UU Ghosts ­ Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Several weeks ago a column in the News-Journal caught my eye. It was written by New York Times correspondent Bob Herbert and describes an upcoming PBS documentary called "Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony." After I read it, I called WMFE in Orlando to discover that the most likely dates the two-part documentary will be aired are the evenings of November 7th and 8th. I decided at the time to write my annual October Unitarian ghost sermon about Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The only problem is, having researched both women, I don't think either of them was a Unitarian!

We certainly do claim Susan B. Anthony. In a 1980's Unitarian Universalist Women's Federation publication called Roots of Our Strength she is described as one of our foremothers. If you go to <<www.uua.org>> on the Internet, you will discover a link to another site called Famous UU's, where Susan's name appears. There is a T-shirt you can buy from Uni-Uniques with names of famous UU's on it, hers one of them. However, my research indicates she herself may never have affiliated with a Unitarian church after she left the Quakers.

We Unitarian Universalists do not claim Elizabeth Cady Stanton. To have named her as a UU ghost was an error on my part.

In my enthusiasm I made the parochial assumption that any two outrageous social reformers as these two would have to be Unitarians. What to do? Confess my ignorance and choose someone else, a definite-buried-by-Unitarian-preacher-So-and-So-Unitarian? Or talk about both women as worthy antecedents even if they were not Unitarians or Universalists? Or talk about Susan B. Anthony only, as she is claimed by some as a foremother?

I chose the latter course. Most of my material comes from a 1995 book by Lynn Sherr, entitled Failure is Impossible, a quote said to be Susan's last words. My portrait this morning will give you an overview of her life, describe briefly her association with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and mention some of the lessons her story has for us today, as a church.

When she was 35 Susan B. Anthony had a physical for a life insurance policy. Here is the physician's report:

Height, 5 ft., 5 in; figure, full; chest, measure 38 in.; weight, 156 lbs.; complexion, fair; habits, healthy and active; nervous affections, none; character of respiration, clear, resonant, murmur perfect; heart, normal in rhythm and valvular sound; pulse 66 per minute; disease, none. The life is a very good one.

Sherr goes on to say that her only physical impediment was a slightly crossed right eye, made worse by surgery. That is why she is so often photographed in profile from the left.

She was born on February 15, 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts. Hers was a activist Quaker family. She was the second of seven children. When Susan was six the family moved to Battenville, New York, and, when she was fifteen, to Rochester, New York.

Susan was to learn a great deal from her father and to have his support of her activities. Once, when Susan was 17 Daniel Anthony made a trip to Washington, DC. He sent home a description of the nation's capitol, including this comment about its legislators, "Our Congressmen are some like other folks, they look out first for themselves." Susan's political astuteness showed that she respected her father's opinion, and took his counsel. She was grateful for his sense of fairness, his understanding that women were people, too, and deserving of rights equal to those of men. Her father was only one man who supported a woman's right to vote; all those who qualified, her father included, won her respect and eternal loyalty.

She doted on the younger members of her family, particularly her nieces. In 1889, when Susan was 69, her sixteen-year-old niece and namesake drowned in an ice-skating accident. Normally undemonstrative, Susan's grief was evident at Susie's funeral ­ so much so that the minister on that occasion said these words, "As a mother's hopes and ambitions and expectations are bound up in a child of especial promise, so Miss Anthony was waiting for her heart longing to be realized in SusieA mutual bond, a mutual taste, a mutual sympathy held them as one in loving hands."

About her religion, biographer Lynn Sherr has this to say, "Anthony took pride in her own Quaker background and always identified herself as a Friend, even though her family had switched to the Unitarian church when the Rochester Quakers did not support the Anthony position against slavery."

Elizabeth Cady Stanton described her friend and colleague as an agnostic. Lynn Sherr includes this quote from an interview with Susan which seems to corroborate this view:

I pray every single second of my life; not on my knees but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men. Work and worship are one with me. I know there is no God of the universe made happy by my getting down on my knees and calling him "great."

In her biography, Sherr also includes part of a thank you note to an unwitting cousin who sent Susan a biblical gift:

Your little birthday present, the Book of Proverbs, came duly. Solomon's wise sayings, however, don't help me very much in my work of trying to persuade men to do justice to women. These men and their progenitors for generations back have read Solomon over and over again, and learned nothing therefrom of fair play for woman, and I fear generations to come will continue to read to as little purpose. At any rate, I propose to peg away in accordance with my own sense of wisdom rather than Solomon's. All those old fellows were very good for their time, but their wisdom needs to be newly interpreted in order to apply to people of today.

Susan also resisted the orthodox habit of closing down all public places except churches on the Sabbath.

It seems to me the common sense thing that all public places of art, science and learning should be open to suit the convenience of all classes of people; the ten hours of each week-day for such as have leisure, the evenings and Sundays for those whose bread-winning employments occupy every one of those ten hours of each of the six week-days

In an 1890 speech, Susan made clear her acceptance and tolerance of all religious positions:

If it is necessary, I will fight forty years more to make our platform free for the Christian to stand upon, whether she be a Catholic and counts her beads, or a Protestant of the straightest orthodox sect, just as I have fought for the rights of the "infidels" the last forty years. These are the principles I want to maintain ­ that our platform may be kept as broad as the universe, that upon it may stand the representatives of all creeds and of no creeds ­ Jew and Christian, Protestant and Catholic, Gentile and Mormon, believer and atheist.

Susan attached her name to many causes. She was an abolitionist. Anti-slavery Quakers met at the Anthony family farm every Sunday. Occasionally Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison joined them. In 1856 she became an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society, handing out leaflets, posting posters, speaking publicly, and arranging meetings. Once an effigy of her was dragged through the streets of Syracuse and hung by anti-abolitionists. She had objects hurled at her, threats made on her life, and angry mobs engulf her.

Susan was an educational reformer. She worked for the admission of women into universities and into the professions. She argued to better pay for women teachers. She favored coeducation and equal educational opportunities for all, including ex-slaves.

Susan was a labor activist. In her paper, The Revolution she advocated an eight-hour day and equal pay for equal work. She helped organize the Workingwomen's Association. She founded an association which reported on working conditions in factories. However, she was accused of strike-breaking when New York printers went on strike and she urged employers to hire women instead, believing this was an opportunity to prove to employers that women could do the work of men.

Susan was a Temperance Worker. She made her first public speech in 1848 at a Daughter of Temperance supper. She resigned from the Women's State Temperance Society when the State Legislature rejected a petition with over 2,800 signatures calling for a law limiting the sale of liquor. The petition was rejected because most of the signatures belonged to women and children. Because of this, Susan resolved to use her life to gain women the right to vote.

She is most known as a suffragist. She did not attend the first women's rights convention in 1851 in Seneca Falls, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Martha Coffin Wright, Jane Hunt, and Mary Ann McClintock. However, in 1866, together with Elizabeth she founded the American Equal Rights Association. In 1868 they founded the Rochester newspaper The Revolution. It masthead read, "Men their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less."

In 1872 Susan voted in Rochester. She was arrested and tried in Canandaigua in 1873. She was fined $100 and set free, so that she would not have recourse to an appeal. She never paid her fine.
Susan and Elizabeth headed the National Women's Suffrage Association, which campaigned for a U.S. constitutional amendment. The American Women's Suffrage Association campaigned on a state-by-state basis, with Wyoming being the first territory to grant women the right to vote ­ in 1869. (Sometime following that vote the governor sent Susan a message announcing the birth of a child. In her reply, Susan asked if the child were a girl or a boy. The governor answered, "No matter which. We are in Wyoming.") Later the NWSA and the AWSA merged to become the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Susan served in several official capacities, the last as president from 1892 to 1900.

Finally, Susan campaigned for women's rights at the same time that she campaigned for their right to vote. Economic freedom, the right to have custody of her own children, to own property in her own name, to work, to divorce ­ these were the rights she sought for women.

I want to end this section by describing Susan's dress. She flirted briefly with support for reform in women's apparel. In 1852 she donned bloomers and cut her long hair. However, public response was so outraged, that she returned to the conservative fashion of the day, rather than draw attention away from her cause. However, she did like to wear a red shawl about her shoulders. This red shawl became something of a trademark. In fact, Lynn Sherr tells this anecdote:

Her red shawl became such a cherished symbol of the venerable leader that even the usually cynical Washington press corps was swept along. In 1898, when she chose instead a white shawl for one session of the suffrage convention, the newspapermen sent her a note that read, "No red shawl, no report." Anthony gamely played along, telling them, "All right, boys, I'll send to the hotel for it." When it arrived and she placed it around her shoulders, the audience burst into applause and the reporters took up their pencils.

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met in 1851 in Seneca Falls. Elizabeth wrote of that occasion:

How well I remember the day! George Thompson and William Lloyd Garrison having announced an anti-slavery meeting in Seneca Falls, Miss Anthony came to attend it. These gentlemen were my guests. Walking home after the adjournment, we met Mrs. Bloomer and Miss Anthony, on the corner of the street, waiting to greet us. There she stood, with her good earnest face and genial smile, dress in gray delaine, hat and all the same color, relieved with pale blue ribbons, the perfection of neatness and sobriety. I liked her thoroughly, and why Id did not at once invite her home with me to dinner I do not know.

Elizabeth was four years Susan's senior. Unlike her single colleague, she was married. Lynn Sherr describes their collaboration:

They became the indivisible odd couple of the American women's rights movement: Stanton, the short, stout mother of seven with a quick wit and facile pen; Anthony, the tall, slim spinster who tended toward the serious and agonized over setting words on paper. But underneath Stanton's white curls and Anthony's gray bun functioned two brains in search of one goal: women's rights-obtainable only through the vote. For more than half a century they led the charge together, sustaining an enviably fulfilling relationship that survived vast distances and occasion strains but never lessened in intensity. Anthony called Stanton "my oldest and longest tried woman friend."Henry Stanton, Elizabeth husband, summarized the team: "[Elizabeth] stirs up Susan, and she stirs the world."

In the beginning Elizabeth coached Susan. Elizabeth was the more seasoned speaker. She offered encouragement to her new colleague, "Dress loose, take a great deal of exercise & be particular about your diet & sleep sound enough, the body has a great effect on the mind."

As Elizabeth's family obligations kept her from travel and as time progressed, Susan became the General and Elizabeth her lieutenant. In 1888 Elizabeth was in England while Susan planned the first session of the International Council of Women in Washington, DC. Susan got word that Elizabeth was planning to stay in England and would not be available to plan the conference or attend the conference. Susan's diary entries reveal the relationship between the two women on this occasion:

February 1­Receive Postal from Mrs. Stanton saying it was doubtful if she came to Council-Was too incensed to write-so waited.

February 2-Received Mrs. Stanton's letter to Rachel [Foster, who was making the arrangements] bidding her to get Susan ready to make the opening speech & get along without her-I was more on fire than ever-

February 3-At 9:30-this eve-mail most terific [sic] letter to Mrs. Stanton-in response to her Postal to me & letter to Rachel Foster-[that] she might not come to Council-

February 14-Wash., D.C. Riggs House.-Got cable-gram from Mrs. Stanton this P.M. saying simply-"coming"-showing that she had received mine of the 3rd-So my heart was relieved-sent word immediately to Miss Foster & Mrs. Sewall--& ran downstairs to tell news to Mrs. Spofford.

That same year Elizabeth ­ a flaming religious liberal who, ten years later was to translate the Bible herself and critique it in a publication know as The Woman's Bible ­ criticized Susan for befriending all women including those who are orthodox in their religion. She did this publicly. Together with Matilda Joslyn Gage she sent her written criticism to Clara Colby's Woman's Tribune, where it was published. Susan vented in a letter to Frances Willard, describing herself as vexed and Elizabeth's criticism as "wretched scribbleidiotic[and, in places] vulgar."

In 1896, when The Woman's Bible was published, a floor fight ensued at the NAWSA convention. Some wanted to censure Elizabeth. Susan was distasteful of her friend's publication, yet she supported her old friend.

If we do not inspire in women a broad and catholic spirit, they will fail, when enfranchised, to constitute that power for better government which we have always claimed for them. Ten women educated into the practice of liberal principles would be a stronger force than 10,000 organized on a platform of intolerance and bigotry. I pray you vote for religious liberty, without censorship or inquisition. This resolution adopted will be a vote of censure upon a woman who is without a peer in intellectual and statesmanlike ability; one who has stood for half a century the acknowledge leader of progressive thought and demand in regard to all matter pertaining to the absolute freedom of women.

In a letter to Elizabeth than same year, Susan emphasized her own focus:

You say "women must be emancipated from their superstitions before enfranchisement will be of any benefit," and I say just the reverse, that women must be enfranchised before they can be emancipated from their superstitions...

Now especially in the California campaign, I shall no more thrust into the discussions the question of the Bible than manufacture of wine.

I have been pleading with Miss Willard for the last three months to withdraw her threatened WCTU invasion of California this year, and at last she has done it; now, for heaven's sake, don't you propose a "Bible invasion." It is not because I hate religious bigotry less than you do, or because I love prohibition less than Frances Willard does, but because I consider suffrage more important just now.

I have given you a brief outline on Susan B. Anthony's life and her friendship with Elizabeth Cady Stanton. I want to close by suggesting three ways in which her life might inform us, today.

First of all, though Susan and Elizabeth (as for that matter, Susan and Frances, and Susan and many other women) had serious philosophical and practical differences, they remained united in their cause to get women the right to vote. Yes, at times they vexed each other. Yes, at times they let their rancor leak out into public. But always they supported each other in their cause.

Second, they were not perfect. H ear how Lynn Sherr describes Susan B. Anthony's bigotry:

She urged the suffrage convention not to adopt a resolution condemning segregated railroad cars because "We women are a helpless, disenfranchised class. Our hands are tied." And she talked Elizabeth Cady Stanton out of writing an open letter to the press congratulating [Frederick] Douglass on his new, second marriage-to a white woman-because "it has no place on our platformYour sympathy has run away with your judgment."

Sherr describes these as tactics as "too considerate of southern white sensibilities." Susan, therefore, was not above compromise ­ on occasion, even of her deepest values.
In addition to these two lessons ­ sticking together and succeeding in spite of imperfections ­ this year's maybe-Unitarian ghost offers us a third lesson ­ she endured because she stayed focused on her cause. I look forward to watching the PBS special profiling Susan and Elizabeth's contributions to the suffrage movement ­ what the filmmaker calls "the largest social movement in US history."
I want to close with this anecdote which describes an incident which occurred three years before her death. Let me tell it in Lynn Sherr's words:

The suffrage conventions became so much a part of her life that Susan B. Anthony was often unable to distinguish between routine and adulation. In 1903, when the meeting was held in New Orleans, she arrived a bit late and entered the hall to a thunderous ovation. The great leader-at eighty-three, now honorary president of the organization she had co-founded-was baffled by the applause. "What has happened, Anna?" she asked Anna Howard Shaw, her able lieutenant. Shaw's reply: "You happened, Aunt Susan."