Susan B. Anthony and Helen Barrett Montgomery: an intergenerational feminist partnership: the name of Susan B. Anthony is synonymous with the struggle for women's suffrage in America

Baptist History and Heritage, Summer-Fall, 2005 by Kendal P. Mobley

She worked tirelessly for numerous reform causes, but above all, she earned a place in American history as one of the foremost advocates of women's rights in her generation. Helen Barrett Montgomery (1861-1934) was equally committed to social reform, yet her name is hardly mentioned today, especially in feminist circles. Among those who do remember her, she is identified with the cause of missions and especially with the ecumenical woman's missionary movement, to which she devoted the greater portion of her adult life.

Conventional thinking about women's history would rarely associate two women whose lives seem to have had such different trajectories. Anthony was a Quaker who became a Unitarian; Montgomery was a middle-of-the-road Baptist. Anthony was a suffrage radical; Montgomery regarded the suffrage label with ambivalence. Nevertheless, for more than a decade, Anthony and Montgomery worked side by side as leaders of the women's movement in Rochester, New York. Even as they worked together and supported the same causes, the strategies they used and the rhetoric they employed reflected their different generations and priorities. Yet Anthony and Montgomery were able to forge an effective partnership because their aims were fundamentally the same. They both wanted to empower women for political engagement as women and as citizens, and they wanted to improve opportunities for women in education. (1)

Anthony and Montgomery: Clubwomen and Feminists

Apparently, Anthony and Montgomery became acquainted through the women's clubs of Rochester. Montgomery made a strong impression on Anthony and the other first-generation feminist leaders, and they turned to her to lead a key new organization--the Women's Educational and Industrial Union (WEIU). Montgomery's presidency of the WEIU (1893-1911) enabled her to exert broad influence in the city's social and political affairs.

Like the WEIUs in Boston, Buffalo, and other cities, the Rochester WEIU was instrumental in redirecting the domestic feminism of the women's literary clubs from their cultural focus to the political and social reform emphasis of "municipal housekeeping." (2) The members of the board were some of the most prominent women in Rochester. Most of them were not radicals. It would have been impossible for Anthony to unite them around the cause of suffrage; but with Anthony's support and under Montgomery's leadership, they built one of the most influential Progressive Era organizations in the city.

Sharing the Platform with Susan B. Anthony

On November 20, 1896, Montgomery spoke at a reception in honor of Anthony. At the head table, sponsored by the Rochester Political Equality dub, Montgomery sat with Anthony, the Rev. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, Mariana W. Chapman, president of the State Suffrage Association, and other notable feminists. The event came at the conclusion of the state suffrage convention, which met in Rochester that year.

Montgomery spoke briefly on "Woman Suffrage in the Home," and her remarks offered clear insight into her views on suffrage and the woman's sphere. She noted that the misperception of most women "that those who are fighting for political equality are strong minded universally" was the movement's chief impediment. Against this misconception, she asserted: "Our conventions are made up of home women, and this movement is a woman's movement. One effect of the movement will be to bring the state into the home, and then again the home into the state." Montgomery's feminism was based upon the assumption, shared by many people of her day, that men and women were endowed with different but complementary physical, intellectual and emotional capabilities. While she agreed that a woman's first duty was to her home and family, she believed that it was a mistake to segregate the woman's sphere completely from the public world. "We need the influence and assistance [of the home] in our state affairs," she asserted. (3) What Montgomery articulated was domestic feminism. (4) She believed there was a difference between women's work and men's work, but she also believed there was women's work to be done outside the home. For the sake of home and family, the state needed the maternal gifts and skills that only women had to offer.

In 1898, Montgomery once again shared the platform with Anthony at the dedication of a new building for the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) in Rochester. The YWCA movement began in Boston in 1866 and rapidly spread nationwide. Its goal was to protect and promote "virtuous womanhood" among country girls moving to the city--an evangelical response to the effects of industrialism and urbanization on young women who worked away from home. (5) The YWCA attempted to provide a wholesome, evangelical, homelike atmosphere where young, single women could find fellowship, recreation, self-cultivation, culture, and support.

Anthony used the occasion of the YWCA building dedication to give a rousing suffrage address. In her view, the essential problem for women was an absence of political power. "Women have not a single power to make the laws that govern these conditions to prevent these miseries among humanity," she said. She believed that women would purify politics. If women could vote, she said, they would "give us a clean, honest administration." In her view, the strategy of the YWCA was palliative but not remedial. The women of the YWCA were "busy repairing damages instead of going to the bottom and changing the social conditions that make the damages." Turning to the assembled clergy who shared the platform with her, she insisted that they should support women's suffrage because women were their best allies. Women's suffrage would shift the balance of power in their favor and give them a political advantage over the "saloon men" who helped create the social conditions that institutions like the YWCA sought to mitigate. (6)