Susan B. Anthony | Page 8

been cut around Hardscrabble. It was disappointing after their fine brick house in Battenville, but they made it comfortable, and their love for and loyalty to each other made them a happy family anywhere. As it had been a halfway house on the road to Troy and travelers continued to stop there asking for a meal or a night's lodging, they took them in, and young Daniel served them food and nonintoxicating drinks at the old tavern bar.
Susan, when her school term was over, put her energies into housework, recording in her diary, "Did a large washing today.... Spent today at the spinning wheel.... Baked 21 loaves of bread.... Wove three yards of carpet yesterday."[15]
The attic of the tavern had been finished off for a ballroom with bottles laid under the floor to give a nice tone to the music of the fiddles, and now the young people of the village wanted to hold their dancing school there. Susan's father, true to his Quaker training, felt obliged to refuse, but when they came the second time to tell him that the only other place available was a disreputable tavern where liquor was sold, he relented a little, and talked the matter over with his wife and daughters. Lucy Anthony, recalling her love of dancing, urged him to let the young people come. Finally he consented on the condition that Guelma, Hannah, and Susan would not dance. They agreed. Every two weeks all through the winter, the fiddles played in the attic room and the boys and girls of the neighborhood danced the Virginia reel and their rounds and squares, while the three Quaker girls sat around the wall, watching and longing to join in the fun.
Such frivolous entertainment in the home of a Quaker could not be condoned, and Daniel Anthony was not only severely censured by the Friends but read out of Meeting, "because he kept a place of amusement in his house." But he did not regret his so-called sin any more than he regretted marrying out of Meeting. He continued to attend Friends' Meeting, but grew more and more liberal as the years went by. At this time, like all Quakers, he refused to vote, not wishing in any way to support a government that believed in war, and this influenced Susan who for some years regarded voting as unimportant. He refused to pay taxes for the same reason, and she often saw him put his pocketbook on the table and then remark drily to the tax collector, "I shall not voluntarily pay these taxes. If thee wants to rifle my pocketbook, thee can do so."[16]
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To help her father with his burden of debt was now Susan's purpose in life, and in the spring she again left the family circle to teach at Eunice Kenyon's Friends' Seminary in New Rochelle, New York. There were twenty-eight day pupils and a few boarders at the seminary, and for long periods while Eunice Kenyon was ill, Susan took full charge.
She wrote her family all the little details of her life, but their letters never came often enough to satisfy her. Occasionally she received a paper or a letter from Aaron McLean, Judge McLean's grandson, who had been her good friend and Guelma's ever since they had moved to Battenville. His letters almost always started an argument which both of them continued with zest. After hearing the Quaker preacher, Rachel Barker, she wrote him, "I guess if you would hear her you would believe in a woman's preaching. What an absurd notion that women have not intellectual and moral faculties sufficient for anything but domestic concerns."[17]
When New Rochelle welcomed President Van Buren with a parade, bands playing, and crowds in the streets, this prim self-righteous young woman took no part in this hero worship, but gave vent to her disapproval in a letter to Aaron.
Disturbed over the treatment Negroes received at Friends' Meeting in New Rochelle, she impulsively wrote him, "The people about here are anti-abolitionist and anti everything else that's good. The Friends raised quite a fuss about a colored man sitting in the meeting house, and some left on account of it.... What a lack of Christianity is this!"[18]
Her school term of fifteen weeks, for which she was paid $30, was over early in September, just in time for her to be at home for Guelma's wedding to Aaron McLean, and afterward she stayed on to teach the village school in Center Falls. This made it possible for her to join in the social life of the neighborhood. Often the young people drove to nearby villages, twenty buggies in procession. On a drive to Saratoga, her escort asked her to give up teaching to marry him. She refused, as she did again a few years