National Citizen and The Ballot Box, The.
[Suffrage]. The Ballot Box, Vol. 2. No. 9 - Vol. 3. No. 1; and The National Citizen and Ballot Box, Volume 1, No. 1 - Vol. 3, No. 6. Toledo, Ohio; Syracuse, New York: S.L.C. Williams, Publisher; Matilda Joslyn Gage, Editor and Proprietor, December, 1877 - May, 1878 and May, 1878 - October, 1881.
Newspaper sheets 13-3/8 x 18-1/8 inches (disbound); occasional brown spot or faint inking, but very nice overall. Specially bound in brown quarter-morocco, worn.
Last five issues of The Ballot Box and a complete run of The National Citizen and Ballot Box (lacking two issues only, December, 1880 and June, 1881).
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in 1868 began printing The Revolution as a woman’s suffrage newspaper. It failed, and Anthony as publisher bore responsibility for the swamp of debts to which the fledgling publication had succumbed. Suffrage leaders recognized, however, that a newspaper of their own was of primary importance. Virtually all newspapers at the time looked askance at the movement and its activities. The American Woman’s Suffrage Association with Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell and Mary Livermore, however, succeeded where Stanton and Anthony had not. Their Woman’s Journal mixed lighter fare and addressed issues with more genteel tones and in Henry Blackwell the paper had a steady, committed financial backer.
The Ballot Box, published by the Toledo Woman Suffrage Association under Sarah Langdon Williams who had edited the woman’s department of the Toledo Blade, offered Stanton and Anthony another opportunity to create a voice for the NWSA. In 1878, after two years under Mrs. Williams, Matilda Joslyn Gage assumed editorship, moved the paper to Syracuse, New York, renamed the publication The National Citizen and Ballot Box, and in April printed the first issue with its masthead listing Stanton and Anthony as corresponding editors. The prospectus announces that the paper will be,
the recognized voice of the views of the National Woman Suffrage Association, and yet continue to be an independent paper speaking for itself. As the first process towards becoming well is to know you are ill, one of the principal aims of the National Citizen will continue to make those women discontented who are now content, — to waken them to self-respect, and a desire to use the talents they possess, — to educate their consciences a right, — to quicken their sense of duty, — to destroy morbid beliefs, and make them worthy of the life with which their creator has endowed them.
A weighty undertaking indeed.
The paper prints a wide variety of regular features: “Eminent Women of Ancient Times,” “Letter from Paris” (written by E.C. Stanton’s son Theodore), “Our Book Table,” “Drift of Thought,” as well as frequent contributions by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. More importantly The National Citizen reports on the NWSA and women’s rights activities in depth. National and state officers of the NWSA are listed; the text of petitions for passage of the 16th Amendment is provided with statistics on the number of petitions submitted, by state, the number of signatures, the names of those who gathered signatures; treasurer’s reports with the names of donors and the amount of donations are printed regularly; NWSA events, conventions, meetings and lectures are announced and reported with the names of delegates, the text of speeches, letters to the Convention(s); liberal quotes from newspapers throughout the country are printed reflecting on NWSA activities. As a source of raw data on the NWSA and on suffrage activities, it would be difficult to surpass. Even more noteworthy, however, is the role The National Citizen undertook in the publication of The History of Woman Suffrage. Stanton, Anthony, and Gage had undertaken the task of recording the birth of the movement and its gradual emergence as a force in American politics. The National Citizen and Ballot Box began to print Volume I in its September 1878 issue and continued
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