The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2): Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many From Her Contemporaries During Fifty Years — John Shaqi
The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 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 2 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
It is simply impossible for me to go to her at present, and we must
all give her our ideas in the rough, from time to time, and let her
weld them together as best she can; and then, as she says, when we
meet in Indianapolis we all will put in our happiest ideas,
metaphysical, political, logical and all other "cals," and make
these the strongest and grandest documents ever issued from any
organization of women. It does seem to me that if we can succeed in
grinding out just the right appeal, demand, or whatever it may be
called, the Republican convention must heed us. At any rate, we
will do our level best at a strong pull, a long pull and a pull all
together to compel them to surrender.
I enclose my list of May lecture engagements. I shall be able to
help in money from them soon, and better than I could in any other
way. I watch both Congress and our State legislatures, but the
"scamps" are vastly better at promising than fulfilling. The
politicians, of course, expect all this flutter and buncombe about
doing something for women in New York--in California--in Iowa--is
going to spike our guns and make us help the Republican party to
carry all before it; but we must not be thus fooled by them.
After a lecture at Waynesburg, Penn., when she had gone to her train at
4 A. M. to find it an hour late, she wrote on the ticket-office shelf,
by the light of a smoky lamp, this letter to her sister:
Just three years ago this day was our dear Hannah's last on earth,
and I can see her now sitting by the window and can hear her say,
"Talk, Susan." I knew she wanted me to talk of the future meetings
in the great beyond, all of them, as she often said, so certain and
so beautiful to her; but they were not to me, and I could not dash
her faith with my doubts, nor could I pretend a faith I had not; so
I was silent in the dread presence of death. Three years--and yet
what a living presence has she been in my thoughts all the days!
There has been scarcely one waking hour that I have not felt the
loss of her. We can not help trying to peer through the veil to
find the certainty of things over there, but nothing comes to our
eyes unless we accept the Spiritualistic testimony, which we can
not wholly do.
Well, only you and I are left of mother's four girls, and when and
how we also shall pass on is among the unknown problems of the
future. Of course I feel and know that your loss is far beyond
mine; for never was there a child who so faithfully devoted herself
to a mother, and made all other interests subserve that mother's
happiness as did you, and I feel, too, that but for you I never
could have done my public work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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