Profiles in Character #3: Susan B. Anthony and the Long Arc of Justice for Women
On August 18, 1920, in a special session of the Tennessee state legislature, Representative Harry Burn cast the deciding vote that ratified the 19th Amendment. The campaign for women's suffrage had started 72 years earlier in Seneca Falls, New York, when the Women's Rights Convention voted "That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise." Some of the women at the convention voted against it, fearing it was too radical.
For the first 300 years of American history, women were denied a political voice. In February 1820, Susan B. Anthony was born, and would dedicate her life to changing that. Her parents encouraged her to learn, think and speak at time when, Anthony would later remark, married women if born poor were expected to be a drudge and if born rich a doll. She was determined to be neither and never married. After a brief stint as a teacher, she became a social reformer, first in the temperance movement and then for women’s rights. "Woman and her disenfranchisement is all I know," she said, seeing the lack of political power as the root cause of the other ills women faced.
She was impatient and never slowed down. “Thus closes 1871,” she wrote in her diary, “a year full of hard work, six months east, six months west of the Rocky Mountains; 171 lectures, 13,000 miles of travel.” At age 76, in the California suffrage campaign, she would spend eight months speaking three times a day. Even her letters were marked by underlined passages, as if urging the reader to pay attention and get moving.
She was eternally optimistic. In 1874, she canvassed Michigan, but the woman suffrage amendment lost by 5–1. Her response: “The Michigan 40,000 votes was really a wonderful success—a triumph.” Her last public words, uttered at the National American Woman Suffrage Association meeting just before she took deathly ill, were: “There have been others also just as true and devoted to the cause . . . with such women consecrating their lives, failure is impossible!”
She was politically astute. As some of the gains sought in Seneca Falls were made, women gained more access to college and jobs - and more money of their own. They formed associations for a range of social reforms, suffrage among them, and had more time to become politically active. Anthony kept a seating chart of Congress in her desk and never failed to cajole, coerce, and plead for women to demand the vote and for men to pass the amendment. She labeled this work as "subsoil plowing," trusting it would bear fruit in time.
She held a mirror up to force America to face its values. In 1872, she voted and was arrested. When finally allowed to speak, after the judge dismissed the jury and found her guilty on his own, Anthony chided him for violating the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. "Your denial of my citizen’s right to vote is the denial of my right of consent as one of the governed,” she said, “the denial of my right of representation as one of the taxed, the denial of my right to a trial by jury of my peers as an offender against law, therefore, the denial of my sacred rights to life, liberty and property."
On August 26th, the first statue in New York's Central Park which features women as other than fictional characters will be dedicated to Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth. Sojourner Truth was a dynamic, impassioned speaker for abolition and women’s rights. Stanton, whom Anthony met in a chance encounter on the streets of Seneca Falls in 1851, was an initial organizer of the Seneca Falls convention and worked with Anthony for over 50 years to set women on the course of political, economic, and social independence. In 1878, Theodore Tilton, abolitionist and woman’s rights champion, captured that partnership well: “I know of no two more pertinacious incendiaries in the whole country . . . this noise-making twain are the two sticks of a drum keeping up what Daniel Webster called the ‘rub-a-dub of agitation.’”
All three women died before Harry Burn cast his historic vote. But they would have seen it not as the end of the struggle but as a midpoint. They were living testimony to the power of optimism married with hard work. Anthony had left a message about her eventual passing for her family a few years before. It was a message to her followers as well and one of hope to all who know the fight for women's equality is ongoing. “When it is a funeral, remember that I want there should be no tears. Pass on, and go on with the work.”
Photo Credit: Library of Congress
