Hoping to counteract this adverse influence by increased pressure for the Sixteenth Amendment, Susan once more appealed for help to the American Woman Suffrage Association through her old friends, William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. Garrison replied that her efforts for a federal amendment were premature and "would bring the movement into needless contempt." This she found strange advice from the man who had fearlessly defied public opinion to crusade against slavery. Wendell Phillips did better, writing, "I think you are on the right track—the best method to agitate the question, and I am with you, though between you and me, I still think the individual States must lead off, and that this reform must advance piecemeal, State by State. But I mean always to help everywhere and everyone."[334]
The American Association continued to follow the state-by-state method, and this holding back aroused Susan to the boiling point, for experience had taught her that in state elections woman suffrage faced the prejudiced opposition of an ever-increasing number of naturalized immigrants, who had little understanding of democratic government or sympathy with the rights of women. A federal amendment, on the other hand, depending for its adoption upon Congress and ratifying legislatures, was in the hands of a far more liberal, intelligent, and preponderantly American group. "We have puttered with State rights for thirty years," she sputtered, "without a foothold except in the territories."[335]
Year by year she continued her Washington conventions, convinced that these gatherings in the national capital could not fail to impress Congressmen with the seriousness of their purpose. As women from many states lobbied for the Sixteenth Amendment, reporting a growing sentiment everywhere for woman suffrage, as they received in the press respectful friendly publicity, Congressmen began to take notice. At the large receptions held at the Riggs House, through the generosity of the proprietors, Jane Spofford and her husband, Congressmen became better acquainted with the suffragists, finding that they were not cranks, as they had supposed, but intelligent women and socially charming.
Mrs. Stanton's poise as presiding officer and the warmth of her personality made her the natural choice for president of the National Woman Suffrage Association through the years. Her popularity, now well established throughout the country after her ten years of lecturing on the Lyceum circuit, lent prestige to the cause. To Susan, her presence brought strength and the assurance that "the brave and true word" would be spoken.[336] A new office had been created for Susan, that of vice-president at large, and in that capacity she guided, steadied, and prodded her flock.
The subjects which the conventions discussed covered a wide field going far beyond their persistent demands for a federal woman suffrage amendment. Not only did they at this time urge an educational qualification for voters to combat the argument that woman suffrage would increase the ignorant vote, but they also protested the counting of women in the basis of representation so long as they were disfranchised. They criticized the church for barring women from the ministry and from a share in church government. They took up the case of Anna Ella Carroll,[337] who had been denied recognition and a pension for her services to her country during the Civil War, and they urged pensions for all women who had nursed soldiers during the war. They welcomed to their conventions Mormon women from Utah who came to Washington to protest efforts to disfranchise them as a means of discouraging polygamy.
Susan injected international interest into these conventions by reading Alexander Dumas's arguments for woman suffrage, letters from Victor Hugo and English suffragists, and a report by Mrs. Stanton's son, Theodore, now a journalist, of the International Congress in Paris in 1878, which discussed the rights of women. Occasionally foreign-born women, now making new homes for themselves in this country, joined the ranks of the suffragists, and a few of them, like Madam Anneké and Clara Heyman from Germany contributed a great deal through their eloquence and wider perspective. These contacts with the thoughts and aspirations of men and women of other countries led Susan to dream of an international conference of women in the not too distant future.[338]
RECORDING WOMEN'S HISTORY
Recording women's history for future generations was a project that had been in the minds of both Susan and Mrs. Stanton for a long time. Both looked upon women's struggle for a share in government as a potent force in strengthening democracy and one to be emphasized in history. Men had always been the historians and had as a matter of course extolled men's exploits, passing over women's record as negligible. Susan intended to remedy this and she was convinced that if women close to the facts did not record them now, they would be forgotten or misinterpreted by future historians. Already many of the old workers had died, Martha C. Wright, Lydia Mott, whom Susan had nursed in her last illness, Lucretia Mott, and William Lloyd Garrison. There was no time to be lost.[339]