Friendships

Friendships were important in the lives of all the historic women I’ve written about. Dorothea Dix, fierce advocate for humane treatment of people with mental illness and head of Civil War nurses, wrote in a poem for her lifelong friend Anne Heath “In the sad hour of anguish and distress/To thee for sympathy will I repair.”  Frances Perkins extolled the “beauty and chivalry between women” that sustained her during the tumultuous years in her first-woman-to-serve career. Then, of course, there is Susan B. Anthony who said of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “I never could have done the work I have if I had not had this woman at my right hand.” And Elizabeth who wrote, “Nothing that Susan could say or do could break my friendship with her; and I know nothing could uproot her affection for me.”

#SusanBAnthony #ElizabethCadyStanton #DorotheaDix #FrancesPerkins #Friends