Chapter XX Recording Women’s History
339 The only such history available was the History of the National Woman’s Rights Movement for Twenty Years (New York, 1871), written by Paulina Wright Davis to commemorate the first national woman’s rights convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850. This brief record, ending with Victoria Woodhull’s Memorial to Congress, was inadequate and placed too much emphasis on Victoria Woodhull who had flashed through the movement like a meteor, leaving behind her a trail of discord and little that was constructive.
340 Aaron McLean, Eugene Mosher, his daughter Louise, Merritt’s daughter, Lucy E. Anthony from Fort Scott, Kansas, and later Lucy’s sister “Anna O.”
341 Mrs. Stanton moved to the new home she had built in Tenafly, New Jersey, in 1868.
342 Fowler & Wells furnished the paper, press work, and advertising and paid the authors 12½% commission on sales. They did not look askance at such a controversial subject, having published the Fowler family’s phrenological books. In addition the women of the family were suffragists.
343 In 1855, at the instigation of her father. Miss Anthony began to preserve her press clippings. She now found them a valuable record, and she hired a young girl to paste them in six large account books. Thirty-two of her scrapbooks are now in the Library of Congress.
344 Aug. 30, 1876, Ida Husted Harper Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library. The history of the American Woman Suffrage Association was compiled for Volume II from the Woman’s Journal and Mary Livermore’s The Agitator by Harriot Stanton.
345 Nov. 30, 1880, Amelia Bloomer Papers, Seneca Falls Historical Society, Seneca Falls, N. Y.
346 Harper, Anthony, II, p. 531. The History received friendly and complimentary reviews, the New York Tribune and Sun giving it two columns.
347 June 28, 1881, Amelia Bloomer Papers, Seneca Falls Historical Society, Seneca Falls, N. Y. The cost of a cloth copy of the History was $3.
348 Dec. 19, 1880, Susan B. Anthony Papers, Library of Congress. Rachel Foster’s mother was a life-long friend of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and sympathetic to her work for women. The widow of a wealthy Pittsburgh newspaperman, she was now active in Pennsylvania suffrage organizations. Her daughters, Rachel and Julia, early became interested in the cause.
349 E. C. Stanton to Laura Collier, Jan. 21, 1886, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Vassar College Library. Mary Livermore criticized the History as poorly edited.
350 After her marriage in 1882, to William Henry Blatch of Basingstoke, Harriot made her home in England for the next 20 years.
351 Harper, Anthony, II, p. 549.
352 Ibid., pp. 553, 558, 562. Miss Anthony spent a week with her old friends, Ellen and Aaron Sargent in Berlin where Aaron was serving as American Minister to Germany. In Paris she visited Theodore Stanton and his French wife.
353 Lydia Becker, Mrs. Jacob Bright, Helen Taylor, Priscilla Bright McLaren, Margaret Bright Lucas, Alice Scatcherd, and Elizabeth Pease Nichol. A bill to enfranchise widows and spinsters was pending in Parliament. Only a few women were courageous enough to demand votes for married women as well.
354 Harper, Anthony, II, p. 582.
355 Ibid., pp. 591, 583.