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Susan B Anthony: life of the week
00:50:53
Susan Ware answers listener questions on the life of American social reformer and women's rights activist, Susan B Anthony
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- [00:01]
Susan Ware
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Eleanor Evans
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Susan Ware
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- [00:17]
Eleanor Evans
Sell wherever your customers are. Visit shopify.com to upgrade your selling today. Hello and welcome to Life of the Week, where leading historians delve into the lives of some of history's most intriguing, intriguing and significant figures. From ancient Egyptian pharaohs and medieval warriors to daring 20th century spies, the name Susan B. Anthony is inextricable from any history of the American movement for women's suffrage. Yet to many, the woman herself can be obscured by her status as a figurehead. In this episode, historian and author Susan Ware sheds light on Anthony's path from her early temperance activism to her role as an indomitable leader of the fight for women's suffrage. Alongside figures like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan was speaking to Eleanor Evans.
- [01:18]
Narrator
Today we are talking about the social reformer and women's rights activist Susan B. Anthony. And we're in great hands today because I'm joined by Susan Ware, who is the author of, among other books, why they Marched, Untold Stories of the Women who Fought for the Right to Vote. Susan, thank you so much for joining me for today's episode.
- [01:36]
Susan Ware
Well, thank you for inviting me.
- [01:38]
Narrator
It's a real pleasure to kick us off. Could you situate us a bit in history? Where is Susan B. Anthony in story?
- [01:45]
Susan Ware
Well, to my mind, she looms very large both in American history and in American women's history, in the history of activism. She is one of those figures that is often the only name that is known. If you ask people who's a famous woman activist, they'll say Susan B. Anthony. They may not know much beyond that, but I think that does say something about the way that she has entered into popular memory as really an embodiment of a history of women's activism on behalf of their rights. And, and that is certainly what she dedicated her entire life to. And when she died in 1906, the cause was not yet successful. She knew it wouldn't be in her lifetime. And it is, as we know, an ongoing cause. And so I see her as one of those towering foremothers of women's rights and women's activism. And I am glad that we're going to have the chance to give people a little more information about her life beyond just those three words.
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Narrator
Susan B. Anthony, her name does loom so large. And I'm really pleased we're going to be unpacking some of her story today. So let's go right back to the beginning. What can you tell us about Susan B. Anthony's upbringing and childhood?
- [03:13]
Susan Ware
Well, in many ways the fact that she was born in 1820 is an important place to start. But even more important is the fact that she was born a woman. And if you think about the options that were available for American women or really women globally in 1820, they were so much more limited in terms of education and professional opportunities and legal rights and all kinds of things. And so I think we always need to remember the time period in which she was born. And then over the course of her 80 plus years, how much did change for American women. And she actually had a fair amount to do with that. But I think that looking back, her options as a girl born in 1820 mainly would have been marriage, to marry and have a family, raise children. And for various reasons, that route did not appeal to her. And yet the challenge was, well, if she's not going to take the traditional female route of marriage, then what is she going to do with her life? Is she going to be a spinster living at home with her family? If she wants to be not in her family, how is she going to support herself? And one of the interesting things when you look at her life is really to think about Susan B. Anthony, who remained single her entire life as a self supporting woman. And that was not so easy to do in the 19th century. Her family was not a wealthy family, it wasn't a poor family, and they were white, which in the United States always gives them a certain amount of racial privilege. But she didn't have family wealth that she could rely on. And so really the only option, the main option for young women was to teach. And so she became a teacher at a fairly young age, certainly not going to college. There weren't colleges for women then. I don't think she especially liked teaching. Most women didn't. The pay was terrible, always much less than male teachers. And while she was a teacher, she began to show her lifelong affinity for social reform causes. And the first one that she got involved in was the temperance movement. And that was a very popular movement in the 1830s and 1840s in the United States. And she kind of cut her teeth in that movement. And I think it did teach her some important lessons that she would later bring to the women's suffrage movement.
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Narrator
Can we go into a few of those lessons? What did her activism look like at this stage in her life?
- [06:09]
Susan Ware
Well, one of the challenges that she faced and any of these early women's rights activists faced was getting the men to take them seriously in these movements. And by that I mean at this point in the 1830s and 40s, it was still somewhat controversial for women to speak in public. So they literally had to fight not just for the cause of temperance and later women's rights, but for the right to. For them to be heard as women. And that can be kind of an eye opening experience when you feel you have as much to contribute to a cause like temperance and you're being told, no, sit down, we can't let you speak in public. You're fine if you go out and organize and raise money for us, but you should stay in the background. And some of these women began to say, nuh, we're not doing that. And so I think that was a very important one. And I think it really did open her eyes to questions of women's rights, broadly defined.
- [07:19]
Narrator
You're giving us the sense then of the frustrations that she faced as a young white woman in this society. She's a teacher. She's obviously from a certain economic background. What about her personality? What kind of young woman is she?
- [07:32]
Susan Ware
Well, it's hard to get a handle on Susan B. Anthony because mainly as historians, we see her once she's become a fully formed adult woman who seems quite austere. I mean, it's hard to imagine her frolicking out in a field, but presumably she did as a young girl. I think she was always very serious. She had a sense of what she wanted to do and how things needed to be changed. And she really was one of those people who could really just keep her eyes on the prize and be focused on things. And of course, that was one of the things that made her such an amazing organizer and also allowed her to take on leadership positions in movements like the women's suffrage movement. So she had these qualities of the organizer, the activist, and also she must have had boundless energy. When you look at the lecture schedule she kept up for her entire life, she would give 75 to 100 lectures a year. And this means traveling around. This is not like traveling today. This is horse and buggies and maybe there's a railroad, but that's a little bit later. But that's how she paid her way and that's how she pled her cause. It was through lectures that she really built audiences for her suffrage and for temperance and the other causes that she was involved in. So she did have this amazing stamina and willingness to channel it into her activism. And this became her life. And it was an incredibly fulfilling life for her. She was not a lonely woman. She was surrounded by other women who shared her passion for women's rights and really was able to be part of a community of women and occasional men who were active in the movement that really I think for her was so much a better alternative than where we started, which was marriage and children.
- [09:42]
Narrator
Okay, so the picture you're painting then is of a woman who's hugely driven and prolific in the things that she gets involved in. We've left her at the temperance movement. Is it the frustrations then, to have her voice heard that pushes her onto other movements? What's the link up there?
- [09:58]
Susan Ware
Well, I think she is frustrated by not being fully taken seriously in the temperance movement. And also simultaneously, the women's rights movement and abolition are both springing to life in the United States. This is in the 1840s, and one can see links between the causes. The supporters are often similar. And the arguments, especially between slavery and women's rights resonate with each other and they resonate with her. So it's not a surprise to me that she is then quickly drawn into anti slavery activism and also women's rights. And this was a time of great ferment in the United States and she was right in the middle of it in upstate New York, which was the center of so much of this action.
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Narrator
Well, perhaps we can stay in upstate New York because there's a convention, isn't there? Can we talk about what happens at Seneca Falls and the turning point there?
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Susan Ware
Yes, and Seneca Falls is one of these tiny small towns in upstate New York. I once paid a pilgrimage there that you would think, how in the world would this be the site of one of the first women's rights conventions ever held? But again, it's where Elizabeth Cady Stanton lived and several other reformers. And they came together in 1848 and produced one of the most famous documents in American women's history, the Declaration of Sentiments, which Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote based on the Declaration of Independence. And we need to look at the chronology here, because the Seneca falls Convention is 1848. Susan B. Anthony doesn't join the women's suffrage movement and meet Elizabeth cady Stanton until 1850 or 1851. Somewhere around in there. And we have to be careful. Anthony is so associated with the women's rights movement and the suffrage movement and so associated with Elizabeth Cady Stanton that many Accounts say that she was at seneca Falls in 1848 and she wasn't. But very soon after, she is in the movement. And you can see in some ways how useful she would be. A single woman, number one, she can sign legal documents. Married women didn't have full economic rights. So how do you hire a hall or open a bank account to pay for a lecture? Something like that. That's very useful. She also wasn't burdened by children. Having children and marriage the way Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who kept having one baby after another in the 1850s. I think she ended up with six or seven. But Susan B. Anthony was the. You know, she was the single woman and she could work with them. And she really forged, almost from the beginning, an amazing political partnership with Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Two very different people. Stanton was joyful and funny and outgoing, and Anthony was a little more serious, I think, in my opinion. But more to the point, Stanton was really the public intellectual. She was the thinker. She had the big ideas. She was the wordsmith. She's the one who wrote the Declaration of Sentiments. And Susan B. Anthony was the bread and butter organizer. And going out on the lecture tours and making sure everything is happening. But between the two of them, it really, really worked. And it was so important to the suffrage movement. In some ways, they are the face of the suffrage movement, which in some ways is too bad because it pushes off to the sidelines a whole range of other women activists like Lucy Stone and Lucretia Mott, who were very important in the early days of the movement. But it's really Stanton and Anthony that are the public face. And they actually worked very hard to make sure that they were the public face. They wanted that recognition. They wanted to be in charge.
- [14:26]
Narrator
Well, I know this is Anthony's episode, but because we are talking so much about Stanton as well and their partnership and their friendship, could you give us a little bit of a sense of who Stanton was? And like you say, are they from similar backgrounds?
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Susan Ware
They're both from upstate New York. And Stanton was the daughter of a judge who was also active in reform movements. And so she had, growing up, just a sense of being part of these larger conversations about legal rights and women's legal rights and questions like temperance and abolition. And she knew people, so it was very much part of her life. She married someone that she met in the abolition movement, Henry Stanton, and that really became both of their lives to great profit. You know, these were the great causes of the mid 19th century, and they were involved in them.
- [15:21]
Narrator
You've started to mention the way that they work together. Stanton being more the words of the movement and Anthony being more of an organizer. Can you take us more into that sort of partnership and how are they championing this cause of women's rights early after they meet in the 1850s?
- [15:36]
Susan Ware
I think we need to remember what a small movement this was at the time, and very controversial too. People really were not so sure that women should be stepping out of the domestic sphere and claiming citizenship in a very public way. And so a lot of what the early women's rights movement had to do was really just get the message out there. People hadn't ever thought about women's issues before in any context. And so a lot of what they're trying to do is they do lectures, they write broadsides, they publish books, they give testimony before legislatures, they're trying to get laws passed, they're trying to get the word out there. But this is not, at this point, anything like a mass movement. It's a pretty small group, and yet you've got to start somewhere. And so this is one strand of what is going to then eventually coalesce into a much broader, somewhat more diverse women's suffrage movement later in the century. And I think we do need to also remember and include and acknowledge the role of African American women who were part of the anti slavery movement and were also very involved in the same kind of battle that Susan B. Anthony had to fight in order for them to speak, they had to be allowed to speak as women. They had to raise the women's issue. And so when we think about where to date the beginnings of women's rights in the United States, an alternative that happens 15 years before Seneca Falls is when Mariah Stewart, an African American woman, speaks in public in Boston in 1832 on the topic of women's rights and anti slavery. So there are all kinds of threads that are coming together at this point, but still it is a small movement and they are bucking up against both indifference and hostility. Because anytime you start calling for changes in women's roles, it's very destabilizing to people. It still is. We see this and what they are asking for is women to really be joining the public life as full citizens. And this was very threatening to people in some ways, it still is to certain people.
- [18:19]
Narrator
Right. Well, I did want to ask about this, actually, so let's stay on that for a little while. How are their activities being received more broadly? Do you have any examples of people pushing back on this admittedly small movement at this stage.
- [18:29]
Susan Ware
Well, if you look at the editorials in newspapers and the cartoons about these women, which often have them portrayed in Bloomer dress, which was a style in the 1850s that had kind of what were called Turkish trousers and a shorter skirt, looked pretty innocuous to me. Must have been much more comfortable than those long dresses. But they were just ribbed mercilessly for wearing that. And they finally gave up on it. But they were portrayed as shrews and hags and mentally unstable and all kinds of things as a way of trying to discredit them and getting people to not listen to what they were saying, which in Stanton's case and Anthony's was really very much based on a view of American history that said the Constitution says all men are created equal. We say all men and women are created equal, which is Stanton's opening of the Declaration of Sentiments. So they're basically calling on the United States to live up to its founding principles. And not everybody was on board with that. And I think we also need to remember that something like politics in the 19th century was a pretty raucous affair. Voting took place in saloons. There were copious amounts of alcohol consumed. Often violence broke out. And the thought of women entering these kinds of public sites really was, for many people, very difficult to imagine. And even as a historian, when I try and think, you know, there was a moment, there was an important court case in 1874 where the suffragists argued that women already had the right to vote as citizens because of the 14th Amendment. And the Supreme Court turned down their argument decisively. But I try to imagine a counterfactual. Well, if they had won that case, can I even imagine women voting in the 1870s? It would have been a stretch. And what's so interesting is by the time we get to the end of the suffrage movement, even to the end of Anthony's life In the early 20th century, so much has changed for women in terms of their opportunities and education and longer lives and access to birth control and all kinds of things, that casting a vote no longer seems like quite the radical act that it was in the 19th century.
- [21:19]
Narrator
That's such a great context to have of that hostile environment. I think I'm very guilty of forgetting how radical this idea was. And obviously, very luckily, from this position in history that they are campaigning. Can you give us a sense of how they're organizing or how Susan B. Anthony, in particular is organizing, his skills that she's bringing you mentioned? She's a prolific speech giver. And a prolific campaigner. Where else is she putting herself in this campaign?
- [21:44]
Susan Ware
Well, one of the things they're trying to do is to build up suffrage organizations throughout the country, which is partly why she's traveling so much. And the idea would be, if she goes and gives a lecture, that if she's successful, two or three or ten women and men who were in the audience would think, well, we should found our own local suffrage organization. So it's a way of sort of seeding the movement by an outsider coming in, and then once all those organizations have come into effect, to then find ways to bring them together with national conventions, for example, which you start seeing after the Civil war in the 1860s and 1870s. And that's a way, again, of giving people a sense that they're part of something larger and building a movement. And because of the way that the government is set up in the United States, with both federal power and a lot of power in the individual states, you need to be active on both fronts. So you need to have people on the ground all across the country. And so one of the things that Anthony is trying to do is to get those organizations going and then build them, meld them into a larger movement. And that's where her skill set was. That's not what Elizabeth Cady Stanton was good at. She was great at writing the speeches and writing the books. I think you need both in a social movement.
- [23:19]
Narrator
Yes, it sounds like they were quite the hefty partnership.
- [23:22]
Susan Ware
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- [23:52]
Narrator
You mentioned that she stayed single her whole life. What were her views on marriage and women's roles in the family unit? And how did that perhaps inform her campaigning for greater women's rights?
- [24:03]
Susan Ware
Well, Susan B. Anthony, as a single woman, was not opposed to marriage and women having families. She just wanted to make sure that they were able to have their legal rights, that they were not being physically abused. That was one of the main parts of temperance. Drunken husbands beating up their wives. So there's a concern with women in families that is part of her activism all along. In terms of her own views about single women, she obviously, as A self supporting woman herself, she was especially interested in making sure that women had chances to support themselves outside of marriage. But she was not opposed to marriage at all. There were many causes that were tangential to marriage in the 19th century. One of them was birth control, because without access to a way to control fertility, many families had large numbers of children. And yet it's quite clear over the course of the 19th century that Elizabeth Cady Stanton's example to the contrary, women were having fewer and fewer children and that this was part of the way that they were thinking women's lives would improve. What was not really a topic ever for the women's rights movement was abortion or birth control. Those were too controversial really at the time. And abortion was not a national issue in the 19th century. And so therefore it seems to me very ironic and anachronistic that one of the ways in which Susan B. Anthony's memory has been deployed is as the namesake of the Susan B. Anthony list, which is one of the main anti abortion groups in the United States. And I have looked at the pronouncements that they cite as showing that she was pro life. And I find them taken totally out of context, as do every other historian. And I think that in some ways it shows that historical memory is never stable and that even someone who I am absolutely certain would, if she were alive today, would be fighting for women's right to choose and to control their bodies. Is being used as an example of someone who would have spoken out against abortion. It's not the way it should be.
- [26:50]
Narrator
Just an example there then of how her legacy is invoked. And I know we'll get onto more of that as the episode progresses. So I wanted to return to something you mentioned which was the Civil War. Now I think there's been a bit of a pattern in history where at times of tumult that has sometimes given opportunity to women in times of war or pandemics and such. I wonder, was there any impact on this burgeoning women's movement in the American Civil War?
- [27:18]
Susan Ware
Well, in many ways the suffrage movement, the women's rights movement really went on hiatus during the Civil War. It's mainly in the North. There are no Southern suffragists or women's rights activists at that point. And so they are working very hard for abolition and trying to make that happen. They don't want to give up their organization entirely. And they are very active in terms of creating some monster petition calling for the abolition of slavery, which was never a done deal, even in the midst of all this fighting. So I think they played an important role. But once the war ended, they were ready to start up again. And yet they faced what really was the existential crisis for the women's suffrage movement, which was the challenge of whether the vote should be given just to recently freed enslaved men, or whether it should be a time where there would be universal suffrage that would also include women. And the movement splits in two quite dramatically at that point in 1869 and 1870, and doesn't really reunite until 1890. I don't think we want to get too far into the weeds of suffrage history, but it is a very important moment that clarifies the uneasy relationship between race and gender in terms of activism. And it is also a moment, especially with Elizabeth Cady Santon, which does not bring out her best incredibly racist statements, saying basically, how can we let recently freed slaves and recent immigrants vote and not let us white women? We would be so much better. And she says that, and she thinks it's an effective argument. And we look back and say, no, that is a racist argument. But it was a key moment. And so for the a good chunk of the 1870s and 1880s, you have two rival movements, each working in their own way for suffrage. And then Susan B. Anthony, again, we're getting back to her as the sort of organizer what's holding the movement together. She and a few others are the ones that orchestrate a merger. And that by 1890, that gives us the oddly named National American Women's Suffrage association. NASA, I mean, doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but there you finally do have a united suffrage movement. And the other thing that has happened then, and Susan B. Anthony is part of this change, is that at the beginning, if you look in the 1840s and 50s in Seneca Falls, there's a whole range of issues on the table. Women's legal rights, how to be self supporting, education, all kinds of things. And what you see as the 19th century progresses is a narrowing of the vision to just a focus on the vote. And that is really what is going to be the focus in the last really two decades of Susan B. Anthony's life.
- [30:46]
Narrator
From what you're saying, it seems that she's a real touchstone for many aspects of this movement and obviously hugely skilled at bringing people together. She's also clearly got some skills at attention grabbing. I wonder if we can turn to one episode in which she gets arrested.
- [31:01]
Susan Ware
Well, women don't usually get arrested in the 19th century, and Susan B. Anthony managed to do so in 1872. When she tried to vote in her hometown of Rochester, New York. And again, she and other suffragists really believed that the amendments that were passed to the constitution as a result of the Civil War, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, especially the 14th Amendment, granted voting rights to all citizens. And they said, well, women are citizens, therefore we should be allowed to vote. That would need to be tested legally. And so Anthony And I think 14 or 15 other women in Rochester managed to register to vote and then showed up at the polls on election day in 1872 and thereby committed a crime for which she was arrested. She was not put in jail. I think she probably would have liked that. And there was a trial, and trials can be good and bad for her. It was a chance to make her case, even though the judge seems to have already made. It was a jury trial. The judge already had made up his mind beforehand and wouldn't even let the jury decide the case on its merits. But he did make the mistake, the small mistake of saying to Ms. Anthony, is there anything you would like to say? So she stood up and she gave him a piece of her mind. And then, showing the savvy of the suffrage movement, they had a transcript of this trial, and they printed it up and used it as a propaganda piece. And you read it, and it almost reads like a treatment for some Hollywood movie. The characters are so starkly drawn. But it shows how the suffrage movement is learning to use moments like this to build support. And then another one will happen four years later in Philadelphia, when the country is celebrating its centennial of Declaration of Independence, 1776, from England. And the women have asked for a place on the platform and were denied. They were given five or six general passes to sit in the audience of this grand occasion. And so they took it upon themselves to disrupt it. They stood up in the middle of it. They went up to the stage. They didn't speak, but they handed out pamphlets with pointing out that we're celebrating the constitution. But what about women's rights? We don't seem to have any. Then they handed out the leaflets, they left the gathering, and then they were outside the convention hall and of course, started immediately making speeches. And it got a huge amount of publicity. And that's really what a movement needs, especially in the early stages. It needs the on the ground organizing, but it also needs the publicity, and they were good at that.
- [34:16]
Narrator
You mentioned then that over the span of Susan b. Anthony's life, great strides are made in terms of the attitude to this issue, in terms of the latter decades. Of her life, then how is public perception changing? How can the campaign's success be characterised in these last two decades of her life?
- [34:34]
Susan Ware
Well, I think maybe I slightly overestimated the amount of success during her lifetime. When she died in 1906, there were only four states in the entire United States that had given women the right to vote, and that was as far as they'd gotten. And the movement couldn't decide whether they should go state by state and do state referendum. Those are very time consuming and costly. Or should they go for a federal amendment which would take care of the whole thing all at once. There wasn't much progress on either front. And so when she dies, the movement is in kind of a doldrums and yet it's already percolating in ways that are just going to explode in the 1910s, in the last decade. And again, this is the same period where in Britain the suffragette movement is really springing to life and taking it to the streets and making sure that nobody cannot have an opinion on women's suffrage. That happens after Anthony has left the scene. But what's so interesting about the movement is because it's so long, you've got several generations of women, so you've got the sort of founding mothers, Stanton and Anthony and Stone and Lucretia motto. And then you have a next generation of women like Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt, who at this point, Anthony's in her 80s, they're in their 40s and they are the ones who, they're not chomping at the bit, but they want to take over and see if maybe they can do it a little better. And so they've got that energy. And then there's going to be a third generation, the younger at the gates with Alice Paul and her militant picketers of the White House during World War I. So I see Anthony's role as part of this larger story and that much of what is starting to coalesce when she dies and then will very quickly come to fruition in the United States in 1920, although it took a lot more effort and it was never a done deal. I think she realized that. I think she always had the sense that she was part of a movement that was bigger than she was and that would go on for much longer than her admittedly quite long and active life. And one of my favorite quotations from her is an inscription in a volume of the history of women's suffrage, which is a three volume history in many ways. Suffragists were our first women's historians, they wanted to document their own story and tell it their way. A final volume came out in 1902, and Anthony inscribed this to a fellow worker. She said, this completes the story of the 19th century. We did all that we could. Who knows what the 20th century will show? But I am confident. Leaving all in younger hands. And in some ways, that was her legacy. Leaving all in younger hands. And then it's been up to generations of women ever since to continue that.
- [38:07]
Narrator
What a moving quote. I feel quite moved by that notion that it's in the future's hands. That's how lovely. So at the time of her death, perhaps we can touch on her final moments and then how her death is commemorated sort of immediately afterwards, and how she's commemorated more broadly as well.
- [38:26]
Susan Ware
Well, I think it's not just what happens at her death. Her major milestones had been being celebrated, and it's. They're fundraising events. Her 80th birthday was a huge deal. And, you know, it's also an important way of showing women aging in public. You know, they're not hiding. They're not going home with their knitting. You know, she's still out there running the movement. And that in many ways, this kind of commemoration of Susan B. Anthony had. Or veneration, putting her on a pedestal had really happened before she died in 1906, and it continued afterwards. And I think that is the reason why she is the one suffragist that Americans tend to know about, because so much effort was put into really elevating her as a symbol of the movement. A single woman who gave her life to activism, you know, always put her principles above questions of comfort and money and other things like that, that she really devoted her life to this larger cause. You know, the phrase failure is impossible, which now is on T shirts and coffee mugs and whatever. But she sort of took on this role in a way that is sort of surprising. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in some ways, is a much more likely contemporary model. I mean, what a mind and what a wit. I mean, but we don't hear as much about her. It's Susan Bee. And so she's the one gets put on the postage stamps and gets included in memorials and gets put on a dollar bill coin in 1979, which is a total bust. And so people's mainly main memory of this dollar coin is, oh, Susan B. Anthony. That didn't work so well. But I think that in many ways it is appropriate that she is the person we associate with the movement. But it also has some Troubling undertones. And I'll go back to one of the earliest memorializations, which was a marble sculpture in 1921, right after the vote had been won that was put in the U.S. capitol. And it was a block of marble sculpted with three suffrage leaders, Anthony Stanton and, I think, Lucretia Mott. And Stanton and Mott are off to the side. Susan B. Anthony is the tallest one, and it's incredibly ugly. It's often referred to as three women in a bathtub. And it was quickly banished to the basement. It's since been brought back up. But you look at it now and you see it's the whiteness of it, the white marble and these three white women. There's no Sojourner Truth, there's no Ida Wells, there's no Mary Church Terrell. And by elevating Susan B. Anthony as the one woman we think of in terms of suffrage, we marginalize or decenter the contributions of a whole range, certainly of African American activists, but a whole range of other people who were really part of the heart and soul of the movement. And Susan B. Anthony did work for antislavery, but she was not free of the racism that affected most of American society in the 19th century and early 20th century. And it is somewhat troubling to elevate her alone as the symbol of it. And yet that is also appropriate. We cannot deny that part of suffrage history. It's very important to confront it. And one of the things that was heartening about the various events surrounding the centennial of the 19th Amendment in 2020 was how front and center the question of racism in the movement, and also a sense of recovering and understanding the contributions of African American women to this struggle. You know, it's interesting for me to see how we are rethinking the suffrage movement. I'm encouraged that we are addressing some of its flaws, and yet part of me is also just amazed at their longevity. This movement went on for almost 100 years, finally built to a mass movement. What they succeeded in doing, this was one of the largest political mobilizations of women in history. We need to know that story as part of American history and as global history. Women's political activism, women demanding their rights. Why don't we think of this as more part of our national histories? And so, for me, the suffrage movement, flaws, warts and all, is a way of just reinforcing to people that women have been political actors. They have been reformers, they've been activists, they've been out there arguing for their vote, for their rights, and for the rights of all Americans and that we need to know those stories. And if Susan B. Anthony is the opening to getting people to ask more questions about this history, then I'm all for it. And she certainly earned it after her lifelong activism.
- [44:24]
Narrator
Yes, a formidable life full of astonishing actions. And as you say, we've had a little look at the suffrage movement through the lens of her life today. But clearly there's many more stories to tell. But I will wrap up this episode by saying, Susan, thank you so much for talking to us about Susan B. Anthony today. And is there any closing thought you'd like to leave us with?
- [44:43]
Susan Ware
I would just like to draw attention to a phenomenon that started, I think, by the time Hillary Clinton ran in 2016, which is that in the United States, when you vote, you get a little sticker that says I voted. And women have started making pilgrimages to Susan B. Anthony's grave in Rochester and putting on it their I Voted stickers. And when I vote, I won't be going to Rochester to do that, but I will very much be thinking of that. And I do. Every time I vote, I realize that I'm standing on the shoulders of the suffragists. And those stickers are a way of honoring that legacy.
- [45:31]
Eleanor Evans
That was Susan Ware, historian and author of many books on women's history, including why they Untold Stories of the Women who Fought for the Right to Vote, published by belknap Press in 2019. Thanks to for listening to today's life of the week. Be sure to join us again next time to learn about another fascinating figure from the past.