The mother of us all?

I was just looking at Susan B. Anthony's Wikipedia biography, because it is Anthony's 189th birthday today.

As long as I'm talking about birthdays so much recently, I don't want to omit The Mother of Us All. That is the title of a fanciful opera about Anthony's life that was written by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson in 1947.

If I were to write an opera about Susan B. Anthony, I think I would call it something else. If anything, Anthony was a sort of un-mother, though she did help to raise the children of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Anthony refused the roles of wife and mother in order to remain an effective campaigner for women's rights. In this refusal, she was motivated at least in part by the fact that women who married in her day gave up many of the rights they had, such as the right to sign a contract.

Anthony is at least as complicated as anyone else I've discussed this week. She can be viewed as an activist of limited vision who subordinated all other interests to gaining the vote for women, in contrast with Stanton. Stanton was the revolutionary who challenged women's place in such institutions as religion and marriage. Then again, Stanton was mostly a theorist who, after her children were grown, supported herself on the lecture circuit. She could well afford to make thought-provoking radical statements--this may even have helped to increase the size of her audiences. And for all her radicalism, Stanton had a pronounced strain of elitism in her world view.

Anthony was the practical political organizer who built the political machinery that eventually gained women the right to vote. Anthony, in my estimation, was a true egalitarian, and probably as much a committed anti-racist as any white person in America in her day. Nevertheless, she was willing to accomodate to racists in her goal of winning the vote for women. She seemed to believe that until she herself was fully empowered as a citizen, she had to give other issues and causes less priority. Nevertheless, she viewed the vote as a means to an end, as a tool for political power. She said something like "Men will sell their vote, but not their right to vote."

I also think she seemed more radical when she was young and more conservative as she grew older. This is because she was young in times when radical political movements were gaining in strength, and later lived during the collapse of Reconstruction, when US politics veered sharply to the right. We are all so affected by the times we live in and the people who surround us, and that simply seems to be part of being human.

My favorite book on Anthony is Kathleen Barry's Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist. It's rather difficult to find, which is why I included the online link to a site that sells used books. I was able to special order it locally at Full Circle Bookstore a year or two ago.

Online, you can find Ida Husted Harper's Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, and also Alma Lutz's biography of Anthony. You might also want to check out the History of Woman Suffrage which Anthony co-authored.

Happy birthday, Susan B. Now I've got to go and get that voter registration form in the mail...