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Susan B. Anthony, Suffragette
Biography of Susan B. Anthony
Susan B. Anthony was born February 15, 1820 in Adams Massachusetts. She was brought up in a Quaker family with long activist traditions. Early in her life she developed a sense of justice and moral zeal.
After teaching for fifteen years, she became active in temperance. Because she was a woman, she was not allowed to speak at temperance rallies. This experience, and her acquaintance with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, led her to join the women's rights movement in 1852. Soon after she dedicated her life to woman suffrage.
Ignoring opposition and abuse, Anthony traveled, lectured and canvassed across the nation for the vote. She also campaigned for the abolition of slavery, women's rights to their own property and earnings, and women's labor organizations. In 1900, Anthony persuaded the University of Rochester to admit women.
Anthony, who never married, was aggressive and compassionate by nature. She had a keen mind and a great ability to inspire. She remained active until her death on March 13, 1906.
After they moved to Rochester in 1845 members of the Anthony family were active in the anti-slavery movement. Anti-slavery Quakers met at their farm almost every Sunday, where they were sometimes joined by Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Anthony's brothers Daniel and Merritt were anti-slavery activists in Kansas.
In 1856 Anthony became an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society, arranging meetings, making speeches, putting up posters, and distributing leaflets. She encountered hostile mobs, armed threats, and things thrown at her. She was hung in effigy, and in Syracuse her image was dragged through the streets.
In 1863 Anthony and Stanton organized a Women's National Loyal League to support and petition for the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery. They went on to campaign for Black and women's full citizenship, including the right to vote, in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. They were bitterly disappointed and disillusioned when women were excluded. Anthony continued to campaign for equal rights for all American citizens, including ex- slaves, in her newspaper The Revolution, which she began publishing in Rochester in 1868. Anthony attacked lynchings and racial prejudice in the Rochester newspapers in the 1890s.
In 1846, at age 26, Susan B. Anthony took the position of head of the girls' department at Canajoharie Academy, her first paid position. She taught there for two years, earning $110 a year.
In 1853 at the state teachers' convention Anthony called for women to be admitted to the professions and for better pay for women teachers. She also asked for women to have a voice at the convention and to assume committee positions.
In 1859 Anthony spoke before the state teachers' convention at Troy, N.Y. and at the Massachusetts teachers' convention, arguing for coeducation and claiming there were no differences between the minds of men and women.
Anthony called for equal educational opportunities for all regardless of race, and for all schools, colleges, and universities to open their doors to women and ex-slaves. She also campaigned for the right of children of ex-slaves to attend public schools.
In the 1890s Anthony served on the board of trustees of Rochester's State Industrial School, campaigning for coeducation and equal treatment of boys and girls.
In the 1890s Anthony raised $50,000 in pledges to ensure the admittance of women to the University of Rochester. In a last-minute effort to meet the deadline she put up the cash value of her life insurance policy. The University was forced to make good its promise and women were admitted for the first time in 1900.
Susan B. Anthony's paper The Revolution, first published in 1868, advocated an eight- hour day and equal pay for equal work. It promoted a policy of purchasing American- made goods and encouraging immigration to rebuild the South and settle the entire country. Publishing The Revolution in New York brought her in contact with women in the printing trades.
In 1868 Anthony encouraged working women from the printing and sewing trades in New York, who were excluded from men's trade unions, to form Workingwomen's Associations. As a delegate to the National Labor Congress in 1868 Anthony persuaded the committee on female labor to call for votes for women and equal pay for equal work, although the men at the conference deleted the reference to the vote.
In 1870 Anthony formed and was elected president of the Workingwomen's Central Association. The Association drew up reports on working conditions and provided educational opportunities for working women. Anthony encouraged a cooperative workshop founded by the Sewing Machine Operators Union and boosted the newly-formed women typesetters' union in The Revolution. Anthony tried to establish trade schools for women printers. When printers in New York went on strike she urged employers to hire women instead, believing this would show how they could do the job as well as men, and therefore deserved equal pay. At the 1869 National Labor Union Congress the men's Typographical Union accused her of strike- breaking and running a non-union shop at The Revolution, and called her an enemy of labor.
In the 1890s, while president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Anthony emphasized the importance of gaining the support of organized labor. She encouraged Florence Kelley and Jane Addams in their work in Chicago, and Gail Laughlin in her goal to seek protection for working women through trade unions.
Susan B. Anthony was brought up a Quaker. Her family believed drinking liquor was sinful. While Anthony was working as head of the girls' department of Canajoharie Academy she joined the Daughters of Temperance, a group of women who drew attention to the effects of drunkenness on families and campaigned for stronger liquor laws. She made her first public speech in 1848 at a Daughters of Temperance supper.
When Anthony returned to Rochester in 1849 she was elected president of the Rochester branch of the Daughters of Temperance and raised money for the cause. In 1853 Anthony was refused the right to speak at the state convention of the Sons of Temperance in Albany. She left the meeting and called her own. In 1853 Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the Women's State Temperance Society with the goal of petitioning the State legislature to pass a law limiting the sale of liquor. The State Legislature rejected the petition because most of the 28,000 signatures were from women and children. Anthony decided that women needed the vote so that politicians would listen to them. She and Stanton were criticized for talking too much about women's rights and resigned from the Women's State Temperance Society.
In the 1860s Anthony and Stanton drew attention to the case of Abby McFarland whose drunken and abusive husband Daniel shot and killed the man she had divorced him to marry. They protested when Daniel was acquitted of murder on a plea of temporary insanity and given custody of their son.
In the 1870s Anthony supported the Rochester women organizers of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, although she told them that women would need to get the vote to reach their goal. She refused to support Prohibition because she believed it detracted attention from the cause of woman suffrage.
Susan B. Anthony was convinced by her work for temperance that women needed the vote if they were to influence public affairs. She was introduced by Amelia Bloomer to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the leaders of the women's rights movement, in 1851 and attended her first women's rights convention in Syracuse in 1852.
Anthony and Stanton believed the Republicans would reward women for their work in building support for the Thirteenth Amendment by giving them the vote. They were bitterly disappointed when this did not happen.
In 1866 Anthony and Stanton founded the American Equal Rights Association and in 1868 they started publishing the newspaper The Revolution in Rochester, with the masthead "Men their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less," and the aim of establishing "justice for all."
In 1869 the suffrage movement split, with Anthony and Stanton's National Association continuing to campaign for a constitutional amendment, and the American Woman Suffrage Association adopting a strategy of getting the vote for women on a state-by-state basis. Wyoming became the first territory to give women the vote in 1869.
In the 1870s Anthony campaigned vigorously for women's suffrage on speaking tours in the West. Anthony, three of her sisters, and other women were arrested in Rochester in 1872 for voting. Anthony refused to pay her streetcar fare to the police station because she was "traveling under protest at the government's expense." She was arraigned with other women and election inspectors in Rochester Common Council chambers. She refused to pay bail and applied for habeas corpus, but her lawyer paid the bail, keeping the case from the Supreme Court. She was indicted in Albany, and the Rochester District Attorney asked for a change of venue because a jury might be prejudiced in her favor. At her trial in Canandaigua in 1873 the judge instructed the jury to find her guilty without discussion. He fined her $100 and made her pay courtroom fees, but did not imprison her when she refused to pay, therefore denying her the chance to appeal.
In 1877 she gathered petitions from 26 states with 10,000 signatures, but Congress laughed at them. She appeared before every congress from 1869 to 1906 to ask for passage of a suffrage amendment. Between 1881 and 1885 Anthony, Stanton and Matilda Joslin Gage collaborated on and published the History of Woman Suffrage. The last volume, edited by Anthony and Ida Husted Harper, was published in 1902.
In 1887 the two women's suffrage organizations merged as the National American Woman Suffrage Association with Stanton as president and Anthony as vice-president. Anthony became president in 1892 when Stanton retired. Anthony campaigned in the West in the 1890s to make sure that territories where women had the vote were not blocked from admission to the Union. She attended the International Council of Women at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago.
In 1900, aged 80, Anthony retired as President of NAWSA. In 1904 Anthony presided over the International Council of Women in Berlin and became honorary president of Carrie Chapman Catt's International Woman Suffrage Alliance.
Susan B. Anthony died in 1906 at her home on Madison Street in Rochester. All American adult women finally got the vote with the Nineteenth Amendment, also known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, in 1920.
Susan B. Anthony advocated dress reform for women. She cut her hair and wore the bloomer costume for a year before ridicule convinced her it detracted from the causes she supported.
In 1853 Anthony began to campaign for women's property rights in New York state, speaking at meetings, collecting signatures for petitions, and lobbying the state legislature. In 1860, largely as the result of her efforts, the New York State Married Women's Property Bill became law, allowing married women to own property, keep their own wages, and have custody of their children. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton campaigned for more liberal divorce laws in New York.
In 1869 Anthony persuaded the Workingwomen's Association in New York to investigate the case of Hester Vaughn, a poor working woman accused of murdering her illegitimate child. Vaughn was pardoned, and Anthony used the case to point out the different moral standards expected of men and women and the need for women jurors to ensure a fair trial.
In 1875 she attacked the "social evil" of prostitution in a speech in Chicago, calling for equality in marriage, in the workplace, and at the ballot box to eliminate the need for women to go on the streets.
The Trial of Susan B. Anthony: A 100-Year Chronology
1820: February 15
Susan Brownell Anthony is born near Adams, Mass.
1839
Anthony begins duties as an assistant teacher at a boarding school in New Rochelle, N. Y.
1846
Anthony takes a job as the headmistress of the female department of Canajoharie Academy.
1848: July 19-20
The first woman's rights convention in the U. S. is held in Seneca Falls, N. Y. Participants sign a "Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions."
1851
Anthony resigns her job at Canajoharie Academy and moves to her father's farm near Rochester. She takes up the causes of temperance and the abolition of slavery.
1851: May
Anthony meets for the first time Elizabeth Cady Stanton, recognized as the most important figure of the time in the woman's rights movement.
1852: Sept.
Anthony attends her first woman's rights convention in Syracuse. Anthony becomes convinced that "the right women needed above every other...was the right of suffrage."
1855
Anthony travels through all fifty-four of New York's counties promoting abolition, temperance, women's suffrage, and other women's rights issues.
1856
Anthony becomes New York state agent for the American Anti-Slavery Association.
1865
Anthony and other female suffragists fight to keep the words "male citizens" out of the proposed 14th Amendment.
1866
Anthony, Stanton, and other suffragists petition Congress for "universal suffrage."
1867
Anthony moves to Lawrence, Kansas, where she heads the suffrage headquarters and will lead a campaign for women's suffrage, which is to be voted on by Kansas males. The measure is defeated by a 3 to 1 margin.
1868
Anthony becomes proprietor of the weekly paper, The Revolution, which promotes women's issues through editorials written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
1869
The women's rights movements splits into two factions, with Anthony and Stanton heading the more radical National Woman's Suffrage Association. The Wyoming Territory is organized with a woman's suffrage provision, the nation's first. 1870 The 15th Amendment gives the franchise to blacks. The NWSA refuses to work for ratification because the amendment offers no protection for women.
1871: Jan. 11
The first woman, Victoria Woodhull, addresses a committee of Congress, the House Judiciary Committee. She argues that the 14th Amendment gives women the right to vote and urges Congress to pass legislation implementing woman's suffrage. 1872: Nov. 1 Anthony attempts to register to vote in Rochester. To the surprise of many, she is allowed to do so. 1872: Nov. 5 Anthony votes in the federal election-- the straight Republican ticket-- and on a 2 to 1 vote, the election inspectors agree to accept her vote. 1872: Nov. 18 Anthony is arrested at her home and charged with "illegal voting." 1873: Jan. 24 Anthony is indicted on charges of illegal voting. She pleads "not guilty." 1873: Feb.-June Anthony travels around the area giving a lecture entitled, "Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?" 1873: June 17 & 18 Anthony is tried in Canandaigua, New York before Judge Ward Hunt. Anthony is barred from testifying and Judge Hunt directs the jury to find her guilty. She is sentenced to pay a fine of $100 and the costs of prosecution. She refuses to pay. 1874: Jan. 12 Anthony submits a two-page petition to Congress asking that the "unjust fine" for illegal voting be remitted. Congress does not act on her petition.
1875
In Minor vs Happersett, the U. S. Supreme Court unanimously concludes that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment does not protect the right of women to vote.
1876
On our nation's 100th birthday, Anthony distributes "A Woman's Declaration of Rights" in Philadelphia.
1878: Jan. 10
Senator Arlen A. Sargent of California introduces a constitutional amendment: "The right of citizens to vote shall not be abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex." This same amendment would be introduced each session of Congress over the next 41 years.
1881
Anthony forms a strategic alliance with Frances Willard and the Women's Christian Temperance Union. For this action, she is criticized by Stanton, Gage, and others.
1887
For the first time, the full Senate votes on the women's suffrage amendment. It loses 34 to 16.
1896
Anthony spends eight months in California campaigning for women's suffrage in California, but the measure loses at the polls.
1900
By 1900, four states (Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and Idaho) have granted women full suffrage. Anthony resigns as president of the National American Women's Suffrage Association.
1902
Anthony appears for the last time before the Senate's Select Committee on Women's Suffrage to ask for a constitutional amendment.
1904
Anthony attends a world conference on women's suffrage in Berlin.
1906: March 13
Anthony dies at her home in Rochester. 10,000 mourners come to her funeral.
1912
Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive (Bull Moose) Party becomes the first national political party to adopt a women's suffrage plank.
1913
Suffragists mount a large parade in Washington on the day before President Wilson's inauguration.
1916
Jeanette Rankin of Montana becomes the first woman elected to the U. S. Congress.
1917
Women win the vote in New York state.
1919: May
The Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women the vote passes both houses of Congress and goes to the states for ratification.
1920: August 26
Tennessee becomes the 36th state to ratify, and the Nineteenth Amendment is adopted.
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