Anthony, Susan B. | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

(b. February 15, 1820; d. March 13, 1906) Women's rights activist and abolitionist.

Susan Brownell Anthony, born on a farm near Adams, Massachusetts, the second of eight children, became a leader in the cause of women's rights and the abolition of slavery. Educated at home and in a district school, she then attended the Friends' Seminary near Philadelphia for four months, learning Quaker tenets of pacifism and the equality of women before God. To help her family, she began teaching at the New Rochelle Friends' Seminary and then, in 1846, at an academy close to her father's new farm near Rochester, New York. As her father often hosted abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, Anthony was exposed to reform causes like antislavery, temperance, and women's rights.

In 1848 Anthony attended the Seneca Falls Convention, the first meeting to promote women's rights. She met Elizabeth Cady Stanton two years later. They crusaded for temperance but felt silenced as women in male-dominated organizations. The two then focused on women's rights, attending many state and national conventions. Their lifelong friendship and the collaboration that developed shaped the women's rights movement for the next half century. Anthony applied her organizational skills and Stanton, her powerful writing and oratory. Anthony became the target of ridicule in the press, which presented her as a gaunt, bitter spinster, even as it spared the portly, maternal Stanton, who was married and the mother of seven children.

Devotion to women's rights did not keep Anthony from her antislavery activism. She abandoned Quakerism for Unitarianism when a Friends' meeting weakened its antislavery stance. Closely allied with abolitionists, she served as principal New York agent for Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society from 1856 until the Civil War. During the Civil War, Anthony and Stanton put their concern for women's rights aside so as to concentrate on abolition. They organized the Women's Loyal National League and gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures demanding the emancipation of slaves.

After the Civil War ended, Anthony became upset when she learned that the Republican Party's reconstruction policy included suffrage for black men but not for women. She denounced the Fourteenth Amendment for ignoring women by inserting the word "male" for the first time into the Constitution. She felt this should have been "woman's hour" because of all that women did to support the Union cause and abolition. Petitions that she presented to Congress in 1866 on behalf of women's suffrage were ignored, as were her efforts to win women the right to vote in Kansas and New York.

Disillusioned, she turned to a wealthy supporter to underwrite an Anthony-Stanton speaking tour and to launch a weekly suffrage magazine, Revolution, in January 1868. It advocated support for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, provided that they included "educated suffrage irrespective of sex and color," as well as equal pay for equal work regardless of gender, the practical education of girls, opening more occupations to women, and liberal divorce laws. Anthony also used Revolution to address women's labor problems. She organized a Working Women's Association in New York City to further unionization for higher wages and shorter hours.

Anthony and Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, which held annual conventions. Anthony alienated more moderate women who were less willing to demand a federal law rather than a state-by-state granting of the vote. Moderates led by Lucy Stone countered by forming the American Woman Suffrage Association, creating a schism that lasted for two decades. Anthony further alienated herself from the moderates by casting a ballot

in the 1872 presidential election, which led to her conviction for breaking the law.

Anthony relinquished Revolution in 1870 because of its heavy debt and traveled the lecture circuit in the Midwest and Far West to great demand. She rejoiced when the Wyoming Territory granted woman suffrage in 1870, quickly followed by the Utah Territory. She continued to work tirelessly for women's suffrage. The divided women's movement reunited in 1890 as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), pledging to work on both state and federal levels. In 1892 Anthony became its president.

Anthony settled down with her sister in Rochester in 1890 but still traveled to promote issues including unionization and race relations. By then, Anthony attracted acclaim as the matriarch of the women's movement as she triumphantly appeared at the Women's Congress of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. During the Spanish-American War, she protested women's inability to vote on matters of war and peace. She founded the International Council of Women (1888) and headed the U.S. delegation at meetings in London in 1899 and in Berlin in 1904, where she was lauded as "Susan B. Anthony of the World." While in Berlin, she and Carrie Chapman Catt formed the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, and she was named its honorary president. Anthony turned the NAWSA presidency over to Catt in 1900 and attended her last convention in 1906. When she died at age eighty-six a month after attending the convention, she was eulogized here and abroad.

Anthony's life illustrates the effects of war, and the events leading up to it, on social reform. As an abolitionist, she contributed to the divisions between North and South that led to war in 1861. As an advocate of rights for women and former slaves, she welcomed the expansion of liberties made possible by Northern victory, and spent the remainder of her life fighting to fulfill the cause of women's suffrage.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady; Woman's Rights Movement; Women's Suffrage Movement.

Anthony, Susan B., and Harper, Ida Husted, eds. History of Woman Suffrage. Rochester, NY: Susan B. Anthony, 1902.

Flexner, Eleanor. Century of Struggle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959.

Gurko, Miriam. The Ladies of Seneca Falls: The Birth of the Woman's Rights Movement. New York: Schocken, 1976.

Harper, Ida Husted. The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony,(1898–1908) 3 vols. Manchester, NH: Ayer, 1969.

Lutz, Alma. "Susan Brownell Anthony." In Notable American Women, 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary. Vol. 1. Edited by Edward T. James, et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.

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