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
In December the third volume of the History of Woman Suffrage at last
was ready for the public, another book of nearly 1,000 pages. It
completed the story up to 1884, and like its predecessors was cordially
received by the press. The money swallowed up by this work hardly will
be credited. Mrs. Stanton not being able or willing to revise the last
volume until it was put into proof slips, and then making extensive
changes, the cost for re-setting type was over $900. The fifty fine
steel engravings and the prints made from them cost over $6,000. For
proof reading $500 was paid, and for indexing, $250. Mrs. Stanton and
Mrs. Gage, seeing that there never would be any profits from the books
and that Miss Anthony proposed to give most of them away, sold out their
rights to her, the former for $2,000 and the latter for $1,000. She
also, as has been stated, bought out the interest of Fowler & Wells.
When the first edition of the three mammoth volumes finally came into
her sole possession, they represented an outlay on her part of $20,000.
While there were many criticisms from certain quarters as to various
errors and so-called misstatements, and many threats to write a history
which should be free from all imperfections, the fact remains that,
although fifty years have passed since the inception of the great
movement to secure equal rights for women, there never has been another
attempt to preserve the story. But for Miss Anthony's careful collecting
and saving of newspaper accounts, manuscripts of speeches, published
reports and the correspondence of half a century, her persistent and
determined effort for ten years to have them put into readable shape,
and Mrs. Stanton's fine ability to do it, the student never would have
been able to trace the evolution of woman from a chattel in the eye of
the law to a citizen with legal and social rights very nearly equal to
those of man. While there is necessarily some repetition, so long a time
elapsing between the writing of the different volumes, and perhaps a
little prolixity, there is not a dull page in the whole work and the
reader will find it difficult to reach a place where she is willing to
stop. It contains a resume of early conditions; the persecutions endured
by the pioneers in the struggle for freedom; the progress in each
separate State, and in foreign countries; the action taken by different
legislatures and congresses; the grand arguments made for equal rights;
the position of woman in church and State. Into whatever library the
student may go seeking information upon this question, it is to these
volumes he must look to find it in collected and connected form. If Miss
Anthony had done no other work but to produce this History, she would
deserve a prominent place on the list of immortal names.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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