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^ 61 The great fact of woman-hood is over and under all the incidents of life—as manhood is over and above all the incidents of his life— Isn’t it sickening that these old flimsey objections are thrust before us today—just as they were a half century ago when our claim was first made Sincerely Yours U Susan B. Anthony Enclosed is the last Republican Convention’s W.S. plank—I do hope they will re-affirm it—2 S. B. A— Y Transcript in unknown hand, AF 26(1), Anthony Family Collection, CSmH. 1. Mary McHenry Keith (1855–1947) grew up in San Francisco,graduated from the University of California, and became the first woman to graduate from the Hastings College of Law. In 1883, she married the artist William Keith and made her home in Berkeley. From there, she emerged as a hardworking and thoughtful advocate of woman suffrage as well as a donor to the state’s campaigns. She remained active for decades to come. (Guide to the Keith-McHenry-Pond Family Papers, C-B 595, CU-BANC; Noel Wise, “An Uncommon Journey: Reflections on the Life of Mary McHenry Keith,” 2002, Women’s Legal History Biography Project, Law School, Stanford University, on-line.) 2. Enclosure missing. SBA may have sent the plank from the California Republican platform of 1894: “Believing that taxation without representation is against the principles of the Government, we favor the extension of the right of suffrage to all citizens of the United States, both men and women.” (San Francisco Call, 3 May 1896.) ••••••••• 20 • SBA to ECS [San Francisco, April? 1896]1 You say “women must be emancipated from their superstitions before enfranchisement will be of any benefit,” and I say just the reverse, that women must be enfranchised before they can be emancipated from their superstitions. Women would be no more superstitious today than men, if they had been men’s political and business equals and gone outside the four walls of home and the other four of the church into the great world, and come in contact with and discussed men and measures on the plane of this mundane sphere, instead of living in the air with Jesus and the angels. So you will have to keep pegging away, saying, “Get rid of religious bigotry 20 march 1896 62 & april 1896 and then get political rights”; while I shall keep pegging away, saying, “Get political rights first and religious bigotry will melt like dew before the morning sun”; and each will continue still to believe in and defend the other. Now, especially in this California campaign, I shall no more thrust into the discussions the question of the Bible than the manufacture of wine. What I want is for the men to vote “yes” on the suffrage amendment, and I don’t ask whether they make wine on the ranches in California or believe Christ made it at the wedding feast.2 I have your grand addresses before Congress and enclose one in nearly every letter I write. I have scattered all your “celebration” speeches that I had,3 but I shall not circulate your “Bible”literature a particle more than Frances Willard’s prohibition literature . So don’t tell Mrs. Colby or anybody else to load me down with Bible, social purity, temperance, or any other arguments under the sun but just those for woman’s right to have her opinion counted at the ballot-box. I have been pleading with Miss Willard for the last three months to withdraw her threatened W.C.T.U. invasion of California this year, and at last she has done it; now,for heaven’s sake,don’t you propose a “Bible invasion .” It is not because I hate religious bigotry less than you do, or because I love prohibition less than Frances Willard does, but because I consider suffrage more important just now. Y Anthony, 2:857. 1. Ida Harper offered no date for this letter except the obvious, that it was written during the California campaign. The text refers to the decision made by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union to move its annual meeting out of California . That decision was made on 24 March 1896 and communicated immediately to San Francisco. See Frances E. Willard to Lillian Stevens, 24 March 1896, and Sarah B. Cooper to F. E. Willard, 25 March 1896, IEWT, from Temperance and Prohibition Papers. 2. John 2:1–10. 3. For the speech ECS...

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