University of Virginia Library

ASSOCIATION WITH MISS ANTHONY.

In 1851 occurred what may well be termed the most important event in Mrs. Stanton's life, her meeting with Susan B. Anthony. The latter was thirty-one years old, electric with the spirit of reform, filled with as holy zeal as ever inspired crusader, fearless, persistent, perfect in physical health, and free to come and go at will. There was an instantaneous, mutual attraction, and before a year had passed a working partnership was formed which was to revolutionize the position of one-half the race during the next forty years, and a friendship was established which was to remain unbroken for half a century. How much of Mrs. Stanton's world-wide fame is due to Miss Anthony cannot possibly be computed. Never two persons more thoroughly complemented each other. Each was strong where the other was lacking, and the two made a perfectly rounded and most effective whole.

It would not be amiss to say that Mrs. Stanton furnished the base of supplies to which Miss Anthony went for the ammunition to rout the enemy. Or that she represented the loom and the warp, Miss Anthony the shuttle and the woof, and by the two was woven the enduring fabric of woman's present position. Mrs. Stanton had no intellectual superior among women, few among men, but she reared seven children to maturity; she was a devoted

mother, an unsurpassed housekeeper. It would have been inevitable, during the twenty-five or thirty years of her life while these children were growing up around her, that she would have laid aside in a large degree both writing and speechmaking, had it not been for the relentless mentor who averted this calamity. The reader will find more delicious in history than the accounts in Mrs. Stanton's "Reminiscences" and Miss Anthony's "Life and Work" of the conditions under which were prepared those great state papers and addresses that will go down to posterity. Miss Anthony was not a writer; but as a worker, a planner, a general, a campaigner, she never has been equalled by any woman. She would have a bill prepared for the Legislature, organize her forces, start them out with petitions, and when everything was under headway, betake herself to Mrs. Stanton for a speech. The latter would protest, rebel, but Miss Anthony was inexorable. She would send the writer off to a quiet spot, take upon herself the care of the children and the house, and hold the fort till the speech was finished. Then she would arrange a day for its delivery, and produce the speaker if she had to go and fetch her bodily. Afterward she would appeal to friends for money, have the speech published and circulate thousands of copies.

This programme was repeated hundreds of times. When the International Council of Women met in Washington, in 1888, Miss Anthony literally compassed sea and land to get Mrs. Stanton over from England, only to find that she had come without any papers suitable for the occasion. Miss Anthony locked her in a room in the hotel and stood guard at the door till she had prepared the brilliant opening and closing addresses which were the leading features of that notable meeting. She really enjoyed writing, however, and when in the spirit of it would spend hours in perfecting the literary style of a single paragraph. She loved best to argue and philosophize, and depended wholly on Miss Anthony for necessary dates and statistics; but between the two were produced innumerable papers which deserve to rank with any in the Government archives. — appeals to the President, Congress, and legislatures, resolutions, addresses for conventions and committees, and in addition numerous articles for magazines and newspapers. For the fifteen years beginning about 1870, when the lecture season was at its zenith, both women were almost continuously on the platform, but during vacations they found time to write the three large volumes of the "History of Woman Suffrage," comprising about 3,000 pages.

Mrs. Stanton had no interest in organization, and hated conventions. She disliked the restrictions of organized work and the responsibility involved in official position, — she wished to be accountable to no one for her utterances. When a convention was imminent, she would write to Miss Anthony: "All I ask is that you will leave me alone in my chimney corner with my goose quill." The latter would go straight forward with the arrangements, advertise Mrs. Stanton as the principal speaker, journey to her home a few days before the date of meeting, pack up her belongings, carry her to the convention, and see that she was reëlected president. The happiest moments of her life were when, at the close of a great speech, she saw her beloved friend greeted with cheers and waving handkerchiefs, and felt that the cause of woman had been moved forward a notch. At the age of eighty, Mrs. Stanton gave her "Reminiscences" to the world, and she dedicated them to "Susan B. Anthony, my steadfast friend for half a century."