In Which We Long To Put Our Arms Around Them

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by ALEX CARNEVALE

Susan B. Anthony learned to read and write before the age of five, in a time when women were often not taught to do either. Her first teacher was slow to recognize her ability, so she forced the man to teach her long division.

Her father lost his cotton mill due to hard times. The family moved to a town called Hardscrabble (this was before irony). Susan's education was prized before material things; her father Daniel's Quaker background reeked of egalitarianism. After a visit from a travelling scientist, she told her dad, "He described only the good organs, and said nothing of the bad. I should like to know the whole truth."

Financial collapse had its unintended benefits. Thousands of women went to work, and not just the poor ones. Susan's first job was as the assistant principal at a girls' boarding school in New Rochelle. It was the largest town she had ever seen. Her brother-in-law recommended that she not try to "niggerize" the school, for Susan saw nothing of either traditional race or class barriers.

For her first 15 weeks of work, she received $30.

Her new job was also a refuge. Men were attracted to Susan, and some even proposed. A part of her wanted that life, but another, more persuasive part of her was made a little nauseous by it. Susan's clothes were less expensive than they looked. Men were astonished by her intelligence; she was disgusted by their consumption of alcohol. After one lovely evening, she wrote in her diary: My fancy for attending dances is fully satiated. I certainly shall not attend another unless I can have a total abstinence man to accompany me, and not one whose highest delight is to make a fool of himself. 

In later life she said, "It always happened that the men I wanted were those I could not get, and those who wanted me I wouldn't have."

susan's attic workroom

Turning her off from the insitution of marriage permanently was the death of her cousin Margaret. The  mother of four suffered severe complications during her last pregnancy, and lay on her deathbed. Her husband spent that time complaining endlessly of a headache. "I've had one for days," Margaret told him. "Oh yes," he responded, "but I mean that I have a real headache, very painful. Yours is just a natural consequence."

Susan told her father she wished she could go west and pan for gold.

1848's Seneca Falls Convention was the brainchild of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, both women from upper class backgrounds. Elizabeth was a mother of seven. After being ejected from a London convention against slavery, the two women were forced to their own cause by the attitudes of purportedly enlightened men. Elizabeth's demand for women's suffrage at Seneca Falls shocked her even her most ardent supporter. "Thee will make us ridiculous," Mott told her.

Elizabeth in later years

Susan was drawn by Elizabeth's eloquence as well as her boldness. The friendship suited them both; Elizabeth did not like the hard detail work the movement required, and Susan was tireless, steadfast and not much of a writer. Their first idea was a woman's temperance society, but that fell apart when males were admitted into the organization. The men changed the name of the society to the People's League, and bullied all the women out. A new message and structure was needed for the movement to survive.

Susan spent most of her time when she was not travelling at Elizabeth's house. Although she did not agree with Elizabeth on everything, she usually objected only at the moments when Elizabeth's impracticality was evident. Stanton's revolutionary ideas about divorce and birth control were as new to many of her allies as they were to her foes.

Whereas Elizabeth's father had been dismissive and condescending about her ideas, Daniel Anthony's only objection to his daughter's new life was that he knew he would see less of her. She carried the message so far and so fast that she very nearly lost her toes from frostbite.

This organizing precipitated the first victory of their movement, a successful if temporary challenge to the English common law which viewed women as property instead of as property holders. The next step was merely the full and complete citizenship of women, and both women would be long dead before that was accomplished.

A sense of history extended over the age. They knew a total overhaul was impossible within their lifetime. This inspired Susan and Elizabeth to pursue their many volumed History of Woman Suffrage. Many of Susan's friends within the movement got married while they waited, and recommended it to her. One told her, "Get a good husband. That's all dear." She viewed their choices as something of a betrayal, since it was impossible to dedicate yourself fully to the cause if you were a mother.

In 1857, she was forced to cancel the National Women's Rights Convention because of this.

Elizabeth & her children

Susan spent much of the Civil War in Kansas, aiding freed slaves. Elizabeth wrote her often:

I hope in a short time to be comfortably in a new house where we will have a room ready for you when you come East. I long to put my arms around you once more and hear you scold me for my sins and short-comings. Your abuse is sweeter to me than anybody else's praise.

Elizabeth's own marriage was an unhappy one. She related to her husband only on the few issues with which they shared some common interest; it would be kind to say she was mostly humoring him. As she became older, the movement looked to Susan for its leadership, and Elizabeth scaled back her public speaking. Elizabeth's ideas about interracial marriage, employment and financial rights, and a woman's right to refuse her husband still remained outside the mainstream. When Frederick Douglass married a white woman, Helen Pitts, in 1884, Susan begged her friend not to publish a letter of a support.

They were always told, "this is not the way." As banal as their methods were, men were insistent on making them scandalous and extreme. When someone loses the ability to argue their point, they attack their opponent's method of persuasion, in unending fashion. The method by which something is done constitutes the least important aspect of it. Elizabeth's eloquence and Susan's persistence eventually managed to make such a rebuke impossible.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording and the on-again off-again love interest of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"The Hours" - Beach House (mp3)

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