Susan B. Anthony: Rebel, Crusader, HumanitarianLutz, Alma
History
Susan B. Anthony: Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian
Lutz, Alma
Anthony, Susan B. (Susan Brownell), 1820-1906
After an enthusiastic welcome in Denver, they moved on to Laramie,
Wyoming, where one hundred women greeted them as the train pulled in.
From this first woman suffrage state, Susan exultingly wrote, "We have
been moving over the soil, that is really the land of the free and the
home of the brave.... Women here can say, 'What a magnificent country
is ours, where every class and caste, color and sex, may find
freedom....'"[268]
They reached Salt Lake City just after the Godbe secession by which a
group of liberal Mormons abandoned polygamy. As guests of the Godbes
for a week, they had every opportunity to become acquainted with the
Mormons, to observe women under polygamy, and to speak in long all-day
sessions to women alone.
Susan tried to show her audiences in Utah that her point of attack
under both monogamy and polygamy was the subjection of women, and that
to remedy this the self-support of women was essential. In Utah she
found little opportunity for women to earn a living for themselves and
their children, as there was no manufacturing and there were no free
schools in need of teachers. "Women here, as everywhere," she
declared, "must be able to live honestly and honorably without the aid
of men, before it can be possible to save the masses of them from
entering into polygamy or prostitution, legal or illegal."[269]
[Illustration: Susan B. Anthony, 1871]
Some of Susan's' critics at home felt she was again besmirching the
suffrage cause by setting foot in polygamous Utah, but this was of no
moment to her, for she saw the crying need of the right kind of
missionary work among Mormon women, "no Phariseeism, no shudders of
Puritanic horror, ... but a simple, loving fraternal clasp of hands
with these struggling women" to encourage them and point the way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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