Susan B. Anthony

Blessed with an industrious and self-disciplined spirit, Susan B. Anthony persevered through the prejudice and culture of her time to emerge as the architect of a movement which secured the passage of the 19th amendment that gave women the right to vote. Her belief that U.S. citizenry entitled everyone to the same rights under the constitution formed her platform for lifelong activism.

"Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation."

— Susan B. Anthony

Born: February 15, 1820 Adams, Massachusetts
Died: March 13, 1906 Rochester, New York

Susan B. Anthony is best remembered as the architect of a movement that would eventually culminate in securing for women the right to vote. Anthony, together with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, co-founded the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890. The creation of this group was the product of 40 years of cooperative activism and friendship between the two women and an expansion of the smaller National Woman Suffrage Association that they had formed 20 years earlier. Anthony is generally acknowledged as the leader of the historic campaign to gain political rights for American women.

Throughout her life, Anthony encouraged women to question their exclusion from politics, and, by insisting that voting rights be based on citizenship and not on sex, established firm ground for a political challenge to the status quo. Her life's work paved the way for the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920, which at long last gave women throughout the United States the right to vote.

Susan B. Anthony, born February 15, 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts, was one of seven children of Daniel and Lucy Read Anthony. Though her mother had been raised a Baptist, the young Anthony was brought up in her father's Quaker faith. The Quakers, also known as the Society of Friends, believed in the concept of the Inner Light -- the representation of God in each person's soul -- and did not rely on clergy to lead them to salvation. This egalitarian ethic led many Quakers to participate in the abolitionist movement during the 19th century, including Daniel Anthony, and later, Susan B. Anthony herself. Though Quaker women at that time still played a traditional role in the life of the community, the core beliefs of the Society of Friends seem to have certainly prepared Susan to eventually champion the woman's cause. The Quakers valued industriousness, self-discipline, piety and modesty, and these qualities would form the cornerstones of Anthony's character.

Though she was a tireless activist until the very end of her life, she was a humble woman who brushed off the adulation heaped on her in old age. She insisted that it was for "the cause," and according to biographer Kathleen Barry, never acknowledged that she herself had become synonymous with the cause of women's rights for so many people.

Growing up, she attended Quaker schools, and then took a teaching job in rural New York state at age 17, entering one of the only careers open to women at that time. Her salary was about one-fifth of what her male colleagues earned, and when she protested this inequality, she was immediately fired. She moved on to a better position as a principal of a girls school, and continued teaching for more than ten years.

In 1849, she left teaching and her second career as an activist began. She joined the local temperance society, and when she was denied the right to speak at a Sons of Temperance meeting because she was a woman, she founded the Daughters of Temperance, the first women's temperance organization in the country. Anthony began writing temperance articles for the Lily, the country's first woman-owned newspaper. Her rising political profile helped her to meet other activist women, including those involved in the abolitionist movement and suffrage movement.

She met Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1851, three years after Stanton organized the first woman's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. In 1852, Anthony attended her first women's-rights conference, and from then until the end of the Civil War, she campaigned and lectured for the abolition of slavery and for equal rights for women. She organized a petition to grant women the right to vote and to own property. Her efforts were crucial to the New York state legislature's passage of the Married Women's Property Act of 1860, which allowed women to enter into contracts and to control their own earnings and property. In 1863, she organized the Women's National Loyal League, which played a critical role in the successful passage of the 13th amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery.

After the war, Anthony and others tried to link women's suffrage with rights for the newly freed slaves, but they were unsuccessful. The 15th Amendment, adopted in 1870, specified voting privileges for black men only. At this point, she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, effectively separating the woman's cause from the abolitionist movement. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution, adopted in 1868, had declared that anyone born in the United States was a citizen and that all citizens were entitled to the same legal privileges. Anthony saw that challenging the 14th Amendment was the key to the suffrage movement. She maintained that under the 14th amendment, women were citizens and thus legally entitled to vote.

In 1872, Anthony and 15 other women registered to vote in Rochester, New York, and became the first women to cast a ballot in a presidential election. All the women were arrested, but only Anthony, as a leader of the suffrage movement, was scheduled for trial. Freed on $1,000 bail, she traveled the country presenting her legal argument in lectures titled, "Is it a Crime for a US Citizen to Vote?" According to Kathleen Barry, "Here was the core of Anthony's ...strategy: Take a concrete issue...; analyze the problem; formulate a specific demand...; then urge women to take practical, confrontational, and effective actions that logically followed from her analysis of the issue. She was determined not only to act on behalf of women, but to mobilize women to act for themselves...she was not interested in merely cultivating followers."

The anti-suffrage judge wrote his opinion against her before the 1873 trial even began, refused to let her testify, and ordered the jury to rule against her. Anthony was ordered to pay a $100 fine, and though she refused, no further action was taken against her. She had hoped to take her case to the Supreme Court, but because her sentence was non-binding, she was barred from making appeals. Anthony spent the rest of her life working for a constitutional amendment that would grant women the right to vote, crossing the country to speak at political conventions, labor meetings, and other public gatherings. Recognizing that the achievements of women had long been ignored in official history books, she, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others worked to compile the three volume History of Woman Suffrage to inform and inspire future generations.

Susan B. Anthony did not live to see the passage of the 19th amendment, though without her the history of women's rights in this country would have been incalculably different. One month before her death in 1906, at age 86, she attended her last suffrage convention. At that time, only Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho and Utah allowed women the right to vote. Fourteen years after her death, her dream of equal voting rights for all US citizens would come true.