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
A letter will illustrate her efforts for South Dakota: "I have 50,000
copies of Senator Palmer's speech ready to go to the Senate
folding-room, and thence to the South Dakota senators and
representatives to be franked, and then back to me to be addressed to
the 25,000 men of the Farmers' Alliance, etc. If suffrage literature
does not penetrate into every single family in every town of every
county of South Dakota before another month rolls round, it will be
because I can not get the names of every one. I am securing also the
subscription lists of every county newspaper. If reading matter in every
home and lectures in every school house of the State will convert the
men, we shall carry South Dakota next November with a whoop! I do hope
we can galvanize our friends in every State to concentrate all their
money and forces upon South Dakota the coming year. We must have no
scattering fire now, but all directed to one point, and get everybody to
thinking, reading and talking on the subject."
And again she writes: "With my $400 which I have contributed to the
National this year, I have made life members of myself, nieces Lucy E.
and Louise, and Mrs. Stanton. Now I intend to make Mrs. Minor, Olympia
Brown, Phoebe Couzins and Matilda Joslyn Gage life members. I had
thought of others, but these last four are of longer standing, were
identified with the old National and have suffered odium and persecution
because of adherence to it."
In the diary's mention of busy days is one item: "Went to the Capitol to
the celebration of the centennial of the First Congress. Justice Fuller
made a beautiful oration on the progress of the century but failed to
have discovered a woman all the way down;" and another: "This morning
called on Mrs. Harrison, Mrs. Stanford and Mrs. Manderson to talk about
having women represented in the Columbian Exposition of 1892. All are in
favor of it."
Every hour was filled with business, and with social duties undertaken
solely because of the influence they might have on the great and only
question. The last day of 1889 she went to pay the final honors to the
wife of her faithful ally, Hon. A. G. Riddle. Death had robbed her of
many friends during the past year. On February 1 her old co-worker Amy
Post, of Rochester, was laid to rest, one of the veteran Abolitionists
who commenced the work in 1833 with Garrison, and who had stood by the
cause of woman as faithfully as by that of the slave. In March passed
away in the prime of womanhood, Mary L. Booth, editor of Harper's Bazar
from its beginning in 1867. In June died Maria Mitchell, the great
astronomer, in the fullness of years, having completed threescore and
ten. In November was finished the work of Dinah Mendenhall, the
venerable Quaker and philanthropist, wife of Isaac Mendenhall, whose
home near Philadelphia had been for sixty years the refuge of the poor
and oppressed, without regard to sex, color or creed.[52]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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