The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (21 page)

A telling story: Many women’s gravestones at this time were etched with a revealing epitaph: “Here lies Mary Jones,
relict of the late Josiah Jones
.” Relict? A relict is, of course, the term used to refer to the surviving remnant of a natural phenomenon—or a surviving shard of an artifact. It is simply what is left over when the primary object is gone.

Women were in bondage of the most insidious sort—and there were no ready escape hatches from this social and political imprisonment. They had only two choices: marriage (which still amounted to legal serfdom), or spinsterhood (and the shame, loss of social esteem, and potential impoverishment that came with that “degrading station.”)

Into such a world was Susan B. Anthony born.

Susan, however, was more fortunate than most. She was born a Quaker. As such, she found herself in a vastly different social milieu than other American girls—a world with at least a window open to other possibilities. Her family believed in absolute equality of the sexes. Her father was a staunch abolitionist, fighting for the emancipation of slaves in the decades just before the Civil War. And Susan was surrounded in her Quaker world by independent-thinking women. Independent-thinking women, and I hasten to say a certain
brand
of independent-thinking women—to wit: schoolteachers.

Schoolteachers were the role models for freedom-craving women of the day. There were very few roles in which a woman could claim social and economic independence, but teaching was one of them. Young Susan B. Anthony was impressed with the intelligence, education, and relative social autonomy of the teachers with whom she came into contact. From a young age, she knew only that she wanted to be like these women. And so, she became a teacher.

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As young Susan B. Anthony educated herself about the world around her, she became aware of a paradox. She was living smack in the center of a culture shaped by Jacksonian democracy—a culture in which the
self-made man
was the national ideal. Everywhere there was talk of Emerson’s spirit of self-reliance. People were reading Thoreau’s new ideas about self-realization—many of them taken directly from the Bhagavad
Gita. “Man” was endowed with inalienable natural rights, it was believed, and it was his right to grow toward his unlimited potential. Anyone could grow up to be president!

Anyone, of course, except a woman. Susan became aware of the radical extent to which women were left out of this world of possibility.
Man was made for himself—
it was often said—
and woman for man
! “I was not made for man,” Anthony would later declare flatly. “I was made for God. And I was made for myself.”

By the time she reached young adulthood, Susan B. Anthony was aware that she had two choices: She could marry. Or she could be an old maid. Anthony would have neither. She was determined to reject the choice as society had defined it. Indeed she would stand the choices on their head. She would not marry, and she would make of the position of old maid something creative and new. Even in her midtwenties, Anthony had the spirit to declare: “
These old Bachelors are nothing but a nuisance to a society but an Old Maid is the cleverest creature I ever saw.”

By the age of twenty-five, Susan B. Anthony had made a conscious choice to remain single. “
When I am crowned with all the rights, privileges, and immunities of a citizen,” she declared, “I may give some consideration to this social institution [marriage]; but until then I must concentrate all of my energies on the enfranchisement of my own sex.”

This was Susan B. Anthony’s first dharma declaration. By her late twenties she had fully declared herself.
I must concentrate all of my energies on the enfranchisement of my own sex!
She had named and claimed her calling. Here is concentration of purpose. This declaration, as we shall see, unified her energy in extraordinary ways.

Naming her dharma allowed Susan to connect her life energy with an idea that was already very much in the atmosphere. It was the fantastic idea of the New True Woman. This idea was being written about in England, particularly in novels by Charlotte Brontë, and in poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Their riveting characters, Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh, were New True Women of the type Susan had already imagined. Charlotte Brontë, dreaming of a powerful, but “plain and true” woman, had promised her sister Emily, “
I will show you a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any
of yours.” And voilà!: Jane Eyre!—the diminutive heroine who would be an inspiration to Anthony and millions of other men and women. Susan B. Anthony placed pictures of Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning over her bureau, and they would remain there for the rest of her life. At her request, these same pictures would hang on the wall above her coffin at her wake.

Susan wrote extensively about “the New True Woman.” When she describes this “new being” her voice is electric with possibility: “
The true woman will not be exponent of another, or allow another to be such for her. She will be her own individual self—do her own individual work—stand or fall by her own individual wisdom and strength … The old idea that man was made for himself and woman for him, that he is the oak, she the vine, he the head, she the heart, he the great conservator of wisdom principle, she of love, will be reverently laid aside with other long since exploded philosophies of the ignorant past.”

Susan had a vision: Women will become acting subjects in their own destiny. This became her most fervently held personal and political manifesto. It was not just a vision for what might be in the future, but her blueprint for who she and her sisters in the struggle would be in the present. And it was in fact the very blueprint for who she would become.

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By her late twenties, Susan B. Anthony had chosen her passion for social action over marriage as a vocation. She felt urgently called to
act
. She had begun her life of action by teaching, but the talented Anthony soon tired of teaching’s routines. She wasn’t bringing forth all that was within her, and she knew it. Teaching—as it was then practiced—was not a big enough palette for her capabilities. “
I am tired of theory,” she said. “I want to hear how we must
act
to have a happier and more glorious world.”

Act she did. By her midtwenties, Susan had become deeply involved in temperance-reform activities. She saw clearly the direct connection between drunkenness and the abuse of women. The routine wife beatings she observed in her small community—most of them associated with male drunkenness—infuriated her. She spoke out. She became involved
in the Women’s Temperance Movement. And “Temperance” would be her first schooling in public action.

As soon as she began her life of action, Susan B. Anthony was presented with a challenge: how to marshal all of her life energy in support of her calling. One thing was perfectly clear: In order to fulfill her dharma, she would have to master the art of public speaking, she would have to learn how to unleash her power in full view of halls of angry men and skeptical women. This was a daunting challenge. It was almost unheard of for women to speak in public. It was considered an act of defiance and an unseemly betrayal of their proper role. Even Anthony’s
right
to speak publicly was challenged by men at every turn. So for her to find her public-speaking voice she would have to summon every bit of determination and skill she could get her hands on. And she would have to overcome her considerable self-doubt.

Susan B. Anthony’s path to her voice must have been thrilling to observe. She accomplished it through sheer guts and with many early failures. But several early successes pointed her in the right direction. One of her most dramatic early triumphs came in her relationship with the male-dominated temperance movement. In January 1852, Anthony attended a meeting called by the Sons of Temperance in Albany. She submitted her credentials along with the rest of the women, and took her place with them at the side of the hall, where it was understood that they (the women) were to remain silent—observing, and “learning from” the speeches of the men who dominated the organization.

Susan would have none of this. She rose to speak—in clear defiance of protocol. She was told by the male moderator that “
the sisters were not invited here to speak but to listen and learn.” She was enraged, and for the first time she allowed her fury to erupt publicly. She stormed out of the meeting, followed by a mob of sympathetic women. This was her first spontaneous protest action. Something inside had been liberated, and she would never be the same.

Emboldened by her first public act of defiance, Anthony organized a protest meeting, to which she pointedly invited only women—and also (one of her secret weapons throughout her life) the press. At the press conference, she announced that the protesting women would form their own independent organization. “
We are heartily sick and tired of the
round of demeaning encomiums which Gentlemen Temperance lecturers are pleased to lavish upon our sex,” she exclaimed. And so, Susan B. Anthony’s first organization, The Women’s State Temperance Society, was born. Anthony did not stop there. She was on a roll: She immediately called a national Women’s Temperance convention.

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