Boardinghouse Guests: Susan B. Anthony II
Many of us have seen her on the dollar coin, Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906), the women’s rights activist who played a pivotal role in the women’s suffrage movement. Written in Julia Wolfe’s Old Kentucky Home guest register on June 21, 1943 is Susan B. Anthony II of Lanham, MD, with a note to forward mail to the Mountain View Inn, Gatlinburg, TN. She is not the woman on the coin. In 1943 at age 27, she was described as “a tall well-built brunette, well-tanned from tending a Victory Garden.” By this time, she had gained a reputation as an active feminist, and a champion of causes such as racial justice and freedom from poverty. Her father Luther Burt Anthony was the son of Susan B. Anthony’s younger brother Jacob Merritt Anthony making her the namesake and grandniece of the illustrious suffragist leader. Susan Brownell Anthony II was born in Easton, Pennsylvania, on July 26, 1916 ten years after her great-aunt had died. She attended the University of Rochester and received a BA in 1938. In 1939 she became engaged to William Dodd, Jr. son of the former ambassador to Berlin who probably had met Thomas Wolfe in Berlin. In 1941 Susan Anthony received an MA from American University in Washington, DC.
Susan B. Anthony II became one of the first woman journalists for the Washington Star newspaper from about 1942 to 1943. She may have been taking a summer vacation in the mountains for her health, with a brief stop at Julia Wolfe’s house, before launching a nationwide tour for her first book in August Out of the Kitchen-Into the War published by Stephen Day Press in 1943. It would be described as a shocking commentary on the state of the feminist movement in the United States. Based largely upon interviews she conducted as a news reporter, the book advocates equal wages and equal work for woman in support of the country in wartime.
Susan Anthony went on write seven more books, including her own fascinating story in The Ghost in My Life published by Chosen Books in 1971. She chronicled the omnipresence of Susan B. Anthony in her own life. Her publisher excitedly prefaced it with the note that it was written by “a thrice-divorced adulteress.” She wrote about becoming an alcoholic before she got out of college, infidelity, and her three failed marriages. In 1946 she hosted a radio program, “This Woman’s World,” aired over New York station WMCA five times a week. It was canceled after nine months, declared “too controversial to be commercially feasible” with only one sponsor. By the early 1950s her involvement with liberal organizations led to a subpoena from the U. S. Justice Department to testify before a Congressional committee investigating communism. To escape the great Red Scare, she briefly became a British citizen.
For many years she was interested in spiritual issues. Anthony was baptized in the Catholic Church in 1961. She applied to become a nun. When this did not happen, she entered St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana, where she was again a controversial commentator on local radio. In 1965 she received a Ph.D. in theology, a rare honor for a woman at that time. She moved to Florida where from 1965 to 1969 served as assistant professor at Marymount College teaching theology. She continued to support women’s Christian organizations, and as a recovered alcoholic, the temperance movement, becoming a substance abuse counsellor at a Mental Health Center in Delray Beach. She died in Florida July 8, 1991.
Biographical Information:
James Hearne, Pennsylvania Center for the Book Fall 2001.
Henry Mitchell, “The Other Susan B. Anthony” The Washington Post 27 September 1978.
