USA > Connecticut > New London County > New London > Fiftieth Anniversary celebration publication, Connecticut College, 1911-1961 > Part 7
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She resolved never to marry. Then Henry Blackwell came along and, after endearing himself to her by his anti-slavery work, finally persuaded her that together they could do more work for woman suf- frage than she could alone. He felt as strongly as she about the status of married women at that time. They signed a statement protesting such laws, saying that a marriage should be "an equal and permanent partnership" and agreed that Lucy should keep her own name, a world-shattering innovation.
They did campaign vigorously, but their most important contribu- tion to the cause was, with their daughter Alice, the editing and financing of the suffrage paper, "The Woman's Journal." This was founded after Susan B. Anthony's radical publication "Revolution" had failed disastrously, after antagonizing most suffragists and many friends. Of "The Woman's Journal" Mrs. Catt said, "Suffrage journalism was not, could never be, a business to this family. It has been a duty, a joy, a consecration and an expense. The suffrage suc- cess of today is not conceivable without it."
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the only one of the four not from New England, was the daughter of a distinguished New York state lawyer. As a child, she heard many pitiful tales from women whose husbands had drunk up or otherwise disposed of their wives' property, with no recourse from the law. Once she followed one weeping woman out of her father's office and told her, "I'm going to cut all those bad laws out of the books and fix it for you." Her father got wind of this and explained that changing the laws was not so simple, thereby un- wittingly starting her on a career of which he strongly disapproved. Her honeymoon was at the London Anti-Slavery Convention. It was she who added suffrage to the "rights" to which women aspired at Seneca Falls, where even Lucretia Mott said, "Why, Lizzie, thee will make us ridiculous." But they kept it in.
Mrs. Stanton had an extraordinary gift for writing-not always accurate as to facts and figures (Miss Anthony always checked them) -but vivid, persuasive, logical, eloquent. The mother of seven chil- dren, she was pretty, immaculately and elegantly dressed with carefully arranged curls. But beneath that placid exterior she hid a thoroughly radical spirit. Her work for suffrage was magnificent, but she could not resist extraneous issues. She championed the Bloomer costume, wrote a "Woman's Bible" with caustic comments on the references to females in Holy Writ, kept saying that the churches of every religion were responsible for the subjugation of women everywhere. She said that not only should drunkenness be
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grounds for divorce, but that the fewer children born to drunken fathers, the better. She even went so far as to defend Victoria Wood- hull, a brilliant, beautiful adventuress who not only preached free love but practiced it openly, and aspired to the Presidency, by saying that you did not inquire so closely into the private lives of men candidates. The effect of that in the Victorian age can be imagined.
For the most part Miss Anthony kept her on the track, but these outbursts certainly gave food to the Antis and finally caused the suf- frage ranks to split into the National and the American Woman's Suffrage Associations and the founding of "The Woman's Journal" in place of the ill-fated "Revolution." My father, William Dudley Foulke, was president of the American Association, which admitted men and alternated men and women presidents. He had a lot to do with uniting the two organizations when the dust of the earlier battles had blown away.
Susan B. Anthony, like Mrs. Mott, was a Quaker, though her father married a Baptist and was later expelled for letting one of the rooms in his house be used for a dancing school. They were fairly well off and the girls went to an advanced school till a panic brought bankruptcy. The girls came home, Susan to teach. When the family finances improved and Susan could keep her own salary she had a period of pretty clothes and dances, but gave it up in disgust be- cause of her almost universally drunken partners and went on to found a Women's Temperance Society. At first she was not much interested in the work of the Seneca Falls Convention, but Lucy Stone's speeches interested her and she came to know Mrs. Stanton. After her Temperance Society was taken over by men and wrecked, she flung herself wholeheartedly into the work for women's rights and suffrage.
She and Mrs. Stanton made a remarkable team, which lasted for life. Susan brought facts and figures, Elizabeth the philosophy and rhetoric, the burning words. Susan was the critic. She was also the organizer, tireless, of absolutely unbelievable energy and drive. She never married. She quoted Lucy Stone, "that all that was left of a married woman to put on her gravestone was that she was the relict of some one who had owned her. I made up my mind that no one could make a relict of me." When a campaign was on or an emer- gency challenged, Miss Anthony would go to Mrs. Stanton's, run the house and tend the very lively children while Elizabeth wrote. Miss Anthony would edit the product, and then go forth to speak and organize.
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In 1890 after the two organizations were joined again, Miss Anthony was president until 1900, then Mrs. Catt, briefly, then Dr. Shaw, and Mrs. Catt again for the last crucial years.
Anna Howard Shaw was a Methodist minister, a doctor as well and a superb orator. She got interested in suffrage much later than the four women already described. Work in the Boston slums convinced her that only a change in the laws would help. She became Miss Anthony's right hand man until her death, and was an equally tire- less worker. Small, with flashing black eyes, full of warmth and human sympathy and equally human indignation, she earned her living by lecturing and always kept her engagements whether speak- ing for suffrage or filling a pulpit. It doesn't sound so difficult now, but in her case it included being chased and almost overtaken by wolves in Kansas, or riding for hours in an open sleigh with the thermometer at 20 below zero. Once, while still in college, she was to preach for a friend in a lumber camp up north. The stage dropped her twenty-two miles from the camp at nightfall. The road lay through a deep forest and she had to drive all night to get there in time. Her driver kept telling her horrible stories of the women kept in stockades at the camps, and, when she protested, started to go for her. Whereat she pulled out a revolver and told him she was hold- ing it at his back and would shoot if he stopped driving or spoke again. She kept it there all through the night. Church in the morning had an unusually large crowd of lumberjacks who took up the big- gest collection ever known there. One was asked if he liked the sermon. "Wa'al, I dunno what she preached. But she sure has got grit."
What about some of the others, who finished the job? Very few of you, I am sure, ever heard of Mrs. Sherman Booth of Chicago. But it was she who made the card-catalogue of the Illinois Legislature and steered through one of the most skillful pieces of lobbying ever seen. Quiet, reserved, with a great faculty for staying unnoticed while her- self noticing everything, she and her committee,5 working very closely with Medill McCormick and the Progressives, literally put over the presidential suffrage bill that broke the old deadlock and made victory possible.
Others were Mrs. Stanley McCormick, right hand man for Dr. Shaw, who brought her keen mind and boundless energy to the fight; M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College, who raised the fund that made it possible for Dr. Shaw to continue her work when the outlook was gloomiest; Maud Wood Park, chairman of the
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Congressional Committee that got the Federal Amendment through Congress and later first president of the League of Women Voters; our own Katharine Ludington, Connecticut State president, who finally got her Legislature to ratify the Amendment, and many, many, more.
And Mrs. Catt. There were many great women in the movement from the beginning, all indispensable for the start and development of the crusade. But the final crucial task, translating an ideal into the law of the land, needed a combination of vision and hard-headed- ness, courage and resource, patience and the swift seizure of op- portunities, statesmanship and political savvy, and above all dog- gedness. Mrs. Catt had them all!
She was not the orator that Dr. Shaw was, not so colorful or warmly human, had none of her flashing wit, not much humor any- how. She was a little detached, a little impersonal, always very gentle, very fair in her dealings. But to sit in a board meeting with her, as I did early in 1916, and hear her lay out a plan of campaign that took in every day of the year, every corner of the land, every woman in the movement was a breath-taking experience. If a woman failed her she never wasted time in blame but just got some one else and some one else and some one else, until finally the organization took shape and grew, equal to the strains upon it. She knew those strains ahead of time.
She knew, none better, the importance of accurate knowledge if you want to do a real job. She had been greatly helped in suffrage work by a close friend, Mrs. Frank Leslie, who left her nearly a mil- lion dollars to help the cause of women. The pressure was great to fritter it away on local campaigns. Instead she set up a research bureau to dig up facts about every angle of the woman's movement and make them available to workers through many types of publica- tions. The League of Women Voters was trained in that school-get the facts, have them accurate, evaluate them, then act.
She was a rarely selfless person. She took leadership because she could see what needed doing, never from personal vanity. In the worst of the Tennessee campaign, in dreary days of discouragement, in moments of high triumph, I don't think she ever thought of her- self, either as martyr or standard bearer. There was a job to be done, let's get on with it. When this one is finished, let's get at the next. A great statesman, a very great soul.
Great leaders are given, and under them great movements come to
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fruition. Sometimes they are not given and then we just have to do the best we can with what we have, and a surprisingly large amount of good work has been done by and with pretty commonplace people. Problems are always with us, the day by day routine that either keeps life steady and fruitful or builds up resentments till they break out in crisis. All these are our responsibility, yours and mine. It's some- thing one can't sidestep. Remember the old saying, "The crooks are put in office by the votes of the good citizens who stay at home." Democracy is not easy to operate, is no self-starter, but it is the only system in the world which gives to every man and woman the right to speak his or her mind, to work for the things in which they be- lieve, to improve the fabric of the government under which they live.
An extra responsibility rests on all of us today. If we cannot prove quickly and plainly that a democracy can give its people as much stability and efficiency as a dictatorship, we'll have the dictatorship, the dictatorship of Communism. And the new emerging nations will have it, too.
Life today is too difficult, the pressures too urgent to permit the old muddling through. Don't forget, the greatest enemy of liberty is apathy. With the challenge of great danger upon us let us remember what that little band of women were able to do with no weapons but their resolution, their dedication to a great cause.
Where is there room for apathy today? We have tools they never dreamed of, the United Nations, the resources of science, of com- munications, of education. We have the certainty that failure means annihilation for most of the civilized world.
Where do we stand?
FOOTNOTES
1. Women and Politics, Carrie Chapman Catt & Nettie R. Shuler, Chap. IX, p. 107.
2. Woman Suffrage and Politics, Catt and Shuler, Chap. XVI, pp. 231-232.
3. President of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association, 1904-1915.
4. President LWV of U.S. 1944-1950.
5. Mrs. Grace Wilbur Trout, Antoinette Funk, Mrs. Medill McCormick.
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