In the spring of 1880, Susan's mother died, and it was no longer necessary for her to fit into her schedule frequent visits in Rochester. Her sister Mary, busy with her teaching, was sharing her home with her two widowed brothers-in-law and two nieces whose education she was supervising.[340] Mrs. Stanton had just given up the strenuous life of a Lyceum lecturer and welcomed work that would keep her at home. Susan, who had managed to save $4,500 out of her lecture fees, felt she could afford to devote at least a year to the history.
She now shipped several boxes of letters, clippings, and documents to the Stanton home in Tenafly, New Jersey.[341] As they planned their book, it soon became obvious that the one volume which they had hoped to finish in a few months would extend to two or three volumes and take many years to write. They called in Matilda Joslyn Gage to help them, and the three of them signed a contract to share the work and the profits.
The history presented a publishing problem as well as a writing ordeal, and Susan, interviewing New York publishers, found the subject had little appeal. Finally, however, she signed a contract with Fowler & Wells under which the authors agreed to pay the cost of composition, stereotyping, and engravings; and as usual she raised the necessary funds.[342]
Matilda Joslyn Gage
Returning to Tenafly as to a second home, Susan usually found Mrs. Stanton beaming a welcome from the piazza and Margaret and Harriot running to the gate to meet her. The Stanton children were fond of Susan. It was a comfortable happy household, and Susan, thoroughly enjoying Mrs. Stanton's companionship, attacked the history with vigor. Sitting opposite each other at a big table in the sunny tower room, they spent long hours at work. Susan, thin and wiry, her graying hair neatly smoothed back over her ears, sat up very straight as she rapidly sorted old clippings and letters and outlined chapters, while Mrs. Stanton, stout and placid, her white curls beautifully arranged, wrote steadily and happily, transforming masses of notes into readable easy prose.[343]
Having sent appeals for information to colleagues in all parts of the country, Susan, as the contributions began to come in, struggled to decipher the often almost illegible, handwritten manuscripts, many of them careless and inexact about dates and facts. To their request for data about her, Lucy Stone curtly replied, "I have never kept a diary or any record of my work, and so am unable to furnish you the required dates.... You say 'I' must be referred to in the history you are writing.... I cannot furnish a biographical sketch and trust you will not try to make one. Yours with ceaseless regret that any 'wing' of suffragists should attempt to write the history of the other."[344]
The greater part of the writing fell upon Mrs. Stanton, but Matilda Joslyn Gage contributed the chapters, "Preceding Causes," "Women in Newspapers," and "Women, Church, and State." Susan carefully selected the material and checked the facts. She helped with the copying of the handwritten manuscript and with the proofreading. Believing that pictures of the early workers were almost as important for the History as the subject matter itself, she tried to provide them, but they presented a financial problem with which it was hard to cope, for each engraving cost $100.[345]
When the first volume of the History of Woman Suffrage came off the press in May 1881, she proudly and lovingly scanned its 878 pages which told the story of women's progress in the United States up to the Civil War.
She was well aware that the History was not a literary achievement, but the facts were there, as accurate as humanly possible; all the eloquent, stirring speeches were there, a proof of the caliber and high intelligence of the pioneers; and out of the otherwise dull record of meetings, conventions, and petitions, a spirit of independence and zeal for freedom shone forth, highlighted occasionally by dramatic episodes. As Mrs. Stanton so aptly expressed it, "We have furnished the bricks and mortar for some future architect to rear a beautiful edifice."[346]