The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: An Awful Hush, 1895 to 1906

Editorial Practice

Principles of selection This volume selects less than ten percent of the documents available for the period of time from December 1895 to March 1906.Documents are printed in their entirety with two exceptions: entries from diaries are selected from the larger document; ecs’s and sba’s contributions to meetings are occasionally excerpted from the fullest coverage available. The high cost of producing and publishing historical editions creates an editorial imperative to bulldoze most of the trees while leaving an attractive and useful forest in place. The selection of documents to include in each volume often boils down to arbitrary choices between equally valuable items. There are, however, guidelines. Selection is governed first by the mission to document the careers of the two co-workers. Drawn from the papers of two people, the selections must next represent differences in the documentation of each one. Although writings by ecs and sba have priority , incoming mail is included if it documents the other voice in longstanding friendships with ecs or sba or supplies unusual evidence about their lives. The dominant stories evident in the documents of any year or era are also retained. The inclusion of discussions in which people other than ecs and sba participate reflects the editors’conviction that in the battle of ideas waged by these women, exchanges with opponents and allies give critical evidence about political style, intellectual influences, and differences of opinion that the principals might otherwise have failed to mention. A considerable “selection” of documents for the years of this volume occurred long before the editors began their work.Even before her death in 1902, letters written by ecs are in very short supply. Ecs is heard primarily in her public voice as a writer.The papers of sba are much fuller,but diaries are again missing. None for 1902 and 1905 are known. • Editorial Practice & xxxiii Arrangement Documents are presented in chronological order according to the date of authorship, oral delivery, or publication of the original text. Documents dated only by month appear at the start of the month unless the context in surrounding documents dictates later placement. Documents that cover a period of time, such as diaries, are placed at the date of the earliest entry, and the longer text is interrupted for the placement of other documents that fall within the same period of time. If a diary entry appears on the same date as another document, it is assumed that the entry was written at day’s end. When two or more documents possess the same date, ecs and sba authorship takes precedence over incoming mail, and sba’s papers appear before those of ecs unless the context dictates otherwise. Selection of text Most documents in this edition survive in a single version. When choices were required, original manuscripts took precedence over later copies, and the recipient’s copy of correspondence was used. The newspaper to which sba or ecs submitted a text took precedence over newspapers that reprinted it. When letters survive only in transcripts made by editors and biographers , the earliest transcript was used as the source text. Typescripts by Harriot Stanton Blatch and Theodore Stanton took precedence over their published texts; considerable rewriting occurred between the two. For the text of meetings and other oral events, the official report, or in its absence,the most comprehensive coverage,is the primary source text.If reports differ widely, composite reports were created. Additions to or substitutions from a second source are set off by angle brackets. The sources are separated by a semicolon in the endnote. Format Some features of the documents have been standardized when set into print. The indentation of existing paragraphs was consistently set. The dateline of each letter appears as the first line of text,flush to the right marxxxiv & editorial practice gin,regardless of its placement in the original.The salutation of letters was printed on one line, flush left. Extra space in the dateline or salutation indicates the author’s line break.The complimentary close of letters was run into the text itself, regardless of how the author laid it out, and signatures were placed at the right margin beneath the text. The dash is uniformly rendered even though the lengths vary in the originals. Each document is introduced by an editorial heading or title that connects the document to ecs or sba. Following the text, an unnumbered endnote describes the physical...