Anna Dickinson, By Sarah Hahn Campbell
Image By Sarah Hahn Campbell
Most people today have never heard of me. However, in the prime of my career, in the 1860s and 70s, I, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, was arguably the most famous woman in America. Born in 1842 to a Pennsylvania Quaker family, I rose rapidly to fame as a young abolitionist. People flocked by the thousands to hear me speak, and I became the first woman to speak on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1863. By 1865, I was earning an annual $20,000 from speaking fees, first as an abolitionist and then as an advocate for laborer's rights, for racial equality, and women's rights.
They called me "America's Joan of Arc," and I was far more famous than my contemporary, Susan B. Anthony. Several wealthy, high-profile men proposed to me, but I refused them all because I loved women. I fanned passionate love affairs with several women in the various cities I visited on the speaking circuit, including Ms. Susan B. Anthony herself for a few months. My sister Susan criticized me, but I told her women like myself loved our women with such passion that we would someday just become men. I liked how that shocked my sister.
The Civil War proved our abolitionist work right, and I focused on racial equality and labor justice. But I gained some enemies: the suffragists wanted me to speak for them, and I would not, hating their refusal to include black women in their fight. By 1873, I worried my fame was failing to bring insufficient income, and I planned a trip west to Colorado as a publicity stunt and as a break from the pressures back east.
My travels through Colorado that summer made me radiant -- even my brother John, who accompanied me, said so. We rode mules to see the sunrise on Gray's and Torrey’s Peaks; we pushed boulders off the top of Mount Elbert. Near Estes Park, I joined the Hayden Survey to attempt the difficult Long’s Peak summit, wearing pants John purchased for me in Longmont (to the horror of a local newspaper). I beat many (most?) of the men to the top. The Survey kindly named the 13,281-foot peak to the northeast of Long's for me: it’s called "Lady Washington," after my nickname in mountaineering circles because I had climbed New Hampshire's Mount Washington over 28 times. In our last week in Colorado, as a final hurrah, I rode to Colorado Springs on the Denver train’s cattleguard (“like a goddess,” one of the passengers told me).
However, though I was only 31, that journey of mine to the Colorado Rockies marked the pinnacle of my life. Shortly after that, the speaking circuit fell out of favor, and then I fell into a debilitating sadness. Maybe it was the drink. Perhaps it was all the disappointments -- the hateful critics who mocked my Broadway Hamlet and my playwriting. Or maybe it was Susan, who nagged at me to do this and that, to make more money. I don’t know what was wrong with me, exactly. But one morning in 1891, Susan and two doctors broke down the door to my room and had me forcibly institutionalized. Oh, my lawyers proved my sanity in court, and I left the institution at Danville after only a few months, but the betrayal broke me. I chose to disappear from the world. Two friends, Sally and George, married, though Sally was in truth more married to me, took me in. I lived with them for the last forty years of my life.
So now people remember Susan B. Anthony and not me, Anna Dickinson. It’s only the curious hiker who deviates from the well-worn Long’s Peak trail in Rocky Mountain National Park to climb the short but challenging Mount Lady Washington who thinks of me. What of it? It was never the Anna Dickinson I wished people to remember, but justice, that invisible sword I held aloft in my speeches, my gray eyes snapping with fire. And on Mount Lady Washington, I want people to remember the views of the distant possible future, not just of the rock on which they stand.
- A.E.D
Image By Sarah Hahn Campbell
Other Sources:
Chester, Giraud. Embattled Maiden: The Life of Anna Dickinson. New York: Putnam, 1951.
Dickinson, Anna Elizabeth. A Ragged Register (of People Place and Opinions). New York: Harper & Bros, 1879.
Faderman, Lillian. To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America - a History. New York: Mariner Books, 2000.
Gallman, J. Matthew. America's Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson. London: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Robertson, Janet. The Magnificent Mountain Women: Adventures in the Colorado Rockies. Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2003.