LETTER: Typed letter signed to "My Dear Friend" (Anna Davis Hallowell), January 21, 1904.
Anthony, Susan B. Typed Letter Signed “Susan B. Anthony” to “My dear friend” [Anna Davis Hallowell]. Rochester, New York. 01/21/1904; two 8 ½ x 11-inch leaves “National American Woman Suffrage Association” stationery; rectos only; mild spots of discoloration; creased where folded from mail.
Anthony writes to Anna Davis Hallowell, following the death of Hallowell’s husband, “I have thought much of you and your home since your good husband left you,” Anthony writes. “It was beautiful that he could go so suddenly and without suffering, if he must go…”
Hallowell (1831-1905) was a prominent voice in woman’s education reform, advocating schooling in a number of capacities, from educating the young to the sick, the prisoners to the poor, ultimately believing that the “fundamental solution to poverty lay in the education of the city’s children.” The Philadelphia-born Hallowell served on a number of state boards—including the first woman to be a member of the Board of Public Education—and worked independently to establish a network of free kindergartens in poor neighborhoods. (Disbrow, Donald W. Notable American Women. 122-23. )
Anthony’s letter hints at the pair’s closeness, as she reminisces on her long friendship with Hallowell (“I remember my Sunday night teas at your house and at his brother’s house, with a great deal of pleasure…”).
As her letter goes on, Anthony addresses business, namely obtaining a photo of Lucretia Mott, Hallowell’s maternal grandmother:
Now I have a woman artist in New York who has made the three faces of the martyred presidents Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley and she wants to make a similar three faces of the originators of the leading persons of the woman suffrage movement. I want the three should be [sic] Lucretia Mott, Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony, but I can’t find any side view of Lucretia Mott. Now, have you such a thing in existence? I am sending her the picture that is in the History. It is beautiful. Maybe she can make one from that.
On other photo options, Anthony writes, “I have a good side view of myself, and a tolerably good one of Mrs. Stanton, but Mrs. Stanton never did take a good signed picture… I am going as soon as there is a pleasant day, to try again to sit for a picture.”
She ends with a postscript: “The lady will return the picture if you have one, and it shan’t be hurt.”
The identity of this original female artist is unclear: a group portrait sculpture would eventually be made these three pioneers of women’s suffrage, but it would come years later, in 1920, by the artist Adelaide Johnson (who was neither from New York nor the artist of any such presidential art triptych). Johnson, who began to work on the busts of the three suffragettes as early as in the 1890s, displayed early incarnations of the busts at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893; her final piece of the women, commissioned by the National Women’s Party, is today housed in the United States Capitol Building, the only monument devoted to the women’s rights movement.
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