A Heroic Woman Reformer:
WOLFE, ANN F.
A Heroic Woman Reformer Susan B. Anthony. By Katharine Anthony. Doubleday. 521 pp. $6.00. Reviewed by Ann F. Wolfe Contributor, N. Y. "Times Book Review," "Saturday Review" SUSAN Brownell...
...Shoestring heroism" is her biographer's term for it...
...Stanton, Susan was no orator...
...It is one of the many ironies of her struggle that American women were not given the vote till 1920, the hundredth anniversary of her birth...
...It constituted, he protested, "the first step to abolish marriage a monster of deformity...
...The enfranchisement of women was not uncommonly associated with free love...
...This home-loving daughter of New England Quakers stumped the length and breadth of the land, braving bandit-infested frontier trails and mountains made impassable by blizzards...
...In such a psychological climate, it was a Herculean grind to finance the battle for women's rights...
...William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips and Horace Greeley were her associates...
...She was caught up in the horrors of New York's draft riots...
...Both through blood ties and through her antislavery agitation, she was involved in the John Brown tragedy...
...When Eugene Debs walked along the Terre Haute streets with Susan, people jeered at him...
...In her home city of Rochester, N.Y., she led fifteen of her followers to the registration office and the ballot box, thus confounding and embarrassing the country's political bosses...
...Over and above the reforms that she effected towers her service as an educator of American opinion...
...Her life was a practical demonstration of the power of faith...
...The good ladies were later arrested and treated like common criminals...
...In her hands, the Susan B. Anthony story adds up to a significant chapter of Americana...
...At 86, the indomitable spinster journeyed to Washington, where she exclaimed to a suffrage gathering: "When will men do something besides extend congratulations...
...Susan's labors as bloomer-clad temperance leader, abolitionist and suffrage reformer were bound up with vital periods in our history...
...Susan herself voted in the Presidential election of 1872—the straight Republican ticket, as she wrote her lifelong friend and colleague, Elizabeth Cady Stanton...
...This was but one of countless stirring incidents in a career that was prodigious for sheer strenuousness...
...Susan suffered years of persecution...
...Earlier, at a teachers' convention, a West Point professor opposed Susan's resolution in favor of coeducation...
...Reviewed by Ann F. Wolfe Contributor, N. Y. "Times Book Review," "Saturday Review" SUSAN Brownell Anthony died in 1906 at the age of 86, after selflessly devoting more than half a century to the cause of women's rights...
...President Theodore Roosevelt had just sent her an anti-climactic birthday greeting...
...Katharine Anthony, no relation, does as handsomely by her feminist namesake as she has done by Marie Antoinette, Margaret Fuller, Catherine the Great and other colorful figures...
...Preposterous as it now seems, opposition to women's rights was formidable...
...But the fact remains that she presented American history with a neat and not unamusing fait accompli...
...As a friend of Henry Ward Beecher and the Tiltons, she was drawn into the sensational developments of l'affaire Beecher...
...Dollar by dollar, mostly self-earned, Susan personally scraped together the money for each meeting, each trip, each printing job...
...Coeducation would lead to sterilization of the human race...
...Yet, she forced herself to address vast audiences here and abroad—once, an audience so hostile that the moderator of the meeting displayed a pistol at the ready...
...Unlike her friend Mrs...
Vol. 38 • April 1955 • No. 14
