Susan B. Anthony: Rebel, Crusader, HumanitarianLutz, Alma
History
Susan B. Anthony: Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian
Lutz, Alma
Anthony, Susan B. (Susan Brownell), 1820-1906
The Democrats as usual were silent on woman suffrage, but undismayed
by them or by the Prohibitionists, who this year failed to endorse
votes for women, Susan moved on to Omaha with Anna Howard Shaw for the
first national convention of the new People's party. Here she met
representatives of the Farmers' Alliance and the Knights of Labor,
both friendly to woman suffrage, and men from other groups, critical
of the two major political parties for their failure to solve the
pressing economic problems confronting the nation. Susan was
sympathetic with many of the aims of the People's party, having seen
with her own eyes the plight of debt-burdened, hard-working farmers
and having crusaded in her own paper, _The Revolution_, for the rights
of labor and for the control of industrial monopoly. However, she
still viewed minor, reform parties with a highly critical eye. The
People's party gave her no woman suffrage plank and she found them
"quite as oblivious to the underlying principle of justice to women as
either of the old parties...."[380]
With the election of Grover Cleveland, whose opposition to woman
suffrage was well known, and with the Democrats in the saddle for
another four years, Congressional action on the woman suffrage
amendment was blocked. Nevertheless, the cause moved ahead in the
states; Colorado was to vote on the question in 1893 and Kansas in
1894, and New York was revising its constitution. In addition, the
World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 offered endless opportunities to bring
the subject before the people.
* * * * *
As soon as plans for the World's Fair were under way, Susan began to
work indirectly through prominent women in Washington and Chicago for
the appointment of women to the board of management. "Lady Managers"
were appointed, 115 strong, who proved to be very much alive under the
leadership of Mrs. Bertha Honore Palmer. Susan found Mrs. Palmer
almost as determined as she to secure equality of rights for women at
the World's Fair, and nothing that she herself might have planned
could have been more effective than the series of world congresses in
which both men and women took part, or than the World's Congress of
Representative Women.
[Illustration: Elizabeth Smith Miller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and
Susan B. Anthony]
Two of Susan's "girls," as she liked to call them, Rachel Foster
Avery[381] and May Wright Sewall, were appointed by Mrs. Palmer to
take charge of the World's Congress of Representative Women, and they
arranged a meeting of the International Council of Women as a part of
this Congress.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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