Susan B. Anthony

Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, near Adams, Massachusetts, into a Quaker family that believed in “the equality of all people before God.” Her father, who ran a cotton mill, tried to avoid buying cotton grown by enslaved people; as a girl Anthony worked in the mill and wondered why he would not make a woman an overseer. Quakers insisted on education for girls as well as boys, and in 1837 she was sent to a Friends’ seminary near Philadelphia to study subjects from algebra to astronomy.

After the family moved to Rochester, New York, in 1845, their farm became a Sunday meeting place for antislavery Quakers, sometimes joined by Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Teaching in Canajoharie, New York, in 1848, Anthony learned that male teachers were paid $10 a month and women $2.50 — a lesson in inequality she never forgot.

In 1851, on a street corner in Seneca Falls, Amelia Bloomer introduced Anthony to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the two began a partnership that lasted the rest of their lives: Stanton, a mother of seven, wrote speeches and arguments, while Anthony, who never married, carried them across the country. In 1853 Anthony campaigned for married women’s property rights in New York, collecting petitions and lobbying the legislature. From 1856 she was an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society; in the “Winter of Mobs” of 1861 she faced hostile crowds and was burned in effigy in Syracuse. In 1863 she, Stanton, and Lucy Stone formed the Women’s Loyal National League to press for the Thirteenth Amendment.

After the war Anthony and Stanton edited The Revolution, whose motto was “Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.” In 1869 they founded the National Woman Suffrage Association to win a constitutional amendment for women. On November 5, 1872, Anthony voted for Ulysses S. Grant in Rochester; she was arrested by a federal marshal, and in 1873 a judge directed an all-male jury to find her guilty. She was fined $100 and refused to pay. With Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage she compiled the multivolume History of Woman Suffrage, and in 1892 she became president of the newly united National American Woman Suffrage Association.

Anthony’s Quaker faith in equality shaped everything she did. She argued that the Constitution already belonged to women: “It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union,” she said in 1873, and it was “a downright mockery” to speak of women enjoying liberty while denying them the ballot. She warned younger suffragists not to expect victory merely because their cause was just.

In the bitter split over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which protected the voting rights of Black men but not of women, Anthony and Stanton opposed the Fifteenth Amendment and broke with former allies such as Frederick Douglass and Lucy Stone. Although Anthony had long fought slavery, the National Women’s History Museum notes that she adopted the racist arguments used by many white suffragists of her day — that educated white women deserved the vote before others. The division created rival suffrage organizations that did not reunite until 1890.

When Anthony retired from the suffrage association’s presidency, she presented Carrie Chapman Catt as her “ideal leader.” In 1905 she met President Theodore Roosevelt to urge a suffrage amendment, and she gave her last great speech at her eighty-sixth birthday celebration: “Failure is impossible!” She died of heart failure and pneumonia at her Rochester home on March 13, 1906. When the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, it was widely known as the “Susan B. Anthony amendment,” and she remains an icon of the women’s suffrage movement.