Anthony, Susan B.

▪ American suffragist

in full  Susan Brownell Anthony  

born Feb. 15, 1820, Adams, Mass., U.S.

died March 13, 1906, Rochester, N.Y.

 pioneer crusader for the woman suffrage movement in the United States and president (1892–1900) of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Her work helped pave the way for the Nineteenth Amendment (1920) to the Constitution, giving women (women's movement) the right to vote.

      Anthony was reared in the Quaker tradition in a home pervaded by a tone of independence and moral zeal. She was a precocious child and learned to read and write at the age of three. After the family moved from Massachusetts to Battensville, New York, in 1826, she attended a district school, then a school set up by her father, and finally a boarding school near Philadelphia. In 1839 she took a position in a Quaker seminary in New Rochelle, New York. After teaching at a female academy in upstate New York (1846–49), she settled in her family home, now near Rochester, New York. There she met many leading abolitionists (abolitionism), including Frederick Douglass, Parker Pillsbury, Wendell Phillips, William Henry Channing, and William Lloyd Garrison. Soon the temperance movement enlisted her sympathy and then, after meeting Amelia Bloomer (Bloomer, Amelia Jenks) and through her Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Stanton, Elizabeth Cady), so did that of woman suffrage.

      The rebuff of Anthony's attempt to speak at a temperance meeting in Albany in 1852 prompted her to organize the Woman's New York State Temperance Society, of which Stanton became president, and pushed Anthony farther in the direction of women's rights advocacy. In a short time she became known as one of the cause's most zealous, serious advocates, a dogged and tireless worker whose personality contrasted sharply with that of her friend and coworker Stanton. She was also a prime target of public and newspaper abuse. While campaigning for a liberalization of New York's laws regarding married women's property rights, an end attained in 1860, Anthony served from 1856 as chief New York agent of Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society. During the early phase of the Civil War she helped organize the Women's National Loyal League, which urged the case for emancipation. After the war she campaigned unsuccessfully to have the language of the Fourteenth Amendment altered to allow for woman as well as "Negro" suffrage, and in 1866 she became corresponding secretary of the newly formed American Equal Rights Association. Her exhausting speaking and organizing tour of Kansas in 1867 failed to win passage of a state enfranchisement law.

      In 1868 Anthony became publisher, and Stanton editor, of a new periodical, Revolution (Revolution, The), originally financed by the eccentric George Francis Train. The same year, she represented the Working Women's Association of New York, which she had recently organized, at the National Labor Union convention. In January 1869 she organized a woman suffrage convention in Washington, D.C., and in May she and Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). A portion of the organization deserted later in the year to join Lucy Stone (Stone, Lucy)'s more conservative American Woman Suffrage Association, but the NWSA remained a large and powerful group and Anthony remained its principal leader and spokeswoman.

      In 1870 she relinquished her position at the Revolution and embarked on a series of lecture tours to pay off the paper's accumulated debts. As a test of the legality of the suffrage provision of the Fourteenth Amendment, she cast a vote in the 1872 presidential election in Rochester, New York. She was arrested, convicted (the judge's directed verdict of guilty had been written before the trial began), and fined, and although she refused to pay the fine the case was carried no further. She traveled constantly, often with Stanton, in support of efforts in various states to win the franchise for women: California in 1871, Michigan in 1874, Colorado in 1877, and elsewhere. In 1890, after lengthy discussions, the rival suffrage associations were merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and at Stanton's resignation in 1892 Anthony became president. Her principal lieutenant in later years was Carrie Chapman Catt (Catt, Carrie Chapman).

      By the 1890s Anthony had largely outlived the abuse and sarcasm that had attended her early efforts, and she emerged as a national heroine. Her visits to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and to the Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland, Oregon, in 1905 were warmly received, as were her trips to London in 1899 and Berlin in 1904 as head of the U.S. delegation to the international Council of Women (which she helped found in 1888). In 1900, at the age of 80, she retired from the presidency of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, passing it on to Catt.

      Principal among Anthony's written works are the first four volumes of the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage, written with Stanton and Matilda J. Gage (Gage, Matilda Joslyn). Various of her writings are collected in The Elizabeth Cady Stanton-Susan B. Anthony Reader (1992), edited by Ellen Carol DuBois, and The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (1997), edited by Ann D. Gordon. With the issue of a new dollar coin in 1979, she became the first woman to be depicted on United States currency, although the honour was somewhat mitigated by popular rejection of the coin because its size was so similar to that of the 25-cent coin.

Additional Reading

Katharine Anthony, Susan B. Anthony: Her Personal History and Her Era (1954, reprinted 1975); Alma Lutz, Susan B. Anthony: Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian (1959, reprinted 1975); Kathleen Barry, Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist (1988); Lynn Sherr, Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words (1995).

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