Known For: Famous American suffragist, women’s rights activist
Dates: A.H.: 1235 – 1323
C.E.: 1820 – 1906

Faith: Christianity
Country: United States

About

Born in 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts, Susan B. Anthony devoted most of her life to fighting for women’s rights, especially the vote. One of six children in a liberal Quaker family, their strong social and political beliefs and support of abolition and temperance encouraged her later aspirations for social reform. In 1826 she moved with her family to a large brick house in Battenville, New York. There her father established a home school where his family and some neighborhood children received most of their formal education.

Anthony began taking small teaching jobs before the age of sixteen, and wanted more from her education, so her father enrolled her in Deborah Moulson’s Female Seminary, a Quaker boarding school in Philadelphia, in 1837. Shortly thereafter her studies ended due to her family’s financial ruin, along with many others, in the Panic of 1837 that forced them to sell nearly all their possessions at auction.

In 1839 the family moved to Hardscrabble, NY and Anthony left home for several years to teach and help pay off family debts, rising to become headmistress of the Canajoharie Academy in 1846. Her family moved again in 1845 to a small farm in Gates, NY. Unhappy with teaching, Anthony moved there in 1849 to help run the farm and also began attending a liberal Unitarian Church (though never left the Quaker meeting). Following her Quaker values she had joined the Daughters of Temperance in 1848, but a few years later was not allowed to speak at a rally because she was a woman.  Leaving the Society, she soon formed the Woman’s New York State Temperance Society.

Her interest in women’s rights sparked in the 1850s. She met her lifelong friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Seneca Falls and attended her first woman’s rights convention, in Syracuse, New York in 1852.  The same year, she implemented women’s rights into the temperance, labor, and education reform movements by: helping organize the “Whole World’s Temperance Convention” in New York City, helping a group of Rochester seamstresses draft a policy summarizing fair wages for working women in the city, and demanding that women be allowed to participate in male-only discussions at a NY State Teacher’s Association meeting.

In 1854, Anthony and others organized petition drives for women’s suffrage, going door to door in every county of New York State for signatures to present to the state government.  Though always committed to women’s rights, from 1856 until the Civil War, she dedicated increasing amounts of energy to abolition by frequently speaking to hostile public crowds as the principal New York agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. At the start of the Civil War, Anthony and Stanton organized the Women’s Loyal National League, the petition drives of which gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures supporting abolition.

After the War, Anthony and Stanton conflicted with many reform allies who wished to focus on winning rights for newly freed African-American men. Their efforts led to the passing of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, but Anthony and Stanton were against the word “male” in the amendments, which would make it even harder for women to obtain voting rights. Thereafter the pair began concentrating solely on women’s rights, publishing a radical feminist newspaper called Revolution in 1868.

In 1869 Anthony and Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association that would fight for a federal woman suffrage amendment while working on significant state campaigns for the vote. Anthony served on the executive committee and later as vice-president, while Stanton was president. For the next thirty years, Anthony spoke for the cause all over the country. In an 1872 act of civil disobedience, Anthony and many other suffragists registered to vote and voted in the presidential election. Arrested for this in 1873, she was tried unjustly in the U.S. District Court and never paid her fine of $100. In the late 1870s Anthony, Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, undertook the immense task of writing the History of Woman Suffrage, publishing the first three volumes (eventually six) in 1886.

Anthony extended her brilliant organizing and political strategizing skills to the global level by founding the International Council of Women in 1888, acting as head of the U.S. delegation to its meetings in 1899 in London and 1904 in Berlin. Fighting for women’s education at the end of the nineteenth century, she tirelessly fundraised for the admission of women to the University of Rochester and women were admitted in 1900 when the funds were finally raised. Attending a women’s suffrage convention in 1906 she famously stated that “failure is impossible,” and died a month later.