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
You know the principal of Number Ten has been ill nearly two
months. I asked him if Miss Hayden, who took his place, was to
receive his salary. He replied: "Do you think after the money has
been audited to me, I ought to turn around and give it all to her?"
Said I: "If the board are willing to pay you $72 a month while you
are sick and pay her the same, all right; but if only one is to
receive that salary, I say, and most emphatically, she is the one."
He wanted to know if I was not aware that mine was the only case
where such a thing had been done in Rochester. I told him I was
heartily glad I had been the means of having justice done for once,
and was really in hopes other women teachers would follow my
example and suffer themselves no longer to be duped.
Miss Hayden however was obliged to accept $25 a month for doing exactly
the work for which the man received $72 during all his illness. To keep
her from making trouble, the board gave her a small present with the
understanding that it was not to be considered as salary. A short time
afterwards Miss Mary wrote again: "A woman teacher on a salary of $20 a
month has just been ill for a week and another was employed to take her
place; when she recovered, she was obliged to have the supply teacher's
salary deducted from her own. So I posted down to the superintendent's
office and had another decidedly plain talk. He owned that it was
unjust but said there was no help for it."
In the winter of 1860, Henry Ward Beecher delivered his great woman's
rights speech at Cooper Institute, New York. At that time his name was
a power in the whole world and his masterly exposition of the rights of
women is still used as one of the best suffrage leaflets. Miss Anthony
tells in her diary of meeting Tilton and of his amusing account of the
struggle they had to get this speech published in the Independent. Her
little visits to New York and Boston always inspired her with fresh
courage, for here she would meet Theodore Parker, Frothingham, Cheever,
Chapin, Beecher, Greeley, Phillips, Garrison, the great spirits of that
age, and all in perfect sympathy with what she represented.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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