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
The Herald says too little. Miss Anthony has labored for the most
part without money, and from pure love of the principle to which
she has devoted her life. She is as good a knight as has enlisted
in any crusade, and has sacrificed as much and been as faithful and
true. She has been thrice true, indeed, because of the ridicule
showered on her as a woman trying to do a man's work. No man ever
had the courage of his convictions as much as she. It takes a bold
spirit to stand up against the dangers of gunpowder in the
old-time, legitimate way; but it is a braver one that withstands
ridicule and that mean cunning which makes wit of every act looking
toward the advancement of women. The Free Press has perhaps had as
many of the frowns of this "good gray poet" of the woman's cause as
anybody. It has seen enough of them to know, however, that behind
that somewhat frigid exterior is a sensitiveness which would well
become a girl of sixteen rather than a lady of sixty-two and which
shows that the woman is always the woman; and it wants to present
its compliments to the bravest and grandest old lady within the
circle of its acquaintance.
The Washington Republic furnished another example of the pleasant things
said:
Miss Anthony, whom we know well and of whom we can speak from
personal experience, is so broad in her charity, so cosmopolitan in
her sympathies, that she will stand, without fearing speck or soil,
beside any publican or sinner whose eyes have been opened to see
the good in woman's rights, and who is willing to help on the work
in his own way. For herself she never deviates from the principles
she espoused when, stepping upon the rostrum to plead for
disfranchised women, she determined that her life work should be
endeavoring to procure for her sex all the rights and privileges of
which exclusively male legislation had for ages defrauded them.
With eyes steadily fixed upon the goal she has in view, neither the
jeers nor ridicule of the crowds without, nor the jealous asides of
those claiming to be workers in the same cause, have had power to
distract her attention or make her turn from her labor to answer or
rebuke.
The last of April the second volume of the History was completed and its
editors found to their dismay that they still had enough material on
hand for a third huge volume. Mrs. Stanton sailed for Europe with her
daughter Harriot, and after Miss Anthony had read the last bit of proof
and seen all safe at the publishers, she obeyed an urgent call from the
women at Washington and hastened thither to look after the congressional
committees on woman suffrage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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