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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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.

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).

(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

See also Feminist Movement; Married Women's Property Acts; National American Woman Suffrage Association; National Woman Suffrage Association; Stanton, Elizabeth Cady; Suffrage; Willard, Frances.

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.

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:

"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."

For other uses, see Susan B. Anthony (disambiguation).

Susan B. Anthony
Born	February 15, 1820(1820-02-15) 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 American civil rights leader who played a pivotal role in the 19th century women's rights movement to introduce women's suffrage into the United States. She traveled the United States and Europe, and gave 75 to 100 speeches every year on women's rights for 45 years.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Early social activism 2.1 The Revolution 2.2 American Equal Rights Association 3 National suffrage organizations 4 Later personal life, death 5 Legacy 5.1 Disputes after her death 6 See also 7 References 8 Further reading 9 External links

Early life

Susan B. Anthony's birthplace

Susan B. Anthony was born and raised in West Grove, near Adams, Massachusetts. She was the second oldest of seven children, Guelma Penn (1818), Susan Brownell (1820), Hannah E. (1821), Daniel Read (1824), Mary Stafford (1827), Eliza Tefft (1832), and Jacob Merritt (1834), born to Daniel Anthony and Lucy Read. One brother, publisher Daniel Read Anthony, would become active in the anti-slavery movement in Kansas, while a sister, Mary Stafford Anthony, became a teacher and a woman's rights activist. Anthony remained close to her sisters throughout her life.

Anthony's father Daniel was a cotton manufacturer and abolitionist, a stern but open-minded man who was born into the Quaker religion.^[1] He did not allow toys or amusements into the household, claiming that they would distract the soul from the "inner light." Her mother Lucy was a student in Daniel's school; the two fell in love and agreed to marry in 1817, but Lucy 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 them. Lucy Anthony 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. Lucy and Daniel Anthony enforced self-discipline, principled convictions, and belief in one's own self-worth.

Susan was a precocious child, having learned to read and write at age three.^[2] In 1826, when she 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 attempted 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, 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, 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.

In 1849, at age 29, Anthony quit teaching and moved to the family farm in Rochester, New York. She 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 the use of alcohol 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

Susan B. Anthony at age 28

Universal manhood suffrage, by establishing an aristocracy of sex, imposes upon the women of this nation a more absolute and cruel despotism than monarchy; in that, woman finds a political master in her father, husband, brother, son. The aristocracies of the old world are based upon birth, wealth, refinement, education, nobility, brave deeds of chivalry; in this nation, on sex alone; exalting brute force above moral power, vice above virtue, ignorance above education, and the son above the mother who bore him. —National Woman Suffrage Association.[3]

In the era before the American Civil War, Anthony took a prominent role in the New York anti-slavery and temperance movements. In 1836, at age 16, Susan collected two boxes of petitions opposing slavery, in response to the gag rule prohibiting such petitions in the House of Representatives.^[4] In 1849, at age 29, she became secretary for the Daughters of Temperance, which gave her a forum to speak out against alcohol abuse, and served as the beginning of Anthony's movement towards the public limelight.

In late 1850, Anthony read a detailed account in the New York Tribune of the first National Women's Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts. In the article, Horace Greeley wrote an especially admiring description of the final speech, one given by Lucy Stone. Stone's words catalyzed Anthony to devote her life to women's rights.^[5] In the summer of 1852, Anthony met both Greeley and Stone in Seneca Falls.^[6]

In 1851, on a street in Seneca Falls, Anthony was introduced to Elizabeth Cady Stanton by a mutual acquaintance, as well as fellow feminist Amelia Bloomer. Anthony joined with Stanton in organizing the first women's state temperance society in America after being refused admission to a previous convention on account of her sex, in 1851. 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.

Anthony was invited to speak at the third annual National Women's Rights Convention held in Syracuse, New York in September 1852. She and Matilda Joslyn Gage both made their first public speeches for women's rights at the convention.^[7] Anthony began to gain notice as a powerful public advocate of women's rights and as a new and stirring voice for change. Anthony participated in every subsequent annual National Women's Rights Convention, and served as convention president in 1858.

In 1856, Anthony further attempted to unify the African-American and women's rights movements when, recruited by abolitionist Abby Kelley Foster,^[8] she became an agent for William Lloyd Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society of New York. 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?"

The Revolution

On January 1, 1868, Anthony first published a weekly journal entitled The Revolution. Printed 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.

Though she never married, Anthony published her views about sexuality in marriage, holding that a woman should be allowed to refuse sex with her husband; the American woman had no legal recourse at that time against rape by her husband. Anthony spoke very little on the subject of abortion. Of primary importance to Anthony was the granting to woman the right to her own body which she saw as an essential element for the prevention of unwanted pregnancies, using abstinence as the method. In The Revolution, Anthony wrote in 1869 about the subject, arguing that instead of merely attempting to pass a law against abortion, the root cause must also be addressed. Simply passing an anti-abortion law would, she wrote, "be only mowing off the top of the noxious weed, while the root remains."^[9] Anthony continued: "Guilty? Yes, 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."^[9]

American Equal Rights Association

In 1869, long-time friends Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony found themselves, for the first time, on opposing sides of a debate. The American Equal Rights Association (AERA), 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 AERA, Anthony soon thereafter devoted herself almost exclusively to the agitation for women's rights.

Susan B. Anthony, ca 1900

On November 18, 1872, Anthony was arrested by a U.S. Deputy Marshal for voting illegally in the 1872 Presidential Election two weeks earlier. She had written to Stanton on the night of the election that she had "positively voted the Republican ticket – straight...". She was tried and convicted seven months later, despite the stirring and eloquent presentation of her arguments that the recently adopted Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States" the privileges of citizenship, and which contained no gender qualification, gave women the constitutional right to vote in federal elections. The sentence was a fine, but not imprisonment; and true to her word in court, she never paid the penalty for the rest of her life. The trial gave Anthony the opportunity to spread her arguments to a wider audience than ever before.^[10]

Anthony toured Europe in 1883 and visited many charitable organizations. She wrote of a poor mother she saw in Killarney that had "six ragged, dirty children" to say that "the evidences were that "God" was about to add a No. 7 to her flock. What a dreadful creature their God must be to keep sending hungry mouths while he withholds the bread to fill them!"^[11]

In 1893, she joined with Helen Barrett Montgomery in forming a chapter of the Woman’s Educational and Industrial Union (WEIU)^[12] in Rochester. In 1898, she also worked with Montgomery to raise funds to open opportunities for women students to study at University of Rochester.

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.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (sitting) with Anthony

In the early years of the NWSA, Anthony made many 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 moderate American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), creating the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). 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 suffragists created long-lasting tension between herself and more radical suffragists like Stanton. 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 factions of less-radical members 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 Prohibition in Arizona,^[13] and Carrie Chapman Catt, whom Anthony endorsed for the presidency of the NAWSA when Anthony formally retired in 1900.

Later personal life, death

This section requires expansion.

Anthony neither married nor had children, but when a leading publicist told her he thought she would make a wonderful mother, she explained, "I thank you, sir, for what I take to be the highest compliment, but sweeter even than to have had the joy of caring for children of my own has it been to me to help bring about a better state of things for mothers generally, so that their unborn little ones could not be willed away from them."^[14] She praised egalitarian marriages; sexuality, in her view, was "the highest and holiest function of the physical organism."^[15]

After retiring in 1900, Anthony remained in Rochester, where she died of heart disease and pneumonia in her house at 17 Madison Street on March 13, 1906.^[16] She was buried at Mount Hope Cemetery. Following her death, the New York State Senate passed a resolution remembering her "unceasing labor, undaunted courage and unselfish devotion to many philanthropic purposes and to the cause of equal political rights for women."^[17]

Legacy

A 1936 U.S. commemorative stamp honoring Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony, who died 14 years 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 minted for circulation at the Philadelphia and Denver mints for all four years, and at the San Francisco mint for the first three production years. She was also featured on U.S. commemorative stamps in 1936 and 1954.

A Susan B. Anthony dollar coin

Anthony's birthplace in Adams was purchased in August 2006 by Carol Crossed, founder of the New York chapter of Democrats for Life of America, affiliated with Feminists for Life.^[18] Anthony's childhood home in Battenville, New York, was placed on the New York State Historic Register in 2006, and the National Historic Register in 2007.^[19]

Susan B. Anthony House in 1967

The Susan B. Anthony House in Rochester was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1966 and was operated as a museum.^[20]

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. Along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, she is commemorated in The Woman Movement, a sculpture by Adelaide Johnson, unveiled in 1921 at the United States Capitol.

Disputes after her death

There remains considerable dispute on Anthony's position in regards to abortion. The organization Feminists for Life, whose founder purchased her birth home, claim that she was "an outspoken critic of abortion." Pro-choice activists say that the incorrect, historically dubious comparison between positions on abortion in the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries places Anthony in the camp of her life-long antagonists, social conservatives.^[21]

See also

• List of civil rights leaders
• List of suffragists and suffragettes

References

1. ^ Harper, 1898, pp. 21–22.
2. ^ Harper, 1898, p. 13.
3. ^ Quoted in The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 3, ch. 27, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage (1886).
4. ^ Miller, 314
5. ^ Hays, Elinor Rice. Morning Star: A Biography of Lucy Stone 1818–1893. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961, p. 88. ISBN 0347937567
6. ^ Harper, 1898, p. 64.
7. ^ Blackwell, Alice Stone. Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Woman's Rights. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2001, p. 101. ISBN 0-8139-1990-8
8. ^ Stanton, 1997, pp. 26–27.
9. ^ ^{a b} "Marriage and Maternity". The Revolution. Susan B. Anthony. July 8, 1869. http://www.prolifequakers.org/susanb.htm. Retrieved 2009-04-21. 
10. ^ Linder, Douglas: "The Trial of Susan B. Anthony for Illegal Voting," University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, at http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/trials14.htm
11. ^ Harper, Ida Husted. "The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, Volume II, Indianapolis and Kansas City, The Bowen-Merrill Company, 1898, p. 574.
12. ^ "Western New York Suffragists - Women Educational and Industrial Union". Rochester Regional Library Council. 2000. http://www.winningthevote.org/weiu.html. Retrieved 2008-07-16. 
13. ^ The prohibition movement and the women's suffrage movement were often allied, as states which enfranchised women soon experienced their voting against alcohol, ostensibly for reason of getting their intoxicated husbands out of saloons.^{[citation needed]} See also List of teetotalers.
14. ^ Woman's Christian Temperance Union, President (1907). "President's annual address". National Woman's Christian Temperance Union. 37th. http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/viewtext/2580740?op=t&n=3. Retrieved 2009-11-21. 
15. ^ Derr, Mary Crane (Spring 1998). "Herstory worth repeating: Susan B. Anthony". The American Feminist 5 (1): 19. http://www.feministsforlife.org/taf/1998/spring/Spring98.pdf. Retrieved 2009-11-21. 
16. ^ "Miss Susan B. Anthony Died This Morning". New York Times. March 13, 1906. http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0215.html. Retrieved 2009-02-19. "Miss Susan B. Anthony died at 12:40 o'clock this morning. The end came peacefully." 
17. ^ Harper, Ida Husted (1908). The life and work of Susan B. Anthony: including public addresses, her own letters and many from her contemporaries during fifty years, Volume 3. Bowen-Merrill. p. 1446. http://books.google.com/books?id=iooEAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA1446. 
18. ^ Schiff, Stacy (2006-10-13). "Desperately Seeking Susan". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/13/opinion/13schiff.html. "That two-story house, a rich but undistinguished piece of real estate perched on a desolate stretch of highway, was sold at auction in August. It belongs now to Carol Crossed, the founder of the New York State chapter of Feminists for Life. Ms. Crossed made the acquisition on behalf of the national anti-abortion organization, which will manage and care for the house." 
19. ^ "New women's museum at home of Susan B. Anthony". History News Network. 2007-02-13. http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/35375.html. "Freddie Mac Bank has donated the childhood home of Susan B. Anthony to New York State Parks Department for $1." 
20. ^ "Susan B. Anthony House". http://www.susanbanthonyhouse.org/. "1966 - The Susan B. Anthony house is designated a National Historic Landmark" 
21. ^ Stevens, Allison (2006-10-06). "Susan B. Anthony's Abortion Position Spurs Scuffle". We.news. http://www.womensenews.org/story/abortion/061006/susan-b-anthonys-abortion-position-spurs-scuffle. Retrieved 2009-11-21. 

Further reading

• Baker, Jean H. Sisters: The Lives of America's Suffragists. Hill and Wang, New York, 2005. ISBN 0-8090-9528-9.
• Bass, Jack (27 November 2005). Civil Rights: Judges followed Parks' bold lead (op/ed). Atlanta Journal Constitution. Retrieved May 18, 2009.
• Boller, Paul F., Jr. "Presidential Campaigns." Oxford University Press, 1984.
• "From Kansas." Proquest Historical Newspapers Chicago Tribune. 7 September 1876. O1
• Harper, Ida Husted. Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (3 vols., Indianapolis, 1898-1908)
• Linder, Douglas. Susan B. Anthony: A Biography
• 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.
• Linder, Douglas Argument for the Defense Concerning Legal Issues in the Case of United States vs Susan B. Anthony
• McCulloch, John. "The Struggle for Women's Suffrage in Queensland." Hecate: 1874.
• Miller, William Lee (1995). Arguing About Slavery. John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle in the United States Congress. Vintage Books. ISBN 0-3945-6922-9. 
• 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. Quincy, MA. 1 March 2006
• Stanton, Elizabeth Cady; edited by Ann D. Gordon; assistant editor Tamara Gaskell Miller. The selected papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Rutgers, 1997. ISBN 0-8135-2317-6
• Susan B. Anthony (1994). The National Women's History Project. Retrieved 18 March 2006.
• "Susan Brownell Anthony." Women in History. Women in History: Living Vignettes of Women From the Past. 21 March 2006
• "The Women in the Field." Proquest Historical Newspaper Chicago Tribune. 9 July 1868. O3.
• Biography at americola.com
• Western New York Suffragists - Susan Brownell Anthony

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Susan B. Anthony

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Susan B. Anthony

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Susan B. Anthony

• Villard, Fanny Garrison (1920-02-14). "Susan B. Anthony". The Nation. http://www.thenation.com/doc/19200214/villard. Retrieved 2009-11-21. 
• The Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Papers Project at Rutgers University
• The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2), by Ida Husted Harper at Project Gutenberg
• The Trial of Susan B. Anthony at Project Gutenberg
• Susan B. Anthony, by Alma Lutz, 1959, from Project Gutenberg
• Anthony trial
• U. S. National Archives exhibit of original testimony from the 1872 case
• Susan B. Anthony at Find a Grave
• Online catalog of Susan B. Anthony's personal library, based on the Susan B. Anthony Collection at the Library of Congress, online at LibraryThing

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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