Susan was not unsympathetic to Mrs. Stanton's ideas, but she opposed this excursion into religious controversy because she was sure it would stir up futile wrangles among the suffragists and keep Mrs. Stanton from giving her best to the cause. Her lack of interest then and her frank disapproval as The Woman's Bible progressed were a great disappointment to Mrs. Stanton, and these two old friends began to grow somewhat apart as they took different roads to reach their goal, the one intent on freeing women's minds, the other determined to establish their citizenship. Yet their friendship endured.
In 1892 Susan reluctantly consented to Mrs. Stanton's retirement as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Mrs. Stanton's request that she be followed by Susan won unanimous approval, and Anna Howard Shaw was moved up to second place, vice-president at large. For forty years, Susan had watched Mrs. Stanton preside with a poise, warmth, and skill which few could equal. She knew she would miss her dynamic reassuring presence at the conventions. Yet she was obliged to admit to herself that it was more than fitting that she should at last head the ever-growing organization which she had built up. This was the last convention which Mrs. Stanton attended, and it was the last for Lucy Stone who died the next year. Susan appreciated the eager young women who now took their places, but she did not yet feel completely at home with them. "Only think," she wrote an old-time colleague, "I shall not have a white-haired woman on the platform with me, and I shall be alone there of all the pioneer workers. Always with the 'old guard' I had perfect confidence that the wise and right thing would be said. What a platform ours then was of self-reliant strong women! I felt sure of you all.... I can not feel quite certain that our younger sisters will be equal to the emergency, yet they are each and all valiant, earnest, and talented, and will soon be left to manage the ship without even me."[379]
In 1892, the year of the presidential election, Susan hopefully attended the national political conventions. Again the Republicans made their proverbial excuses, explaining that they not only faced a formidable opponent in Grover Cleveland but also the threat of a new People's party. The familiar ring of their alibis, which they had repeated since Reconstruction days, made Susan wonder when and if ever the Republicans would feel able to bear the strain of woman suffrage. Their platform remembered the poor, the foreign-born, and male Negroes, but it still ignored women. Yet hope for the future stirred in her heart as she saw at the convention two women serving as delegates from Wyoming. Here was the entering wedge.
The Democrats as usual were silent on woman suffrage, but undismayed by them or by the Prohibitionists, who this year failed to endorse votes for women, Susan moved on to Omaha with Anna Howard Shaw for the first national convention of the new People's party. Here she met representatives of the Farmers' Alliance and the Knights of Labor, both friendly to woman suffrage, and men from other groups, critical of the two major political parties for their failure to solve the pressing economic problems confronting the nation. Susan was sympathetic with many of the aims of the People's party, having seen with her own eyes the plight of debt-burdened, hard-working farmers and having crusaded in her own paper, The Revolution, for the rights of labor and for the control of industrial monopoly. However, she still viewed minor, reform parties with a highly critical eye. The People's party gave her no woman suffrage plank and she found them "quite as oblivious to the underlying principle of justice to women as either of the old parties...."[380]
With the election of Grover Cleveland, whose opposition to woman suffrage was well known, and with the Democrats in the saddle for another four years, Congressional action on the woman suffrage amendment was blocked. Nevertheless, the cause moved ahead in the states; Colorado was to vote on the question in 1893 and Kansas in 1894, and New York was revising its constitution. In addition, the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 offered endless opportunities to bring the subject before the people.
As soon as plans for the World's Fair were under way, Susan began to work indirectly through prominent women in Washington and Chicago for the appointment of women to the board of management. "Lady Managers" were appointed, 115 strong, who proved to be very much alive under the leadership of Mrs. Bertha Honoré Palmer. Susan found Mrs. Palmer almost as determined as she to secure equality of rights for women at the World's Fair, and nothing that she herself might have planned could have been more effective than the series of world congresses in which both men and women took part, or than the World's Congress of Representative Women.
Elizabeth Smith Miller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony
Two of Susan's "girls," as she liked to call them, Rachel Foster Avery[381] and May Wright Sewall, were appointed by Mrs. Palmer to take charge of the World's Congress of Representative Women, and they arranged a meeting of the International Council of Women as a part of this Congress.