Susan B Anthony and the Runaway Wife

Legally wrong but morally right

Boston, late 1850s

Phoebe Harris Phelps felt like her perfect world was ending when she found the letters detailing her husband’s infidelity. Her husband Charles was a respectable Harvard trained doctor turned state Senator and they lived in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood with their son and three daughters. But things weren’t perfect at home. When Phoebe discovered his infidelity, she couldn’t bring herself to just smile and pretend everything was fine. Hadn’t they both taken vows to love and honor each other?

When she confronted him about it, Charles threw her down the stairs and then had her committed to the McLean Lunatic Asylum, where she would be locked up against her will and kept her away from her children for eighteen months. She was perfectly sane.

This seems to have been a done thing with “inconvenient” women in one’s life in the nineteenth century. In 1860, Elizabeth Packard’s husband forcibly committed her because she disagreed with him. In the late 1870s, The Complete History of Women’s Suffrage the authors write, “Could the dark secrets of these insane asylums be brought to light, we should be shocked to know the countless number of rebellious wives, sisters, and daughters that are thus annually sacrificed.” This was all decades before Nellie Bly shocked the world with her exposé, Ten Days in a Madhouse. To be clear, absolutely no one should be confined in the conditions of these asylums, including (even especially) the mentally ill.

Phoebe spent eighteen months in the asylum before her brother finally managed her release. What had hurt the most was not the betrayal of her husband, or the wretched conditions of the asylum, but the separation from her children. Once Phoebe was freed, her brother could not and would not help her anymore, particularly when it came to reuniting her with her children. The law was clear: children belonged to the father.

No one was willing to help her.

Except for one person.

It was a snowy Christmas Eve and Susan B. Anthony was enjoying tea before the fireplace in the parlor when Phoebe Phelps burst in, heavily veiled and desperate for help. She wasn’t alone—her thirteen year-old daughter was with her. She told her story and pleaded for help, for there was no one else she could turn to.

After making quiet inquiries to confirm her story, Susan had no qualms about helping Phoebe and her daughter escape and go into hiding, even though she was well-aware that it was against the law. The law was wrong, in her opinion, and thus must not be followed.

Together they fled to New York City and they arrived in the midst of a raging snowstorm. They went to inn after inn after inn, up and down the avenues and along the crosstown streets. Every hotel and every inn refused to let them a room for the simple reason that they were not with a man. Cold, weary and infuriated, Susan finally sat down and said she wasn’t leaving until they were granted a room. Go ahead, call the police Susan challenged. They were given a room. In the morning, they fled to Philadelphia, where Phoebe and her daughter might have a chance to start a new life together.

But that was not the end of the saga. For her work in assisting a runaway wife and her daughter, Susan roundly received condemnation from activist circles out of fear that she would compromise their efforts. At an anti-slavery convention, William Lloyd Garrison challenged Susan: “Don’t you know the law of Massachusetts gives the father the entire guardianship and control of the children?”

Anthony replied, “Yes, I know it, and does not the law of the United States give the slaveholder the ownership of the slave? And don’t you break it every time you help a slave to Canada?”

“Yes, I do,” Garrison said. He and Susan were both well aware of the Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed Southern agents to seize anyone believed to be a runaway slave and return them to the South—without due process.

“Well, the law which gives the father the sole ownership of the children is just as wicked and I’ll break it just as quickly. You would die before you would deliver a slave to his master, and I will die before I give up that child to its father.”

Susan’s father, who supported her completely, summarized her position as “legally wrong, morally right.”

There is a lot to examine in this true story (please leave your thoughts in the comments). I see a few: the way children and a mother’s love were weaponized against women to keep them in unhappy marriages, the way the male abolitionists had different standards for women’s rights advocacy, how fearless Susan B. Anthony is, the horrors of the Fugitive Slave Law which allowed any one suspected of being a runaway to be snatched off the streets without due process and sent down South.

But one thing that particularly sticks out to me is this: Susan demonstrates the Bonobo principle in action. The Bonobos are our closest living primate relatives and they live in matriarchal, female-dominated groups. Overall, the bonobos are a peaceful group all about sex and love and sharing. But when a male steps out of line, a group of female Bonobos swarm to keep his aggression in check. The males know it, and so most of the time won’t dare to try anything. One of my favorite Substacks has an excellent deep dive on the Bonobos that I highly recommend: Want To Topple the Patriarchy? Learn From Female Bonobos.

I also recommend this piece on the Bonobo Principle, which has two parts:

1. No one has a right to exploit my sister.

2. Everyone is my sister.

Susan B. Anthony did not know Phoebe Phelps before she was sobbing in her drawing room, pleading for help. She was well aware of what the law said on the matter of wives and their rights to their children. But Susan answered to a higher authority than the law—of sisterhood, her own sense of justice, her own moral compass. She saw Phoebe as her sister. She saw Phoebe’s daughter as her own daughter.

With Susan’s help, Phoebe made it to Philadelphia where she embarked on a new life as a seamstress and writer—she must have been living in poverty, especially compared to her previous life, but at least she was free. Susan helped her file for divorce and they tried to regain custody of her children. But they were no match for her husband’s agents, who tracked down mother and daughter and snatched the daughter to return her to the father.

Some sources say that mother and daughter never saw each other again. But others report that Phoebe was happily reunited with all her children as adults. Phoebe found success as a children’s book author and many of her stories included the names of her children.