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Lillie Devereux Blake was involved in the National Woman Suffrage Association (later the National American Woman Suffrage Association) and the New York State Suffrage Association. As a member of both organizations, Blake worked on may other feminist issues other than woman suffrage.
In Colony days there was little security anywhere, and the home was all-important. School, manufacturing plant, fortress, sanctuary, all were within its walls, and there women worked and toiled, on them depending the health and well-being of the family. Well-to-do or poor alike, with their own strong hands they planted and raised food, tended the domestic animals, spun and wove fabrics for clothing and bed-coverings; made candles for light, soap for cleanliness. Housewives in the Colonies acted as doctors, surgeons, tailors, and diplomats. Their lives were rich and full, and their position was assured because woman's work was absolutely necessary to the existence of the community, just as it is today, although under entirely different conditions.
Women had rights the; they had power and responsibility. In pioneering days influence lies primarily in character, courage, stamina, mental strength, and in these qualities men and women are equal. Although the laws of the Colonies, founded on the English common law, ignored women's personal and property rights, considering their interests merged with those of their husbands, nevertheless as individuals the women of our Colonies were frequently above these laws, for the reason that their economic importance assured them of freedom in their actions and relationships.
They had courage and faith in God. They had honesty, for when life is stripped to its foundations facts confront us and sham is a dreary dream. They had both vision and industry, for their mothers had trained them for their profession, household management. Working side by side with their husbands they faced a wilderness and founded a nation.
In Revolutionary days, when the nation had emerged from the wilderness and it became necessary to h old what had been won, women were ready. They were outspoken, intelligent, decisive, and resourceful. The voluminous printed letters and diaries of those times disclose what a tremendous part women played by their counsel, persuasion, encouragement and quick-wittedness. In energy, in strategy, in selfless expenditure of themselves, thy were worthy descendants of the Colonial heroines. Side by side with their husbands they fought the struggle through. Then they helped to repair the damage and to build and buttress the Republic. Washington, Adams, Madison, all had mothers and wives who helped to make them great.
Through 1800, woman's knowledge of the household arts and her trained hands were still so vital to the life of the community that her rights were factual, and few found a need to demand others.
With the early years of the Nineteenth Century, all this began to change. Life on our continent was easier. The new government ran smoothly in the hands of the sons of proud-spirited men and women who had brought the land with their strength and their lives. We were free to press on further into t he West; to open up its El Dorado riches. Americans began to travel about, to trade and talk together; to learn from each other, and apply old-world knowledge in new-world ways. A growing nation clamored for its requirements.
To dig out the highways and build the railroads the merry Irish came to find a land where famine was unknown, and where their sturdy muscles earned them more ease and luxury than they had ever dreamed of. Joyfully they took over much of the hard physical labor, and the wives and daughters who came with them took up domestic work in the Northern homes where there were few Negro slaves.
So, gradually, the focus of women's industry altered. Instead of making candles, they took the money their husbands made by trade and bought oil lamps; instead of weaving wool from their own sheep into fabrics for wearing apparel, they bought French silks for themselves and their daughters. More and more, money became a factor in their daily lives, as the invention and use of mechanical implements, and factory production, although then on a small scale, took the manufacture of household necessities out of women's hands. They had more time to read; to look across the seas; to watch what women in the older societies were doing, and as their literature was mainly English, they saw and coveted the privileges and pleasures of the British aristocrats. Soon an American aristocracy evolved, but with the possession of wealth substituted for an inherited title.
Since creative work was no longer needed within the home, among women with any pretense to position domestic work became distasteful, and, finally, disgraceful. The mistress of the house sat at ease while someone else toiled at the household tasks or sewed on her wardrobe, ever more costly and elaborate. She folded her white hands and looked lovely.
Her husband liked her in this new role. She was an object of beauty; his, to cherish and protect and make love to. Observing that he liked this, she bought still further luxury by becoming more beautiful, more cherishable -- and perishable. She fostered the arts of swooning and tears. Her delicacy was carefully conserved. She was assured that she was too fragile to work as men did. Anyhow, women as doctors, lawyers, scientists, were not required, even had women's "inferior" brains permitted such attainments. A woman's highest achievement was to be loved and admired, to marry a "good catch," and live as a contented, silk-clad lady, her energies devoted to making and complicating the rules of a social world ever becoming more tyrannical and restrictive; her time spent in an absorbing round of little things. The bric-a-brac crowding her whatnot is no bad symbol for the pettiness that filled the lives of many educated women during the greater part of the Nineteenth Century in America.
Without realizing it, women had given up their right to labor, when they thought about this at all, they considered that they had gained much and lost nothing. The wife or daughter spoke of her father or husband as her "protector," and expected him to support her, as it was gravely expressed, "in the style to which she was accustomed."
But-- since the laws remained unchanged, the woman without a kind and honest protector was extremely unfortunate, especially if she must earn her living. The "privileges" of such a woman were to work long hours for a minimum of pay, and to have no redress if the little she earned were withheld from her by any employer mean and clever enough to do it. If he employer did not rob her of her earnings, the law gave her husband that right. A married woman's labor, her money, her clothes, even her children, belonged to her husband. Under the property laws she had few rights, although when it came to the penal laws, "he" was interpreted to mean also "she." " pp. 9-12
In the History of Woman Suffrage, those four weighty volumes compiled under the eye of the leader of the movement, and the only available source of much information about the Nineteenth Century struggle for the vote, Lillie Devereux Blake has, as she foretold she would have, "but scant recognition." Reading that book, one would never dream that Mrs. Blake was a leader, an inventor of slogans, a planner of widespread campaigns, during the eleven hard-worked years that she was elected and re-elected president of the lively, powerful Association of New York State.
She wrote eagerly for forty years, and publishers accepted and printed her work, but you will find her books in few libraries. From 1869 to 1909 she wrote for suffrage." p. 14
"After a summer of restless days and feverish nights, and a prolonged study of the various aspects of woman's position, Lillie made her choice. She wrote of this:
"My decision is made at last. I will do as my conscience and my aspirations bid me. I am almost thirty-six yeas old. I have a right to arrange my life as it pleases me. I will not be deterred from giving my hearty support to a cause in which I thoroughly believe, by any fears as to what may be said. I will leave the result in the hands of God."
Mr. Blake made no attempt to dissuade her. He said only, "I believe in the justice of this cause, Lillie. Do as you please in working for it. If it makes you happy, I am content."
All these things I heard discussed between my mother and my stepfather. I was learning much. One thing I learned in those early years, and my experience through a long life have only emphasized it:
Society will forgive either a lack of wealth or radicalism. If one is poor, and conforms, society overlooks the poverty. If one who is wealthy elects to be a radical, society condones the defection from type. But if one is poor embraces radicalism in any form, there is no forgiveness. One is pushed out; the ranks close up.
That is what Lillie Devereux Blake had to learn. When she married a poor man, and wrote to supplement her income, she was still invited and accepted as before in the society she had known all her life. Her poverty made little difference to anyone but herself. But when, in addition to being poor, she espoused an unpopular, radical movement, her friends no longer invited her to their "functions"; she was no longer included in lists of those asked to the Charity Ball, or asked to be patroness of this or that philanthropic activity. Worst of all, her relatives practically declined to see her. Only her faithful sister remained loyal." pp. 77-78
From 1869 to the end of her life she devoted her strength and intellect to this task. She gave up everything else for it.
Together with those earlier leaders, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone, she was that until women had achieved their rights as citizens and human beings, they would not be ready to use the ballot effectively. For this reason, although she worked loyally for the right to vote, she always found for herself some additional objective that was possible of immediate achievement.
Each step she took was one of interest at the moment, and each one aroused more and more women, while working with her, to look beyond their own homes, and inspired them to an independence of thought and action that became of great value when the right to vote was won.
I think that for many years she did not realize the fundamental difference of plan that to a certain extent caused Miss Anthony's destructive opposition to this phase of the work. Miss Anthony demanded that women concentrate on securing the vote, because she held that the vote was woman's most imperative need, and when the vote was won all requisite legislative changes could be made at once. This was a mistake, as Negro suffrage showed. The vote alone is not a cure-all for unfair conditions.
The National American Woman Suffrage Association, which was formed in 1890 by a union of the two great suffrage associations, continued to hold to Miss Anthony's theory that the vote would be a cure-all for the age-old wrongs of women. The National Woman's Party, started twenty five years later, was composed of women who were true followers of the ideas of my mother and Mrs. Stanton.
But that new organization was formed by women too young to have taken part in the long struggle for the vote, and for the rights that must go with it. Mrs. Stanton had been pushed aside by Miss Anthony and her committee, and the members of the new Woman's Party knew only that Susan had long been president of the National Woman's Suffrage Association, previous to Mrs. Catt's presidency, so gave to Miss Anthony credit for all the work that had been done. They even called the Nineteenth Amendment the "Susan B. Anthony Amendment," unaware that it had been written by Mrs. Stanton, in 1869, and by her first brought before Congress in 1878 -- after Susan for nine years had failed to push it. Mrs. Blatch has stated the facts in her recent autobiography.
From the time Lillie Devereux began to work for woman suffrage, she lost the haunting sense of frustration that had tormented her earlier life. There was never any lack of stimulus. Either she was enjoying the excitement of success, or feeling the pain of meeting envy and jealous intrigue, or she was planning for and struggling to achieve a next step on the road toward sex equality under the laws, every inch of which has been -- and still is! -- strenuously contested." p. 80 - 81
"She changes the whole method of the suffrage campaign by bringing the beauty and grace and charm of loveliest womanhood to aid the arguments and logic of the rather unattractive advocates who had been most conspicuous."
This seems to me to sum up, in the words of one who knew her well, that phase of her achievement." p. 85
All this was bad for the suffrage association. In fact, New York membership so shrank that for the time only parlor meetings were held." p. 91
I find among her papers one of the many anonymous letters she received, this one evidently from a laboring man. It is signed "Nestor." In it he implies that in spite of his terrible discouragement, his conviction that the inequalities between capital and labor might never be solved, that he "owes a fee," because her speech the previous evening had so encouraged him that he "walked all the way to the ferry without noticing it." Evidently, she had aroused his imagination. In her correspondence I find many letters expressing similar ideas, and her diary insistently stresses her earnest desire to be of use to the working people." p. 92
"My resentment increased as I read these reports in the daily papers, and when finally the platform and the name of the nominee were announced, my wrath rose to a very tornado.
Horace Greeley! The man who had openly declared himself opposed to giving women any political equality. Whose paper had persistently misrepresented our movement and assailed our leaders, doing more than any other journal in American to discredit our cause. Horace Greeley for President! And the first sentence of the platform was an insult to any woman: 'We believe that all men are entitled to equal protection under the law.' " p. 96
Gentlemen
It is not my purpose to assail you with legal propositions sustaining the claims of the women of this State to the ballot. I wish to appeal to your hearts rather than to your heads -- to your sense of justice rather than to the dry dictates of the law, and I ask you, gentlemen, how you would like to change places with us, and stand in the position to which political liabilities condemn us? How would you like to be forced, as we are forced, to plead for what ought to be our inalienable birthright as American citizens?
We have committed no crime, and yet upon us, and women like ourselves, has been inflicted a stigma such as the law only inflicts upon the most degraded or the most criminal of your sex. We possess every qualification for suffrage which you yourselves possess. We are intelligent beings; we are of full age; some of us are taxpayers to a considerable extent, and if the question of military duty be raised, we are perhaps as capable of defending our country as some of your own venerable members; and yet you refuse to us personal representation at the ballot box. Have you ever considered how cruel this injustice is?
When a portion of our people revolted from the Federal government, there were men who received their education from the nation's bounty, who turned traitors to their country, and were false to their oaths. These men helped to plunge us into the horrors of a civil war, and almost succeeded in dismembering our fair republic. And for these crimes what punishment was decreed? Righteous indignation said that these men must have placed against their names a brand of infamy that would set them apart, in a class by themselves; and the statesmen of the land, searching for a place suited to these political outcasts, found it side by side with their wives and daughters! To the loyal women of the North and the recreant soldiers of the South was meted out the same measure -- disfranchisement!
Again there are certain unfortunate beings marked even from birth for a life of darkness, cut off from the light of reason; and there are other unhappy creatures whom some terrible affliction has driven to the awful doom of madness. Poor children of misfortune by the decree of Providence, placed on a level with the brute. Yet no! For here, again, the despised sex bears them company, and the ballot is denied to idiots, lunatics, and women!
Even more. When the doors of the state prison have closed on a malefactor, when the sentence is pronounced that stamps him a felon, added to the punishment of the loss of liberty, as the worst stigma that the law can place on him, it is decreed that henceforth he is held unfit to cast his vote. The government which he has outraged deems him unworthy to choose his rulers, counting this as one of the heaviest penalties of his offense. But here, too, he finds associates, for the law denies the ballot not only to criminals, but to women!
Do you think, gentlemen, that we do not feel such humiliations as these? I tell you that in our hearts we revolt against them with a bitter indignation that no words can express! We love our country as dearly as you do; we have toiled for it and wept for it in its dark hours; some of us have given up to its service what was nearest and dearest; but we stand before you today, guilty of no crime, but disfranchised. Gentleman, do you think this is just? You are here to do away with wrongs and evils of existing laws; will you not do away with this most intolerable evil, which refuses to half the people of this State all voice in choosing their rulers?
The magnitude of this oppression is so gigantic that nothing but the blindness of long prejudice can close one's eyes to its true proportions. Why, only imagine that half the men of the State were denied the right of suffrage, for no fault of their own, but simply for some physical accidents of weight or coloring -- would not the crying injustice be speedily abolished? And yet the oppression would not be so great as this of which we complain! You affect to consider this a free state, and the Constitution declares that it is so established by the people of New York, and yet you persist in forcing one half the inhabitants to pay taxes and obey laws, while denying them all power in the legislation.
In apology you will perhaps say that women have their own duties and responsibilities and that their place is home. To this we say most heartily, Amen! A woman's place if home and her first duty is to her children, and it is on this account that she will surely be a most valuable and conscientious voter. The men of the state come from the market-place, from the stock-board, and from the barroom to the ballot box; the women of the state will come from the fireside. Which, think you, will bring the purest hands to the work?
Of course, there are bad women; but are there not also bad men? Only fancy that a body of women holding power had conducted themselves as did the men who, until a few months ago, ruled the city of New York. Would it not have been declared that they had proved themselves entirely unfit to be trusted, and might not one argue that their whole sex should be enfranchised? But we say not so. The grand popular uprising which took place was a complete vindication of the power of universal suffrage. Rightly employed, it can be made the bulwark of the nation. When the honest men of the city were appealed to, they went to the ballot box, voting in a solid phalanx for the right. When the women of the land are appealed to, they will be found in this, as in other respects, willing to do their duty.
Women, in virtue of their motherhood, actual or possible, hold the conscience of the world. They guard the sanctities of the hearthstone; they train up their children to purity; they fill the churches, and their prayers ascend in perpetual incense to heaven. Do you not see that the inevitable effect of admitting such a body of voters to the suffrage must be for good?
And on this point I bring to you no romantic suggestions of fancy unsupported by proof. I can appeal to that most convincing of all arguments, the argument of facts. The experience of placing the ballot in the hands of women has been tried in the West, and I hold in my hand a letter from Judge Kingman, of Wyoming, in which he bears unqualified testimony to its absolute success. (Here the lady read from the Judge, in which he spoke in enthusiastic terms of the practical results of women having the right of suffrage.)
Here we have a summary of what woman suffrage has done for the people of a Western territory; will you not recommend it for an Eastern State? Here, too, there is vice to be suppressed, terrible social evils of intemperance and license, from which members of our sex are peculiarly suffer; will you not accept their aid in abolishing these crimes? I assure you that they alone can help you. Just so long as you deny to the mother heart all expression for its councils, so long will the miseries continue which today stain our civilization. The government is only the family on a large scale, and it is as unreasonable to banish women from the council chamber and the ballot box as from the parlor and the nurser.
In conclusion, let me draw your attention to one most important aspect of this question -- never, until all restrictions are removed and equal advantages are given to all human beings, can our race reach its highest development. One of the most prominent of our living orators said in a speech last fall: 'The progress of a people is in proportion to the advancement of individuals and whenever an insulting or arbitrary distinction debars a portion, what portion is inevitably dwarfed and injured. But when the prizes of life are open to all, so that all may at least struggle and aspire, the whole body is inevitably benefited.
There is a sacred truth in these words; our people are as yet only half developed. The nation is great, but it should be greater, and it will be when all unfounded restrictions are removed, and the daughters of this republic are made the peers of her sons.
The ship of State has heretofore moved forward as it were with only one engine. God has given it two impelling forces; man has condemned one to inaction. We ask that these bonds be removed and that the power that lies in maternity and tenderness, as well as the power that proceeds from strength and wisdom, be employed to advance our beloved country on the road of human progress.
Finally, we ask you, gentlemen, what right have you, representing the men of this state, to deny to the women equal protection under the law? What God-given power has descended upon you and your brothers declaring that you may enjoy a liberty which you deny to your sisters? No one any more believes that might makes right. You will not tell us that the stalwart bruisers of the Sixth Ward are more desirable voters than we are. You have it in your power to do away with the oppression of which we complain. Can you reconcile it to your conscience if you refuse? You stand with your powerful hands on the barrier between us and freedom. Will you see that that barrier is taken down?
A century ago a handful of men, fewer in number than those assembled here tonight, drew up a declaration that has conferred upon them immortal honor. Will you not wreathe for yourselves also an imperishable crown of fame by finishing the great work then commenced? Our forefathers promised us a free republic, but this we have never had, among all the federations that form our union. Foremost of these federations in power and strength stands the Empire State. Will you not promise that it shall be foremost also in giving to all its children the priceless boon of liberty?" pp. 101-105
"Of course, Miss Anthony was not the only woman who had tested her right to vote. All over the States, wherever suffrage societies were strong, women went to the polls and made the attempt, usually without any result except that of being courteously refused the right. Miss Anthony, however, by some curious combination of circumstance, was allowed to cast her ballot. It was strange.
Mrs. Blake tried more than once, and Mrs. Gage, when living in Fayetteville, also tried. A letter from her to Mrs. Blake says:
The fun of the thing was that I had nine women with me in the sitting-room of the hotel. I went down first and offered my vote. They were voting in a barroom, but the ballot box was on the door into the hall where I stood. I was refused on the ground that I was a married woman. So then I took down two single women who supported themselves and owned their own home. Their votes were also refused. Then I took down one or more was widows whose husbands' bones had been left to bleach on the battlefield in defense of their country. They, too, were refused, and so on, through the whole nine. with each one offered I made an appropriate argument, and had a big and attentive crowd to hear me. The very worst feature of our case was that it was a corporation tax election; only taxpayers were called on to vote on the raising of money for putting in waterworks, etc. The largest taxpayer in the village was a woman, as was the smallest. The women I offered were all taxpayers, and even I was a taxpayer, in addition to my husband's being one. It created a great stir.It was like Matilda Joslyn Gage to make her test in that exceedingly thorough fashion. Whatever she did, she did with all her might." p. 108
Their places were filled by another group, which included man6y people important in the political and literary life of New York City at that time, and many leaders in the suffrage movement.
I have vivid memories of four brave women, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Susan B. Anthony, and Isabella Beecher Hooker. Of that four I preferred Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Gage, because of their fine characters and first-rate mentalities. Both had been softened by the experiences of love and marriage and child-bearing-- fine children they had, too. Mrs. Stanton it was whose keen intellect made it possible for suffragists to prepare the unanswerable arguments that in the early days were presented to state and congressional committees. Those rather heavy documents were often enlivened by her wit, for she had a delightful sense of humor.
Mrs. Gage was a tireless student, a fine research worker, thorough in all she undertook; she had a deep sense of justice and at time an appalling frankness of speech -- which I loved! One was never in doubt as to where Mrs. Gage stood, and she was invariably fair to others. She prepared many important suffrage documents, not always getting credit for them. In a letter written to my mother she says that she was the originator of the motto, so freely used by the suffragists over their own signatures: "There is a word sweeter than Mother, Home, or Heaven; that word is Liberty." She was absolutely honest in all her dealings, and I would take her word at any time as against anybody else's. I always loved and admired her greatly. I think that in some ways she was the greatest of those four women. Someone should write an adequate life of this great leader." p. 115
Our discussions and conferences at that time resulted in the formation of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association, with Mrs. Gage as president of the National, myself as acting president for the State, and Dr. Lozier as president of the New York City Woman Suffrage Association, we determined to unite in urging the Legislature to give the women of New York State the right to vote for President and Vice-President of the United States.Before returning to New York [City[ she spoke several times more on suffrage, and gave her lecture on "Women of the Revolution."
The advantages in framing our attack in this way were several. In the first place, the near approach to a presidential campaign made the time proper, and in addition, it was within the power of the lawmakers to give us this right by statute without the tedious process necessary for a constitutional amendment.
While I was visiting Mrs. Gage we arranged a Woman Suffrage meeting in Fayetteville which was largely attended. From Fayeteville I went on to Canastota, and then to Sherwood, near Cayuga Lake, where I spoke on Friday on Woman Suffrage, and was urged to speak again. As I was to leave on Monday, they fixed on Sunday evening, so I took for my subject, 'The Bible and Woman suffrage,' and on September 5, 1875, I preached my first sermon! Read the last chapter of Proverbs, and preached from the text, Genesis 1, 27 and 28. A successful effort.
That fall Mrs. Blake and other of the New York Suffragists started calling on members of the State legislature, in the effort to secure the right of New York women to vote in Presidential elections, a campaign for which Mrs. Gage and Mrs. Blake had made the detailed plan in August." pp. 120-121
On Monday, March 11, the suffragists presented themselves in the Senate Chamber, and the bill was read. The senators permitted themselves a ripple of sneering laughter at a clause referring to military service, and when the reading ended, Senator Hughes suggested that the bill be referred "to the Committee on Poor Laws." My mother writes:
Oh, how indignant I was. I could neither sleep nor rest until the evening came, and with it our moment. . . . The Senate Chamber was jammed, and Senator Hughes was a member of the Committee. Before the hearing he came to me and tried to apologize, but I would not accept his excuses. When I rose to speak all the morning's anger rushed back on me, and never in my life have I made such a speech -- indignant, sarcastic, and eloquent, given with a force and intensity that threatened to tear me to pieces. How they all looked at me! How they enjoyed my sneer that 'here in this little village you may choose to treat our cause with contempt, in your ignorance of the progress of events, but while this august body of the Senate of New York can smile at our request, the Senate of the United States has given it proper respect.'
Hughes positively turned pale when I pointed my finger at him and asked if anyone thought that if women had been represented in the senate, any man would have dared suggest that our bill should be referred to the Committee on Poor Laws.
The moment's triumph did not prevent my being half sick with the apparent hopelessness of our struggle. . . nothing could make me forget my bitterness.
Mrs. Gage had proceeded me, speaking well on the legal aspects of the question, and Mrs. Slocum made the final appeal, admirably toughing in its pathos and earnestness. altogether we had an effective meeting . . . .
Yet, as a matter of course, as soon as we were gone it was forgotten." pp. 129-130
I pushed my views as forcibly as I was able. I proposed that after the convention to be held at Annapolis, another convention of the National should be held in Chicago, to influence the Republican Convention to nominate a friendly candidate for the Presidency. I also urged that the work of petitioning, which had cost so much money and time and had led to so little, should cease. Instead the Association should devote all its time and energies to influencing the coming Presidential contest. My plans were finally accepted, although not enthusiastically. Miss Anthony and the other older workers have so long labored in this cause as a mere moral reform, that having learned their first lesson in the anti-slavery agitation, they cannon realize that this question of ours can be made a living political issue . . . .Here is again, put clearly, the difference between Lillie Devereux Blake's views and those of the older leaders. Can any woman who remembers that army of women, representing every profession, marching up Fifth Avenue in 1915, preceded by beautiful Inez Mulholland on her white horse, doubt that it was such aggressive tactics -- a showing of power -- that finally won the day?" pp. 136-137
Finally, I was appointed chairman of a committee to draw up an appeal to the women of the country, urging them wherever it was possible to send delegates pledged to Woman Suffrage, to the Nominating Conventions of both parties.
The greatest danger threatening our cause, to my mind, was that it might drift high and dry into the backwater of respectable indifference -- small meetings of nice old ladies in churches, assembling to listen to long-winded arguments on the movement! My great desire for a year past has been for us to gain political influence, and consequently power, and I have tried hard to impress my reasons for these views on the others.
I fell sure that this brilliant success and its widespread recognition had much to do with Miss Anthony's changed attitude, which had hitherto bee not unfriendly. As I look back I can see that her opposition showed itself more or less openly after this period. I have been told that Miss Anthony feared for her own dominance. If this was so, she did not realize Mrs. Blake's loyalty to a leader, and her refusal to take credit or honors anyone else had won." pp. 153-154
"This committee [Legislative Committee] was formed for the purpose of giving information as to the best methods of conducting legislative campaigns, advising how to secure the passage of laws, and suggesting measures which may be pushed for the benefit of women. Each member of the committee has had legislative experience, and, after consultation, they offer the following plan of work. . . ."
Then follows information on the measures which should be pressed, such as school suffrage, equality of property rights, joint guardianship of children; and the appointment of women as factory inspectors, as physicians in hospitals and insane asylums, as trustees in state institutions, as police matrons. The leaflet also urged that women in every state work also for such reforms as seats for saleswomen in shops, and the raising of the "age of consent." It suggested the methods by which these things might best be accomplished, and ended by offering the services of the committee to anyone who needed them for such activities." The leaflet was printed in The Woman's Journal, No. 3, Vol. VII of the Woman Suffrage Leaflets dated May, 1895. p. 186
I have received an insult from the Business Committee of the NAWSA. The day after I read my fine report at Grand Rapids, they destroyed my Committee."Her shock and distress in those days, after she received word of the action of the Business Committee, were pathetic. She soon heard that as soon as she left the Convention her committee was dismissed, and a new Committee of one woman appointed.
May 24: I have written letters of protest to Miss Anthony and others of the officers. This morning had an interview with Mrs. Catt. She says the destruction of the Committee was Miss Anthony's doing. I am so indignant.
May 25: Alas, alas!
She always wanted to be entirely fair in her dealings, and sure of her ground, so, before she took any action, she consulted other parliamentarians. They all agreed, after reading the Constitution of the NAWSA, that the Business Committee had no authority to dissolve the Legislative Committee; that their action was entirely illegal." p. 195
Miss Anthony's antagonism to Mrs. Blake was never vocal. She dealt in innuendoes, in complete silence in reply to praise for Mrs. Blake, a silence with lifted eyebrows. I have before me a letter from Mrs. Ida Husted Harper, in reply to one from me which I wrote after my mother died, trying to find out why Miss Anthony had been so unjust and so unkind. In it Mrs. Harper says, with frankness:
'I often tried to modify Miss Anthony's feelings toward your mother. She never gave me the slightest reason for this, but some people said it was because she thought your mother was always wishing to supplant her as National President.'
I am confident that Miss Anthony never had a valid excuse for thinking so. My mother, naturally, hoped that, some day, when the older woman was no longer able to continue, she might be chosen as Miss Anthony's successor -- but never did she wish to supplant her.
I suppose the answer to my question fundamentally lies in the fact that Lillie Devereux Blake was s complete contrast to Miss Anthony, that she was beloved, beautiful, graceful, brilliant and kind, and willing to work without adequate recognition, while Miss Anthony was plain, angular, and ungraceful, without originality, although dominant and determinedly ambitious. In confirmation of this, one woman told me that a brother of her, in comparing Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony, used to say, "Miss Anthony is completely ambitious. Her personal ambition colors all that she does."
Doubtless, also, Miss Anthony envied Mrs. Blake her oratorical ability, for the younger woman could always take the audience that Miss Anthony's arguments had left cold, and arouse it to enthusiasm, laughter or tears.
In the early days, Mrs. Stanton wrote the speeches that Susan B. Anthony read, Miss Anthony's forte lying in another field, that of being able to wangle money out of any audience. In her later days, when she was an old woman, her reminiscences of amusing occurrences during campaigns in the Western States, and the physical tribulations that the suffrage speakers underwent, made entertaining topics for speeches; she enjoyed telling these stories, and her audience liked to hear them.
It is impossible to understand, however, why Miss Anthony did not use to its fullest extent Mrs. Blake's ability and mentality, her capacity for work along legislative lines. In cold-shouldering Mrs. Blake, whatever her reasons, in pushing her out, Miss Anthony did something definitely detrimental to the cause of suffrage. Only Mrs. Blake's loyalty and fair-mindedness, her lack of guile, made it possible for Miss Anthony so long to hamper her, even in her own state of New York, in her chosen work of preparing women to understand why they needed and should demand the ballot, and how they should use it when won.
Aside from any question of personality, one cannot understand why, having seen the Negroes, because of being unprepared, fail to benefit fully from securing the vote, Miss Anthony did not realize the value of the work Mrs. Blake advocated and originated.
But that she should permit herself to crush the broader legislative work in the NAWSA, so important to women all over the country, that she should be willing to offend the men and women who had put time and thought into the country-wide work described in that legislative report, simply because Mrs. Blake was at the head of it, seems almost unbelievable. Yet the thing was done, exactly as described, and I have heard no reason ever presented, except the one suggested here.
Mrs. Blake was not the only one so treated. During Miss Anthony's presidency, by surrounding herself with "yes" women, and by concentrating in herself all powers of the organization, she was able to exclude, one-by-one, many ardent women with brains. I have seen not a few unhappy letters from women who were set aside as leaders in their own states, women who should have been permitted to bring to the Annual Convention a brilliance and originality that were often lacking. Not until she felt the weight of years upon her did Miss Anthony welcome the brains of younger women, among whom the leaders were Anna Shaw and Mrs. Catt." p. 197 - 198
Since our last conversation my thoughts have often dwelt on you. I feel moved to write you what in my opinion is the best thing for you to do. You have not been treated by our young coadjutors with less consideration than I have been. They refused to read by letters and resolutions to the conventions. They have denounced the Woman's Bible unsparingly; not one of them has ever reviewed or expressed the least appreciation of Eighty Years and More [a book written by her]. Not one of my suffrage friends has ever thought it worth a complimentary notice in any of the metropolitan journals. . . . A criticism on the Grand Rapids Convention neither The Woman's Journal nor The Woman's Tribune would publish.
For all this I make no public protest, -- I propose no revenge. Because of this hostile feeling I renounced the presidency and quietly accept the situation, and publish what I have to say in the liberal papers. I do not cultivate any feelings of revenge or hostility, but quietly do my work in other ways that open to me. I have outgrown the Suffrage Association as the ultimatum of human endeavor, and no longer belong in that of old, with its limitations. Now you must do the same; do not cultivate any hostile feelings, nor try to revenge what you deem your wrongs, but use what talents you have in ways that are open to you. Prepare able articles for our leading periodicals, and brilliant speeches for your various clubs. You can write, and say in many ways, and at other times than in suffrage conventions.
Feelings of discontent, anger, and revenge have a worse effect on ourselves than others. Let us make a fair estimate of ourselves, and do the best we can with our own possibilities, adopting the motto of the good Abbé de Lammenais, "Let the weal and woe of humanity be all to use, their praise and their blame of no effect." Every good deed we do, and every true word we utter, will tell on the eternities, though denounced by our coadjutors.
Do not let your thoughts dwell on the indignity offered you in the Grand Rapids Convention; use your powers as a free lance; you can do better work with your pen than as an officer in an association with restricted limits, -- and so can I. I saw how deeply you were wounded, and felt after you had gone that I did not say the right word at the time. You have certainly done a good work in this city, as well as the state, for a quarter of a century, which many of your friends appreciate. If now someone has arisen, feeling that she can do a better work, and wished to seize your crown and scepter, lay them at her feet, knowing there are broader fields for you to cultivate.
Yours sincerely,
(Signed) Elizabeth Cady Stanton" pp. 200-201
I therefore hail with joy the prospect in the near future of a new, fresh, untrammeled organization for God and humanity. The time is auspicious. . . .' " pp. 208-209
She was right when she wrote, 'I shall probably have small recognition.' " p. 211
The effort to secure continuous citizenship for American-born women was one of Mrs. Blake's great achievements. Mr. Hay's ruling stood until, when he was no longer Secretary of State, an iniquitous bill was slipped through Congress, destroying the right of an American woman to citizenship when married to a foreigner." p. 216-217
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