Abstract
As a famous suffragette and crusader for women's rights who fought well into her eighties, Susan B. Anthony is often known by works and speeches made well after the Civil War. In 1863 when Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, Anthony was at a personal crossroads, not yet an open advocate of women's suffrage but considerably more radical in her approach to women's rights than even her closest comrade, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The War had presented the various reform movements, which had shared many members, with a crisis of conscience. When male abolitionists asked advocates of women's rights to cease their activities for the duration of the War, Stanton agreed, but Anthony could not. Anthony was unwilling to wait, and when the reformers began to seek black male suffrage, she put a fine point on it: "I would sooner cut off my right hand than ask the ballot for the black man and not for woman. " Stanton found this position "unreasonable."1 Anthony wanted to continue to hold conventions and to work tirelessly through the conflagration to bind the fight for black men's rights to that for women's. So strongly did she hold her position that she ran afoul of Frederick Douglass and other pillars of the abolitionist movement.
Journal Title
Iowa Journal of Communication
Volume
25
Issue
3
First Page
32
Last Page
34
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Johnstone, Monica C.
(1993)
"for Susan B. Anthony,"
Iowa Journal of Communication: Vol. 25:
No.
3, Article 11.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/ijc/vol25/iss3/11
Copyright
©1993 Iowa Communication Association
