Somehow the tall, gaunt figure, the pale, lean, earnest, intellectual face of Susan B. Anthony is indissolubly linked with a love of my youth - my dear Knight of La Mancha.
Somehow, to the end of time, I shall see her in my mind's eye - the Donna Quixote of the Nineteenth Century.
Don't laugh.
This is not the place to laugh.
I am not poking covert ridicule at Susan B.
I am not trying to be cheaply smart at the expense of so great and admirable a personality.
I think, indeed, that the silly season in relation to Susan B. Anthony is over, permanently over; that she has come into her own; that even the "funny man" of our newspaper world finds the point of his paragraph dulled by his respect for her, that he has voluntarily blue-penciled her off the list of his stick subjects.
It is not an inadvertence - a slip of the pencil - when I call her the Donna Quixote of the Nineteenth Century. It is to the nineteenth century that her activities and her story belong; it is upon the horizon of that time that her gaunt, Quixotish figure is scrawled - indelibly.
Now she is but the lingering of the sunset slope, in the pleasant afterglow of labor faithfully done and life well spent - yet still active, still a force, it must be remembered.
In my mind's eye - and, let me hasten to assure you, I am not a woman's suffragist; I am without prejudices; I am still in a state of receptivity - the windmills my Donna Quixote has tilted against are not the figments of HER fancy. They are other people's windmills, millions of other people's, and the lances my Donna Quixote tilted with were Reasonableness, and Logic, and Common Sensibilities.
So you see now why I said, "Don't laugh."
•••••••
[…]
Anywhere there is a frontier, where there are new and hard conditions to be met, tasks to be done, you may find this Susan B. Anthony kind of womanliness.
It is the homespun, dyed-in-the-wool brand, as distinguished from the boudoir, beauty-doctored brand.
Let me show her to you in her rocking chair.
It is not without determined effort and much expense of strenuosity that I can do it, for Susan B. Anthony is the liveliest girl of 85 that I ever pursued.
Although eighty-five are her birthdays, she has not reached the chimney-corner age.
You cannot say to yourself, when I have finished this, that and the other - attended to the more pressing affairs - I will drop in on Miss Anthony. She is 85, and sure to be at home.
On the contrary, you will get up, as I did, earlier than your wont, and if you're wise and would save time and travel you will start before breakfast - as I did not, alas!
As for me, Miss Anthony had but one boat the start of me, not more I'm sure, and I followed her trail to Oakland, to Berkeley and back again to San Francisco, with Miss Anthony always one jump, and sometimes two, ahead of me.
She crowded into her round trip a luncheon, a reception, a drive through the university grounds, with a comprehensive inspection of the university, another reception, a little talk, a dinner party and got to bed (and to sleep, too, no doubt) all before I could catch up with her.
That's doing pretty well for a girl of eighty-five, isn't it?
So that, when at last I take you in with me and show her to you in her rocking chair, I may be pardoned for regarding it as something of an achievement.
Well, here she is, a fine, venerable, commanding figure, "Susan B. Anthony, the woman."
She is tall and gaunt. In her long, busy life she has had no time to acquire embonpoint of her thinness - yet I think it is more likely because of the blending of what is fine and true and strong into an impressive personality - she recalls a Toledo blade my fencing master took pride in.
This Toledo blade, like Susan B., was fine and true and strong, with an edge so keen it would cut a hair. Even I, who was no connoisseur, could appreciate that it was something above the common when the fencing master, in a particularly gracious mood, would press its point to the floor and bend it almost to a circle, then release it and let it fly back like a flash of light.
Susan B. Anthony is like the Toledo blade, we see as we sit at her knee for this close examination of her in her rocking chair, for she has not snapped or broken under the pressure of the burdens of life.
She is still vivid, strong and mistress of her mind, not dwelling reminiscently in the past, but pointing with commanding hand to what must be done in the present and the future.
[…]
I ask the eternal question - why?
Why did Susan B. take up the cause of woman's suffrage? Why did she give her private, personal woman's life to it?
"I had taught school for fifteen years - from the time I was fifteen until I was thirty. I got a dollar and a half a week - six dollars a month - for the same work that a man for thirty [dollars] for, just because he was a man. I taught during the summer term, giving my place up to a man during the winter term, because at that time a woman was not considered capable of going through the snow, and keeping the fire in the school going, as a man - and the children who attended the school - had to do.
"The man who filled my place during the winter terms was staying at our house. Somebody asked him how he was getting along with the school.
"'Oh,' said he, 'I ain't looked the barn over yet. I'll know better when I look it over!'
"This was the answer of the man who took my place, and who was paid $30 a month against my $6. Naturally I gave it some thought. I wondered why it was that he should have the advantage.
"Just about this time Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton came to our town to speak on woman's rights. I was told about Lucretia Mott and her pretty Quaker kerchief and sweet face, and about Mrs. Stanton and her black curls and fresh color and ready wit, and urged to go hear them. I laughed at the idea.
"'Oh fudge!' I said, 'I don't want to vote.'
"But I did go to hear them, and I did come to understand why the man who was not so competent as I was got my place and $30 a month to my $6.
"The upshot of it was that I saw the importance of the ballot to women, and I started out to do what I could to get it for them. I gave up teaching in 1859, and I've been working for this one thing ever since."
Here, in a paragraph or two, is the whole story of Susan B. Anthony, Suffragist.
All the rest is addition, repetition and detail.
Once having set her foot on the road that seemed the right road to her there has been no turning back. Always the goal has been just a little farther ahead and always she has set her face to it. For one half a century it has kept just out of reach, it has eluded the grasp. Disappointment has followed disappointment.
Yet - the Toledo blade, so fine, so true, so strong, never snaps nor breaks. See it spring back!
"Each defeat," says Susan B. Anthony, "is a victory!
"We haven't got the ballot for women - except in four States, when we want national suffrage - but see what we have got for them!
"When the movement was begun women had no right to their children, no right to their wages, no right to their prosperity. They couldn't get an education - the institutions of learning were closed to them. They couldn't earn a living, except by doing housework, or teaching, or working in factories.
"Women have marriage rights now. They have rights in their children. They have a right to the wages they earn, to the property they inherit. The high schools, the colleges, the universities are open to them: the avocations. There isn't a place to-day where woman goes to earn a dollar, or to fit herself for the earning of the dollar, that she is not indebted to woman's suffragists for."
[…]
Yet in spite of all the things that were attained on the way to the one thing that is wanted, that fine Toledo blade has been near to breaking many times. There was one time when - Susan B. is relating -
"We worked for ten years getting laws passed protecting woman's property rights and her rights in her children. It took us from 1851 to '61, and then in the next session at Albany," the battle ground was in New York then, "they were annulled because it was claimed they would interfere with the adjudicating on estates."
"And ten years of effort wasted?"
"The work of ten years."
"How disappointing - how terribly discouraging."
"Yes - it was for a moment. Then we took a fresh start."
So perfectly is the Toledo blade tempered.
There is one little word which occurs three times in the second section of the fourteenth amendment which Susan B. Anthony has petitioned every Congress since the Congress of 1865 to remove. It is the world "male." It is the word that stands between her and the achievement of her lifelong purpose.
"I am an optimist," she tells me on top of this story of persistence. "Each time we go back we hope to win; and each time we are defeated we begin the work all over again. Yet with each defeat we make a little headway, we learn."
"And for this," I ask, "you have given up your personal and private and woman's life?"
"Why, this IS my personal life, my whole life."
"And do you not regret what you have missed?"
Susan B. chooses to misinterpret diplomatically. She knows very well what I mean, but she has the artfulest of diplomatists when she chooses to be, and she chooses just now to be and to give an evasive answer.
"Of course," she says, "I have missed much along the lines of culture. My work has been entirely along humanitarian lines, and I have had no time for any other. I hear of clubs of woman taking up the study of Pericles, or Archimedes, and - I have missed that opportunity for culture."
She says it blandly. I look up quickly. Is that or is that not a whack - a little whack - at the frittering club woman? Is that or is it not a fleeting gleam of laughter in her calm blue eyes?
I'm sure I don't know, and I leave it to you.
But I get back to my question - in spite of Susan B.'s evasiveness - and I ask it a little straighter from the shoulder:
"You never cared to marry, and - "
"I never had time to think of it."
"Are you glad or sorry, now?"
"I've had a good many dear friends who married," and the humorous smile plays gently, "and I never knew any of them that I'd want to change places with."
"And you've not been lonely?" I ask this knowing full well that in every city, in every State, and all the world over there are friends of Susan B. Anthony honored in counting her their friend.
"How could I be? I have been busy all my life, and I have many friends wherever I go. I have lived in the best society." Susan B. smiles her humorous smile and runs over some names that are not in the "smart set" but that are big names in the big, big world, and comments that, "that is one of the big advantages of the reformer - the privilege of living in the best society."
I look with fresh interest at the calm, strong face with its something of eagle quality. The lines and furrows are all of thought, none are the ravages of warring emotions. It is purely and entirely of intellectual cast, bespeaking the brain to conceive, the will to achieve.
Around this fine old figure, that is fine as silk and steel are fine with the fineness of concentrated power, what eddies of silly ridicule and petty criticism and foolish misinterpretation have swirled, and through them all she has gone straight to her goal, not reaching but always keeping in sight.
She is saying: "I have not seen the ballot given to women, and I probably shall not see it, but I can drop out and a dozen or a hundred others can drop out and the movement will go on just the same, and win at last."
"And in spite of the disappointment you are satisfied with your life's work?"
"I am satisfied - I am more than satisfied."