VI

WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND ITS NAPOLEON

SUSAN B. ANTHONY

WRITERS about Woman with a capital W are fond of alluding to an amazing definition of their subject in the first edition of a famous encyclopædia. The thing, when I encountered it, seemed too good to be true, but, to place the matter beyond question, I turned to the third and last volume of the Encyclopædia Britannica as it was first printed in Edinburgh in 1771. There indeed stands this immortal line: "WOMAN, the female of man. See HOMO." To see it through, I saw "HOMO." Fifteen lines were devoted to him, with not a word about Woman. I learned, however, that Linnæus ranks man under the order of primates, and divides him into two species, homo sapiens and homo troglodytes. Homo sapiens is subdivided into five varieties, the American, the European, the Asiatic, the African, and what he calls "the monstrous.' Under this heading the

not

eighteenth-century encyclopædists would probably have ranked the newest New Woman had she been available for classification in 1771. Long before that, Saint Chrysostom, framing a list of neatly worded definitions of woman in general, gave one of them as "a desirable calamity" so far from "the monstrous" of Linnæus. In the latest edition of the Britannica, Woman, as a separate subject, is treated with the greatest seriousness in a number of pages, ending with a bibliography for further reading calculated to occupy an inquiring mind for months.

Such is the change that has come in a century and a half. In fact it may be said to have come in half that period, for in spite of such tokens of the impending as the publication, in 1790, of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, by Mary Wollestonecraft, whose daughter, Mary Godwin, became the wife of Shelley, it was not until about 1850 that the "Woman Movement” assumed serious proportions. With its progress in America no single figure was more conspicuously, or more effectively, identified than Susan B. Anthony.

Nor was there in the whole nineteenth-century company of American "come-outers" and reformers a more typical figure than Miss Anthony.

BIOGRAPHY;

OR,

MEMOIRS OF. REMARKABLE

FEMALE CHARACTERS

ANCIENT AND MODERN.

ACTRESSES

ADVENTURERS

AUTHORESSES

INCLUDING,

FORTUNETELLERS

GIPSIES
DWARFS
SWINDLERS AND
VAGRANTS.

ALSO MANY OTHERS

WHO HAVE DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES BY THEIR CHASTITY, DISSIPATION, INTREPIDITY, LEARNING, ABSTINENCE, CREDULITY,

&c. &c.

ALPHABETICALLY ARRANGED. FORMING A PLEASING MIRROR OF REFLECTION TO THE

FEMALE MIND.

MWorcester :

PRINTED BY ISAIAH THOMAS, JUN :

For B. & J. HOMANS.

SOLD BY THEM AND THOMAS & WHIPPLE, NEWBURYPORS April-1804. .

A FEMINIST TITLE-PAGE, 1804

AN ADVANCE ON THE FIRST BRITANNICA

To

his

or her

say that your true reformer is so in love with work that all its hardships, physical, mental, and social, are really to be counted among its satisfactions and rewards, is not at all to disparage the reformer. In the very nature of the case, the reformer is a "disturbing element,' a very pestilence to all the comfortable folk who are content to let well enough alone. There must have been something quite unlovely in many representatives of the contemporary type to which Miss Anthony belonged. Barrett Wendell found, among the men, Whittier "the least irritating of the reformers." Henry James was manifestly thinking of some woman reformer known to his American youth when he described a character in The Bostonians in these terms:

Mrs. Farrinder, at almost any time, had the air of being introduced by a few remarks. She talked with great slowness and distinctness, and evidently a high sense of responsibility; she pronounced every syllable of every word and insisted on being explicit. If, in conversation with her, you attempted to take anything for granted, or to jump two or three steps at a time, she paused, looking at you with a cold patience, as if she knew that trick, and then went on at her own measured pace. She lectured on temperance and the rights of women; the ends she labored for were to give the ballot to every woman in the country and to take the flowing bowl from every man.

This is precisely what Miss Anthony did, but if in her younger days she was ever such a woman as Mrs. Farrinder the testimony of her friends leaves no reason to believe that she continued so to the end, or anywhere near it. She was none the less a typical reformer — subjected to incredible fatigues and discouragements, ridiculed and abused, yet unshaken in her devotion to the cause to which she had consecrated her heart, brain, and bodily strength, and apparently no more abased through failures than exalted through triumphs, indeed just as truly the "happy warrior" as her friend Frances Willard. Her cause and her character are equally worthy of study the one as a cause to the slow winning of which her pioneering and long-sustained effort made a vast contribution, the other as a character remarkable in itself and highly typical of the nineteenth-century "come-outer."

I

Susan B. Anthony was nearly thirty years old when she entered the field of active work as a reformer. It is easy to place her chronologically in relation to the mid-year of the nineteenth century, for in 1850 she reached the age of thirty. Her actual entrance to the reform field came through the avenues of temperance and antislavery, in each