For the second week of Women’s History Month, I headed west to the Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum in Adams, Massachusetts, where abolitionist and suffragist Anthony was born in 1820. Guided tours are available on the weekends, but I opted to walk through on my own. There are exhibits about Anthony’s childhood, as well as her work on temperance, abolition, and most famously, women’s suffrage, which sadly was not granted until almost fifteen years after her death.
Sojourner Truth’s story gave me a glimpse of the intersection of the temperance, abolition, and women’s suffrage movements, and I got a more in-depth look at this at Anthony’s home. Her Quaker faith informed her decisions on all three of these causes. The temperance movement was connected to the women’s movement because of the belief that alcohol often led to the abuse of women and children and to financial ruin that impacted them as well. Abolition was a huge cause for Anthony, as well as for others like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass, and the Civil War put much of the women’s movement on hold. The friendship between Anthony and Douglass is celebrated in Two Friends: Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass by Dean Robbins, and Harriet Tubman sits down with her friend Susan for tea and reminiscences in Chasing Freedom: the Life Journeys of Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony Inspired by Historical Facts by Nikki Grimes.
After the Civil War, conflicts began to arise in the movements between those who prioritized suffrage for Black men, and those who advocated for women getting the right to vote. Anthony’s close friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton in particular expressed racism in her writing, but the women’s suffrage movement as a whole focused on white women’s rights. For a glimpse of how Black women were often treated by white suffragists, take a look at Ida B. Wells Marches for the Vote by Dinah Johnson.
The exhibit that surprised me the most was the one on Susan B. Anthony’s opposition to Restellism, an abortion practice performed by Ann Trow Lohman, a.k.a Madame Restell. I was not aware of the controversy surrounding this, with the modern pro-life movement claiming that Anthony opposed abortion, but the exhibit felt like it had a contemporary pro-life bias. Abortion in the 19th century was very different from procedures today, which may at least partially explain why 19th century suffragists might have opposed it (it was a much more dangerous procedure that often took away women’s agency over their own bodies). Although there’s more information in the exhibit, this summary from the museum’s website captures the essence of it: Restellism was a form of abortion, and Susan B. Anthony unequivocally opposed Restellism. I found a 2022 Smithsonian article that quotes Deborah L. Hughes, president of the National Susan B. Anthony Museum and House saying that Anthony was neither pro-choice or pro-life. Now I’m curious to travel to Rochester to see how this issue is portrayed there.