Susan B. Anthony’s remarkable confession about her best friend

It slays me every time I read it

For a long time, the woman’s rights movement was powered by best friends: Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They stuck together and kept championing the cause even when it was unpopular. It has been said that Elizabeth “forged the thunderbolts” and Susan “fired them.” One was the the stay at home writer with radical ideas, the other had a strategic and analytic mind and was constantly traveling. They were friends for decades, through some major ups and downs. I’m sure that sometimes it must have felt like just the two of them against the world. 

I’ve come to understand that Susan, who I have read so much about that I now feel like we’re close personal friends on a first name basis, was very concerned with her legacy…to the point of writing out frenemies from The Complete History of Woman’s Suffrage, handpicking her biographer, and burning materials that may have contradicted the narrative she created for herself.  

And yet she shares this remarkably vulnerable confession in her biography, which is so honest and real, that it just slays me every time I read it: