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^ 151 Y Lexington Leader, 4 July 1897, Scrapbook 1876–1903, SBA Papers, DLC. 1. Margaret Cartwell Bryan Shelby (c. 1862–1898) was regent of the Bryan Station Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Lexington, Kentucky . The Bryan and Lexington chapters joined forces to edit a special Fourth of July edition of the Lexington Leader. SBA also sent a contribution. (American Monthly Magazine 15 [July 1899]: 60–61; Lexington Leader,23 March 1898; Morning Herald, 24 March 1898; Film, 37:81; with the assistance of Nyota Hawkins.) 2. About this motto, see note above at June 1897. 3. Dan. 5:27. 4. ECS made the same contrast in her article “Jails and Jubilees,” 12 May 1887, Film, 25:447–48, while England celebrated the Jubilee of Queen Victoria’s reign. ••••••••• 63 • Speech by SBA at the Annual Meeting of the Berkshire County Historical and Scientific Society, Adams, Massachusetts Editorial note: The Berkshire Scientific and Historical Society convened its annual meeting at the pavilion in Forest Park on 29 July 1897 in the afternoon. Torrential rains stopped that morning but not before washing out tracks and roads and blocking the way for some of SBA’s hosts.An audience of six to eight hundred people was made up of townspeople ; journalists from western Massachusetts and Rochester; scores of members of the Anthony and Read families, scheduled for a reunion on the next day; leaders of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association , in town for meetings of the Business Committee; and members of the historical society. As told in this speech, SBA’s recollections of her childhood in Adams echo stories Ida Harper had already incorporated into the first chapter of her as yet unpublished Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony. On 19 March 1897, SBA listened to Harper read aloud first drafts of five chapters that treated her first thirty years. “I told her,” SBA wrote at the time, “if she could make so pretty a story out of nothing, I didn’t know what she would be able to do when she came down to the actual working years of my life.”On this occasion SBA gave the storytelling a try herself. (SBA diary, 29 July—2 August 1897, and SBA to Rachel G. F. Avery, 23 March 1897, Film, 36:247ff, 973–80; Anthony, 1:1–15.) [29 July 1897] Miss Anthony said:— “Good friends, one part of my work a few years ago was in association with Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Mrs. Matilda Joslyn Gage gathering 30 june 1897 152 & up the stories of the work of women, especially of the women of this country and the women of this age and putting them on record in a book entitled ‘The History of Woman Suffrage.’ This is bound in three huge volumes, of nearly 1000 pages each. I brought those three volumes to Adams for the express purpose of presenting them to the Berkshire County Historical society,and I intended to have those volumes on this table,so that all could have seen the large books which it took to record the works of the women of this country, from the foundation of this government in their efforts to secure liberty. But the clerk of the weather here in Adams has behaved so terrifically that, I assure you, when it stopped raining this morning and we could get out of doors and into the carriage to come here, I forgot everything under the sun but that it did not rain, and so the books are not here. But, in imagination, I want you to see those three huge volumes of the history of this Woman Suffrage movement, and I present these to your acting president, Mr. Whipple, 1 that they may be placed in the historical library of Berkshire county, for each and every one of you to call there and obtain the reading of them and to learn what all of the women of this country have done as well as the women who have the honor of having been born in this county.” (Accepted by vice-President Whipple.) Miss Anthony continued. “It seems to me, good friends, that I have said a great deal all the way through and that there is really nothing more. 2 I was but six years old when my father moved to Battenville, 3 but my sister older and the one a little younger 4 used to go to school,over at Bowens’Corners, out beyond the Walker...

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