Susan B. Anthony

Who was Susan B. Anthony?

Raised a Quaker, Susan B. Anthony was born in Adams, Massachusetts. Her family moved near Rochester, New York, and held antislavery meetings on their farm. She worked as a teacher, took up temperance and the antislavery cause, and from 1851, after she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, spent her life organising for women's rights. She worked for the American Anti-Slavery Society and in 1869 helped found a suffrage association of her own. When the rival groups merged, she led the combined body from 1892 until 1900. The Nineteenth Amendment of 1920 is often nicknamed for her.

Political views

• Pressed for married women's right to own property and for the vote for women in New York State.Source: nps.gov
• Took a job as an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1856.Source: nps.gov
• Told an 1857 teachers' convention that women and Black Americans should be educated.Source: susanb.org
• Made a national constitutional amendment the main goal for winning women the vote.Source: nps.gov
• Cast a ballot in the 1872 presidential election as a test of the law, and was tried and fined.Source: nps.gov
• Set up groups for women who worked in the printing and garment trades.Source: susanb.org

Legacy

Anthony became the face of the suffrage movement. Admirers say her decades of speeches, petitions and organising built the national campaign that ended with the Nineteenth Amendment, and in 1979 she became the first real woman shown on regular US coins. Historians also note its darker side. When the Fifteenth Amendment gave the vote to Black men and not to women, she and Stanton split from old allies, among them Frederick Douglass, who was hurt by their insulting arguments about African Americans, as the National Park Service records. The suffrage history she helped write centres white women and leaves out most women of colour. The Park Service adds that her 1873 trial verdict closed off an appeal to the Supreme Court.

In their own words