Gallery,
San Marino, California)

Carrie Chapman Catt 289
(Courtesy Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College,
Northampton, Massachusetts)

Quotation in the handwriting of Susan B. Anthony 297

Susan B. Anthony at the age of eighty-five 301
(From a photograph by J. E. Hale)

Susan B. Anthony, 1905 309
(From a photograph by Ellis)

QUAKER HERITAGE

"If Sally Ann knows more about weaving than Elijah," reasoned
eleven-year-old Susan with her father, "then why don't you make her
overseer?"

"It would never do," replied Daniel Anthony as a matter of course. "It
would never do to have a woman overseer in the mill."

This answer did not satisfy Susan and she often thought about it. To
enter the mill, to stand quietly and look about, was the best kind of
entertainment, for she was fascinated by the whir of the looms, by the
nimble fingers of the weavers, and by the general air of efficiency.
Admiringly she watched Sally Ann Hyatt, the tall capable weaver from
Vermont. When the yarn on the beam was tangled or there was something
wrong with the machinery, Elijah, the overseer, always called out to
Sally Ann, "I'll tend your loom, if you'll look after this." Sally Ann
never failed to locate the trouble or to untangle the yarn. Yet she
was never made overseer, and this continued to puzzle Susan.[1]

The manufacture of cotton was a new industry, developing with great
promise in the United States, when Susan B. Anthony was born on
February 15, 1820, in the wide valley at the foot of Mt. Greylock,
near Adams, Massachusetts. Enterprising young men like her father,
Daniel Anthony, saw a potential cotton mill by the side of every
rushing brook, and young women, eager to earn the first money they
could call their own, were leaving the farms, for a few months at
least, to work in the mills. Cotton cloth was the new sensation and
the demand for it was steadily growing. Brides were proud to display a
few cotton sheets instead of commonplace homespun linen.

When Susan was two years old, her father built a cotton factory of
twenty-six looms beside the brook which ran through Grandfather Read's
meadow, hauling the cotton forty miles by wagon from Troy, New York.
The millworkers, most of them young girls from Vermont, boarded, as
was the custom, in the home of the millowner; S