If she were still alive, Susan Brownell Anthony would be turning 175
next year. But if you were planning to throw her a party, you'd be well
advised to cross Patricia Ireland and Gloria Steinem off your guest list
and invite Phyllis Schlafly and Beverly LaHaye instead.
America's first feminist would not be accepted by today's leaders,
who would likely vilify her as one of those intolerant Religious Right
types wanting to force her morality on everyone else.
If she could observe American life almost a century after she died in
1906, Susan B. Anthony would be delighted to see women serving in
Congress, owning businesses and blasting into space. Knowing that a woman
had run for Vice President as the candidate of a major party would thrill
the suffragette who was once arrested for daring to vote in a presidential
election.
Were Susan B. Anthony alive today, we'd probably see this staunch
abolitionist and temperance advocate working with civil rights groups and
organizations such as Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. Campaigning for laws
that would force fathers to support their children would likely be a top
priority for her, along with getting the government to devote more money
to finding cures for women's diseases.
In her spare time, the woman who once illegally hid a "runaway wife"
and the woman's child would probably volunteer at a shelter for battered
women. But if you imagine that Susan B. Anthony would be running the
National Organization for Women, think again. The mother of modern
feminism would be thrown out on her ear by today's feminists for her
passionate pro-life views.
"I deplore the horrible crime of child-murder," she wrote in 1869,
referring to abortion. "No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a
desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully
guilty who commits the deed."
Didn't anyone ever tell her that the human fetus isn't a person?
Early feminists were unanimous in their belief that abortion should
be outlawed, variously calling it "desperate savageness," "this most
monstrous crime" and "the slaughter of the innocents." In her views on
abortion, Susan B. Anthony was hardly an unthinking product of her
Victorian environment. This in-your-face feminist who made civil
disobedience a way of life and scandalized polite society with her radical
views can scarcely be accused of letting 19th-century mores dictate her
attitudes.
Susan B. Anthony, who was outraged when the Dred Scott decision was
handed down, would have had no difficulty in seeing the parallels between
that ruling and Roe v. Wade: both declared that a class of people could be
treated as someone else's property, to be disposed of as the owner saw
fit. Those who told her to mind her own business concerning temperance and
slavery were tartly invited to interview the female victims of alcoholic
husbands and of the slave system, as she had done.
Today, Susan B. Anthony might busy herself with setting up crisis
pregnancy centers, helping women sue abortionists and offending the
public's sensibilities once more by passing out brutal photographs of
abortion's tiny victims.
The radical who flouted the Fugitive Slave Law by helping runaway
slaves escape might today be organizing rescues of the preborn. Susan B.
Anthony's attitude regarding sex and the single girl was even further from
the viewpoint of modern liberal feminists than was her position on
abortion. She advocated self-control for men and women alike. This former
schoolteacher would likely ask, with some asperity, why today's educators
persist in rejecting chastity-based programs with a proven track record in
favor of "if it feels good do it with a condom" programs that don't work.
What a pity that Susan Brownell Anthony is not here today to shake us
up and expose, with her acid wit, the hypocrisy of those who claim to
represent the interests of women.
Anne Morse lives in Maryland.
This article may be downloaded. For reprint permission, contact
Celebrate Life magazine.
Celebrate Life magazine is available for $12.95 per year (6 issues)
from American Life League, P.O. Box 1350, Stafford, VA 22555.
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