John Frederick - "Riders of the Silences"

Catherine Parr Traill - "Canadian Crusoes"

Victor Appleton - "Tom Swift and His Airship"

Walter Lippmann - "A Preface to Politics"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Susan B. Anthony

A >> Alma Lutz >> Susan B. Anthony




[Illustration: Daniel Anthony, brother of Susan B. Anthony]

When Daniel was busy with his campaign for his second term as mayor,
she helped him edit the _Bulletin_. He warned her not to fill his
paper up with woman's rights, and in spite of his sympathy for the
Negro, forbade her to advocate Negro suffrage in his paper.

"I wish I could talk through it the things I'd like to say to the
young martyr state ..." she wrote Mrs. Stanton. "The Legislature gave
but six votes for Negro suffrage the other day.... The idea of Kansas
refusing her loyal Negroes."

Again and again she was shocked at the prejudice against Negroes in
Kansas, as when Daniel employed a Negro typesetter and the printers,
refusing to admit him to their union, went out on strike until he was
discharged.

"In this city," she reported to Mrs. Stanton, "there are four thousand
ex-Missouri slaves who have sought refuge here within the three past
years." Making it her business to learn what was being done to help
them and educate them, she visited their schools, their Sunday
schools, and the Colored Home, and gave much of her time to them. To
encourage them to demand their rights, she organized an Equal Rights
League among them. This was one thing she could do, even if she could
not plead for Negro suffrage in Daniel's newspaper.[165]

Then one breath-taking piece of news followed another--Lee's
surrender, April 9, 1865, and in less than a week, Lincoln's
assassination, his death, and Andrew Johnson's succession to the
Presidency.

Susan looked upon Lincoln's assassination and death as an act of God.
She wrote to Mrs. Stanton, "Was there ever a more terrific command to
a Nation to 'stand still and know that I am God' since the world
began? The Old Book's terrible exhibitions of God's wrath sink into
nothingness. And this fell blow just at the very hour he was declaring
his willingness to consign those five million faithful, brave, and
loving loyal people of the South to the tender mercies of the ex-slave
lords of the lash."[166]

She longed "to go out and do battle for the Lord once more," but when
she could have expressed her opinions at the big mass meeting held in
memory of Lincoln, she remained silent. "My soul was full," she
confessed to Mrs. Stanton, "but the flesh not equal to stemming the
awful current, to do what the people have called make an exhibition of
myself. So quenched the spirit and came home ashamed of myself."

Then she added, "Dear-a-me--how overfull I am, and how I should like
to be nestled into some corner away from every chick and child with
you once more."

* * * * *

Disturbing news came from the East of dissension in the antislavery
ranks, of Garrison's desire to dissolve the American Antislavery
Society after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, and of
Phillips' insistence that it continue until freedom for the Negro was
firmly established. While Garrison maintained that northern states,
denying the ballot to the Negro, could not consistently make Negro
suffrage a requirement for readmitting rebel states to the Union,
Phillips demanded Negro suffrage as a condition of readmission.
Immediately abolitionists took sides. Parker Pillsbury, Lydia and
Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, Anna E. Dickinson, the Stantons,
and others lined up with Phillips, whose vehement and scathing
criticism of reconstruction policies seemed to them the need of the
hour. Susan also took sides, praising "dear ever glorious Phillips"
and writing in her diary, "The disbanding of the American Antislavery
Society is fully as untimely as General Grant's and Sherman's granting
parole and pardon to the whole Rebel armies."[167]

To her friends in the East, she wrote, "How can anyone hold that
Congress has no right to demand Negro suffrage in the returning Rebel
states because it is not already established in all the loyal ones?
What would have been said of Abolitionists ten or twenty years ago,
had they preached to the people that Congress had no right to vote
against admitting a new state with slavery, because it was not already
abolished in all the old States? It is perfectly astounding, this
seeming eagerness of so many of our old friends to cover up and
apologize for the glaring hate toward the equal recognition of the
manhood of the black race."[168]

She rejoiced when word came that the American Antislavery Society
would continue under the presidency of Phillips, with Parker Pillsbury
as editor of the _Antislavery Standard_; but she was saddened by the
withdrawal of Garrison, whom she had idolized for so many years and
whose editorials in the _Liberator_ had always been her
inspiration.[169]

As she read the weekly New York _Tribune_, which came regularly to
Daniel, she grew more and more concerned over President Johnson's
reconstruction policy and more and more convinced of the need of a
crusade for political and civil rights for the Negro. Asked to deliver
the Fourth of July oration at Ottumwa, Kansas, she decided to put into
it all her views on the controversial subject of reconstruction.

Traveling by stage the 125 miles to Ottumwa, she found good company
en route and "great talk on politics, Negro equality, and temperance,"
and thought the "grand old prairies ... perfectly splendid and the
timber-skirted creeks ... delightful."[170]

Before a large gathering of Kansas pioneers, many of whom had driven
forty or fifty miles to hear her, she stood tall, straight, and
earnest, as she reminded them of the noble heritage of Kansas, of the
bloody years before the war when in the free-state fight, Kansas men
and women "taught the nation anew" the principles of the Declaration
of Independence. Lashing out with the vehemence of Phillips against
President Johnson's reconstruction policy, she warned, "There has been
no hour fraught with so much danger as the present.... To be foiled
now in gathering up the fruits of our blood-bought victories and to
re-enthrone slavery under the new guise of Negro disfranchisement ...
would be a disaster, a cruelty and crime, which would surely bequeath
to coming generations a legacy of wars and rumors of wars...."[171]

She then cited the results of the elections in Virginia, South
Carolina, and Tennessee to prove her point that unless Negroes were
given the vote, rebels would be put in office and a new code of laws
apprenticing Negroes passed, establishing a new form of slavery.

She urged her audience to be awake to the politicians who were using
the peoples' reverence and near idolatry of Lincoln to push through
anti-Negro legislation under the guise of carrying out his policies.
Then putting behind her the prejudice and impatience with Lincoln
which she had felt during his lifetime, she added, "If the
administration of Abraham Lincoln taught the American people one
lesson above another, it was that they must think and speak and
proclaim, and that he as their President was bound to execute their
will, not his own. And if Lincoln were alive today, he would say as he
did four years ago, 'I wait the voice of the people.'"

In her special pleading for the Negro, she did not forget women.
Calling attention to the fact that our nation had never been a true
republic because the ballot was exclusively in the hands of the "free
white male," she asked for a government "of the people," men and
women, white and black, with Negro suffrage and woman suffrage as
basic requirements.

[Illustration: Wendell Phillips]

So enthusiastic were the Republicans over her speech that they urged
her to prepare it for publication, suggesting, however, that she
delete the passage on woman suffrage. This was her first intimation
that Republicans might balk at enfranchising women. So great had been
women's contribution to the winning of the war and so indebted were
the Republicans to women for creating sentiment for the Thirteenth
Amendment, that she had come to expect, along with Mrs. Stanton, that
the ballot would without question be given them as a reward.

* * * * *

It was soon obvious to Susan that politicians in the East as well as
in Kansas were shying away from woman suffrage. Mrs. Stanton reported
that even Wendell Phillips was backsliding, not wishing to campaign
for Negro suffrage and woman suffrage at the same time. "While I could
continue as heretofore, arguing for woman's rights, just as I do for
temperance every day," he had written, "still I would not mix the
movements.... I think such mixture would lose for the Negro far more
than we should gain for the woman. I am now engaged in abolishing
slavery in a land where the abolition of slavery means conferring or
recognizing citizenship, and where citizenship supposes the ballot for
all men."[172]

Such reasoning filled Susan with despair, for she firmly believed that
women who had been asking for full citizenship for seventeen years
deserved precedence over the Negro. Mrs. Stanton agreed. To them,
Negro suffrage without woman suffrage was unthinkable, an unbearable
humiliation. Half of the Negroes were women, and manhood suffrage
would fasten upon them a new form of slavery. How could Wendell
Phillips, they asked each other, fail to recognize not only the
timeliness of woman suffrage, but the fact that women were better
qualified for the ballot than the majority of Negroes, who, because of
their years in slavery, were illiterate and the easy prey of
unscrupulous politicians? By all means enfranchise Negroes, they
argued with him, but enfranchise women as well, and if there must be a
limitation on suffrage, let it be on the basis of literacy, not on the
basis of sex.

Among Republican members of Congress and abolitionists, there was
serious discussion of a Fourteenth Amendment to extend to the Negro
civil rights and the ballot. Susan, reading about this in Kansas, and
Mrs. Stanton, discussing it in New York with her husband, Wendell
Phillips, and Robert Dale Owen, saw in such a revision of the
Constitution a just and logical opportunity to extend woman's rights
at the same time. Previously committed to state action on woman
suffrage but only because it had then seemed the necessary first step,
both women welcomed the more direct road offered by an amendment to
the Constitution. Only they of all the old woman's rights workers were
awake to this opportunity.

Throughout the United States, people were thinking about the
Constitution as Americans had not done since the Bill of Rights was
ratified in 1791. Not only were amendments to the federal Constitution
in the air, not only were rebel states being readmitted to the Union
with new constitutions, but state constitutions in the North were
being revised, and western territories sought statehood. In Susan's
opinion the time was ripe to proclaim equal rights for all. This
clearly was woman's hour.

* * * * *

"Come back and help," pleaded Elizabeth Stanton, who grew more and
more alarmed as she saw all interest in woman suffrage crowded out of
the minds of reformers by their zeal for the Negro. "I have argued
constantly with Phillips and the whole fraternity, but I fear one and
all will favor enfranchising the Negro without us. Woman's cause is in
deep water.... There is pressing need of our woman's rights
convention...."[173]

Susan's spirits revived at the prospect of holding a woman's rights
convention, and plans for the future began to take shape as she read
the closing lines of Mrs. Stanton's letter: "I hope in a short time to
be comfortably located in a new house where we will have a room ready
for you.... I long to put my arms about you once more and hear you
scold me for all my sins and shortcomings.... Oh, Susan, you are very
dear to me. I should miss you more than any other living being on this
earth. You are entwined with much of my happy and eventful past, and
all my future plans are based on you as coadjutor. Yes, our work is
one, we are one in aim and sympathy and should be together. Come
home."

Parker Pillsbury also added his plea, "Why have you deserted the field
of action at a time like this, at an hour unparalleled in almost
twenty centuries?... It is not for me to decide your field of labor.
Kansas needed John Brown and may need you ... but New York is to
revise her constitution next year and, if you are absent, who is to
make the plea for woman?"

Reading her newspaper a few days later, she found that the politicians
had made their first move, introducing in the House of Representatives
a resolution writing the word "male" into the qualifications of voters
in the second section of the proposed Fourteenth Amendment. She
started at once for the East.

* * * * *

On the long journey back, in the heat of August, traveling by stage
and railroad with many stops to make the necessary connections, Susan
not only visited her many relatives who had moved to the West, but
also called on antislavery and woman suffrage workers, and held
meetings to plead for free schools for Negroes and for the ballot for
Negroes and women. She found people relieved to have the war over and
busy with their own affairs, but with prejudices smoldering. Public
speaking was still an ordeal for her and she confessed to her diary,
"Made a labored talk.... Had a struggle to get through with speech,"
and again, "Had a hard time. Thoughts nor words would come--Staggered
through."[174] However, she was a determined woman. The message must
be carried to the people and she would do it whether she suffered in
the process or not.

Late in September, she reached her own comfortable home in Rochester,
but she had too much on her mind to stay there long, and within a few
weeks was in New York with Elizabeth Stanton, deep in a serious
discussion of how to create an overwhelming demand for woman suffrage
at this crucial time. Again they decided to petition Congress, this
time for the vote for both women and Negroes. Five years had now
passed since the last national woman's rights convention, and the
workers were scattered; some had lost interest and others thought only
of the need of the Negro. Lucretia Mott, Lydia Mott, and Parker
Pillsbury responded at once. Susan sought out Lucy Stone in spite of
the differences that had grown up between them, and after talking with
Lucy, confessed to herself that she had been unjustly impatient with
her.[175]

Hoping for aid from the Jackson or Hovey Fund, she went to New England
to revive interest there and in Concord talked with the Emersons,
Bronson Alcott, and Frank Sanborn. When she asked Emerson whether he
thought it wise to demand woman suffrage at this time, he replied,
"Ask my wife. I can philosophize, but I always look to her to decide
for me in practical matters." Unhesitatingly Mrs. Emerson agreed with
Susan that Congress must be petitioned immediately to enfranchise
women either before Negroes were granted the vote or at the same
time.[176]

Even Wendell Phillips, who did not want to mix Negro and woman
suffrage, gave Susan $500 from the Hovey Fund to finance the
petitions, but many of the friends upon whom she had counted needed a
verbal lashing to rouse them out of their apathy. Very soon she had to
face the unpleasant fact that by pressing for woman suffrage now, she
was estranging many abolitionists. Nevertheless she and Mrs. Stanton
went ahead undaunted, determined that a petition for woman suffrage
would go to Congress even if it carried only their own two signatures.

However, petitions with many signatures were reaching Congress in
January 1866--the very first demand ever made for Congressional action
on woman suffrage. Senator Sumner, for whom women had rolled up
400,000 signatures for the Thirteenth Amendment, now presented under
protest "as most inopportune" a petition headed by Lydia Maria Child,
who for years had been his valiant aid in antislavery work; and
Thaddeus Stevens, heretofore friendly to woman suffrage and ever
zealous for the Negro, ignored a petition from New York headed by
Elizabeth Cady Stanton.[177]

By this time it was clear to Susan that since the two powerful
Republicans, Senator Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, both basically
friendly to woman suffrage, were determined to devote themselves
wholly to Negro suffrage and to the extension of their party's
influence, she could expect no help from lesser party members. Her
only alternative was to appeal to the Democrats or to an occasional
recalcitrant Republican, and she allowed nothing to stand in her way,
not even the frenzied pleas of her abolitionist friends. She found
James Brooks of New York, Democratic leader of the House, willing to
present her petitions, and she made use of him, although he was
regarded by abolitionists as a Copperhead and although he was now
advocating conciliatory reconstruction for the South of which she
herself disapproved. Other Democrats came to the rescue in the Senate
as well as in the House--a few because they saw justice in the demands
of the women, others because they believed white women should have
political precedence over Negroes, and still others because they saw
in their support of woman suffrage an opportunity to harass the
Republicans. During 1866, petitions for woman suffrage with 10,000
signatures were presented by Democrats and irregular Republicans.

In the meantime, conferences in New York with Henry Ward Beecher and
Theodore Tilton were encouraging, and for a time Susan thought she had
found an enthusiastic ally in Tilton, the talented popular young
editor of the _Independent_. Theodore Tilton, with his long hair and
the soulful face of a poet, with his eloquence as a lecturer and his
flare for journalism, was at the height of his popularity. He had
winning ways and was full of ideas. After the ratification of the
Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, in December 1865, he had
proposed that the American Antislavery Society and the woman's rights
group merge to form an American Equal Rights Association which would
fight for equal rights for all, for Negro and woman suffrage. Wendell
Phillips he suggested for president, and the _Antislavery Standard_
as the paper of the new organization.

This sounded reasonable and hopeful to Susan, and she hurried to
Boston with a group from New York, including Lucy Stone, to consult
Wendell Phillips and his New England colleagues. Wendell Phillips,
however, was cool to the proposition, pointing out the necessity of
amending the constitution of the American Antislavery Society before
any such action could be taken. Never dreaming that he would actually
oppose their plan, Susan expected this would be taken care of; but
when she convened her woman's rights convention in New York in May
1866, simultaneously with that of the American Antislavery Society,
she found to her dismay that no formal notice of the proposed union
had been given to the members of the antislavery group and therefore
there was no way for them to vote their organization into an Equal
Rights Association. Not to be sidetracked, she then asked the woman's
rights convention to broaden its platform to include rights for the
Negro. To her this seemed a natural development as she had always
thought of woman's rights as part of the larger struggle for human
rights.

"For twenty years," she declared, "we have pressed the claims of women
to the right of representation in the government.... Up to this hour
we have looked only to State action for the recognition of our rights;
but now by the results of the war, the whole question of suffrage
reverts back to the United States Constitution. The duty of Congress
at this moment is to declare what shall be the basis of representation
in a republican form of government.

"There is, there can be, but one true basis," she continued. "Taxation
and representation must be inseparable; hence our demand must now go
beyond woman.... We therefore wish to broaden our woman's rights
platform and make it in name what it has ever been in spirit, a human
rights platform."[178]

The women, so often accused in later years of fighting only for their
own rights, had the courage at this time to attempt a practical
experiment in generosity. Susan and Mrs. Stanton with all their hearts
wanted this experiment to succeed, and yet as they resolved their
woman's rights organization into the American Equal Rights
Association, they were apprehensive.

They did not have to wait long for disillusionment. Meeting Wendell
Phillips and Theodore Tilton in the office of the _Antislavery
Standard_ to plan a campaign for the Equal Rights Association, they
discussed with them what should be done in New York, preparatory to
the revision of the state constitution. Emphatically Wendell Phillips
declared that the time was ripe for striking the word "white" out of
the constitution, but not the word "male." That could come, he added,
when the constitution was next revised, some twenty or thirty years
later. To their astonishment, Theodore Tilton heartily agreed. Then he
added, "The question of striking out the word 'male,' we as an equal
rights association shall of course present as an intellectual theory,
but not as a practical thing to be accomplished at this convention."
Completely unprepared for such an attitude on Tilton's part, Susan
retorted with indignation, "I would sooner cut off my right hand than
ask for the ballot for the black man and not for woman." Then telling
the two men just what she thought of them for their betrayal of women,
she swept out of the office to keep another appointment.[179]

Equally exasperated with these men, Mrs. Stanton stayed on, hoping to
heal the breach, but when Susan returned to the Stanton home that
evening, she found her highly indignant, declaring she was through
boosting the Negro over her own head. Then and there they vowed that
they would devote themselves with all their might and main to woman
suffrage and to that alone.

* * * * *

By this time, Congress had passed a civil rights bill over President
Johnson's veto, conferring the rights of citizenship upon freedmen,
and a Fourteenth Amendment to make these rights permanent was now
before Congress. The latest developments regarding the various drafts
of the Fourteenth Amendment were passed along to Susan and Mrs.
Stanton by Robert Dale Owen. Senator Sumner, he reported, had yielded
to party pressure and now supported the Fourteenth Amendment, although
in the past he had always maintained such an amendment wholly
unnecessary since there was already enough justice, liberty, and
equality in the Constitution to protect the humblest citizen. Senator
Sumner opposed and defeated a clause in the amendment referring to
"race" and "color," words which had never previously been mentioned
in the Constitution, but he raised no serious objection to the
introduction of the word "male" as a qualification for suffrage, which
was also unprecedented. That he tried time and time again to avoid the
word "male" when he was redrafting the amendment or that Thaddeus
Stevens tried to substitute "legal voters" for "male citizens" was no
comfort to Susan and Mrs. Stanton, as they saw the Fourteenth
Amendment writing discrimination against women into the federal
Constitution for the first time.[180]

As they carefully read over the first section of the Fourteenth
Amendment, which conferred citizenship on every person born or
naturalized in the United States, women's rights seemed assured:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and
subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the
United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State
shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the
privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States;
nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or
property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person
within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Then in the controversial second section which provided the penalty of
reduction of representation in Congress for states depriving Negroes
of the ballot, they saw themselves written out of the Constitution by
the words, "male inhabitants" and "male citizens," used to define
legal voters. It was baffling to be kept from their goal by a single
word in a provision which at best was the unsatisfactory compromise
arrived at by radical and conservative Republicans and which sincere
abolitionists felt was unfair to the Negro. That it was unfair to
women, there was no doubt.

With determination, Susan and Mrs. Stanton fought this injustice. Were
they not "persons born ... in the United States," they asked. Were
they forever to be regarded as children or as lower than persons,
along with criminals, idiots, and the insane? Were women not counted
in the basis of representation and should they not have a voice in the
election of those representatives whose office their numbers helped to
establish?

As Susan studied the Constitution, she saw that the question of
suffrage had up to this time been left to the states and that there
were no provisions defining suffrage or citizenship or limiting the
right of suffrage. Only now was the precedent being broken by the
Fourteenth Amendment which conferred citizenship on Negroes and
limited suffrage to males. How could this be constitutional, she
reasoned, when the first lines of the Constitution read, "We, the
people of the United States, in order to ... establish justice ... and
secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do
ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of
America." Of course "the people" must include women, if the English
language meant what it said.

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