Susan B. Anthony | Page 3

Bewick Colby 232 (From History of Woman Suffrage by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage)
Matilda Joslyn Gage 236 (From History of Woman Suffrage by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage)
Anna Howard Shaw 248 (From a photograph by Mary Carnel)
Harriot Stanton Blatch 250 (Courtesy Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California)
The Anthony home, Rochester, New York 255 (Courtesy Susan B. Anthony Memorial, Inc., Rochester, New York)
Susan B. Anthony at her desk 257 (Courtesy Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts)
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton 259
Elizabeth Smith Miller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 262 and Susan B. Anthony
Ida Husted Harper 271 (Courtesy Library of Congress)
Rachel Foster Avery 275 (Courtesy Library of Congress)
Harriet Taylor Upton 276 (Courtesy Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California)
Carrie Chapman Catt 289 (Courtesy Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts)
Quotation in the handwriting of Susan B. Anthony 297
Susan B. Anthony at the age of eighty-five 301 (From a photograph by J. E. Hale)
Susan B. Anthony, 1905 309 (From a photograph by Ellis)

QUAKER HERITAGE
"If Sally Ann knows more about weaving than Elijah," reasoned eleven-year-old Susan with her father, "then why don't you make her overseer?"
"It would never do," replied Daniel Anthony as a matter of course. "It would never do to have a woman overseer in the mill."
This answer did not satisfy Susan and she often thought about it. To enter the mill, to stand quietly and look about, was the best kind of entertainment, for she was fascinated by the whir of the looms, by the nimble fingers of the weavers, and by the general air of efficiency. Admiringly she watched Sally Ann Hyatt, the tall capable weaver from Vermont. When the yarn on the beam was tangled or there was something wrong with the machinery, Elijah, the overseer, always called out to Sally Ann, "I'll tend your loom, if you'll look after this." Sally Ann never failed to locate the trouble or to untangle the yarn. Yet she was never made overseer, and this continued to puzzle Susan.[1]
The manufacture of cotton was a new industry, developing with great promise in the United States, when Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, in the wide valley at the foot of Mt. Greylock, near Adams, Massachusetts. Enterprising young men like her father, Daniel Anthony, saw a potential cotton mill by the side of every rushing brook, and young women, eager to earn the first money they could call their own, were leaving the farms, for a few months at least, to work in the mills. Cotton cloth was the new sensation and the demand for it was steadily growing. Brides were proud to display a few cotton sheets instead of commonplace homespun linen.
When Susan was two years old, her father built a cotton factory of twenty-six looms beside the brook which ran through Grandfather Read's meadow, hauling the cotton forty miles by wagon from Troy, New York. The millworkers, most of them young girls from Vermont, boarded, as was the custom, in the home of the millowner; Susan's mother, Lucy Read Anthony, although she had three small daughters to care for, Guelma, Susan, and Hannah, boarded eleven of the millworkers with only the help of a thirteen-year-old girl who worked for her after school hours. Lucy Anthony cooked their meals on the hearth of the big kitchen fireplace, and in the large brick oven beside it baked crisp brown loaves of bread. In addition, washing, ironing, mending, and spinning filled her days. But she was capable and strong and was doing only what all women in this new country were expected to do. She taught her young daughters to help her, and Susan, even before she was six, was very useful; by the time she was ten she could cook a good meal and pack a dinner pail.
[Illustration: Daniel Anthony, father of Susan B. Anthony]
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Hard work and skill were respected as Susan grew up in the rapidly expanding young republic which less than fifty years before had been founded and fought for. Settlers, steadily pushing westward, had built new states out of the wilderness, adding ten to the original thirteen. Everywhere the leaven of democracy was working and men were putting into practice many of the principles so boldly stated in the Declaration of Independence, claiming for themselves equal rights and opportunities. The new states entered the Union with none of the traditional property and religious limitations on the franchise, but with manhood suffrage and all voters eligible for office. The older states soon fell into line, Massachusetts in 1820 removing property qualifications for voters. Before long, throughout the United States, all free white men were enfranchised, leaving only women, Negroes, and Indians without the full rights of citizenship.
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