Revolution, The, prospectus for Vol. V., No. 1.
A Presentation Copy,
Together With A Rare Joint Photo With
Editor Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Anthony, Susan B. and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Prospectus for The Revolution. Vol. V, No. 1. New York: [Susan B. Anthony], Thursday January 6, 1870.
8vo.; a fragile sheet of newsprint, text on recto and verso; edges with a few tiny nicks, nearly invisible to the naked eye; else fine. Housed, together with publisher’s band signed by Susan B. Anthony and an original photograph of Anthony with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First, and surely the only, printing of the 1870 prospectus for Anthony’s scarce and fragile women’s rights newspaper. Loosely laid on top of this copy is a pale blue paper publisher’s band which carries a note entirely in Anthony’s hand: with kind regards of Susan B. Anthony July 14, 1874.
This two-page prospectus of The Revolution, predating the first issue of the year, devotes considerable space to marketing: the first page prints a lengthy philosophical rationale (“..We make a broad demand for the Enfranchisement of Women, as the only way by which all her just rights can be permanently secured...By discussing, as we shall, all leading questions of political and social importance, we hope to educate women for an intelligent judgement upon public affairs, and for a faithful expression of that judgement at the polls...”) and urges potential subscribers and advertisers to contact Susan B. Anthony at 49 East 23rd Street, New York; the second page consists entirely of advertisements, including several placed by insurance firms announcing “Married Women’s Policies” and others aimed at female consumers.
In retrospect, this zeal for self-promotion is not surprising: by January 1870 the paper was singing its financial swan song. The Revolution’s high price ($3.00 per year) and its lack of commercial success, together with Anthony’s refusal on political grounds to pay its taxes, led to its demise. The Revolution was published as a feminist paper under Anthony’s auspices for only three short years; four months after this prospectus appeared, she was forced by creditors to relinquish ownership. On May 22, 1870, the proprietorship of The Revolution passed from Anthony’s hands to Laura Curtis Ballard and Theodore Tilton, who turned it into a literary and society journal. [n.b.: In 1872, the feminist movement was rocked when Tilton’s wife Elizabeth, poetry editor for the new Revolution, made headlines when her affair with Henry Ward Beecher was exposed by free love advocate Victoria Woodhull in her radical newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly.]
Anthony’s heart was nearly broken by The Revolution’s failure. “...My paper must not, shall not, go down,” she insisted to her cousin just weeks before the paper’s transfer (Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist, by Kathleen Barry, New York: NYU Press, 1988, pp. 221-22). But go down it did, despite Anthony’s desperate fundraising drives among her family and friends and her deeply ingrained belief that “the paper [was] one of her prime achievements” (AR, 29). Anthony ultimately paid off the Revolution’s debt of $10,000 throughout the next decade by turning over earnings from her speaking engagements.
The paper’s failure left Anthony discouraged, but not destroyed: “I am not complaining,” she remarked, “for mine is the fate of almost every originator, pioneer, who has ever opened up the way. I have the joy of knowing that I showed the thing possible—to publish a live out-and-out woman’s paper; taught other women to invest, and to enter in and reap when I had sown—sown in faith too, such as no canting priest or echoing follower ever dreamed of” (Barry, 223). That The Revolution defined Anthony’s political consciousness is clear; in 1873, one year before her presentation of this issue, Anthony invoked the paper and its legacy during a fiery speech to the judge who presided over her arrest for voting as a woman:
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