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Susan B. Anthony

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Born: 15 February 1820
Birthplace: Adams, Massachusetts
Died: 13 March 1906 (complications from a stroke)
Best Known As: The suffragist on the one-dollar coin

Susan B. Anthony is remembered as a women's rights leader, but she also campaigned against slavery and in favor of temperance (the abolition of liquor). Along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton she founded the American Equal Rights Association in 1866, and she spent the better part of her life trying to win voting rights for women in the United States. In 1920, 14 years after Anthony's death, American women finally won the vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment. Congress honored Anthony in 1979 by putting her portrait on a new one-dollar coin.

Anthony's home in Rochester, New York is now a National Historic Monument... Anthony was one of seven children... She had no children herself and never married... The last Susan B. Anthony dollar coins were minted in 1999. The Sacagawea dollar coin was introduced in 2000.

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Biography: Susan Brownell Anthony

Susan Brownell Anthony (1820-1906) was an early leader of the American woman's suffrage movement and pioneered in seeking other equalities for women. An active abolitionist, she campaigned for emancipation of the slaves.

Susan B. Anthony was born on Feb. 15, 1820, in Adams, Mass., one of seven children. Her family had settled in Rhode Island in 1634. She attended Quaker schools and began teaching at the age of 15 for $1.50 a week plus board. When the family moved to Rochester, N.Y., in 1845, her brilliant father, Daniel Anthony, the dominant influence in her life, worked with important abolitionists. Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and other guests at the Anthony farm helped form her strong views on abolition of slavery.

Woman's Rights

Though her family attended the first Woman's Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls and Rochester, N.Y., in 1848, Anthony did not take up the cause of woman's rights until 1851, when male hostility to her temperance efforts convinced her that women must win the right to speak in public and to vote before anything else could be accomplished. Her lifelong friendship and partnership with Elizabeth Cady Stanton also began in 1851, as did her temporary doffing of corsets in favor of the revolutionary "bloomer" costume - which was women's first major dress reform in the movement. Anthony attended her first woman's-rights convention in 1852; from then until the end of the Civil War she campaigned from door to door, in legislatures, and in meetings for the two causes of abolition of slavery and of woman's rights. The New York State Married Woman's Property and Guardianship Law in 1860 was her first major legislative victory.

Formation of Suffrage Movement

With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, woman's rights took second place. Susan Anthony organized the Women's National Loyal League, which mobilized the crucial petitions to force passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution to abolish slavery. In 1865 she began her battle in the content of the 14th and 15th Amendments, hoping to gain the franchise for women as well as for African American males. But her former male allies in the abolitionist struggle brushed her aside, saying the time was not yet ripe for woman's suffrage. Saddened but not deterred by this defeat, Anthony worked solely for woman's suffrage from this time to the end of her life, organizing the National Woman Suffrage Association with Stanton. The association's New York weekly, The Revolution, was created in 1868 to promote women's causes. After its bankruptcy in 1870, Anthony lectured throughout the nation for 6 years to pay its $10,000 debt.

In the 1872 presidential race Susan Anthony and 15 Rochester comrades became the first women ever to vote in a national election. That they were promptly arrested for their boldness did not dismay her, as she sought to test women's legal right to vote under the 14th Amendment by carrying the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Her case was singled out for prosecution, and trial was set for 1873 in Rochester. Free on bail of $1,000, Anthony stumped the country with a carefully prepared legal argument, "Is It a Crime for a U.S. Citizen to Vote?" She lost her case, following some dubious legal maneuvering by the judge, but was unfortunately barred from appealing to the Supreme Court when her sentence was not made binding.

Later Years

Susan Anthony spent the rest of her life working for the Federal suffrage amendment - a strenuous effort that took her not only to Congress but to political conventions, labor meetings, and lyceums in every section of the country. Mindful of the nearly total omission of women from historical literature, in 1877 she forced herself to sit down with her colleagues to begin the monumental and invaluable History of Woman Suffrage in five volumes. She later worked with her biographer, Ida Husted Harper, on two of the three volumes of The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, which were drawn largely from her continuous scrapbooks (1838-1900), now in the Library of Congress, and her diaries and letters.

Up to just one month before her death in 1906, Anthony was still active: she attended her last suffrage convention and her eighty-sixth birthday celebration in Washington. She closed her last public speech with the words, "Failure is impossible." When she died in her Rochester home on March 13, only four states had granted the vote to women. Fourteen years later the suffrage amendment, the 19th, was added to the Constitution.

Further Reading

The most complete work on Anthony is Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (3 vols., 1898-1908). Katharine Anthony, a distant relative and noted biographer, had access to Miss Anthony's diaries and wrote the best recent biography, Susan B. Anthony: Her Personal History and Her Era (1954). Alma Lutz, Susan B. Anthony: Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian (1959) and Created Equal: A Biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1940), which also contains considerable material on Anthony, are more solid accounts than Rheta Childe Dorr, Susan B. Anthony: The Woman Who Changed the Mind of a Nation (1928).

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Susan Brownell Anthony

(click to enlarge)
Susan B. Anthony. (credit: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

(born Feb. 15, 1820, Adams, Mass., U.S. — died March 13, 1906, Rochester, N.Y.) U.S. pioneer in the women's suffrage movement. A precocious child, she learned to read and write at the age of three. After attending a boarding school in Philadelphia, she took a teaching position in a Quaker seminary in upstate New York. She taught at a female academy (1846 – 49) and then settled in her family home near Rochester, N.Y. There she met many leading abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. The rebuff of her attempt to speak at a temperance meeting in Albany in 1852 prompted her to join Elizabeth Cady Stanton in organizing the Woman's State Temperance Society of New York. From this time she was a tireless campaigner for abolition and women's rights. During the early phase of the Civil War she helped organize the Women's National Loyal League, which urged the case for emancipation. After the war, she campaigned unsuccessfully to have the language of the Fourteenth Amendment altered to allow for woman as well as "Negro" suffrage. In 1868 she represented the Working Women's Association of New York, which she had recently organized, at the National Labor Union convention. In January 1869 she organized a woman suffrage convention in Washington, D.C., and in May she and Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). As a test of the legality of the suffrage provision of the Fourteenth Amendment, she cast a vote in the 1872 presidential election in Rochester. She was arrested, convicted (the judge's directed verdict of guilty had been written before the trial began), and fined; though she refused to pay the fine, the case was carried no further. She served as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1892 – 1900) and lectured throughout the country for a federal women's-suffrage amendment.

For more information on Susan Brownell Anthony, visit Britannica.com.

US History Companion: Anthony, Susan B.

(1820-1906), women's rights leader. Anthony was born in Adams, Massachusetts. Her father, a Quaker, was excluded from his meeting when he married her mother, a Baptist, and Susan, while much affected by her Quaker background, was also shaped by the proud independence this exclusion gave her family. In the depression of 1837, the family's economic security was shaken, and Anthony became a teacher, the only profession open to middle-class women. She never married and was a lifelong self-supporting woman. Her most distinctive contribution to the early women's rights movement was her appreciation of the importance of economic independence to women's emancipation.

In 1851, while visiting in nearby Seneca Falls, New York, Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had organized the first women's rights convention in 1848. Together they led the women's rights movement for the next half century. They first tried to organize a women's temperance society, but that reform proved too church-bound for their feminist concerns. In 1854, they turned to the creation of a women's rights movement per se. While Cady Stanton wrote articles and declarations to legislatures, Anthony discovered her own special genius, the organization of women into a sustained political movement. From 1854 to 1860, she circulated petitions demanding married women's rights to property, wages, and the custody of their children in the event of a divorce, and all women's rights to the suffrage. In 1860, all but the vote were secured by New York's landmark Married Women's Property Act.

The Civil War and its aftermath had a tremendous impact on Anthony and Cady Stanton. At first they believed that women's rights agitation should be suspended during the crisis. Indefatigably active, however, they organized the National Women's Loyal League to demand the constitutional abolition of slavery (and incidentally the emancipation of women). After the war, they expected that congressional Republicans would enfranchise women along with the freedmen, but were horrified to discover that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments did not give women the vote. In response, they severed their ties with old abolitionist allies and organized an independent woman suffrage society, an action with which many other women's rights leaders disagreed.

Without a family to divide her interests and more inclined than Cady Stanton to dedicate herself to a single issue, Anthony spent the rest of her life working for the vote. Believing that women should be enfranchised by federal, not state action, she annually pressed woman suffrage on Congress. As the range of women's public activities grew, she educated college women, "social purity" activists, and women's club members in the necessity of gaining the vote. To this end, she effected an alliance of sorts with the dynamic leader of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Frances Willard. This conflicted with the militant secularism of Cady Stanton, and though their personal bond remained strong, their activities diverged in their final years.

Anthony did not live to see the constitutional enfranchisement of women, but she had helped establish the conditions for victory. She set aside old hurts and encouraged the reunification of the suffrage movement in 1890. She nurtured a second generation of suffrage leaders, treating them virtually as kin. So totally did she merge her personal fate and that of the suffrage movement that dedication to "the cause" and love of "Miss Anthony" became indistinguishable. In 1900, she retired from the presidency of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, but remained active to the end. The respect accorded her was even stronger after her death, and devotees honored her memory long after the vote had been won and the names of other suffrage leaders forgotten.

Bibliography:

Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, 3 vols. (1898-1908); Alma Lutz, Susan B. Anthony: Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian (1959).

Author:

Ellen Carol DuBois

Columbia Encyclopedia: Anthony, Susan Brownell,

1820–1906, American reformer and leader of the woman-suffrage movement, b. Adams, Mass.; daughter of Daniel Anthony, Quaker abolitionist. From the age of 17, when she was a teacher in rural New York state, she agitated for equal pay for women teachers, for coeducation, and for college training for girls. When the Sons of Temperance refused to admit women into their movement, she organized the first woman's temperance association, the Daughters of Temperance. At a temperance meeting in 1851 she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and from that time until Stanton's death in 1902 they were associated as the leaders of the woman's movement in the United States and were bound by a warm personal friendship. Susan B. Anthony lectured (1851–60) on women's rights and on abolition, and, with Stanton, secured the first laws in the New York state legislature guaranteeing to women rights over their children and control of property and wages. In 1863 she was a coorganizer of the Women's Loyal League to support Lincoln's government, especially his emancipation policy. After the Civil War she opposed granting suffrage to freedmen without also giving it to women, and many woman-suffrage sympathizers broke with her on this issue. She and Stanton organized (1869) the National Woman Suffrage Association. In 1890 this group united with the American Woman Suffrage Association to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association, of which Anthony was president from 1892 to 1900. In 1872 she led a group of women to the polls in Rochester, N.Y., to test the right of women to the franchise under the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment. Her arrest, trial, and sentence to a fine (which she refused to pay) were a cause célèbre; other women followed her example until the case was decided against them by the U.S. Supreme Court. From 1869 she traveled and lectured throughout the United States and Europe, seeing the feminist movement gradually advance to respectability and political importance. The secret of her power, aside from her superior intellect and strong personality, was her unswerving singleness of purpose. With Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage, she compiled Volumes I to III of the History of Woman Suffrage (1881–86), using a personal legacy to buy most of the first edition and present the volumes to colleges and universities in the United States and Europe. The History was completed by Ida Husted Harper (Vol. IV–VI, 1900–1922; Susan B. Anthony contributed to Vol. IV).

Bibliography

See The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, ed. by I. Husted (3 vol., 1908; repr. 1969); biographies by K. S. Anthony (1954) and R. C. Dorr (1928, repr. 1970).

Works: Works by Susan B. Anthony

(1820-1906)

1881

History of Woman Suffrage. The women's rights crusader directs the preservation of the documentary record of the early women's movement in the first installment of what would become a multivolume collection of letters, speeches, reminiscences, and conference papers. Four volumes would be issued by 1887, with two more, compiled by Ida Husted Harper, added by 1922.

History Dictionary: Anthony, Susan B.

A reformer of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, known especially for her advocacy of women's suffrage. She was also active in the cause of abolitionism before the Civil War.

Legal Encyclopedia: Anthony, Susan Brownell

People no longer are surprised when an American woman works outside the home, keeps her own bank account, maintains custody of her children after a divorce, or votes in a presidential election. Yet, not too long ago, these practices were uncommon, if not illegal, in the United States. Due in large part to the efforts of the remarkable Susan Brownell Anthony and other pioneers of feminism, women in the United States enjoy rights and opportunities that are simply taken for granted today.

Anthony was born in 1820, during an era when most women got married, produced children, and deferred completely to their husbands. Daniel Anthony, her father, belonged to the Society of Friends (better known as Quakers), a religious group that recognized the equality of men and women. Daniel encouraged his daughter to think independently and to speak her mind. He supported her educational pursuits and emphasized self-sufficiency.

Although Anthony's father was an admirable man and progressive for his time, her mother, Lucy Anthony, found little pleasure in her restricted, duty-bound life. She appeared overwhelmed by eight pregnancies and exhausted from running the household while keeping boarders and raising six surviving children. Historians believe that the withdrawn, careworn Lucy became a symbol to Anthony of the unfair burdens of marriage. The institution seemed weighted against women, even those with kind and liberal-minded husbands. Anthony concluded that marriage was necessary only when a strong emotional bond existed between two people. This view put her at odds with most women of her generation, who considered matrimony a requirement for social and economic security. True to her principles, Anthony— who once referred to marriage as slavery and "a blot on civilization"—rejected several suitors' offers and remained single throughout her long life.

Anthony was an intelligent young girl who received the best education available at the time. Although she attended a well-regarded boarding school in Philadelphia, she did not enroll in college. In the 1830s, only one college in the United States, Ohio's Oberlin College, accepted women. Even with a college education, Anthony would have faced a limited number of employment opportunities. As a woman, her only options were to become a seamstress, a domestic, or a teacher. Anthony chose teaching and, in 1938, began the first of several teaching jobs. In 1846, she became headmistress at Canajoharie Academy in New York. There, she discovered that male teachers were paid $10.00 a week, whereas she received $2.50. Frustrated with the low pay and a lack of respect for her work, Anthony decided to devote her energies to social reform.

Although Anthony is best known for her fight for women's suffrage, she also crusaded for other causes. In 1852, Anthony became active in the temperance movement, a national campaign to ban the sale and consumption of alcohol. When it became clear that women were not allowed full leadership in the existing temperance organizations, Anthony helped form the Woman's State Temperance Society of New York.

Like her father, Anthony also was a fervent abolitionist. She became friends with Frederick Douglass and attended her father's antislavery meetings in the family home. Before and during the U.S. Civil War, Anthony devoted her organizational skills to the cause. As head of the Anti-Slavery Society of New York, she planned lecture schedules and spoke publicly against the evils of the Southern system and of the discriminatory practices in the North. During this time, she joined forces with another abolitionist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was the acknowledged leader of the fledgling women's rights movement.

After the war, Anthony and Stanton continued to work together for social reform. They were bitterly disappointed when their fellow abolitionists refused to support their strategy for constitutionally mandating voting rights for women. A golden opportunity for female suffrage had arisen with the drafting of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This amendment was necessary to grant voting rights to the former slaves who were liberated by President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. However, the abolitionists supported the Fifteenth Amendment only to the extent that it gave African American males the right to vote. They were not concerned about the amendment's exclusion of women. With that defeat, Anthony focused her sights on a separate constitutional amendment to grant women the franchise.

In 1868, Anthony began publishing The Revolution, a weekly newsletter advocating suffrage and equal rights for women. In 1869, Anthony and Stanton formed the National Woman's Suffrage Association. An indefatigable worker, Anthony became a fixture on the lecture circuit and headed national petition drives to establish support for female voting rights.

In 1872, Anthony decided to test the legality of voting laws that allowed only white and African American males to go to the polls. She registered and voted in the 1872 presidential election in Rochester, New York. Anthony was prosecuted for the offense and fined $100, but she refused to pay. Her defiance rallied supporters of women's rights across the nation. In time, Anthony merged her suffrage organization with another one, to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She served as president of this association from 1892 to 1900.

Not surprisingly, Anthony fought hard for the liberalization of laws for married women. During most of the nineteenth century, a wife had very little protection under the law. Any income she produced automatically belonged to her husband, as did any inheritance she received. Her husband could apprentice their children without her permission and was designated sole guardian of their children, no matter how unfit he might be. A husband even had the right to pass on his guardianship of the children by will. In Anthony's home state of New York, her petition drives and lectures were instrumental in convincing the legislature to pass laws giving married women power over their incomes and guardianship of their children.

Anthony was not afraid to flout social conventions to achieve her goals. For a time, she wore bloomers, a controversial garment named after Amelia Jenks Bloomer, the woman who popularized it. Bloomers were loose-fitting trousers gathered at the ankle and worn underneath a knee-length skirt. The costume was intended as a protest against the tight-fitting corsets and unwieldy petticoats popularly worn by women at the time. Although she withstood ridicule to make her point, Anthony stopped wearing bloomers when she concluded that they were diverting attention from the more serious issues facing women.

Anthony's message of equality often met resistance, and not just from men. Many women in the nineteenth century were frightened by or skeptical of change. In 1870, Anthony lamented their wariness when she wrote, "The fact is, women are in chains, and their servitude is all the more debasing because they do not realize it." She urged women to recognize the inequities they faced and to speak and act for their own freedom.

When Anthony died in 1906, women did not yet have the right to vote in presidential elections. When the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution finally became law in 1920, it was called the Anthony amendment in recognition of her valiant efforts to gain suffrage.

Anthony was also honored in 1979 and 1980, when the U.S. Mint issued one dollar coins bearing her likeness. She became the first woman to be pictured on a U.S. coin in general circulation.

CROSS-REFERENCES: Stanton, Elizabeth Cady.

Quotes By: Susan B. Anthony

Quotes:

"The true Republic: men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less."

"Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less."

"Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation or social standards never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest are willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathies with despised ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences."

"Suffrage is the pivotal right."

Wikipedia: Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony

Born	February 15 1820(1820--) Adams, Massachusetts
Died	March 13 1906 (aged 86) Rochester, New York
Occupation	Suffragist, women's rights advocate

Susan Brownell Anthony (February 15, 1820 – March 13, 1906) was a prominent, independent and well-educated American civil rights leader who played a pivotal role in the 19th century women's rights movement to secure women's suffrage in the United States. She traveled the United States and Europe, and gave 75 to 100 speeches per year on women's rights for some 45 years. Susan B. Anthony died in Rochester, New York in her house at 17 Madison Street on March 13, 1906, and is buried at Mount Hope Cemetery.

Early life

Susan Brownell Anthony was born and raised in Adams, Massachusetts (West Grove), the second of 8 children born to Daniel Anthony and Lucy Read. One of her brothers, publisher Daniel Read Anthony, would become active in the anti-slavery movement in Kansas. She was a precocious child, having learned to read and write at age three. Her father, a cotton manufacturer and abolitionist, was a stern but open-minded man who was born into the Quaker religion. Her mother was a student in Daniel's school when she and Daniel fell in love. Although Lucy readily agreed to marry Daniel in 1817, she was less sure about marrying into the Society of Friends (Quakers). She was not a convinced Quaker and claimed that she was “not good enough” for the religion. In 1826, when the Quakers split into liberal and conservative camps, the Anthonys quickly followed the liberals, known as the "Hicksite Friends" - a group named after Elias Hicks.

Susan Brownell Anthony, age 28

Daniel wished to raise his children in a moderately strict household and did not allow Susan to experience what he perceived as the childish amusements of toys and games, which were seen as distractions from the “Inner Light”. However, Daniel was shunned by other Quakers for permitting dancing and citing a firm belief in "complete personal, mental and spiritual freedom" in his home. Together the Anthonys enforced self-discipline, principled convictions, and belief in one's own self-worth.

In 1826, when Susan was six years old, the Anthony family moved from Massachusetts to Battenville, New York. Susan was sent to attend a local district school, where a teacher refused to teach her long division because of her gender. Upon learning of the weak education she was receiving, her father promptly had her placed in a group home school, where he taught Susan himself. Mary Perkins, another teacher there conveyed a progressive image of womanhood to Anthony, further fostering her growing belief in women's equality.

In 1837, Anthony was sent to Deborah Moulson's Female Seminary, a Quaker boarding school in Philadelphia. She was not happy at Moulson's, but she did not have to stay there long. She was forced to end her formal studies because her family, like many others, was financially ruined during the Panic of 1837. Their losses were so great that they were forced to attempt to sell everything in an auction, even their most personal belongings, which were saved at the last minute when Susan's uncle, Joshua Read, stepped up and bid for them in order to restore them to the family.

In 1839, the family moved to Hardscrabble (later called Center Falls) New York, in the wake of the panic and economic depression that followed. That same year, Anthony left home to teach and to help pay off her father's debts. She taught first at Eunice Kenyon's Friends' Seminary in New Rochelle, and then at the Canajoharie Academy in 1846, where she rose to become headmistress of the Female Department. Anthony's first occupation inspired her to fight for wages equivalent to those of male teachers, since men earned roughly four times more than women for the same duties. Lucy was a progressive-minded woman. She attended the Rochester women’s rights convention held in August 1848, two weeks after the historic Seneca Falls Convention, and signed the Rochester convention’s Declaration of Sentiments.

In 1849, at age 29, Anthony quit teaching and moved to the family farm in Rochester, New York. Anthony began to take part in conventions and gatherings related to the temperance movement. In Rochester, she attended the local Unitarian Church and began to distance herself from the Quakers, in part because she had frequently witnessed instances of hypocritical behavior such as alcohol abuse amongst Quaker preachers. As she got older, Anthony continued to move further away from organized religion in general, and she was later chastised by various Christian religious groups for displaying irreligious tendencies.

In her youth, Anthony was very self-conscious of her looks and speaking abilities. She long resisted public speaking for fear she would not be sufficiently eloquent. Despite these insecurities, she became a renowned public presence, eventually helping to lead the women's movement.

Early social activism

In the decade before the American Civil War, Anthony took a prominent role in the New York anti-slavery and temperance movements. In 1849, at age 29, Anthony became secretary for the Daughters of Temperance, allowing her a forum to speak out against alcohol abuse, and beginning a movement towards the public limelight.

Anthony (standing) with Elizabeth Cady Stanton

In 1851, on a street in Seneca Falls, Anthony was introduced to Elizabeth Cady Stanton by mutual acquaintance and fellow feminist Amelia Bloomer. Anthony joined with Stanton in organizing in 1852, the first women's state temperance society in America. Stanton remained a close friend and colleague of Anthony's for the remainder of their lives, but Stanton longed for a broader, more radical women's rights platform. Together, the two women traversed the United States giving speeches and attempting to persuade the government that society should treat men and women equally.

After the first American women's rights convention took place on July 19 and July 20, 1848, in Seneca Falls, New York, Anthony took the opportunity to attend and support the women's rights convention held in Syracuse, New York, in 1852. It was around this time that Anthony began to gain widespread notoriety as a powerful public advocate of women's rights and as a new and stirring voice for change.

In 1856, Anthony further attempted to unify the African-American and women's rights movements when, recruited by abolitionist Abby Kelley^{[citation needed]}, she became agent for William Lloyd Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society of New York State. Speaking at the Ninth National Women’s Rights Convention on May 12, 1859, Anthony asked "Where, under our Declaration of Independence, does the Saxon man get his power to deprive all women and Negroes of their inalienable rights?"

In 1869, long time friends Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony found themselves, for the first time, on opposing sides of a debate. The Equal Rights Association, which had originally fought for both blacks’ and women’s right to suffrage, voted to support the 15th Amendment to the Constitution granting suffrage to black men, but not women. Anthony questioned why women should support this amendment when black men were not continuing to show support for women’s voting rights. Partially as a result of the decision by the Equal Rights Association, Anthony soon thereafter devoted herself almost exclusively to the agitation for women's rights.

On January 1, 1868, Anthony first published a weekly journal entitled The Revolution. Published in New York City, its motto was: "The true republic — men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less." Anthony worked as the publisher and business manager, while Elizabeth Cady Stanton acted as editor. The main thrust of The Revolution was to promote women’s and African Americans’ right to suffrage, but it also discussed issues of equal pay for equal work, more liberal divorce laws, and the church’s position on women’s issues. The journal was backed by independently wealthy George Francis Train, who provided $600 in starting funds.

Anthony occasionally wrote about abortion, which she opposed, and for which she blamed men, laws, and the "double standard", as women had no other options: "No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; But oh, thrice guilty is he who, for selfish gratification, heedless of her prayers, indifferent to her fate, drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime! … All the articles on this subject that I have read have been from men. They denounce women as alone guilty, and never include man in any plans for the remedy."^[1] In the 19th century, abortion was an illegal and life-threatening procedure. Pulitzer prize winner Stacy Schiff has discussed Anthony's opposition to abortion, saying that "...[although] Anthony deplored abortion, in 19th century abortion was life-threatening [and] it is impossible to know what Anthony would make of today's debate." Schiff cautions that "...thrusting historical figures into contemporary debate is treacherous because argument can be made for anything when words are taken out of context..." ^[2]

In 1893, she joined with Helen Barrett Montgomery in forming a chapter of the Woman’s Educational and Industrial Union (WEIU) in Rochester. In 1898, she also worked with her to raise fund to open opportunities for women students to study at University of Rochester, a goal which was reached in 1900.

Anthony used The Revolution as a vehicle in her crusade for equality, writing passionately about a variety of subjects relating to women's rights.

National suffrage organizations

In 1869, Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the National Women's Suffrage Association (NWSA), an organization dedicated to gaining women's suffrage. Anthony was vice-president-at-large of the NWSA from the date of its organization until 1892, when she became president .

In the early years of the NWSA, Anthony made attempts to unite women in the labor movement with the suffragist cause, but with little success. She and Stanton were delegates at the 1868 convention of the National Labor Union. However, Anthony inadvertently alienated the labor movement not only because suffrage was seen as a concern for middle-class rather than working-class women, but because she openly encouraged women to achieve economic independence by entering the printing trades, where male workers were on strike at the time. Anthony was later expelled from the National Labor Union over this controversy.

In 1890, Anthony orchestrated the merger of the NWSA with the more conservative American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), creating the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Prior to the controversial merge, Anthony had created a special NWSA executive committee to vote on whether they should merge with the AWSA, despite the fact that using a committee instead of an all-member vote went against the NWSA constitution. Motions to make it possible for members to vote by mail were strenuously opposed by Anthony and her adherents, and the committee was stacked with members who favored the merger. (Two members who voted against the merger were asked to resign).

Anthony's pursuit of alliances with moderate and conservative suffragists created long lasting tension between herself and more radical suffragists like Stanton. Anthony felt strongly that a moderate rather than radical approach to women's rights was more realistic, and would consequently serve to gain more for women in the long-run. Anthony's strategy was to unite the suffrage movement wherever possible and to then concentrate strictly on gaining the vote, temporarily postponing other efforts related to women's rights in order to focus attention on a singular cause. Stanton openly criticized Anthony's stance, writing that Anthony and AWSA leader Lucy Stone, "see suffrage only. They do not see woman's religious and social bondage." Anthony responded to Stanton: "We number over 10,000 women and each one has opinions...we can only hold them together to work for the ballot by letting alone their whims and prejudices on other subjects."

The creation of the NAWSA effectively marginalized the more radical elements within the women's movement, including Stanton. Anthony pushed for Stanton to be voted in as the first NAWSA president, and stood by her as Stanton was belittled by the large conservative factions within the new organization.

In collaboration with Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husted Harper, Anthony published The History of Woman Suffrage (4 vols., New York, 1884–1887). Anthony also befriended Josephine Brawley Hughes, an advocate of women's rights and of alcohol abolition in Arizona, and Carrie Chapman Catt, who Anthony endorsed for the presidency of the NAWSA when Anthony formally retired in 1900.

United States v. Susan B. Anthony

For casting a vote in the presidential election held on November 5, 1872, in Rochester, New York, Anthony was arrested on November 18 and pled not guilty, asserting that the 14th amendment entitled her to vote because, unlike the original Constitution, it provides that all "persons" (which includes females) born in the US are "citizens" who shall not be denied the "privileges" of citizenship (which includes voting).

She was defended at trial by Matilda Joslyn Gage, who asserted that it was the United States that was truly on trial, not Anthony. At the trial, Anthony made her famous On Women's Right to Vote speech, which asserted that casting her vote in the previous presidential election was not a crime but the legal right of a United States citizen. Citing the Constitution, her speech was a strong attempt to persuade the federal government that she was not unlawful in her action, and if she were male, her behavior would have never been questioned.

However, her defense was all for naught. The judge, Supreme Court Associate Justice Ward Hunt, explicitly instructed the jury to deliver a guilty verdict, refused to poll the jury, delivered an opinion he had written before trial had even begun, and on June 18 1873, sentenced her to pay a $100 fine. Anthony responded, "May it please your honor, I will never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty." She never did pay the fine, and the government never pursued her for nonpayment, for otherwise she would be able to file a habeas corpus, which would give her a chance to be heard by the appellate justices, and Justice Ward Hunt could not risk her convincing them.

Court speech on women's right to vote

Anthony recited a now famous speech before the court, in defense of women's suffrage. The following is a summary of her remarks:

Susan B. Anthony

"Friends and fellow citizens: I stand before you tonight under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen's rights, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any state to deny.

The preamble of the Federal Constitution says: "We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

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. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people - women as well as men. And it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government - the ballot.

For any state to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people, is to pass a bill of attainder, or, an ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land. By it the blessings of liberty are forever withheld from women and their female posterity. To them this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed. To them this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex; the most hateful aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe; an oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor. An oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant, or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex, which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters, of every household - which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries dissension, discord, and rebellion into every home of the nation.

Webster, Worcester, and Bouvier all define a citizen to be a person in the United States, entitled to vote and hold office. The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not. Being persons, then, women are citizens; and no state has a right to make any law, or to enforce any old law, that shall abridge their privileges or immunities. Hence, every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several states is today null and void, precisely as is every one against Negroes."

Legacy

A Susan B. Anthony dollar coin

Susan B. Anthony, who died 14 years, 5 months and 5 days before passage of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote, was honored as the first real (non-allegorical) American woman on circulating U.S. coinage with her appearance on the Susan B. Anthony dollar. The coin, approximately the size of a U.S. quarter, was minted for only four years, 1979, 1980, 1981, and 1999. Anthony dollars were produced at the Philadelphia and Denver mints for all four years, and at the San Francisco mint for all production years except 1999.

Anthony's birthplace in Adams was purchased in August of 2006 by Carol Crossed, affiliated with both Democrats for Life of America and Feminists for Life. She has stated that efforts will be made to open the home to the public in the near future.^[3]

Anthony's childhood home was placed on the National Historic Register in 2007 and NY State Historic Register 2006. The Susan B. Anthony House in Rochester was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1965 and is operated now as a museum.^[4]

100th Anniversary of Susan B. Anthony's death was on March 13, 2006.

The American composer Virgil Thomson and poet Gertrude Stein wrote an opera, The Mother of Us All, that abstractly explores Anthony's life and mission.

Notes

^ http://iris.virginia.edu/irisonline/archive/11_2_05/saywhat.html
^ Stacy Schiff, "Desperately Seeking Susan," (Op-Ed), New York Times, October 13, 2006.
^ Suffragist leader's home sold for $164K
^ Susan B. Anthony House website

References

Baker, Jean H. Sisters: The Lives of America's Suffragists. Hill and Wang, New York, 2005. ISBN 0-8090-9528-9.
Barry, Kathleen , Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist, Authorhouse 2000, ISBN 1-58721-009-6
Bass, Jack. "CIVIL RIGHTS: Judges followed Parks' bold lead." 27 November 2005. Atlanta Journal Constitution. LexisNexis. 5 March 2006. <http:/web.lexisnexis.com/universe/document?_m=00a2bc74653371...>.
Boller, Paul F., Jr. "Presidential Campaigns." Oxford University Press, 1984.
"From Kansas." Proquest Historical Newspapers Chicago Tribune. 7 September 1876. O1
Harper, Mrs Ida Husted. Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (3 vols., Indianapolis, 1898-1908)
Linder, Douglas. "Susan B. Anthony: A Biography." Law.umkc.edu. 2001. 05 March 2006 22 October, 2005 http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/anthony/sbabiog.html
Linder, Douglas. "Famous American Trials: The Anthony Trial: An Account." Argument for the Defense Concerning Legal Issues in the Case of: United States vs. Susan B. Anthony. 2001. 5 March 2006. <http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/anthony/defargument.html>
McCulloch, John. "The Struggle for Women's Suffrage in Queensland." Hecate: 1874.
Mobley, Kendal. 2005. “Susan B. Anthony and Helen Barrett Montgomery: An Intergenerational Feminist Partnership”. Baptist History & Heritage 40, Summer 80–90
Patriot Ledger Staff. "Role model: Susan B. Anthony to come to life." The Patriot Ledger: City Edition. LexisNexis., Quincy, MA. 1 MArch 2006 <http://lexis-nexis.com/universe/document?_m=969f13ed043290...>.
"Suffragist." Susan B. Anthony House. 03 2006. 18 Mar. 2006 <http://susanbanthonyhouse.org/index.shtml>.
"Susan B. Anthony." The National Women's History Project. 1994 18 Mar. 2006 <http://www.mith2.umd.edu/WomensStudies/PictureGallery/anthony.html>.
"Susan Brownell Anthony." Women in History. Women in History: Living Vignettes of Women From the Past. 21 Mar. 2006
"The Women in the Field." Proquest Historical Newspaper Chicago Tribune. 9 July 1868. O3.
Stories in Stone - "Famous People in Mount Hope Cemetery, Lucy Read Anthony"<http://www.fomh.org/stories.php?subaction=showfull&id=1120617483&archive=&start_from=&ucat=1&>
Western New York Suffragists - "Susan Brownell Anthony"<http://www.winningthevote.org/SBAnthony.html

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about:

Susan B. Anthony

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Susan B. Anthony

The Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Papers Project, Rutgers University
The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2), by Ida Husted Harper, available at Project Gutenberg.
The Trial of Susan B. Anthony, available at Project Gutenberg.
Susan B. Anthony, by Alma Lutz, 1959, from Project Gutenberg
First Unitarian Church
Susan B. Anthony House Website
Anthony trial
New York Times obituary
U. S. National Archives exhibit of original testimony from the 1872 case
Susan B. Anthony History
Gay Great - Susan B. Anthony

Persondata
NAME	Anthony, Susan B.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Anthony, Susan Brownell
SHORT DESCRIPTION	American women's rights activist
DATE OF BIRTH	February 15, 1820
PLACE OF BIRTH	Adams, Massachusetts, U.S.
DATE OF DEATH	March 13, 1906
PLACE OF DEATH	Rochester, New York, U.S.

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Susan B. Anthony

Early life

Early social activism

National suffrage organizations

United States v. Susan B. Anthony

Court speech on women's right to vote

Legacy

Notes

References

External links

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