"The Woman Who Dared"
As the collections, taken up after her lectures, were too small to pay her expenses, her financial problems weighed heavily. The notes she had signed for The Revolution were in the main still unpaid, and one of her creditors was growing impatient. She had recently paid her counsel, Judge Selden, $200 and John Van Voorhis, $75, leaving only $3.45 in her defense fund, but as usual a few of her loyal friends came to her aid, and both Judge Selden and John Van Voorhis, deeply interested in her courageous fight, gave most of their time without charge.[301]
If this campaign was a problem financially, it was a success in the matter of nation-wide publicity. The New York Herald exulted in hostile gibes at women suffrage and published fictitious interviews, ridiculing Susan as a homely aggressive old maid, but the New York Evening Post prophesied that the court decision would likely be in her favor. The Rochester Express championed her warmly: "All Rochester will assert—at least all of it worth heeding—that Miss Anthony holds here the position of a refined and estimable woman, thoroughly respected and beloved by the large circle of staunch friends who swear by her common sense and loyalty, if not by her peculiar views." In fact the consensus of opinion in Rochester was much like that of the woman who remarked, "No, I am not converted to what these women advocate. I am too cowardly for that; but I am converted to Susan B. Anthony."[302]
This, however, was far from the attitude of Lucy Stone's Woman's Journal, which had ignored Susan's voting in November 1872 because it was out of sympathy with this militant move and with her interpretation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Later, as her case progressed in the courts, the Journal did give it brief notice as a news item, but in 1873 when it listed as a mark of honor the women who had worked wisely for the cause, Susan B. Anthony's name was not among them, and this did not pass unnoticed by Susan; nor did the fact that she was snubbed by the Congress of Women, meeting in New York and sponsored by Mary A. Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, and Maria Mitchell. This drawing away of women hurt her far more than newspaper gibes. In fact she was sadly disappointed in women's response to the herculean effort she was making for them.
Even more disconcerting was the adverse decision of the Supreme Court on the Myra Bradwell case, which at once shattered the confidence of most of her legal advisors. The court held that Illinois had violated no provision of the federal Constitution in refusing to allow Myra Bradwell to practice law because she was a woman and declared that the right to practice law in state courts is not a privilege or an immunity of a citizen of the United States, nor is the power of a state to prescribe qualifications for admission to the bar affected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, filing a dissenting opinion, lived up to Susan's faith in him, but Benjamin Butler wrote her, "I do not believe anybody in Congress doubts that the Constitution authorizes the right of women to vote, precisely as it authorizes trial by jury and many other like rights guaranteed to citizens. But the difficulty is, the courts long since decided that the constitutional provisions do not act upon the citizens, except as guarantees, ex proprio vigore, and in order to give force to them there must be legislation.... Therefore, the point is for the friends of woman suffrage to get congressional legislation."[303]
Susan, however, never wavered in her conviction that she as a citizen had a constitutional right to vote and that it was her duty to test this right in the courts.