The Susan B. Anthony Bicentennial

I Think I’m in Love!

I am just the right age to remember a nationwide contretemps that occurred in 1979, back when we didn’t know how much bigger and more numerous American problems could be. That was the year that the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin was loosed into the world. My, what a kerfuffle. The Susan B. Anthony dollar replaced the Eisenhower dollar, which had only been created in 1971, in part to politically balance out the creation of the Kennedy half-dollar in 1964. The Eisenhower coin was pretty large, so a decision was to mint a smaller one. Originally a Columbia goddess or something was going to be put on the face of the coin, but then it was decided that an actual female American hero should go on. This is the kind of thing American liberals succeed at and count as a victory. They never passed the Equal Rights Amendment and bungled and outright lost abortion rights, but they can manage to get somebody’s face on a coin. A coin that was pretty much hated, because it got mixed up in your pocket or purse with quarters, and was completely discontinued two years later, because, ya know, Ronald Reagan. Anyway, this is all so much foreshadowing for all the controversy about replacing Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill in more recent times.

I’m quite sure that if you had asked Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) which she would have preferred, she’d have taken ERA passage over being on a coin any day. She had been agitating for equal rights for women since at least 1848. (Though she was pretty hands-off on the topic of abortion.) The women’s rights movement in America is now nearly 177 years old. Only some of its aims have been realized, and plenty of them remain under threat. There is a substantial faction in this country that seems to want to women back operating spinning wheels and butter churns. And 200 year old ideas continue to be regarded as unacceptably radical.

For a time in the ’70s, it seemed like Susan B. Anthony seemed to become the poster gal for feminism, trying to retrofit the women’s movement to be more like other movements that rallied around a single leader (e.g. Martin Luther King and Civil Rights). In reality, there were many who could lay equal claim, including my relative (and Anthony’s partner in activism) Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage (mother-in-law of L. Frank Baum), Lucretia Mott, Margaret Fuller, Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, Presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull, and many others. Like many in the movement, Anthony was raised as a Quaker, with some Unitarian influence, and was deeply involved in related causes, such as Abolitionism and Temperance.

It is said that as they grew older, Stanton became more radical and Anthony more conservative. Anthony became involved with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, for example, whereas, Stanton published The Women’s Bible, a deconstruction of the Christian Bible attacking women’s subservience to men in its pages. On the other hand, Anthony remained an opponent of the institution of marriage throughout her life; whereas Elizabeth Cady was contentedly married to Henry Brewster Stanton and the mother of seven children. (More on Stanton and the work she and Anthony did together here).

These days, attaining equal rights for women seems to be a steeper climb than at any time since, oh, 1919, when they attained the right to vote. How many centuries more?