"No, Susan," she insisted, "you're wrong for once. I remember perfectly when that happened, for it was at the time I was beginning to wean Harriet."
Aunt Susan, though somewhat staggered by the force of this testimony, still maintained that Mrs. Stanton must be mistaken, whereupon the latter repeated, in exasperation, "I tell you it happened when I was weaning Harriet." And she added, scornfully, "What event have you got to reckon from?"
Miss Anthony meekly subsided.
Mrs. Stanton had wonderful blue eyes, which held to the end of her life an expression of eternal youth. During our conventions she usually took a little nap in the afternoon, and when she awoke her blue eyes always had an expression of pleased and innocent surprise, as if she were gazing on the world for the first time—the round, unwinking, interested look a baby's eyes have when something attractive is held up before them.
Let me give in a paragraph, before I swing off into the bypaths that always allure me, the consecutive suffrage events of the past quarter of a century. Having done this, I can dwell on each as casually as I choose, for it is possible to describe only a few incidents here and there; and I shall not be departing from the story of my life, for my life had become merged in the suffrage cause.
Of the preliminary suffrage campaigns in Kansas, made in company with "Aunt Susan," I have already written, and it remains only to say that during the second Kansas campaign yellow was adopted as the suffrage color. In 1890, '92, and '93 we again worked in Kansas and in South Dakota, with such indefatigable and brilliant speakers as Mrs. Catt (to whose efforts also were largely due the winning of Colorado in '93), Mrs. Laura Johns of Kansas, Mrs. Julia Nelson, Henry B. Blackwell, Dr. Helen V. Putnam of Dakota, Mrs. Emma Smith DeVoe, Rev. Olympia Browne of Wisconsin, and Dr. Mary Seymour Howell of New York. In '94, '95, and '96 special efforts were devoted to Idaho, Utah, California, and Washington, and from then on our campaigns were waged steadily in the Western states.
The Colorado victory gave us two full suffrage states, for in 1869 the Territory of Wyoming had enfranchised women under very interesting conditions, not now generally remembered. The achievement was due to the influence of one woman, Esther Morris, a pioneer who was as good a neighbor as she was a suffragist. In those early days, in homes far from physicians and surgeons, the women cared for one another in sickness, and Esther Morris, as it happened, once took full and skilful charge of a neighbor during the difficult birth of the latter's child. She had done the same thing for many other women, but this woman's husband was especially grateful. He was also a member of the Legislature, and he told Mrs. Morris that if there was any measure she wished put through for the women of the territory he would be glad to introduce it. She immediately took him at his word by asking him to introduce a bill enfranchising women, and he promptly did so.
The Legislature was Democratic, and it pounced upon the measure as a huge joke. With the amiable purpose of embarrassing the Governor of the territory, who was a Republican and had been appointed by the President, the members passed the bill and put it up to him to veto. To their combined horror and amazement, the young Governor did nothing of the kind. He had come, as it happened, from Salem, Ohio, one of the first towns in the United States in which a suffrage convention was held. There, as a boy, he had heard Susan B. Anthony make a speech, and he had carried into the years the impression it made upon him. He signed that bill; and, as the Legislature could not get a two-thirds vote to kill it, the disgusted members had to make the best of the matter. The following year a Democrat introduced a bill to repeal the measure, but already public sentiment had changed and he was laughed down. After that no further effort was ever made to take the ballot away from the women of Wyoming.
When the territory applied for statehood, it was feared that the woman-suffrage clause in the constitution might injure its chance of admission, and the women sent this telegram to Joseph M. Carey:
"Drop us if you must. We can trust the men of Wyoming to enfranchise us after our territory becomes a state."