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
I can not answer for others, but I shall not pray or speak or work
for the defeat of the nominees of the party of which every United
States Senator who voted for us last winter is a leading member,
and to which belongs every man but six in the Kansas Legislature
who made the overwhelming vote giving municipal suffrage to the
women of that State. Not until a third party gets into power or is
likely to do so, which promises a larger per cent. of
representatives on the floor of Congress and in the several State
legislatures who will speak and vote for woman's enfranchisement,
than does the Republican, shall I work for it. You see, as yet
there is not a single Prohibitionist in Congress, while there are
at least twenty Republicans on the floor of the United States
Senate, besides fully one-half of the members of the House of
Representatives, who are in favor of woman suffrage. For the women
of Kansas or Iowa to work for any third party would be ungrateful
and suicidal.
Since I hope to live to see a Sixteenth Amendment Bill through
Congress and three-fourths of the State legislatures, I do not
propose to work for the defeat of the party which thus far has
furnished nearly every vote in that direction. If you will pardon
me, I think it will be quite as suicidal a policy for the
temperance women of the nation to work to defeat the party which
contains so nearly all of their best friends and helpers. What it
seems to me should be done by all women who want reforms in
legislation, is to appoint committees to confer with leading
Republicans asking them to make pledges in the direction of
suffrage and temperance, with the assurance of our support in case
of the insertion of the planks we ask in their platform. I fear,
however, you are already pledged to the Third party, come what may,
and if so it is of no use for me to advise.[34]
In May Miss Anthony again journeyed westward, though she says in her
diary: "It never was harder for me to start. A heavy nothingness is upon
head and heart." She went first to the State Suffrage Convention at
Indianapolis, where as usual she was a guest in the beautiful home of
Mr. and Mrs. Sewall. A reception was given her at the Bates House and
she was cordially greeted by several hundred ladies. She went to
meetings at Evansville, Richmond and Lafayette, and then to the Ohio
convention at Cleveland; here, as always, the guest of her loved friend,
Louisa Southworth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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