The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (22 page)

Susan B. Anthony decided that she would not be content to be a “good enough” public speaker. She must be great. Nothing else would fulfill her dharma. She became boldly single-minded in her practice. And she took on a coach: her closest friend, Elizabeth Cady Stanton—a masterful writer and speaker in various reform movements.

Stanton’s coaching turned out to be phenomenal. She suggested that Susan “
dress loose, take a great deal of exercise, and be particular about your diet and sleep sound enough, the body has a great effect on the mind.” Cady might as well have been a yoga teacher, so much emphasis did she place on the body. Susan, still at times overcome by self-doubt, frequently tried to get Stanton herself to give the speeches she had written, but Stanton wisely refused: “
I have no doubt a little practice will make you an admirable lecturer. I will go to work at once and write you the best lecture I can.” And she did. Henceforth, the two would be a team—and a force to be reckoned with wherever they showed up.

A little practice will make you an admirable lecturer
. Truer words were never spoken. Susan B. Anthony became a force of nature on the podium. She was Leontyne Price and Marian Anderson rolled into one. With her new skills giving her increasing self-confidence, she set about lecturing, organizing, petitioning, and raising money throughout New York. Suddenly, Susan B. Anthony was everywhere: She was speaking in churches, town halls, meeting rooms, individual homes. She was fast becoming that guided missile we spoke of earlier.

We have a number of written observations of Anthony’s growth in her dharma. Clarina Howard Nichols, another women’s rights advocate, wrote to Susan, “
It is most invigorating to watch the development of a woman in the work for humanity: first, anxious for the cause and depressed with a sense of her own inability; next, partial success of timid
efforts creating a hope; next, a faith; and then the fruition of complete self-devotion. Such will be your history.” One could hardly have stated the progression more powerfully.

As Susan gathered and focused her energy, her strategy became clearer. Her biographer, Kathleen Barry, describes her unique method succinctly: “
Take a concrete issue, such as intemperance; analyze the problem, formulate a specific demand … then urge women to take practical, confrontational and effective action that logically followed from her analysis of the issue. She was determined not only to act on behalf of women, but to mobilize women to act for themselves.”

7

Susan’s work gained in power. And it inevitably brought her face-to-face with the full extent of male domination. Many men who felt committed to the status quo found her presence—and her power—to be infuriating. The more successful she was, the more she had to face men’s rage, and this routinely brought to her doorstep withering moments of public excoriation and every form of low personal attack.

Here is a typical newspaper rampage against Susan’s work—and, really, her very existence. This article—one of hundreds of its ilk—specifically refers to Anthony’s “agitation” for women’s rights in marriage, and to a talk about the subject she gave one evening in Utica, New York. Keep in mind that the sentences come from a so-called “news story”—not an editorial—published the morning after her talk.

“
With a degree of impiety which was both startling and disgusting, this shrewish
maiden
counseled the numerous wives and mothers present to separate from their husbands whenever they became intemperate,
and particularly not to allow the said husbands to add another child to the family
[probably no married advocate of woman’s rights would have made this remark]. Think of such advice given in public by one who claims to be a
maiden lady
.”

As part of her dharma training, Susan learned to toughen herself to these outbursts. She became famous for standing her ground with equanimity. There are dozens of fantastic stories of her facing down apoplectic men in public situations—usually winning the day with her calm, her
sense of humor, and her impressive composure under impossible circumstances. Angry men would simply come unglued in her presence.

Susan’s diaries revealed the secret to her composure: She had early on learned not to take any of these public excoriations personally. She understood that they were
not about her in any personal sense
, but about social and economic issues far larger than herself. As she said, “
The mob represents more than itself; it evidences that general masculine opinion of woman, which condensed into law forges the chains which enslave her.”

Susan began to believe, as she often said, that in order to be effective, “
The important thing is to forget self.”
Forget self
. Says Barry, “
This was the real philosophy behind her asceticism and the force that propelled her through her campaigns. She cared little about her own comforts, nor was she concerned with gaining personal rewards for her work. Success was for the cause—for womankind—not for herself.” For the rest of her life, she would return again and again to this principle. “Forgetting self” would become one of her principal mantras. She knew that “the work” had energy and a power of its own, and was only undermined by any hint of self-aggrandizement.

Everything she did—what she wore, how she lived—now came into line with this principle.
Forget self
. She kept her physical needs very simple, which gave her more energy for her work. She dressed, as Stanton had urged, simply and conservatively, so as not to draw attention to her own person—always in dignified black. Susan loved colorful clothes. But her dharma discipline required that she enjoy her few colorful dresses at home and in her garden in Rochester. They were not for public work.

Barry describes it well: “
Susan B. Anthony came to her platforms with neither flourish nor flair. Always wearing a simple black dress with a fitted ‘basque waist’ jacket, she walked with determined but not heavy stride to the front of her audiences and stood very straight before them, looked directly at them, and delivered her message. In Roundout, N. Y, the papers reported that Anthony ‘unattended and unheralded, quietly glided in and ascended the platform.’ She did not exhibit nervousness or anxiety but instead was ‘easy and self-possessed as a lady should always be when performing a plain duty, even under 600 curious eyes.’ ”

The
Tao te Ching
says, “
[The Master] doesn’t glitter like a jewel … [but is] as rugged and common as a stone.” This is a predictable characteristic of those who have matured into their dharma. We see it in every other character we’ve examined: Goodall, Thoreau, Whitman, and Frost.
Rugged and common as a stone
. As the inner life of the practitioner of dharma becomes more complex, the outer life becomes simpler.

Susan’s audiences saw this. They felt it. They were moved by her simplicity, by the way in which her actions were in accord with her words. They were moved by the granite of her character, and her resolve. What her audiences felt was the power of someone living in the center of her dharma. We have evidence that even those who opposed her were moved. As one detractor admitted: “
While we differ widely with Miss Anthony, both as regards the propriety of the calling she has assumed, and the notions of which she is advocate, we cheerfully accord to her credit, as a public speaker, much above mediocrity, expressing herself with clearness and many times with elegance and force.”

Kathleen Barry captures it exactly: “
She did not mince words but conveyed her message through the fiery passion of her convictions. If her audiences did not agree with her, she was too much the kind of character they respected to dismiss her even though she was a woman. The simplicity of her dress and the directness of her speech revealed a woman of common origins. She was a woman who had retained the simplicity of earlier life even as she had surpassed its limitations.”

Susan B. Anthony
was
what she championed. She had become, through her own practice, the New True Woman.

8

For Susan B. Anthony, clarity about her vocation grew along with her actions in pursuit of dharma. That is to say, her actions themselves brought her increasing understanding of what was true. And they brought her, at midlife, to an epiphany: There could be no true success on the path to women’s equality without the vote. Until women had the vote, they would always be the pawns of men in the political and social sphere. Any gains women made could quickly and easily be erased. And as Susan digested
this truth, her calling became vividly clear. All of her energies must be devoted to the vote.

“
Until women are made a balance of power—to be consulted, catered to, and bargained with, if you please—My one article of party creed—shall be that of woman suffrage—All other articles of party creeds shall be with me as a drop in the bucket—as compared with this vital one—hence I make it my whole party creed!!”

The telescope had now locked firmly onto the star. Now all of Anthony’s actions came into alignment with her purpose. She refused to be distracted by other causes. She would, of course, remain passionately concerned about marriage laws, equal pay, coeducation. But she knew that the vote was the key to it all. Without the vote, none of the other gains could be sustained.

“
Woman and her disfranchisement is all I know,” she said.

Susan had matured into a visionary. She was supremely optimistic about the power of politics in American life. She knew that success was inevitable. She said, famously, “
failure is impossible.” But she knew, too, that it would take decades of work, consciousness-raising, education, and what she called “agitation” before the final goal would be achieved. And she knew that most likely the vote would not come in her lifetime. “
Not in our day,” she wrote, “but we must work on for future generations.”

Susan B. Anthony understood a central teaching of the Bhagavad Gita: Complete devotion inexorably brings its own fulfillment. “When a person is devoted to something with complete faith,” said Krishna to Arjuna, “I unify his faith in that form … Then, when his faith is completely unified, he gains the object of his devotion. In this way, every desire is fulfilled by me.”