Susan B. Anthony | Page 5

looked on and patiently waited until she was ready to leave.
For his transgression of marrying out of Meeting, Daniel had to face the elders as soon as he returned from his wedding trip. They weighed the matter carefully, found him otherwise sincere and earnest, and decided not to turn him out. Lucy gave up her dancing and her singing. She gave up her pretty bright-colored dresses for plain somber clothes, but she did not adopt the Quaker dress or use the "plain speech." She went to meeting with Daniel but never became a Quaker, feeling always that she could not live up to their strict standard of righteousness.[7]
This was Susan's heritage--Quaker discipline and austerity lightened by her father's independent spirit and by the kindly understanding of her mother who had not forgotten her own fun-loving girlhood; an environment where men and women were partners in church and at home, where hard physical work was respected, where help for the needy and unfortunate was spontaneous, and where education was regarded as so important that Grandfather Anthony built a school for his children and the neighbors' in his front yard. Her childhood was close enough to the Revolution to make Grandfather Read's part in it very real and a source of great pride. Eagerly and often she listened to the story of how he enlisted in the Continental army as soon as the news of the Battle of Lexington reached Cheshire and served with outstanding bravery under Arnold at Quebec, Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga, and Colonel Stafford at Bennington while his young wife waited anxiously for him throughout the long years of the war.
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The wide valley in the Berkshire Hills where Susan grew up made a lasting impression on her. There was beauty all about her--the fruit trees blooming in the spring, the meadows white with daisies, the brook splashing over the rocks and sparkling in the summer sun, the flaming colors of autumn, the strength and companionship of the hills when the countryside was white with snow. She seldom failed to watch the sun set behind Greylock.
Her father's cotton mill flourished. Regarded as one of the most promising, successful young men of the district, he soon attracted the attention of Judge John McLean, a cotton manufacturer of Battenville, New York, who, eager to enlarge his mills, saw in Daniel Anthony an able manager. Daniel, always ready to take the next step ahead, accepted McLean's offer, and on a sunny July day in 1826, Susan drove with her family through the hills forty-four miles to the new world of Battenville.
Here in the home of Judge McLean, she saw Negroes for the first time, Negroes working to earn their freedom. Startled by their black faces, she was a little afraid, but when her father explained that in the South they could be sold like cattle and torn from their families, her fear turned to pity.
At the district school, taught by a woman in summer and by a man in the winter, she learned to sew, spell, read, and write, and she wanted to study long division but the schoolmaster, unable to teach it, saw no reason why a woman should care for such knowledge. Her father, then realizing the need of better education for his five children, Guelma, Susan, Hannah, Daniel, and Mary, established a school for them in the new brick building where he had opened a store. Later on when their new brick house was finished, he set aside a large room for the school, and here for the first time in that district the pupils had separate seats, stools without backs, instead of the usual benches around the schoolroom walls. He engaged as teachers young women who had studied a year or two in a female seminary; and because female seminaries were rare in those days, women teachers with up-to-date training were hard to find. Only a few visionaries believed in the education of women. Nearby Emma Willard's recently established Troy Female Seminary was being watched with interest and suspicion. Mary Lyon, who had not yet founded her own seminary at Mt. Holyoke, was teaching at Zilpha Grant's school in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and one of her pupils, Mary Perkins, came to Battenville to teach the Anthony children. Mary Perkins brought new methods and new studies to the little school. She introduced a primer with small black illustrations which fascinated Susan. She taught the children to recite poetry, drilled them regularly in calisthenics, and longed to add music as well, but Daniel Anthony forbade this, for Quakers believed that music might seduce the thoughts of the young. So Susan, although she often had a song in her heart, had to repress it and never knew the joy of singing the songs of childhood.
Her father, looking upon the