Henrietta Hay's Column

Talk about the odd couple. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony invented the term.

Stanton was born to wealth, and received the best education available to women in 1830. While she staying home and producing and raising seven children, she became a pioneer in the women's suffrage movement. In 1948 she convened first women's rights convention and wrote the Seneca Falls Declaration which said in part, "We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights..." And -- horrors -- it claimed for women the right to vote.

Susan B. Anthony, also a passionate believer in the rights of women was also well educated for her day, As a Quaker she grew up in a culture that permitted women to express themselves freely. She never married and spent her life traveling and speaking for women's causes.

In 1851 these two firebrands met and the world was never the same again. Their collaboration evolved into one of the most productive working partnerships in U. S. history. Stanton was the leading voice and philosopher of the women's rights and suffrage movements, and Anthony was the powerhouse who commandeered the women who struggled to win the vote for American women. Stanton wrote the words at home. Anthony traveled across the country and spoke them.

Stanton wrote, "If there is one part of my life which gives me more intense satisfaction than another, it is my friendship of more than forty years standing with Susan B. Anthony... Emerson says, 'It is better to be a thorn in the side of your friend than his echo.' If this adds weight and stability to friendship, then ours will endure forever, for we have indeed been thorns in the side of each other... I have had no peace for forty years, since the day we started together on the suffrage expedition in search of woman's place in the National Constitution."

They both lived past their mid-eighties, but they did not live to see their cause become a reality. Anthony died in 1906, saying, "Failure is impossible." Fourteen more years of ceaseless agitation would be necessary before the 19th Amendment finally gave American women the vote on August 26, 1920.

Last month PBS presented a fine documentary called "Not for Ourselves Alone," which chronicled the long partnership between Stanton and Anthony and what it meant to our country.

I wonder how many of the women who are mayors and county commissioners and governors and state legislators and congresswomen and eventually presidents stop now and then in their busy days to remember the courage of those two women whose lifelong struggle helped make their positions possible today.

Now nearly a hundred years after their deaths, feminism is still struggling, but very much alive in America. In many parts of the world, however, the battle for equal rights for women is being fought over and over. Diane Carman, writing in the Denver Post, told of a group of Ugandan students studying at La Roche College in Pittsburgh.

Uganda is a very old country, with a bitter history of bloodshed. It has been a Republic only since 1994, but it seems that the Ugandans catch on faster than we did. They started out with universal suffrage. It took us nearly 150 years. Carman writes, "..at the urging of Ugandan women impatient for change, the Yoweri Museveni government decided that the country could not afford to waste all that untapped intellectual potential. It was needed not only for the future of the young nation, but for the development of the social structure."

Faculty members at La Roche note the contrast between the powerful convictions and fervor for change of these Ugandan students and the political apathy on our American college campuses today.

Young American women all too often take their opportunities for granted. We need to remember and honor the long hard struggle waged by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and all the those who followed. These young Ugandan women remind us once again that women worldwide are still fighting for their personal and political freedom.

Just look at what the odd couple started.