All in the Day's Work: An AutobiographyTarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
History
All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography
Tarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
Journalists -- United States -- Biography; Tarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva), 1857-1944
The move to Titusville, however, soon put my mother in touch with the
crusade for equal political rights which was taking the place of the
earlier movement for woman’s rights. The Civil War had slowed up that
agitation; indeed, many of its best talking points had been conceded and
were slowly going into practice. Most of the militants had thrown
themselves into war work and, after the war, into the campaign for negro
suffrage; but the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, for the
first time introducing the word “male” into the Constitution, aroused a
sense of outrage, not only in the advocates of equal rights but in many
women who had not approved of previous agitations. Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the greatest of the early leaders, failing
to keep the humiliating distinction out of the Amendment, began a
tremendous national crusade for woman’s suffrage. They marshaled a group
of splendid women and undertook an intensive campaign meant to reach
every woman in the country. It reached us in Titusville, even reached
our home where my father and mother, always hospitable to crusaders,
opened their doors to them. I remember best Mary Livermore and Frances
Willard—not that either touched me, saw me; of this neglect I was
acutely conscious. I noted, too, that the men we entertained did notice
me, talked to me as a person—not merely as a possible member of a
society they were promoting. There was Neal Dow—father by this time was
a prohibitionist—who let me show him our Dante with Gustave Doré’s
pictures. Men were nicer than women to me, I mentally noted.
As the struggle for equal rights grew in heat I became aware that it was
far from a united struggle, that as a matter of fact leaders and
followers were spending almost as much time disapproving of one
another’s methods as fighting for their cause. The friction came largely
from the propensity of Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony to form alliances
shocking to many of their oldest and wisest friends. Before the war they
had, rather recklessly from a political point of view, supported easier
divorce. As one of their friends wrote them, they had in so doing broken
the heart of the portly _Evening Post_ and nearly driven the _Tribune_
to the grave. Time had not cooled their ardor for strange bedfellows.
They made an alliance now of which I heard no little talk by my mother
and her friends; it was with the two most notorious women in the eye of
the public at the moment. “Hussies,” conservative circles in Titusville,
Pennsylvania, called them—Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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