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The heroic careers of three famous champions of women's rights

By Helen Keller

I HOLD in my heart the memory of three loving and courageous women -- women who possessed a gracious presence, unusual intelligence and great eloquence. They listened to the "voices" in their youth, like Joan of Arc, and their demands kept Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone and Elizabeth Cady Stanton young and beautiful even into old age.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1815, and lived to see the century out. Her father was a Supreme Court Judge. At the age of twenty-five she married Mr. Henry Brewster Stanton, a descendant of the Puritan elder. She was not dazzled by this distinction, nor was she much impressed by Puritanism. But Mr. Stanton was a leading abolitionist, and was sent as a delegate to the World's Anti-slavery Convention which met in London in 1840.

Elizabeth was a girl of high spirit, eager to see the world. She married on Friday (the word "obey" was omitted from the ceremony), and on Monday she sailed for England. On this eventful journey she met Lucretia Mott, and shared with her the humiliation of being excluded from the Anti-slavery Convention floor on account of her sex -- an act of tactlessness to which we probably owe the Anglo-American movement for woman's political equality.

A convention called by Mrs. Stanton and Lucretia Mott in Seneca Falls, 1848, placed her name on the revolutionary roll-call. Not long afterwards she joined Susan B. Anthony and a few kindred spirits to form the first women's rights organization in this country. This was the beginning of the lifelong struggle of these women against repressive laws and traditions affecting women.

Their "wants" were so numerous, just to name them would fill my space! I will mention a few of them. They wanted bloomers, they wanted divorce, they wanted the franchise, they wanted equal pay, they wanted to enter the professions on equal terms with men, they wanted education. They stopped at nothing until the Civil War came along and put an end to their "unseemly practice of public lectures" throughout the country.

Susan B. Anthony was born in South Adams, Mass. Her environment moulded her for the destiny she was to fulfill. She had experience as a teacher and a factory worker. The hard life her mother and neighbors lived kindled in her the flame of the crusader.

She became interested in temperance work. To her surprise and indignation she was denied admission to a meeting of temperance workers because she was a woman.

She was present at the convention called by Mrs. Stanton and Lucretia Mott at Seneca Falls. Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony seem to have been created for each other, and certainly they were one in every crisis of their heroic lives. Miss Anthony also met Lucy Stone at the Seneca Falls convention for the first time.

Lucy Stone was born in 1818, on a picturesque, rocky farm near West Brookfield, Mass.

Her mother, a farmer's wife, had milked eight cows the night before Lucy was born, as a sudden shower had obliged all the men of the family to rush to the fields and save the hay. When she was told the sex of the new baby (the eighth of nine children), the mother immediately cried, "Oh, dear. I am so sorry it's a girl. A woman's life is so hard!" I like to think that the baby born of that weary, sad mother was destined to make life less hard for all the generations of women that were to follow.

The world upon which Lucy's bright eyes opened was very different from the world of our day. Women were not admitted to the colleges. No free high school for girls existed. It was generally believed that a woman should receive only enough instruction to enable her to read the Psalms and to keep her household accounts, and that any attempt to give her more knowledge would ruin her as a wife and mother.

Public speaking for women was taboo. Even to write for publication vas considered unwomanly. Law, religion and custom affirmed the inferiority of woman.

Lucy Stone was the first married woman in America to keep her own lame. She was also the first woman to receive a college degree. She converted Susan B. Anthony and Julia Ward Howe to the Suffragists' Cause. She was the founder and editor of "The Woman's Journal" in Boston, which was the principal woman suffrage newspaper of the United States for nearly half a century. During heir heroic careers these three women champions of women's rights revealed the qualities of steadfastness, independent thinking and large sympathy.

We of today can have little conception of the difficulties these women encountered, or the brutal prejudice hat pursued them ceaselessly. They were accused of being infidels and atheists! They were charged with being free lovers! It was asserted and venerated that they were bent upon undermining the sacredness of the institution of marriage, breaking up the family and destroying the home! Yet the cause for which those women were slandered is triumphant today.