Susan B. Anthony, 1856
Busy with preparations for woman's rights meetings in popular New York summer resorts, Saratoga Springs, Lake George, Clifton Springs, and Avon, she grew panicky at the prospect of her impending speech and dashed off another urgent letter to Mrs. Stanton, underlining it vigorously for emphasis: "Not a word written ... and mercy only knows when I can get a moment, and what is worse, as the Lord knows full well, is, that if I get all the time the world has—I can't get up a decent document.... It is of but small moment who writes the Address, but of vast moment that it be well done.... No woman but you can write from my standpoint for all would base their strongest argument on the unlikeness of the sexes....
"Those of you who have the talent to do honor to poor, oh how poor womanhood have all given yourselves over to baby-making and left poor brainless me to battle alone. It is a shame. Such a lady as I might be spared to rock cradles, but it is a crime for you and Lucy and Nette."[93]
On a separate page she outlined for Mrs. Stanton the points she wanted to make. Her title was affirmative, "Why the Sexes Should be Educated Together." "Because," she reasoned, "by such education they get true ideas of each other.... Because the endowment of both public and private funds is ever for those of the male sex, while all the Seminaries and Boarding Schools for Females are left to maintain themselves as best they may by means of their tuition fees—consequently cannot afford a faculty of first-class professors.... Not a school in the country gives to the girl equal privileges with the boy.... No school requires and but very few allow the girls to declaim and discuss side by side with the boys. Thus they are robbed of half of education. The grand thing that is needed is to give the sexes like motives for acquirement. Very rarely a person studies closely, without hope of making that knowledge useful, as a means of support...."[94]
Mrs. Stanton wrote her at once, "Come here and I will do what I can to help you with your address, if you will hold the baby and make the puddings."[95] Gratefully Susan hurried to Seneca Falls and together they "loaded her gun," not only for the teachers' convention but for all the summer meetings.
Addressing the large teachers' meeting in Troy, Susan declared that mental sex-differences did not exist. She called attention to the ever-increasing variety of occupations which women were carrying on with efficiency. There were women typesetters, editors, publishers, authors, clerks, engravers, watchmakers, bookkeepers, sculptors, painters, farmers, and machinists. Two hundred and fifty women were serving as postmasters. Girls, she insisted, must be educated to earn a living and more vocations must be opened to them as an incentive to study. "A woman," she added, "needs no particular kind of education to be a wife and mother anymore than a man does to be a husband and father. A man cannot make a living out of these relations. He must fill them with something more and so must women."[96]
Her advanced ideas did not cause as much consternation as she had expected and she was asked to repeat her speech at the Massachusetts teachers' convention; but the thoughts of many in that audience were echoed by the president when he said to her after the meeting, "Madam, that was a splendid production and well delivered. I could not have asked for a single thing different either in matter or manner; but I would rather have followed my wife or daughter to Greenwood cemetery than to have had her stand here before this promiscuous audience and deliver that address."[97]
It was one thing to talk about coeducation but quite another to offer a resolution putting the New York State Teachers' Association on record as asking all schools, colleges, and universities to open their doors to women. This Susan did at their next convention, and while there were enough women present to carry the resolution, most of them voted against it, listening instead to the emotional arguments of a group of conservative men who prophesied that coeducation would coarsen women and undermine marriage. Nor did she forget the Negro at these conventions, but brought much criticism upon herself by offering resolutions protesting the exclusion of Negroes from public schools, academies, colleges, and universities.
Such controversial activities were of course eagerly reported in the press, and Henry Stanton, reading his newspaper, pointed them out to his wife, remarking drily, "Well, my dear, another notice of Susan. You stir up Susan and she stirs up the world."[98]