Susan B. Anthony Believes That Fundraising Efforts For the National Woman Suffrage Association and the First International Council of Women Will Bear Fruit

In May 1869, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), a woman-led organization devoted to obtaining a federal woman suffrage amendment. During the 1870s and 1880s, it was mainly Anthony who sustained NWSA. She was convinced that her primary task was to educate society – legislators, the male electorate, and all women – to an understanding of the crucial importance of the ballot. She educated the public through her cross-country lecture tours, her relationship with the press, her lobbying of legislators, speeches in Congress, state suffrage campaigns, and her guidance of suffragists nationwide.

During the early-mid 1880s, Stanton and Anthony once again worked in concert to produce the first three volumes of the “History of Woman Suffrage”, the story of the movement they created. In 1882 and again in 1886, Stanton traveled to England and Europe to visit two of her children and to investigate the possibility of an international suffrage movement. When Anthony joined her in 1883, they agreed to organize an international conference of women in 1888 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention that had kicked off the women’s suffrage movement. The International Council of Women, which gathered in Washington in March 1888, proved to be the largest women’s convention of its time. It stimulated cooperation among U.S. and foreign women reformers, thus unifying those advancing the suffrage cause in many countries.

But getting funding for the Council was a challenge, so in February 1888, a month before it would convene, Anthony wrote to some of her some reliable contributors asking for money. One of these, Isabella Challacombe Hedenberg of Chicago, was a long-time prominent member of the NWSA, whose name appears often in the proceedings of the national conventions. Her husband was a real estate tycoon who sympathized with the cause in which his wife was engaged. In the early 1890s he would finance NWSA campaigns and make direct appeals for support to labor leaders like Samuel Gompers. In response to Anthony’s letter, Isabella wrote with an idea for aiding the organization obtain and sustain financial security, both for the Council and beyond. Anthony, in this letter, approved, but she placed the onus on Hedenberg to get the ball rolling; and knowing the NWSA had friends in Congress, Anthony suggested to Hedenberg that she contact them to raise funds for the venture.

Autograph letter signed, on her National Woman Suffrage Association letterhead, Washington, February 18, 1888. “I have been thinking of your proposal of yesterday ensuring a regular income to the National W.S.A. to enable it to carry forward its work south as well as north – and if you will just start the ball, it will soon get to be a large one. You might get some of the rich M.C.s & Senators to pledge the sum. Now, my dear, it is a splendid thing for you to try to make up, and the one who has the thought come to her is the very one to succeed in its practice.” She adds, “P.S. Wednesday p.m. is my day to be home, and I hope you’ll be able to report good progress there.”

Isabella Hedenberg died in 1893, and Anthony eulogized her at that year’s NWSA convention, saying “Isabella Hedenberg, whose genial face and generous hand we miss here today”.