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
[92] During this time Miss Anthony gave ten days to the national
convention in Washington; and the day after the last of the mass
meetings she started for Kansas; stopped in Cincinnati for the Ohio
convention, speaking each of the three days; opened the Kansas campaign
May 4, spoke in that State every day for two weeks; and on May 21
presented herself, fresh and cheerful, at the Constitutional Convention
in Albany, N. Y.
[93] As has been noted, Miss Anthony spoke at Ann Arbor, Mich., January
13, 14, 15, 16 and 17; at Toledo the 19th, and was ready to open the New
York campaign the 22d.
[94] In December Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton had issued an address
calling upon the women of New York to unite in this grand effort for
political freedom. During the entire campaign Mrs. Stanton contributed
to the New York Sun masterly arguments for woman suffrage, which were
widely copied by the press of the State.
[95] Mrs. Jane Marsh Parker, a newspaper woman of Rochester, attempted
to organize a club there and secure a petition in opposition to the
amendment. Her efforts evidently did not meet with marked success for,
in a letter to the New York Evening Post, she says, "In offering the
'protest' for signatures, quality rather than quantity has been
considered." That prince of editors, Joseph O'Connor, at that time in
charge of the Rochester Post-Express, gave the lady a delicious dressing
down in an editorial beginning: "What is 'quality'?" and ending:
"Probably she means no more by the offensive words 'quality' and
'quantity' than this--that she has secured to the protest only the
signatures of a few representative women, no better and no worse than
many of their opponents. Such an interpretation saves the statement from
being insulting; but unhappily very many women in Rochester give it a
different interpretation."
[96] Mr. Choate might claim that he did not know the position of these
men on this question, but it was so well understood that Miss Anthony
and her associates felt all hope depart when they read the names of the
committee. John Bigelow and Gideon J. Tucker had favored a woman
suffrage amendment when they were members of the Constitutional
Convention in 1867, but, being now over eighty, were not able to make an
aggressive fight for it.
[97] The addresses made on this occasion were issued in pamphlet form
and presented to the suffrage association by Messrs. Lauterbach and
Towns, of the committee.
[98] Although their petitions contained 600,000 names and those of the
"Antis" 15,000.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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