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
Susan and I, though members of the Equal Rights Association, do
many things outside that body for which no one is responsible. The
idea of starting a paper under its auspices, or as an organ for it,
never entered our minds. We went to Kansas as individuals; personal
friends outside that association gave us money to go and
contributed the funds to start a paper. We object to that
resolution of censure, first, because we were outside its province;
second, because it was an outrage to repudiate Susan and me, who
have labored without cessation for twenty years and had just
returned from a hard three months' campaign. For any one to
question our devotion to this cause is to us amazing. The treatment
of us by Abolitionists also is enough to try the souls of better
saints than we. The secret of all this furor is Republican spite.
They want to stave off our question until after the presidential
campaign. They can keep all the women still but Susan and me. They
can't control us, therefore the united effort of Republicans,
Abolitionists and certain women to crush us and our paper.
In showing how the women were sacrificed, The Revolution said:
Charles Sumner, Horace Greeley, Gerrit Smith and Wendell Phillips,
with one consent, bid the women of the nation stand aside and
behold the salvation of the negro. Wendell Phillips says, "One idea
for a generation," to come up in the order of their importance.
First negro suffrage, then temperance, then the eight-hour
movement, then woman suffrage. Three generations hence, woman
suffrage will be in order! What an insult to the women who have
labored thirty years for the emancipation of the slave, now when he
is their political equal, to propose to lift him above their heads.
Gerrit Smith, forgetting that our great American idea is
"individual rights," on which Abolitionists have ever based their
strongest arguments for emancipation, says: "This is the time to
settle the rights of races; unless we do justice to the negro we
shall bring down on ourselves another bloody revolution, another
four years' war, but we have nothing to fear from woman, she will
not avenge herself!" Woman not avenge herself? Look at your asylums
for the deaf, the dumb, the blind, the insane, and there behold the
results of this wholesale desecration of the mothers of the race!
Woman not avenge herself? Go into the streets of your cities at the
midnight hour, and there behold those whom God meant to be queens
in the moral universe giving your sons their first lessons in
infamy and vice. No, you can not wrong the humblest of God's
creatures without making discord and confusion in the whole social
system.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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