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
Miss Anthony divided the winter of 1860 between the anti-slavery and
the woman's cause. As she had very little on hand (!) she arranged
another course of lectures for Rochester, inviting A.D. Mayo, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Thomas Starr King and others. These speakers were in the
employ of the lyceum bureau, but were so restricted by it that they
could give their great _reform_, lectures only under private
management. At the close of Emerson's he said to Miss Anthony that he
had been instrumental in establishing the lyceum for the purpose of
securing a freedom of speech not permitted in the churches, but he
believed that now he would have to do as much to break it up, because
of its conservatism, and organize some new scheme which would permit
men and women to utter their highest thought. She was in the habit of
arranging many of her woman's rights meetings in different towns when
Phillips or others were to be there for a lyceum lecture, thus securing
them for a speech the following afternoon.
[Autograph: Cordially yours, T.S. King]
A letter received this winter from her sister Mary is interesting as
showing that the belief in equal rights for women was quite as strong
in other members of the family. She had been requested by the board of
education to fill the place of one of the principals who was ill, and
gives the following account:
I was willing to do the best I could to help out, so the next
morning, with fear and trembling, I faced the 150 young men and
women, many of whom, like their fathers and mothers before them,
felt that no woman had the ability to occupy such a place. All went
well until it was noised about that I should expect as much salary
as had been paid the principal. To establish such a precedent would
never do, so a man from a neighboring town was sent for post-haste,
but the moment he began his administration the boys rebelled. After
slates and books had been thrown from the window and I had been
obliged to guard him from their snowballs on his way home, he
decided teaching, in that place at least, was not his "sphere" and
refused to return.
Next morning the committee asked me to resume the management. I
answered: "No person can fill the place of a long-tried teacher,
but I in a measure succeeded--yet not one of you would entertain
the idea of paying me as much as the principal. You sent to another
town for a man, who has made an absolute failure, and yet you do
not hesitate to pay him the full salary for the time he was here.
If you will be as just to me, I will resume the work and do my
best--on any other conditions I must decline." They agreed to the
proposition, I finished the term and for the first time on record a
woman received a principal's salary!
A little later Miss Mary continues the story:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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