The Great Work of Your Life

by Stephen Cope

  Susan wrote extensively about “the New True Woman.” When she describes this “new being” her voice is electric with possibility: “The true woman will not be exponent of another, or allow another to be such for her. She will be her own individual self—do her own individual work—stand or fall by her own individual wisdom and strength … The old idea that man was made for himself and woman for him, that he is the oak, she the vine, he the head, she the heart, he the great conservator of wisdom principle, she of love, will be reverently laid aside with other long since exploded philosophies of the ignorant past.”

  Susan had a vision: Women will become acting subjects in their own destiny. This became her most fervently held personal and political manifesto. It was not just a vision for what might be in the future, but her blueprint for who she and her sisters in the struggle would be in the present. And it was in fact the very blueprint for who she would become.

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  By her late twenties, Susan B. Anthony had chosen her passion for social action over marriage as a vocation. She felt urgently called to act. She had begun her life of action by teaching, but the talented Anthony soon tired of teaching’s routines. She wasn’t bringing forth all that was within her, and she knew it. Teaching—as it was then practiced—was not a big enough palette for her capabilities. “I am tired of theory,” she said. “I want to hear how we must act to have a happier and more glorious world.”

  Act she did. By her midtwenties, Susan had become deeply involved in temperance-reform activities. She saw clearly the direct connection between drunkenness and the abuse of women. The routine wife beatings she observed in her small community—most of them associated with male drunkenness—infuriated her. She spoke out. She became involved in the Women’s Temperance Movement. And “Temperance” would be her first schooling in public action.

  As soon as she began her life of action, Susan B. Anthony was presented with a challenge: how to marshal all of her life energy in support of her calling. One thing was perfectly clear: In order to fulfill her dharma, she would have to master the art of public speaking, she would have to learn how to unleash her power in full view of halls of angry men and skeptical women. This was a daunting challenge. It was almost unheard of for women to speak in public. It was considered an act of defiance and an unseemly betrayal of their proper role. Even Anthony’s right to speak publicly was challenged by men at every turn. So for her to find her public-speaking voice she would have to summon every bit of determination and skill she could get her hands on. And she would have to overcome her considerable self-doubt.

  Susan B. Anthony’s path to her voice must have been thrilling to observe. She accomplished it through sheer guts and with many early failures. But several early successes pointed her in the right direction. One of her most dramatic early triumphs came in her relationship with the male-dominated temperance movement. In January 1852, Anthony attended a meeting called by the Sons of Temperance in Albany. She submitted her credentials along with the rest of the women, and took her place with them at the side of the hall, where it was understood that they (the women) were to remain silent—observing, and “learning from” the speeches of the men who dominated the organization.

  Susan would have none of this. She rose to speak—in clear defiance of protocol. She was told by the male moderator that “the sisters were not invited here to speak but to listen and learn.” She was enraged, and for the first time she allowed her fury to erupt publicly. She stormed out of the meeting, followed by a mob of sympathetic women. This was her first spontaneous protest action. Something inside had been liberated, and she would never be the same.

  Emboldened by her first public act of defiance, Anthony organized a protest meeting, to which she pointedly invited only women—and also (one of her secret weapons throughout her life) the press. At the press conference, she announced that the protesting women would form their own independent organization. “We are heartily sick and tired of the round of demeaning encomiums which Gentlemen Temperance lecturers are pleased to lavish upon our sex,” she exclaimed. And so, Susan B. Anthony’s first organization, The Women’s State Temperance Society, was born. Anthony did not stop there. She was on a roll: She immediately called a national Women’s Temperance convention.

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  Susan B. Anthony decided that she would not be content to be a “good enough” public speaker. She must be great. Nothing else would fulfill her dharma. She became boldly single-minded in her practice. And she took on a coach: her closest friend, Elizabeth Cady Stanton—a masterful writer and speaker in various reform movements.

  Stanton’s coaching turned out to be phenomenal. She suggested that Susan “dress loose, take a great deal of exercise, and be particular about your diet and sleep sound enough, the body has a great effect on the mind.” Cady might as well have been a yoga teacher, so much emphasis did she place on the body. Susan, still at times overcome by self-doubt, frequently tried to get Stanton herself to give the speeches she had written, but Stanton wisely refused: “I have no doubt a little practice will make you an admirable lecturer. I will go to work at once and write you the best lecture I can.” And she did. Henceforth, the two would be a team—and a force to be reckoned with wherever they showed up.

  A little practice will make you an admirable lecturer. Truer words were never spoken. Susan B. Anthony became a force of nature on the podium. She was Leontyne Price and Marian Anderson rolled into one. With her new skills giving her increasing self-confidence, she set about lecturing, organizing, petitioning, and raising money throughout New York. Suddenly, Susan B. Anthony was everywhere: She was speaking in churches, town halls, meeting rooms, individual homes. She was fast becoming that guided missile we spoke of earlier.

  We have a number of written observations of Anthony’s growth in her dharma. Clarina Howard Nichols, another women’s rights advocate, wrote to Susan, “It is most invigorating to watch the development of a woman in the work for humanity: first, anxious for the cause and depressed with a sense of her own inability; next, partial success of timid efforts creating a hope; next, a faith; and then the fruition of complete self-devotion. Such will be your history.” One could hardly have stated the progression more powerfully.

  As Susan gathered and focused her energy, her strategy became clearer. Her biographer, Kathleen Barry, describes her unique method succinctly: “Take a concrete issue, such as intemperance; analyze the problem, formulate a specific demand … then urge women to take practical, confrontational and effective action that logically followed from her analysis of the issue. She was determined not only to act on behalf of women, but to mobilize women to act for themselves.”

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  Susan’s work gained in power. And it inevitably brought her face-to-face with the full extent of male domination. Many men who felt committed to the status quo found her presence—and her power—to be infuriating. The more successful she was, the more she had to face men’s rage, and this routinely brought to her doorstep withering moments of public excoriation and every form of low personal attack.

  Here is a typical newspaper rampage against Susan’s work—and, really, her very existence. This article—one of hundreds of its ilk—specifically refers to Anthony’s “agitation” for women’s rights in marriage, and to a talk about the subject she gave one evening in Utica, New York. Keep in mind that the sentences come from a so-called “news story”—not an editorial—published the morning after her talk.

  “With a degree of impiety which was both startling and disgusting, this shrewish maiden counseled the numerous wives and mothers present to separate from their husbands whenever they became intemperate, and particularly not to allow the said husbands to add another child to the family [probably no married advocate of woman’s rights would have made this remark]. Think of such advice given in public by one who claims to be a maiden lady.”

  As part of her dharma training, Susan learned to toughen herself to these outbursts.
She became famous for standing her ground with equanimity. There are dozens of fantastic stories of her facing down apoplectic men in public situations—usually winning the day with her calm, her sense of humor, and her impressive composure under impossible circumstances. Angry men would simply come unglued in her presence.

  Susan’s diaries revealed the secret to her composure: She had early on learned not to take any of these public excoriations personally. She understood that they were not about her in any personal sense, but about social and economic issues far larger than herself. As she said, “The mob represents more than itself; it evidences that general masculine opinion of woman, which condensed into law forges the chains which enslave her.”

  Susan began to believe, as she often said, that in order to be effective, “The important thing is to forget self.” Forget self. Says Barry, “This was the real philosophy behind her asceticism and the force that propelled her through her campaigns. She cared little about her own comforts, nor was she concerned with gaining personal rewards for her work. Success was for the cause—for womankind—not for herself.” For the rest of her life, she would return again and again to this principle. “Forgetting self” would become one of her principal mantras. She knew that “the work” had energy and a power of its own, and was only undermined by any hint of self-aggrandizement.

  Everything she did—what she wore, how she lived—now came into line with this principle. Forget self. She kept her physical needs very simple, which gave her more energy for her work. She dressed, as Stanton had urged, simply and conservatively, so as not to draw attention to her own person—always in dignified black. Susan loved colorful clothes. But her dharma discipline required that she enjoy her few colorful dresses at home and in her garden in Rochester. They were not for public work.

  Barry describes it well: “Susan B. Anthony came to her platforms with neither flourish nor flair. Always wearing a simple black dress with a fitted ‘basque waist’ jacket, she walked with determined but not heavy stride to the front of her audiences and stood very straight before them, looked directly at them, and delivered her message. In Roundout, N. Y, the papers reported that Anthony ‘unattended and unheralded, quietly glided in and ascended the platform.’ She did not exhibit nervousness or anxiety but instead was ‘easy and self-possessed as a lady should always be when performing a plain duty, even under 600 curious eyes.’ ”

  The Tao te Ching says, “[The Master] doesn’t glitter like a jewel … [but is] as rugged and common as a stone.” This is a predictable characteristic of those who have matured into their dharma. We see it in every other character we’ve examined: Goodall, Thoreau, Whitman, and Frost. Rugged and common as a stone. As the inner life of the practitioner of dharma becomes more complex, the outer life becomes simpler.

  Susan’s audiences saw this. They felt it. They were moved by her simplicity, by the way in which her actions were in accord with her words. They were moved by the granite of her character, and her resolve. What her audiences felt was the power of someone living in the center of her dharma. We have evidence that even those who opposed her were moved. As one detractor admitted: “While we differ widely with Miss Anthony, both as regards the propriety of the calling she has assumed, and the notions of which she is advocate, we cheerfully accord to her credit, as a public speaker, much above mediocrity, expressing herself with clearness and many times with elegance and force.”

  Kathleen Barry captures it exactly: “She did not mince words but conveyed her message through the fiery passion of her convictions. If her audiences did not agree with her, she was too much the kind of character they respected to dismiss her even though she was a woman. The simplicity of her dress and the directness of her speech revealed a woman of common origins. She was a woman who had retained the simplicity of earlier life even as she had surpassed its limitations.”

  Susan B. Anthony was what she championed. She had become, through her own practice, the New True Woman.

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  For Susan B. Anthony, clarity about her vocation grew along with her actions in pursuit of dharma. That is to say, her actions themselves brought her increasing understanding of what was true. And they brought her, at midlife, to an epiphany: There could be no true success on the path to women’s equality without the vote. Until women had the vote, they would always be the pawns of men in the political and social sphere. Any gains women made could quickly and easily be erased. And as Susan digested this truth, her calling became vividly clear. All of her energies must be devoted to the vote.

  “Until women are made a balance of power—to be consulted, catered to, and bargained with, if you please—My one article of party creed—shall be that of woman suffrage—All other articles of party creeds shall be with me as a drop in the bucket—as compared with this vital one—hence I make it my whole party creed!!”

  The telescope had now locked firmly onto the star. Now all of Anthony’s actions came into alignment with her purpose. She refused to be distracted by other causes. She would, of course, remain passionately concerned about marriage laws, equal pay, coeducation. But she knew that the vote was the key to it all. Without the vote, none of the other gains could be sustained.

  “Woman and her disfranchisement is all I know,” she said.

  Susan had matured into a visionary. She was supremely optimistic about the power of politics in American life. She knew that success was inevitable. She said, famously, “failure is impossible.” But she knew, too, that it would take decades of work, consciousness-raising, education, and what she called “agitation” before the final goal would be achieved. And she knew that most likely the vote would not come in her lifetime. “Not in our day,” she wrote, “but we must work on for future generations.”

  Susan B. Anthony understood a central teaching of the Bhagavad Gita: Complete devotion inexorably brings its own fulfillment. “When a person is devoted to something with complete faith,” said Krishna to Arjuna, “I unify his faith in that form … Then, when his faith is completely unified, he gains the object of his devotion. In this way, every desire is fulfilled by me.”

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  As she grew fully into her dharma, Susan saw that a great work can only be accomplished through a series of small acts. She called these small acts “subsoil plowing”—a wonderfully agricultural image from the daughter of a farmer. Later in life, Susan set about a campaign of education. She would lecture, raise consciousness among women, give them tools to speak, to organize. She would henceforward get women engaged through a kind of saturation-bombing approach. She moved tirelessly from town to town and city to city, preparing the ground for those whom she knew would come after her.

  Once she found her dharma, it became the point of radiance around which all of her energies were organized. How she lived, ate, dressed, spoke, moved, thought, all began to move into orbit around the work. Her life itself took on the radiance and color of her central vision. This gave her life enormous power. But she understood that it was not her power. It was the power of the dharma.

  Susan felt her own life’s energy begin to connect with the bigger stream of social concern and suffering. “I believe our happiness is increased by yielding momentary self-gratification and doing all in our power to render others happy.” In its most mature form, dharma inevitably puts the energies of self in the service of others—in the service of something bigger than self.

  Susan’s later life is exemplary of a central fact of dharma: It always involves the surrender of self to Self. In this surrender, action and awareness merge, time disappears, and the work is no longer “my” work, but “the work.” The work becomes the path to God—the way of knowing the Divine essence.

  Susan never denied the existence of God. But her beliefs were secularized and lodged in the world around her. When she was once asked, “Do you pray?” she responded, “I pray every single second of my life; not on my knees but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men. Wor
k and worship are one with me.”

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  Just three years before she died, Susan B. Anthony was attending—as she had for the previous forty years—the annual suffrage convention that was then being held in New Orleans. She was now eighty-three, and the honorary president of the organization. As she entered the hall, a thunderous ovation spontaneously erupted, and went on for many minutes.

  Alarmed, Susan turned to her longtime lieutenant, Anna B. Shaw, and asked, “What has happened?”

  Shaw replied, “You happened, Aunt Susan.”

  Anthony still looked puzzled.

  “It’s for you,” explained Shaw to a dumbstruck Anthony. “The applause is for you.”

  “Nonsense,” she shot back. “It’s not for me. It’s for the cause—The Cause.”

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  “When a person is devoted to something with complete faith,” said Krishna to Arjuna, “I unify his faith in that form.”

  Perhaps the most demanding practice in a life of dharma is the ongoing practice of unification—a process that Susan B. Anthony had mastered. Unification means simply that everything in your life must line up around the spine of your dharma. Eventually, everything that is not dharma must fall away—as it did in the life of Susan B. Anthony. Any life of dharma will demonstrate this principle.

  Writing has been my own particular school for dharma, and it has taught me a lot about the challenges—and power—of the Bhagavad Gita’s Doctrine of Unified Action. After all, when you look closely, you’ll discover that writing a book is nothing more than a heroic act of unification. How does this work? Well, the book has a spine. A dharma. But you don’t know what its dharma is until you begin to write it. Forget about all the things you said to yourself about your book at the beginning of the project—or what you told your editor, or what you wrote in your brilliant book proposal. No. The book has its own dharma, which will slowly reveal itself to you. And then you have a choice. You can choose the book’s dharma. Or you can choose your idea of what the book should be. If you choose the latter, of course, the book will be a lousy book. It will have no power. If you choose the former—your book’s authentic dharma—well, then you are really in deep trouble. Because you will have to bring absolutely everything you’ve got to the effort to manifest this book’s true calling.