Recording Women’s History
Recording women’s history for future generations was a project that had been in the minds of both Susan and Mrs. Stanton for a long time. Both looked upon women’s struggle for a share in government as a potent force in strengthening democracy and one to be emphasized in history. Men had always been the historians and had as a matter of course extolled men’s exploits, passing over women’s record as negligible. Susan intended to remedy this and she was convinced that if women close to the facts did not record them now, they would be forgotten or misinterpreted by future historians. Already many of the old workers had died, Martha C. Wright, Lydia Mott, whom Susan had nursed in her last illness, Lucretia Mott, and William Lloyd Garrison. There was no time to be lost.339
In the spring of 1880, Susan’s mother died, and it was no longer necessary for her to fit into her schedule frequent visits in Rochester. Her sister Mary, busy with her teaching, was sharing her home with her two widowed brothers-in-law and two nieces whose education she was supervising.340 Mrs. Stanton had just given up the strenuous life of a Lyceum lecturer and welcomed work that would keep her at home. Susan, who had managed to save $4,500 out of her lecture fees, felt she could afford to devote at least a year to the history.
She now shipped several boxes of letters, clippings, and documents to the Stanton home in Tenafly, New Jersey.341 As they planned their book, it soon became obvious that the one volume which they had hoped to finish in a few months would extend to two or three volumes and take many years to write. They called in Matilda Joslyn Gage to help them, and the three of them signed a contract to share the work and the profits.
The history presented a publishing problem as well as a writing ordeal, and Susan, interviewing New York publishers, found the subject had little appeal. Finally, however, she signed a contract with Fowler & Wells under which the authors agreed to pay the cost of composition, stereotyping, and engravings; and as usual she raised the necessary funds.342
Returning to Tenafly as to a second home, Susan usually found Mrs. Stanton beaming a welcome from the piazza and Margaret and Harriot running to the gate to meet her. The Stanton children were fond of Susan. It was a comfortable happy household, and Susan, thoroughly enjoying Mrs. Stanton’s companionship, attacked the history with vigor. Sitting opposite each other at a big table in the sunny tower room, they spent long hours at work. Susan, thin and wiry, her graying hair neatly smoothed back over her ears, sat up very straight as she rapidly sorted old clippings and letters and outlined chapters, while Mrs. Stanton, stout and placid, her white curls beautifully arranged, wrote steadily and happily, transforming masses of notes into readable easy prose.343
Having sent appeals for information to colleagues in all parts of the country, Susan, as the contributions began to come in, struggled to decipher the often almost illegible, handwritten manuscripts, many of them careless and inexact about dates and facts. To their request for data about her, Lucy Stone curtly replied, “I have never kept a diary or any record of my work, and so am unable to furnish you the required dates.... You say ‘I’ must be referred to in the history you are writing.... I cannot furnish a biographical sketch and trust you will not try to make one. Yours with ceaseless regret that any ‘wing’ of suffragists should attempt to write the history of the other.”344
The greater part of the writing fell upon Mrs. Stanton, but Matilda Joslyn Gage contributed the chapters, “Preceding Causes,” “Women in Newspapers,” and “Women, Church, and State.” Susan carefully selected the material and checked the facts. She helped with the copying of the handwritten manuscript and with the proofreading. Believing that pictures of the early workers were almost as important for the History as the subject matter itself, she tried to provide them, but they presented a financial problem with which it was hard to cope, for each engraving cost $100.345
When the first volume of the History of Woman Suffrage came off the press in May 1881, she proudly and lovingly scanned its 878 pages which told the story of women’s progress in the United States up to the Civil War.
She was well aware that the History was not a literary achievement, but the facts were there, as accurate as humanly possible; all the eloquent, stirring speeches were there, a proof of the caliber and high intelligence of the pioneers; and out of the otherwise dull record of meetings, conventions, and petitions, a spirit of independence and zeal for freedom shone forth, highlighted occasionally by dramatic episodes. As Mrs. Stanton so aptly expressed it, “We have furnished the bricks and mortar for some future architect to rear a beautiful edifice.”346
The distribution of the book was very much on Susan’s mind, for she realized that it would not be in great demand because of its cost, bulk, and subject matter. Nor could she at this time present it to libraries, as she wished, for she had already spent her savings on the illustrations. “It ought to be in every school library,” she wrote Amelia Bloomer, “where every boy and girl of the nation could see and read and learn what women have done to secure equality of rights and chances for girls and women....”347
So much material had been collected while Volume I was in preparation that both Susan and Mrs. Stanton felt they should immediately undertake Volume II. After a summer of lecturing to help finance its publication, Susan returned to Tenafly to the monotonous work of compilation. “I am just sick to death of it,” she wrote her young friend Rachel Foster. “I had rather wash or whitewash or do any possible hard work than sit here and go there digging into the dusty records of the past—that is, rather make history than write it.”348
Yet she never entirely gave up making history, for she was always planning for the future and Rachel Foster was now her able lieutenant, relieving her of details, doing the spade work for the annual Washington conventions, and arranging for an occasional lecture engagement. Susan would not leave Tenafly for a lecture fee of less than $50.
She took this intelligent young girl to her heart as she had Anna E. Dickinson in the past. Rachel, however, had none of Anna’s dramatic temperament or love of the limelight, but in her orderly businesslike way was eager to serve Susan, whom she had admired ever since as a child she had heard her speak for woman suffrage in her mother’s drawing room.
While Susan was pondering the ways and means of financing another volume of the History, the light broke through in a letter from Wendell Phillips, announcing the astonishing news that she and Lucy Stone had inherited approximately $25,000 each for “the woman’s cause” under the will of Eliza Eddy, the daughter of their former benefactor, Francis Jackson. Although the legacy was not paid until 1885 because of litigation, its promise lightened considerably Susan’s financial burden and she knew that Volumes II and III were assured. Her gratitude to Eliza Eddy was unbounded, and better still, she read between the lines the good will of Wendell Phillips who had been Eliza Eddy’s legal advisor. That he, whom she admired above all men, should after their many differences still regard her as worthy of this trust, meant as much to her as the legacy itself.
In May 1882 she had the satisfaction of seeing the second volume of the History of Woman Suffrage in print, carrying women’s record through 1875. Volume III was not completed until 1885.
Women’s response to their own history was a disappointment. Only a few realized its value for the future, among them Mary L. Booth, editor of Harper’s Bazaar. The majority were indifferent and some even critical. When Mrs. Stanton offered the three volumes to the Vassar College library, they were refused.349 Nevertheless, every time Susan looked at the three large volumes on her shelves, she was happy, for now she was assured that women’s struggle for citizenship and freedom would live in print through the years. To libraries in the United States and Europe, she presented well over a thousand copies, grateful that the Eliza Eddy legacy now made this possible.
In 1883, Susan surprised everyone by taking a vacation in Europe. Soon after Volume II of the History had been completed, Mrs. Stanton had left for Europe with her daughter Harriot.350 Her letters to Susan reported not only Harriot’s marriage to an Englishman, William Henry Blatch, but also encouraging talks with the forward-looking women of England and France whom she hoped to interest in an international organization. Repeatedly she urged Susan to join her, to meet these women, and to rest for a while from her strenuous labors. The possibility of forming an international organization of women was a greater attraction to Susan than Europe itself, and when Rachel Foster suggested that she make the journey with her, she readily consented.
“She goes abroad a republican Queen,” observed the Kansas City Journal, “uncrowned to be sure, but none the less of the blood royal, and we have faith that the noblest men and women of Europe will at once recognize and welcome her as their equal.”351
In London, Susan met Mrs. Stanton, “her face beaming and her white curls as lovely as ever.” Then after talking with English suffragists and her two old friends, William Henry Channing and Ernestine Rose, now living in England, Susan traveled with Rachel through Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and France, where a whole new world opened before her. She thoroughly enjoyed its beauty; yet there was much that distressed her and she found herself far more interested in the people, their customs and living conditions than in the treasures of art. “It is good for our young civilization,” she wrote Daniel, “to see and study that of the old world and observe the hopelessness of lifting the masses into freedom and freedom’s industry, honesty and integrity. How any American, any lover of our free institutions, based on equality of rights for all, can settle down and live here is more than I can comprehend. It will only be by overturning the powers that education and equal chances ever can come to the rank and file. The hope of the world is indeed our republic....” To a friend she reported, “Amidst it all my head and heart turn to our battle for women at home. Here in the old world, with... its utter blotting out of women as an equal, there is no hope, no possibility of changing her condition; so I look to our own land of equality for men, and partial equality for women, as the only one for hope or work.”352
Back in London again, she allowed herself a few luxuries, such as an expensive India shawl and more social life than she had had in many a year, and she longed to have Mary enjoy it all with her. She visited suffragists in Scotland and Ireland as well as in England and occasionally spoke at their meetings.353 Here as in America suffragists differed over the best way to win the vote, and even the most radical among them were more conservative and cautious than American women, but she admired them all and tried to understand the very different problems they faced. Gradually she interested a few of them in an international conference of women, and before she sailed back to America with Mrs. Stanton in November 1883, she had their promise of cooperation.
The newspapers welcomed her home. “Susan B. Anthony is back from Europe,” announced the Cleveland Leader, “and is here for a winter’s fight on behalf of woman suffrage. She seems remarkably well, and has gained fifteen pounds since she left last spring. She is sixty-three, but looks just the same as twenty years ago. There is perhaps an extra wrinkle in her face, a little more silver in her hair, but her blue eyes are just as bright, her mouth as serious and her step as active as when she was forty. She would attract attention in any crowd.”354
Susan came back to an indifferent Congress. “All would fall flat and dead if someone were not here to keep them in mind of their duty to us,” she wrote a friend at this time, and to her diary she confided, “It is perfectly disheartening that no member feels any especial interest or earnest determination in pushing this question of woman suffrage, to all men only a side issue.”355