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
How splendidly Kansas women voted, and now come suffrage amendments
in Colorado, New York and Kansas! Well, we must buckle on our armor
for a triple fight, and we must shout more loudly than ever to our
friends all over the country for money to help these States.
Although Kansas is the most certain to carry the question,
nevertheless we must organize every school district of every county
of each State in which the battle of the ballot for woman is to be
fought. _Organize_, _agitate_, _educate_, must be our war cry from
this to the day of the election.
Today's mail brought $100 to our national treasury from Mrs. P. A.
Moffett, of Fredonia. How my heart leaped for joy as I read her
letter and again and again looked at her check, and how I
ejaculated over and over, "O that a thousand of our good women who
_wish_ success to our cause would be moved thus to send in their
checks!" Only a very few can go outside to work, but many can
contribute money to help pay the expenses of those who do leave all
their home-friends, comforts and luxuries. If the many who stay at
home and wish, could only believe for a moment that we who go out
not knowing where our heads will rest when night comes, really love
our homes as they love theirs, they would vie with each other to
throw in their mite to make the path smooth for the wayfarers. But
we, every one of us who can speak acceptably, must do all in our
power to persuade the men of these States to vote for the
amendment. Do let us all take to ourselves new hope and courage for
the herculean task before us. Who will send the next $100? O, that
we had $10,000 to start with!
Miss Anthony and Mrs. Avery met at Mrs. Sewall's for a conference on
Woman's Congress matters and then went to Chicago to attend, by
invitation, the formal opening of the Columbian Exposition May 1, 1893.
Miss Anthony wrote: "Mrs. Palmer's speech was very fine, covering full
equality for woman." Her address the year before at the dedication
ceremonies contained one of the noblest tributes ever paid to women,
closing with these beautiful sentences: "Even more important than the
discovery of Columbus, which we are gathered together to celebrate, is
the fact that the general government has just discovered woman. It has
sent out a flashlight from its heights, so inaccessible to us, which we
shall answer by a return signal when the exposition is opened. What will
be its next message to us?" Upon this occasion she was even more
eloquent. Her keen expose of the absurd platitudes in regard to woman's
sphere, and her fine defence of women in the industrial world, deserve a
place among the classics.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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