to marry but deliberately choose not to marry. She was no more of an agitator, though, than Elisabeth Cady Stanton, who was married and the mother of several children, or of Matilda Joslyn Gage (whom Craig mentioned in his comments below), who also married at 18 and was the mother of five children--and she is considered more radical than either Stanton or Anthony. Prophets and other critics of society and outspoken advocates for social change can always be "psychoanalyzed" and said to have been affected by various psychological problems or weaknesses. But haven't most of the advancements in forming a more just society for all people been made partly or largely by people who were not "well adjusted" to the dominant society of the times? The Old Testament prophets, and even Jesus himself, were suspected and/or accused of being "mad" or in some ways maladjusted.
So, while Susan B. Anthony was certainly not "normal" in the sense of marrying at an early age and living her life supporting her husband and caring for her children and being a "nice" member of the ladies guild, I certainly do not think there is any basis for saying that her exemplary agitation for the abolition of slavery and for the social equality of women was based upon her emotional experiences of loneliness and self-loathing.
Milton has been leading our class through Nassim Talib's "The Black Swan" the last few weeks, and I have had to miss most of it because I have been in the church "radio room" trying to learn how to do the "production" end of church video. I was especially sad to miss the discussion of Chapter 6, "The Narrative Fallacy" because Milton usually likes to talk about narrative when we read scripture and other literature. Indeed, this past Sunday I made part of the discussion of the following chapter, and I was wondering if I was hearing rumblings of echoes from "The Narrative Fallacy."
DeleteSo what is the narrative of an agitator? Well, they are all over the place, from Ralph Nader to Greta Thunberg and Cain to Trump. The narrative with Cain is fairly clear, he was mad at God, so he killed his brother Abel, then had an angry shouting match with God. Of course, ethical reasoning had little to do with Cain. Indeed, the Bible presents many people quite blind to their own motives and actions. Consider Noah, the first sower of grapes, sleeping off the first hangover, embarrassed by his son, and responding by cursing his grandson. So let us assume SBA did not have a fully formed rationale for her agitation. So what? Perhaps she did something greater than she knew. I would suggest we could make a parallel consideration of the abolitionist John Brown. He looked crazy trying to start a slave revolt, and refusing to defend himself during his trial. Yet, not long after he surrendered his hopeless cause to General Robert E. Lee, soldiers were singing "John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave" which in time lead Julia Ward Howe to transform it into "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." So which was Brown, a madman or a prophet? Yes!
Talib ends his discussion of "The Narrative Fallacy" by saying, "Finally, there may be a way to use a narrative--but for a good purpose. Only a diamond can cut a diamond; we can use our ability to convince with a story that conveys the right message--what storytellers seem to do." For "the right message" Talib suggests "experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories." That sounds a lot like the scientific method!
Let us speak of "The Matilda Effect." It is usually used for women in science who do not get the credit they are due, but the original Matilda had an additional problem, as a freethinker and possibly the most radical of all the suffragettes, she was also largely erased from that history. You can read more about the Matilda Effect here: http://sustainable-nano.com/2017/03/08/what-is-the-matilda-effect-and-how-can-we-improve-recognition-of-women-scientists/
ReplyDeleteMatilda Joslyn Gage was co-author of the first three volumes of History of Woman Suffrage, together with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She served in leadership of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, including a turn as President. She was also passionate about indigenous rights. If this sounds like something out of the land of Oz, that is appropriate, for L. Frank Baum was her son-in-law. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, indeed! You can read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_Joslyn_Gage
Craig, thank you so much for writing about a significant women I knew nothing about. I now have her on my list of planned blog articles to write about for March 20, 2021.
DeleteHere are comments from local Thinking Friend Bob Leeper:
ReplyDelete"Leroy: thanks for your weekly efforts to prime our brains into evaluating good ideas and memorable dates. I am intrigued by the juxtaposition of your S B A blog and last night’s appearance on MSNBC Rachel Maddow show of Yale professor TIMOTHY SNYDER, author of ON TYRANY; I made a note of his memorable line.....A LOT OF US HAVE TO DISSENT."
Thanks for your timely comments, Bob. I just heard part of what Rachel said about Snyder, but I hope to listen to her interviewing him, which is available online. I was surprised that his book "On Tyranny," which I assumed was a new book, was published in 2017.
DeleteAnd these comments from Thinking Friend Truett Baker in Arizona:
ReplyDeleteGreat, informative information on a great, indomitable woman. She was a godly woman but strongly influenced by the Unitarians. She was always proud of her Quaker roots but appeared to be more Unitarian in religious belief.
"The period of her work almost corresponds to the beginning of the Social Work Movement in this country, which included Jane Addams and Mary Richmond. It would be interesting to know if either women knew or was influenced by the others.
"Thanks for recognizing this amazing lady and her courageous work!"
Thanks for your comments, Truett. Addams and Richmond were born in 1860 and 1861, so they were 40/41 years younger than Anthony--and they were both from Illinois, quite far from New York then. But my guess is they both knew of and were influenced by SBA.
ReplyDeleteI saw the Ken Burns special "Not For Ourselves Alone" when it first came out around 1999 or 2000. I liked it a lot and when it was available at the library, I used it for teaching a church school class at Rainbow Mennonite. I learned a lot from that film series, but in conversation with others who are knowledgeable about women's suffrage, I found that credit often goes to SBA and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to the exclusion of other women who were also leaders for the movement. Thanks to Diane Eickhof and her book "A Revolutionary Heart," I became aware of Clarina Nichols and her suffrage work in Kansas.
ReplyDeleteI also read a thoughtful review of "Not for Ourselves Alone" which claimed that the video was very good in many respects, but didn't address the complexity of Anthony and Stanton's thought on both suffrage and its relationship to other issues. For example, after the Civil War and during Reconstruction, Anthony and Stanton made questionable alliances including with a racist individual while trying to gain the support of Southern white women. This raises the issue of unsavory compromises and alliances that may sometimes be made by key leaders in achieving social change.
This is Karen Hostetler, and I see my name didn't come through on the comment immediately above, so am adding this note.
DeleteKaren, thanks for posting comments and then for identifying yourself. I appreciate you reading the article about SBA and taking the time to write.
DeleteThank you for mentioning Clarina Nichols. You may not be aware that I posted a blog article about her five years ago. Here is the link to that article: https://theviewfromthisseat.blogspot.com/2015/01/clarina-nichols-frontier-feminist.html. While Clarina was certainly an important advocate for women's suffrage, perhaps her were was more limited to the frontier whereas Stanton and Anthony were in New York and were more national advocates.
Concerning your second paragraph: certainly Anthony (as well as Stanton) was greatly disappointed when the abolitionists, with whom she had worked so hard, turned away from what she considered an equally important issue: equality for women. As I mentioned, she was a close friend of Frederick Douglass, but when he ceased to push for the rights of women as well as the rights of black men, she had a strained relationship with him, as well as William Lloyd Garrison. (That is why I wrote that she and Douglass were friends--and antagonists.) At this point I am fuzzy about the alliances that Anthony made with Southern white women, but that certainly would not be surprising. She had worked diligently for the abolition of slavery--and after the Civil War she worked diligently for the equality of women, black and white. She and many others could not understand while poor, uneducated black men were given rights that middle class and highly educated white women such as she and her peers did not have. But as I understand it, hers was an ongoing struggle for equality of women both black and white. So, I don't see what she did as being an "unsavory compromise." The nationwide suffrage that was finally obtained for women, several years after her death, included blacks as well as whites.