“Every Woman for Herself. . . .”
Susan B. Anthony: Her Personal History and Her Era.
by Katherine Anthony.
Doubleday. 521 pp. $6.00.

In the history of the non-conforming American, women have occasionally outnumbered men. Melville and Thoreau were indeed at odds with society, but so were their more numerous female contemporaries: Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, Antoinette Brown, Amelia Bloomer, the Grimké sisters, Lydia Maria Child, Ernestine Rose, Abby Kelley, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and others.

Susan B. Anthony, one of America’s foremost dissenting women, was so out of step with America as to be laughed off as a sexless joke. She wore short hair and long pantaloons and agitated in public against slavery. She never married although she espoused, for more than fifty years, equal rights in marriage, as well as in politics, education, and in society at large.

Susan was descended from Puritans who, in the 1630’s, fled the England of Charles I and Bishop Laud for eccentric Rhode Island. Twenty years later Abraham Anthony became one of Rhode Island’s first converts to Quakerism, a sect that even Roger Williams thought perverse. In the late 18th century Abraham’s descendants went west to the Berkshires, where Daniel, Susan’s father, was born. He kept alive the family tradition of independence and married outside the faith; although he raised his children as Friends, he became a Unitarian late in life. Disowned by the Battenville, N. Y., Quakers for sanctioning dancing, he in turn disowned the Rochester, N. Y., Quakers for accepting slavery. Alternately a schoolteacher, farmer, mill-owner, storekeeper, and insurance salesman, he moved his family around as often as he changed occupations. Settled in Rochester by the 1840’s, Daniel Anthony promptly turned his home into a station for the Underground Railway. One of his Quaker sons fought with John Brown at Osawatomie.

Susan was born on February 15,1820, in Adams, Massachusetts, and grew up in America’s first great period of social reform. She was, as Katherine Anthony’s account shows at length, her father’s daughter. Educated at a Quaker school in Philadelphia, she was able while still in her teens to earn an independent living as a schoolteacher. Many proposals of marriage came her way, but none from men she favored. At her father’s Rochester home she met Rochester’s own Frederick Douglass and Boston’s Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison. She became an Abolitionist and temperance crusader. In 1851 she was converted to the equal-rights movement by Lucy Stone and Elizabeth Cady Stanton—with Daniel Anthony’s blessing.

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Actually, Susan Anthony matured late as a feminist. Until her thirtieth year, she was noted only for a common enough Quaker independence and stubbornness, but she was fond of pretty clothing, wanted to marry, and yearned for stability. For one who was later to be known as “Miss Strongminded,” she had a curious sensitivity about a scarcely noticeable cross-eye. At no time as a girl or young woman did she rebel against the harshness of her education or of her mother’s life.

What then, apart from the contagion of the times, made her a reformer? According to her biographer, Susan, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was in love with the husband of her eldest sister. Both Susan and Mrs. Stanton, after meeting almost by chance, turned their joint energies toward the larger world of public affairs. The author speculates, albeit intelligently and persuasively, about the causal connection between frustrated love and feminist zeal.

Katherine Anthony shows how hard it was for Susan to remain steadfast to her mission; if it were merely an emotional need she was fulfilling, Susan might well have turned to the more normal way of marriage. Even at the age of forty she had a chance to marry, but could not believe, remembering the back-breaking life of her mother, that marriage would leave her free for her work. When Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown, also reformers and spinsters, married the liberal Blackwell brothers, Susan wrote that they had done wrong. Privately, though, she wondered if she was doing right. Behind the grim, combative, and almost arrogant platform manner lay a confused, often unhappy, soul.

The Stanton-Anthony collaboration was a happy, satisfying one, however. In the beginning the more literate and literary Mrs. Stanton wrote Susan’s speeches, but with experience on the platform Susan soon was able to speak extemporaneously and well. On the eve of the Civil War, married women in New York finally got the right to make contracts, keep their earnings, and hold equal guardian rights over their children. After the freeing of the slaves, the Stanton-Anthony National Woman Suffrage Association, centered in New York, turned toward winning the vote for their sex. When Susan died in 1905, the grand triumph of the Nineteenth Amendment was well in the making.

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Reform movements are like religious movements in that as they succeed they pass from objecting to the world to joining it. Today’s legatees of the equal-rights movement are the well dressed, up-to-date, and reasonably well adjusted suburbanites of the League of Women Voters. Far from being eccentric, they are sober, indeed model, citizens. And with the respectability that members of a church possess and adherents of a sect do not, they blot out the memory of predecessors who were often ridiculed, and sometimes mobbed, as sexless subversives.

Katherine Anthony’s thoughtful biography reminds us again that America owes a debt to the rebels who have believed that this nation spells equal rights. Like the abolition of Negro slavery and the extension of full civic rights to Jews and Catholics, the emancipation of women was in the democratic tradition of extending rights to ever widening groups of men and women. Each of these movements found a moral sanction in the Enlightenment’s axiom that all human beings, despite differences, share a common humanity and therefore ought to share equally in the rights of mankind. These rights were not those of a social welfare state; the objective was free and fair competition achieved by getting rid of all impediments and barriers. A leading feminist who was also an Abolitionist and an advocate of religious freedom put it this way. “La carrière ouverte aux talents. Every man for himself, every woman for herself . . . .”

American women have demanded a lot because America promises a lot. What is the Enlightenment if not a promise of a better future, and what is America if not the promised land? In Europe, the Enlightenment was a class ideology, but in America it underwrote the decision of an entire people to declare itself an independent nation. And although the Fourth of July oration is dead, Americans continue to define their nationality by reference to the principles that gave birth to the country; the United States has been the land of the Permanent Enlightenment.

But the unfulfilled promises of that Enlightenment breed problems and dilemmas, as Gunnar Myrdal has pointed out. The young mother who has been to college, who has had a taste of a career, and who has been brought up to believe that she has rights equal with men, is not easily reconciled to babies, bottles, dishes, and diapers. And the young father who takes his democracy seriously is troubled by the knowledge that the open society is more open for himself than for his college-bred wife. This complication escaped the attention of the leaders of the equal-rights movement, who were, for the most part, well-to-do matrons with servants, or else grandmothers or spinsters.

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