The Vegas Voice 3-21

March 13, 1906
By: John Beilun / Time Traveler
Susan was born in 1820 in Adams,
Massachusetts. Her father, Daniel, was a
strict Quaker and a stern abolitionist who forbade
his children to play with toys or enjoy amusements. Deprived of such
diversions, this may be why Susan learned to read and write before she
was four.
Two years later her father sent her to school. However, when her
teacher refused to teach the six-year old long division simply because
of her gender, Daniel removed Susan from class and home-schooled
his daughter himself.
The Panic of 1837 ruined the family and Susan became a teacher
to help put food on the table. At 29 she quit in protest of the 4-1 wage
disparity between her male colleagues and their female counterparts. At
the same time Susan renounced Quakerism because of the hypocrisies
she had witnessed and eventually gave up on organized religion
altogether.
As a deeply moral person, she became evermore disturbed by the
inequities and problems of the pre-Civil War era. Initially intimidated
by fear of public speaking, Susan soon became an orator famous for
her anti-slavery, temperance and women’s rights positions.
At the National Women’s Rights Convention in 1859, she eloquently
asked: “Where, under our Declaration of Independence does the
Saxon man get his power to deprive all women and Negroes of
their inalienable rights?”
After the war, more determined
than ever, Susan began publishing
The Revolution, the most popular
women’s rights journal of its day.
Its motto was: “The true republic
- men, their rights and nothing
more; women, their rights and
nothing less.”
Susan also began traveling
across the country, giving more
than a hundred speeches each year.
Many were not well received.
And her aggressive and compassionate adamancy about the need for
reform often got Susan into trouble. Ruffians often attempted to scare
her off by hanging, burning, drawing and quartering her effigy.
Even our government thought ill of her. In one infamous incident
in 1872, the New York authorities actually arrested Susan for trying to
vote.
During the next 28 years, Susan’s combativeness continued to make
new enemies and alienate former friends - the most famous of which
was probably Frederick Douglass, with whom she had campaigned
shoulder-to-shoulder on behalf of both Blacks and women; only to see
Negro men winning suffrage. But not women.
Weary of her battles and weakened by age, Susan B. Anthony retired
in 1900. She quietly died in her home on March 13, 1906. Sadly,
American women would not receive the right to vote for another 14
years.
Most of us who have ever heard of Susan think of her merely as
a suffragette. However, she was so much more: an abolitionist, an
educational reformer, a labor activist, a temperance worker and finally,
a women’s rights advocate.
Shot Again
Vegas Voice travel editor Stu Cooper receives his 2 nd and final
COVID-19 vaccination. Did you get yours? The Vegas Voice urges
all readers (despite the delays and red tape) to take the time to make a
reservation date, time & place and get their shot(s) as well.​
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March 2021