By THE NEW YORK TIMES
ROCHESTER,
March 13, -- Miss Susan B. Anthony died at 12:40 o'clock this morning. The end
came peacefully. Miss Anthony had been unconscious practically all of the time
for more than twenty-four hours, and her death had been almost momentarily
expected since last night. Only her wonderful constitution kept her alive.
Dr. M. S. Ricker, her attending physician, said Miss Anthony died of heart
disease and pneumonia of both lungs. She had had serious valvular heart trouble
for the last six or seven years. Her lungs were practically clear and the
pneumonia had yielded to treatment, but the weakness of her heart prevented her
recovery.
Miss Anthony was taken ill while on her way home from the National Suffrage
Convention in Baltimore. She stopped in New York, where a banquet was to be
given Feb. 20 in honor of her eighty-sixth birthday, but she had an attack of
neuralgia on Feb. 18 and hastened home. Pneumonia developed after her arrival
here, and on March 5 both her lungs became affected. She rallied, but had a
relapse three days ago, and the end after that never was in doubt.
Miss Anthony herself had believed that she would recover. Early in her
illness she told her friends that she expected to live to be as old as her
father, who was over 90 when he died. But on Wednesday she said to her sister:
"Write to Anna Shaw immediately, and tell her I desire that every cent I
leave when I pass out of this life shall be given to the fund which Miss Thomas
and Miss Garrett are raising for the cause. I have given my life and all I am to
it, and now I want my last act to be to give it all I have, to the last cent.
Tell Anna Shaw to see that this is done."
Miss Shaw said:
"On Sunday, about two hours before she became unconscious, I talked with Miss
Anthony, and she said: 'To think I have had more than sixty years of hard
struggle for a little liberty, and then to die without it seems so cruel."
Susan Brownell Anthony was a pioneer leader of the cause of woman suffrage,
and her energy was tireless in working for what she considered to be the best
interests of womankind. At home and abroad she had innumerable friends, not only
among those who sympathized with her views, but among those who held opinions
radically opposed to her. In recent years her age made it impossible for her to
continue active participation in all the movements for the enfranchisement of
women with which she had been connected, but she was at the time of her death
the Honorary President of the National Woman Suffrage Association, the society
which she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized in 1869.
Miss Anthony possessed a figure of medium size, a firm but rather pleasing
face, clear hazel eyes, and dark hair which she always wore combed smoothly over
the ears and bound in a coil at the back. She paid much attention to dress and
advised those associated in the movement for women suffrage to be punctilious in
all matters pertaining to the toilet. For a little over a year in the early
fifties she wore a bloomer costume, consisting of a short skirt and a pair of
Turkish trousers gathered at the ankles. So great an outcry arose against the
innovation both from the pulpit and the press that she was subjected to many
indignities, and forced to abandon it.
Miss Anthony was born at South Adams, Mass., on Feb. 15, 1820. Daniel
Anthony, her father, a liberal Quaker, was a cotton manufacturer. Susan Anthony
was first instructed by teachers at home. She was sent afterward to finish her
education at a Friends' boarding school in Philadelphia. She continued to attend
this school until, at the age of fifteen, she was occasionally called on to help
in the teaching. At seventeen she received a dollar a week with board by
teaching in a private family, and the next summer a district school engaged her
for $1.50 a week and "boarded her round." She continued to teach until 1852,
when she found her taste for this profession entirely gone, a school in
Rochester being her last charge.
Miss Anthony had become impressed with the idea that women were suffering
great wrongs, and when she abandoned school teaching, having saved only about
$300, she determined to enter the lecture field. People of to-day can scarcely
understand the strong prejudices Miss Anthony had to live down. In 1851 she
called a temperance convention in Albany, admittance to a previous convention
having been refused to her because it was not the custom to admit women. The
Women's New York State Temperance Society was organized the following year.
Through Miss Anthony's exertions and those of Elizabeth Cady Stanton women soon
came to be admitted to educational and other conventions, with the right to
speak, vote, and act upon committees.
Miss Anthony's active participation in the movement for woman suffrage
started in the fifties. As early as 1854 she arranged conventions throughout the
State and annually bombarded the Legislature with messages and appeals. She was
active in obtaining the passage of the act of the New York Legislature in 1860
giving to married women the possession of their earnings and the guardianship of
their children. During the war she was devoted to the Women's Loyal League,
which petitioned Congress in favor of the thirteenth amendment. She was also
directly interested in the fourteenth amendment, sending a petition in favor of
leaving out the word "male."
In company with Mrs. Stanton and Lucy Stone, Miss Anthony went to Kansas in
1867, and there obtained 9,000 votes in favor of woman suffrage. The following
year, with the co-operation of Mrs. Stanton, Parker Pillsbury, and George
Francis Train, she began the publication in this city of a weekly paper called
The Revolutionist, devoted to the emancipation of women.
In order to test the application of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments
she cast ballots in the State and Congressional election in Rochester in 1872.
She was indicted and ordered to pay a fine, but the order was never enforced.
Miss Anthony succeeded Mrs. Stanton as President of the National Woman
Suffrage Association in 1892, Mrs. Stanton having resigned because of old age.
This office she held until February, 1899, her farewell address being delivered
at a meeting of the association in Washington. For a number of years she
averaged 100 lectures a year. She engaged in eight different State campaigns for
a Constitutional amendment enfranchising women, and hearings before committees
of practically every Congress since 1869 were granted to her.
She was the joint author with Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Ida Husted Harper, and Mrs.
Matilda Joslyn Gage of "The History of Woman Suffrage." She also was a frequent
contributor to magazines.
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