Susan B.’s Sibling Trivia

Seventy people joined me for a presentation on the Anthony siblings at Webster Immanuel Lutheran Church today. What a program! Each week they meet for an exercise program followed by a speaker (this week, it was me) and then lunch–all for $2! I am impressed by this group’s creativity in serving the interests and needs of their community.

As I was preparing for the presentation, I came up with some interesting facts about the Anthony siblings. Susan had three sisters and two brothers. Here goes:

• Both brothers moved to Kansas to serve the abolitionist movement and the Army, despite their pacifist Quaker upbringing.
• All but two of the siblings married. Susan and her sister Mary, two linchpins of the woman suffrage movement, remained single.
• Two sisters died of consumption. Susan feared it would claim her life also, but it never did.
• Both brothers died of heart trouble; D.R. had a weak heart after his serious gunshot wound.
• All the sisters voted with Susan and got arrested.
• Susan was a teetotaler all her life; D.R. flaunted his enjoyment of alcohol and did not support prohibition.
• Susan was a member in good standing in the Quaker fellowship, but D.R. was almost dismissed after he killed a civilian in self-defense. (He was always getting into scrapes because of his hair-trigger temper.)
• D.R. supported Susan’s newspaper The Revolution with both advice and money. When injury and political campaigns prevented him from giving enough attention to his own newspaper (The Daily Times), Susan ran it for him.

Like all parents, the senior Daniel Anthony and his wife Lucy must have watched their children with bemusement and marveled sometimes at how such different fruits could have fallen from the same tree.