I think of no title for your course, but why have any? Why not say simply, "A Course of Independent Lectures?" To call them woman's rights would damn them in advance, so strong is prejudice. The only one I have at all suited to your purpose is "Fair Play for Women."1 I hate the words "woman's rights," nor do they properly describe my treatment of the question which, in my mind, is not one of sex but of humanity. My lecture is a plea for the recognition of the equal humanity of women and an assertion that they have rights not as women but as human beings. In respect to terms, I leave it with you. I usually receive $50, but you will understand that I should prefer to pay the expenses myself rather than that you or any one interested should expend a penny; so if you can not justly give me anything, I shall be content.
Yours very faithfully,
George William Curtis
Miss Anthony always came out of these lecture courses in debt, but she would call upon her friends or borrow from sister or father enough to make up the deficit, and replace the loan out of her scanty earnings. She persisted in having them to educate the public on the progressive questions of the day. At this time the long, severe mental and physical strain of years began to be felt in her one weak spot, and the old trouble with her back asserted itself. From every quarter came urgent appeals for her assistance. At first she answered: "If New York calls a constitutional convention for next spring, this will be a capital winter to strike heavy blows for freedom and equality such as we shall not have for a long time to come. I am ready just as soon as the armies can be marshaled and equipped." But later she wrote:
It is being forced upon me that nature orders me to stay quietly at home this winter and it may be that it is to enable me to get a greater literary culture than I possibly could, amidst the hurry and bustle of continual meetings. Somehow I can not philosophize away a shrinking from going into active work. I can not get up a particle of enthusiasm or faith in the success, either financial or spiritual, of another series of conventions. For the past five years I have gone through this routine and something within me keeps praying to be spared from more of it. There has been such a surfeit of lecturing, the people are tired of it. Then I never was so poor in purse and I fear to end another campaign with a heavy debt to still further encroach upon my small savings. I can not bear to make myself dependent upon relatives for the food I eat and the clothes I wear; I never have done it and hope I may never have to. Perhaps I may feel a renewed faith in myself and my work but the past years have brought me so much isolation and spiritual loneliness, although in the midst of crowds, that I confess to a longing to stay for awhile among my own people.
The commands of the physician were imperative that she should avoid all fatigue and nervous excitement, but her pen was not idle, and the time which she hoped to devote to the reading of many books was occupied in sending out letters, petitions, appeals and the various documents necessary to keep the work going. In answer to an invitation from the Friends of Human Progress she wrote:
To be esteemed worthy to speak for woman, for the slave, for humanity, is ever grateful to me, and I regret that I can not be with you at your annual gathering to get for myself a fresh baptism, a new and deeper faith. I would exhort all women to be discontented with their present condition and to assert their individuality of thought, word and action by the energetic doing of noble deeds. Idle wishes, vain repinings, loud-sounding declamations never can bring freedom to any human soul. What woman most needs is a true appreciation of her womanhood, a self-respect which shall scorn to eat the bread of dependence. Whoever consents to live by "the sweat of the brow" of another human being inevitably humiliates and degrades herself.... No genuine equality, no real freedom, no true manhood or womanhood can exist on any foundation save that of pecuniary independence. As a right over a man's subsistence is a power over his moral being, so a right over a woman's subsistence enslaves her will, degrades her pride and vitiates her whole moral nature.
To her brother Daniel R., in Kansas, who was somewhat skeptical on the woman question, she sent this strong letter:
Even the smallest human right denied, is large. The fact that the ruling class withhold this right is prima facie evidence that they deem it of importance for good or for evil. In either case, therefore, the human being is outraged. It, perchance, may matter but little whether Kansas be governed by a constitution made by her bona fide settlers or by people of another State or by Congress; but for Kansas to be denied the right to make her own constitution and laws is an outrage not to be tolerated. So the constitution and laws of a State and nation may be just as considerate of woman's needs and wants as if framed by herself, yet for man to deny her the right to a voice in making and administering them, is paralleled only by the Lecompton usurpation. For any human being or class of human beings, whether black, white, male or female, tamely to submit to the denial of their right to self-government shows that the instinct of liberty has been blotted out.
You blunder on this question of woman's rights just where thousands of others do. You believe woman unlike man in her nature; that conditions of life which any man of spirit would sooner die than accept are not only endurable to woman but are needful to her fullest enjoyment. Make her position in church, State, marriage, your own; everywhere your equality ignored, everywhere made to feel another empowered by law and time-honored custom to prescribe the privileges to be enjoyed and the duties to be discharged by you; and then if you can imagine yourself to be content and happy, judge your mother and sisters and all women to be.
It was not because the three-penny tax on tea was so exorbitant that our Revolutionary fathers fought and died, but to establish the principle that such taxation was unjust. It is the same with this woman's revolution; though every law were as just to woman as to man, the principle that one class may usurp the power to legislate for another is unjust, and all who are now in the struggle from love of principle would still work on until the establishment of the grand and immutable truth, "All governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed."
She wrote Lydia Mott: "The new encyclopedia is just out and I notice in regard to Antoinette Brown Blackwell that it gives a full description of her work up to the time of her marriage, then says: 'She married Samuel Blackwell and lives near New York.' Not a word of the splendid work she has done on the platform and in the pulpit since. Thus does every married woman sink her individuality." This brought from Lydia a spirited answer:
For my part, when you speak of the individuality of one who is truly married being inevitably lost, I think you mistake. If there ever was any individuality it will remain. I don't believe it is necessary for development that the individual must always force itself upon us. We naturally fall into the habits and frequently the train of thought of those we love and I like the expression "we" rather than "I." I never feel that my interests and actions can be independent of the dear ones with whom I am surrounded. Even the one who seems to be most absorbed may, in reality, possess the strongest soul. This standing alone is not natural and therefore can not be right. I am sure one of these days you will view this matter from a different standpoint.
Miss Anthony so far yielded as to reply: "Institutions, among them marriage, are justly chargeable with many social and individual ills but, after all, the whole man or woman will rise above them. I am sure my 'true woman' never will be crushed or dwarfed by them. Woman must take to her soul a purpose and then make circumstances conform to this purpose, instead of forever singing the refrain, 'if and if and if!'" But later when one woman failed to keep a lecture engagement because her husband wanted her to go somewhere with him, and another because her husband was not willing she should leave home, she again poured out her sorrows to her friend:
There is not one woman left who may be relied on, all have "first to please their husband," after which there is but little time or energy left to spend in any other direction. I am not complaining or despairing, but facts are stern realities. The twain become one flesh, the woman, "we"; henceforth she has no separate work, and how soon the last standing monuments (yourself and myself, Lydia), will lay down the individual "shovel and de hoe" and with proper zeal and spirit grasp those of some masculine hand, the mercies and the spirits only know. I declare to you that I distrust the power of any woman, even of myself, to withstand the mighty