Susan B. Anthony

Susan Brownell Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, in Adams, Massachusetts, the second of seven children of Daniel Anthony, a cotton mill owner, and Lucy Read Anthony ^[1]. Her father was a Quaker whose faith taught that women and men possessed equal spiritual worth, an idea that shaped the household. The family valued self-discipline, plain living, and education for daughters as well as sons, which was unusual for the period.

In 1826 the Anthonys moved to Battenville, New York, where Daniel ran a larger mill. Susan learned to read early and later attended a Quaker boarding school near Philadelphia, but the financial panic of 1837 ruined the family business and cut her formal schooling short ^[1]. She took teaching positions to help pay family debts, an experience that gave her a firsthand education in inequality: male teachers routinely earned several times the wages paid to women doing identical work ^[2].

By 1845 the family had settled on a farm near Rochester, New York, a city that would remain Anthony's home for the rest of her life. The Rochester farm became a gathering place for reformers, and Frederick Douglass, who published his newspaper in the city, was among the abolitionists who visited ^[3]. Anyone asking who was Susan B. Anthony before she became famous would find a serious young teacher already surrounded by radical ideas.

Anthony's first public causes were temperance and abolition rather than suffrage. While teaching in Canajoharie, New York, in the late 1840s, she joined the Daughters of Temperance and discovered a talent for organizing meetings and raising money ^[2]. When male-run temperance societies refused to let women speak from the floor, she began to see the vote as the tool that made every other reform possible.

The decisive moment in any Susan B. Anthony biography came in 1851, when a mutual friend introduced her to Elizabeth Cady Stanton on a street corner in Seneca Falls ^[1]. The two formed one of the most productive partnerships in American political history. Stanton, tied to home by seven children, drafted arguments and speeches; Anthony, unmarried and free to travel, carried them across the country. Stanton later said she forged the thunderbolts and Anthony fired them, a division of labor both women acknowledged ^[4].

Through the 1850s Anthony organized petition campaigns across New York State, gathering thousands of signatures for married women's property rights and for suffrage. She also worked as an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society, arranging lectures and facing hostile crowds that sometimes hanged her in effigy ^[3]. The work taught her canvassing methods, county by county and door by door, that suffragists would use for the next seventy years.

Among the most consequential Susan B. Anthony achievements was the creation of a permanent national suffrage movement. In 1866 she and Stanton helped found the American Equal Rights Association, and in 1869, after the movement split over the Fifteenth Amendment's enfranchisement of Black men but not women, they launched the National Woman Suffrage Association ^[2]. Anthony argued that the Constitution should never introduce the word male into questions of voting rights, a stand that put her at odds with former abolitionist allies.

Her most famous act of protest came on November 5, 1872, when she and a group of Rochester women persuaded election inspectors to register them and then cast ballots in the presidential election. Anthony was arrested, tried in federal court in Canandaigua, New York, in June 1873, and fined one hundred dollars after the judge directed the jury to find her guilty ^[5]. She refused to pay a single dollar of the fine, and the government never pursued collection. Her courtroom statement that she had been denied trial by a jury of her peers circulated widely in the press.

Anthony also built the movement's institutions and its written record. From 1868 to 1870 she published a weekly newspaper, The Revolution, under the motto of equal rights for all ^[1]. With Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage she compiled the first volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage, a documentary project that eventually ran to six volumes and preserved the movement's own account of itself ^[4]. In 1890 she engineered the merger of the rival suffrage factions into the National American Woman Suffrage Association, serving as its president from 1892 to 1900 ^[2].

Anthony never married, a choice she defended as necessary for her work. She told interviewers that she could not consent to a legal relationship in which the wife was subordinate, and she often noted that every woman she recruited to the cause seemed to be lost to marriage and household duties soon after ^[1]. Contemporaries mocked her as a spinster; she treated her independence as the foundation of her usefulness.

Her closest bonds were with family and fellow reformers. She shared a home at 17 Madison Street in Rochester with her sister Mary Anthony, a schoolteacher who managed the household and quietly funded much of Susan's travel ^[6]. The friendship with Stanton lasted more than fifty years despite sharp disagreements, including Anthony's discomfort with Stanton's attack on organized religion in The Woman's Bible during the 1890s.

Raised a Quaker, Anthony later attended the First Unitarian Church of Rochester and described her creed simply as the practice of doing good ^[3]. She lived frugally, dressed plainly, and by the end of her life had given away nearly everything she earned from lecturing to the cause. Among lesser-known Susan B. Anthony facts is that she left an estate consisting mostly of her papers, which she directed to the movement.

The final two decades of Anthony's life were spent turning a scattered crusade into a disciplined national organization. As president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association she recruited and trained a younger generation, including Carrie Chapman Catt and Anna Howard Shaw, and deliberately handed leadership to Catt when she retired from the presidency in 1900 at the age of eighty ^[2].

She remained a relentless traveler. Anthony campaigned in state suffrage referendums from Kansas to California, crossed the Atlantic to help found the International Council of Women in 1888, and attended the International Woman Suffrage Alliance meeting in Berlin in 1904 ^[4]. She also pushed the University of Rochester to admit women, pledging her own life insurance policy in 1900 to close the fundraising gap that opened the university's doors to female students ^[6].

Anthony made her last major public appearance at the 1906 suffrage convention in Baltimore, where she told delegates that failure is impossible, a phrase the movement adopted as a rallying cry ^[5]. Weakened by pneumonia and heart disease, she returned home and died at her Madison Street house in Rochester on March 13, 1906, at the age of eighty-six ^[1]. An estimated ten thousand mourners filed past her casket despite a snowstorm.

Anthony did not live to vote legally, but the cause she organized reached its goal within a generation. When Congress passed the federal suffrage amendment in 1919 and the states ratified it in 1920, supporters and newspapers alike called the Nineteenth Amendment the Susan B. Anthony Amendment in her honor ^[2]. The measure enfranchised roughly twenty-six million American women, though many Black women in the South remained blocked from the polls for decades by discriminatory state laws.

Her memory is woven into American public life. In 1979 she became the first real woman depicted on a circulating United States coin, the Susan B. Anthony dollar ^[7]. Her Rochester home is preserved as the National Susan B. Anthony Museum and House, and her grave at Mount Hope Cemetery draws visitors who leave voting stickers on her headstone during elections, a tradition that surged during the 2016 and 2020 presidential contests ^[6]. In 2020, on the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, a presidential pardon was issued for her 1872 conviction, though the museum bearing her name noted that she had never wanted one ^[8].

Historians continue to debate parts of her record, particularly her heated rhetoric during the Fifteenth Amendment dispute, when she opposed enfranchising Black men ahead of women. Yet her larger achievement is not in doubt: she took a demand once dismissed as absurd and, through fifty years of petitions, lectures, arrests, and organization, made it inevitable ^[3].