The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2): Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many From Her Contemporaries During Fifty YearsHarper, Ida Husted
History
The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2): Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many From Her Contemporaries During Fifty Years
Harper, Ida Husted
Anthony, Susan B. (Susan Brownell), 1820-1906
At the appointed hour a lady, unattended and unheralded, quietly
glided in and ascended the platform. She was as easy and
self-possessed as a lady should always be when performing a plain
duty, even under 600 curious eyes. Her situation would have been
trying to a non-self-reliant woman, for there was no volunteer
co-operator. The custodian of the hall, with his stereotyped
stupidity, had dumped some tracts and papers on the platform. The
unfriended Miss Anthony gathered them up composedly, placed them on
a table disposedly, put her decorous shawl on one chair and a very
exemplary bonnet on another, sat a moment, smoothed her hair
discreetly, and then deliberately walked to the table and addressed
the audience. She wore a becoming black silk dress, gracefully
draped and made with a basque waist. She appears to be somewhere
about the confines of the fourth luster in age, of pleasing rather
than pretty features, decidedly expressive countenance, rich brown
hair very effectively and not at all elaborately arranged, neither
too tall nor too short, too plump nor too thin--in brief one of
those juste milieu persons, the perfection of common sense
physically exhibited. Miss Anthony's oratory is in keeping with all
her belongings, her voice well modulated and musical, her
enunciation distinct, her style earnest and impressive, her
language pure and unexaggerated.
Judging from other friendly notices this must be an accurate
description of Miss Anthony at the age of thirty-five. The experiment
of a woman on the platform was too new, however, and the doctrines she
advocated too unpopular for it to be possible that she should receive
fair treatment generally, and there were few papers which described her
in as unprejudiced a manner as the one quoted. A letter from her father
during this trip said: "Would it not be wise to preserve the many and
amusing observations by the different papers, that years hence, in your
more solitary moments, you and maybe your children can look over the
views of both the friends and opponents of the cause?" This was the
beginning of the scrap books carefully kept up for nearly half a
century.
The journal for that year gives a detailed account of the hardships of
this winter, one of the coldest and snowiest on record. Many towns were
off the railroad and could be reached only by sleigh. After a long ride
she would be put for the night into a room without a fire, and in the
morning would have to break the ice in the pitcher to take that sponge
bath from head to foot which she never omitted. All that she hoped from
a financial standpoint was to pay the expenses of the trip, and had she
desired fame or honor, she would not have sought it in these remote
villages. The diary relates:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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