Susan B. Anthony Biography

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (seated) with Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony was born February 15, 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts. She was raised in a family with strong social equality traditions.  Her father and brothers were abolitionists.  When the family moved to Rochester, New York in 1845 their home became a meeting place for reformers and activists such as Frederick Douglass.
 
In 1851, Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton.  Three years earlier, Stanton had co-organized the Seneca Falls Convention, launching what would become a seventy-two year battle for women’s suffrage.  The two formed a deep relationship that had an enormous impact on the women’s movement.
 
Laws at that time granted husbands sweeping ownership of family finances and custody of children.  Alcoholism was common among men which, given the legal gender bias, often resulted in an abusive father and husband who still maintained complete claim to family wealth, child custody, and general impunity from domestic abuse.  Thus, many of the early efforts of Stanton and Anthony were in support of temperance, including their co-creation of the Women’s State Temperance Society in Rochester, New York.
 
Dedicated to the cause of abolition since teenage years, Anthony organized an anti-slavery convention in 1851 and supported the Underground Railroad, meeting Harriet Tubman.  Eventually, tensions developed between abolitionist and women’s rights activists concerning the relative priority of the causes.  Nevertheless, Anthony and Stanton organized the Woman’s Loyal National League in 1863 to campaign for an amendment to abolish slavery.  The league organized the largest petition drive to date, substantially impacting the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment that ended slavery.
 
In 1868, Anthony and Stanton launched a weekly newspaper in New York City called The Revolution.  Its masthead read, “PRINCIPLE, NOT POLICY:  JUSTICE, NOT FAVORS—MEN, THEIR RIGHTS AND NOTHING MORE:  WOMEN, THEIR RIGHTS AND NOTHING LESS.”  This was also a period in which the women’s movement split over the issue of the proposed Fifteenth Amendment.  Anthony and Stanton opposed the amendment prohibiting the denial of suffrage based on race if it did not, at the same time, include a call to enfranchise women.  Others in the women’s movement supported the amendment and the clash led Anthony, Stanton, and others to form the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA).
 
Anthony now focused her attention on women’s suffrage.  Despite the fact that women did not yet have the right to vote, Anthony had emerged as a political force.  She remained unmarried, dedicating herself exclusively to the cause with indefatigable energy while deflecting withering abuse from detractors.  She traveled extensively, giving lectures at breakneck pace and recruiting new adherents to the movement while lobbying Congress and organizing conventions. 
 
In a historic act of civil disobedience Anthony and dozens of other women attempted to vote in the 1872 presidential election.  Anthony was arrested and used the occasion to once again garner national attention to the cause of women’s suffrage.  With characteristic energy and passion, she spoke in twenty-nine towns in the New York county where the trial would take place.  She was found guilty and sentenced to pay a $100 fine.  She told the judge in response, “I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty.”  She never did, but her defiance head reached a dead end of sorts.  It was becoming clear that the means of a legal attack would not likely achieve the end goal of women’s suffrage.  It was becoming clear that the daunting challenge of a constitutional amendment would need to be pursued.
 
For the next three decades Anthony worked well into her eighties, attempting in vain to realize that goal.  In 1894, she communicated the sentiments on the long struggle and the hindsight future generations would have:
 
We shall someday be heeded, and when we shall have our amendment to the Constitution of the United States, everybody will think it was always so, just exactly as many young people think that all the privileges, all the freedom, all the enjoyments which woman now possesses always were hers. They have no idea of how every single inch of ground that she stands upon today has been gained by the hard work of some little handful of women of the past.
 
Susan B. Anthony died on March 13, 1906.  From that point, it would be more than sixteen years before the Nineteenth Amendment (colloquially known as the “Anthony Amendment”) was adopted, prohibiting the denial of suffrage based on sex.
 
The noted women’s studies scholar Eleanor Flexner wrote in Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States:
 
Anthony did not live to see the achievement of women's suffrage at the national level, but she was proud of the progress the women's movement had made. At the time of her death, women had achieved suffrage in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Idaho, and several larger states followed soon after. Legal rights for married women had been established in most states, and most professions had at least a few women members. 36,000 women were attending colleges and universities, up from zero a few decades earlier.

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