importance of keeping the National
American Woman Suffrage Association informed on all developments
affecting wage-earning women and to her delight she found three young
suffragists wide awake on this subject. One of them, Florence Kelley,
had joined forces with that remarkable young woman, Jane Addams, in
her valuable social experiment, Hull House, in the slums of Chicago,
and was now devoting herself to improving the working conditions of
women and children. She represented a new trend in thought and
work--social service--which made a great appeal to college women and
set in motion labor legislation designed to protect women and
children. Another young woman of promise, Gail Laughlin, pioneering as
a lawyer, approached the subject from the feminist viewpoint, seeking
protection for women not through labor legislation based on sex, but
through trade unions, the vote, equal pay, and a wider recognition of
women's right to contract for their labor on the same terms as men.
Her survey of women's working conditions, presented at a convention of
the National American Association was so valuable and attracted so
much attention that she was appointed to the United States Labor
Commission. Harriot Stanton Blatch also understood the significance of
the industrial revolution and woman's part in it, and she too opposed
labor legislation based on sex. Coming from England occasionally to
visit her mother in New York, she brought her liberal viewpoint into
woman suffrage conventions with a flare of oratory matching that of
her gifted parents. "The more I see of her," Susan remarked to a
friend, "the more I feel the greatness of her character."[425]

* * * * *

Although it was Susan's intention to hew to the line of woman suffrage
and not to comment publicly on controversial issues, she could not
keep silent when confronted with injustice. Religious intolerance,
bigotry, and racial discrimination always forced her to take a stand,
regardless of the criticism she might bring on herself.

The treatment of the Negro in both the North and the South was always
of great concern to her, and during the 1890s, when a veritable
epidemic of lynchings and race riots broke out, she expressed herself
freely in Rochester newspapers. She noted the dangerous trend as
indicated by new anti-Negro societies and the limitation of membership
to white Americans in the Spanish-American War veterans' organization.
Whenever