Geo F Hoar
After the convention Miss Anthony went to Tenafly with Mrs. Stanton for a few days, to aid in disentangling the mass of material which was being prepared for the History; then started again into the lecture field, commencing at Skowhegan, Me. She lectured through New Hampshire and Vermont, taking long sleigh-rides from point to point, through wind and sleet, but comforted by the thought that many of her audience had done likewise to receive the gospel she preached. On her way westward she stopped at home for one short day, the first for four months, and then started on the old route through the States of the Middle West, this year adding Kentucky to the list. It is not essential to a full appreciation of her work to follow in detail these tours, which extended through a number of years and were full of pleasant as well as disagreeable features; nor is it possible to quote extensively the comments of the press. Miss Anthony undoubtedly has been as widely written up as any lecturer, and she seldom received less than a column in each paper of every town visited. Large numbers of these notices have been carefully preserved in those wonderful scrap-books which cover a period of fifty years.
At first her demands seemed so radical and the idea of a woman on the platform was so contrary to the precedent of all the ages, that the tone of the press, almost without exception, was contemptuous or denunciatory. As the justice of her claims began to dawn upon the minds of enlightened people, as many other prominent women joined in advocating the same reforms, and as these were adopted, one after another, without serious consequences, the public mind awakened to the remarkable change which was being wrought, and in a large measure gave its approval. When the masses of people throughout the country came to see and hear and know Miss Anthony, they resented the way in which she had been misrepresented. There was in her manner and words so much of dignity, earnestness and sincerity that "those who came to scoff remained to pray," and this change of sentiment was nowhere so marked as in the newspapers. Even those who differed radically from her views paid tribute to the persistence with which she had urged them and the sacrifices she had made for them during the past thirty years. Not only had there been developed a recognition of her high purposes and noble life, but also of her great intellectual ability and clear comprehension of all the issues of the day. An extract from the Terre Haute Express, February 12, 1879, illustrates this:
Miss Anthony's lecture was full of fine passages and strong appeals, and replete with well-stated facts in support of her arguments. She has wonderful command of language, and her speech at times flows with such rapidity that no reporter could do her justice or catch a tithe of the brilliance of her sayings. Moreover, there are not half of our public men who are nearly so well posted in the political affairs of our country as she, or who, knowing them, could frame them so solidly in argument. If the women of the nation were half so high-minded or even half so earnest, their title to the franchise might soon be granted.[96]
Another Indiana paper thus voiced the changing sentiment: "The fact is, that like the advance agent of any great reform—especially if a woman—Susan B. Anthony has been so belied and maligned by the press in years gone by that many who do not stop to think had come to believe her a perfect ogre, a cross-grained, incongruous old maid whom nobody could like, when the truth of the matter is, one has but to look at and listen to her, either in public or private, to realize that she is a pure, generous, deep-thinking, womanly woman. Simply because she has lived her own life, spoken her own thoughts and stood upon her own platform, the masses have condemned her; but history has already recorded her as one of the most earnest, hard-working reformers of the day. If the women of this country only knew how many changes and ameliorations have been made in the laws regarding themselves through her unselfish, persistent efforts, at her approach they would all rise up and call her blessed." But that there still existed editors of the old-time caliber, this extract from the Richmond, Ky., Herald, October 29, 1879, shows:
Miss Anthony is above the medium height for women, dresses plainly, is uncomely in person, has rather coarse, rugged features and masculine manners. Her piece, which doubtless she has been studying for thirty or forty years, was very well delivered for a woman, containing no original thought, but full of old hackneyed ideas, which every female suffrage shrieker has hurled from the stump against "ignorant men and small boys," for time out of mind all over this country and every other country where they could command an audience of curious people willing to throw away an hour or two on a vain, futile and foolish harangue, proposing to transform men into women and women into men. Such dissatisfied females should not hurl anathemas at men, forsooth, because they happened to be born into the world women instead of men. God alone is responsible for the difference between the sexes, and he is able to bear it. Men are not to blame that women are women, for there is not a man in this whole land who wouldn't rather have a boy baby than a gal baby any time. There never was a newly-married man when he learned that his first born was a girl, that didn't try to tear out his hair by the roots because it wasn't a boy.... If this tirade against men is to be persisted in, we see no escape for man except to quit his foolishness and have no more children, unless he can have some sort of guarantee that they will all be boys. It will have come to a strange pass indeed when the good women of this land, who, as mothers, have the nurture, training and admonition of every boy from his cradle to mature manhood, are unwilling to trust in the hands of their own offspring the destinies of the nation.
That such an attack can not be attributed to sectional prejudice may be proved by this extract from a column of vituperation in the Grand Rapids, Mich., Times, during this same trip, headed "Spinster Susan's Suffrage Show:"
A "miss" of an uncertain number of years, more or less brains, a slimsy figure, nut-cracker face and store teeth, goes raiding about the country attempting to teach mothers and wives their duty.... As is the yellow-fever to the South, the grasshopper to the plains, and diphtheria to our northern cities, so is Susan B. Anthony and her class to all true, pure, lovely women. The sirocco of the desert blows no hotter or more tainting breath in the face of the traveller, than does this woman against all men who do not believe as she does, and no pestilence makes sadder havoc among them than would Susan B. Anthony if she had the power. The women who make homes, who are sources of comfort to husbands, fathers, brothers, sisters or themselves, who wish to keep sacred all that goes to make their lives noble, refined and worth the living, will be as diametrically opposed to the lecturer of last evening as are most intelligent men. Susan B. Anthony may find her remedy in suffrage, but alas! there is no remedy for us against Susan and her ilk.
Each lecture usually was followed by letters not only from friends but from entire strangers, asking her forgiveness for having misjudged her so many years, and closing something like this from a lady in St. Paul, Minn.: "For the last ten years your name has been familiar to me through the newspapers, or rather through newspaper ridicule, and has always been associated with what was pretentious and wholly unamiable. Your lecture tonight has been a revelation to me. I wanted to come and touch your hand, but I felt too guilty. Henceforth I am the avowed defender of woman suffrage. Never again shall a word of mine be heard derogatory to the noble women who are working with heart and hand for the best welfare of humanity."
A two-column interview in the Chicago Tribune during this tour gives Miss Anthony's views on many public matters, concluding thus: