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Publication of Susan B. Anthony & Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Place Details
Borough : Manhattan
Neighborhood : Civic Center
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By Breanne Scanlon
On January 8, 1868, in a room on the fourth floor of 37 Park Row in downtown Manhattan, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton published the first issue of Revolution, a newspaper dedicated to advancing the cause of women's suffrage, among other social reform issues. Although the newspaper survived in its original form for just slightly over two years, it helped gain public exposure for the women's suffrage movement and for Anthony and Stanton, two of the movement’s most influential leaders.
The first issue of Revolution announced itself as "The Organ of the National Party of New America" and its slogan as "Principle, Not Policy: Justice, Not Favors." Susan B. Anthony was the proprietor and manager of the paper, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Parker Pillsbury were the editors. Revolutionwas started with investments by a wealthy and eccentric Democrat named George Francis Train and David Melliss, financial editor of the New York World.
The paper was run out of
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By Breanne Scanlon
On January 8, 1868, in a room on the fourth floor of 37 Park Row in downtown Manhattan, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton published the first issue of Revolution, a newspaper dedicated to advancing the cause of women's suffrage, among other social reform issues. Although the newspaper survived in its original form for just slightly over two years, it helped gain public exposure for the women's suffrage movement and for Anthony and Stanton, two of the movement’s most influential leaders.
The first issue of Revolution announced itself as "The Organ of the National Party of New America" and its slogan as "Principle, Not Policy: Justice, Not Favors." Susan B. Anthony was the proprietor and manager of the paper, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Parker Pillsbury were the editors. Revolutionwas started with investments by a wealthy and eccentric Democrat named George Francis Train and David Melliss, financial editor of the New York World.
The paper was run out of a small office in the same building that housed the New York World newspaper, directly across the street from City Hall Park on Park Row. Park Row was known as "Newspaper Row" from the 1840s through the early 1900s for the large number of newspaper headquarters located on the street. Newspapers such as The New York Times, The New York World, and The New York Post strategically established their base of operations near City Hall, the heart of New York City politics. This proximity to City Hall ensured the newspapers quick access to developments in local politics as they happened. Printing presses, paper supply shops, and typesetting companies sprang up on nearby blocks. These amenities, located within walking distance of Revolution, helped Anthony and Stanton to operate the paper on a small budget.
While other suffragists also published papers that advocated equal rights for women, Revolution took up the cause of not only women, but also abolitionists, workers, the poor, the unjustly condemned, and those who sought to reform the American financial system. The paper confronted subjects not discussed in most mainstream news publications of the time, including sex education, rape, and domestic violence. Stanton and Pillsbury, a radical male abolitionist who had previously worked with Stanton and Anthony in 1865 to help draft the constitution of the American Equal Rights Association, wrote the majority of Revolution's articles. Their editorials and news pieces covered such wide-ranging issues as labor union disputes, the cotton tax, infanticide, prostitution, and most prominently, women's fight for the right to vote and for equal wages.
Revolution quickly built a subscriber base (Anthony claimed that she even convinced President Andrew Johnson to subscribe) and received attention from the mainstream press for its controversial and radical stances. Not all of the attention it received was positive, as evidenced in a review in the New York Sunday Times, which dismissed the paper as "meaningless and foolish" and urged Stanton to "attend a little more to her domestic duties and a little less to those of the great public."
When Train departed the United States for a lecture tour of Europe in 1869, he took his funding with him, and the newspaper had to survive primarily on subscriptions and advertisements. To economize, that same year Anthony and Stanton accepted the invitation of philanthropist Elizabeth Phelps to move Revolution's offices to the first floor of a large house at 49 East 23rd Street, which Phelps intended to establish as the "Woman’s Bureau" and to rent only to enterprises run by women.
Stanton and Anthony focused the paper more on women's rights and less on other social reform issues. They changed the newspaper's motto to "The True Republic--Men, their rights and nothing more: Women, their rights and nothing less."
Despite these efforts, Revolution still struggled financially. After two years, Stanton and Anthony had managed to build a subscriber base of 3,000 people, but the subscription fee of two dollars a year was hardly enough to support the costs of running the paper. Anthony, who had no prior experience in business management, attempted to bolster the failing paper by adding more advertisements and even tried to form a stock company to fund it. However, most advertisers and investors turned her down due to her refusal to change the controversial content and name of the paper. Pillsbury agreed to accept a very small salary, and Stanton soon stopped drawing any salary at all. Anthony vowed in a letter to her cousin that "My paper must not, shall not go down," but in the spring of 1870, she made the difficult decision to pass Revolution to The New York Independent newspaper. Anthony personally assumed $10,000 of debt in the process.
In the final issue, on May 26, 1870, Anthony wrote: "I feel a great calm sadness like that of a mother binding out a pet child she could not support." Edwin Studwell of The New York Independent took over the paper's business operations and Laura Curtis Bullard became the new editor. Studwell and Bullard changed the motto to "What, therefore, God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." They retained the Revolution's focus on women's suffrage, but replaced the more radical subject matter with poetry and society stories.
The Park Row building where Revolution began burned down in the 1870s. [Posted June 2008]
Sources
Anthony, Susan B., Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds. History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. II 1861-1876. New York: Fowler & Wells, 1882.
Barry, Kathleen. Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist. New York: New York University Press, 1988.
Burrows, Edwin and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
DuBois, Ellen Carol, ed. The Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Reader. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992.
Harper, Ida Husted. Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony. Salem: Ayer Company Publishers, reprint 1983.
The Revolution,1868-1870, on microfilm at the New-York Historical Society.
