Anthony, Susan B. (1820-1906)

Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906)

Woman’s rights activist

Source

Early Life. Born on 15 February 1820 in Adams, Massachu-setts, Susan Brownell Anthony was a descendant of early settlers of Rhode Island. She grew up in Battenville, New York, a small village about thirty-five miles north of Albany and about ten miles east of the Hudson River, where the family settled in 1832. In 1838 her father enrolled her at Deborah Moulson’s Female Seminary, a Quaker school in Hamilton, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, where Anthony was taught that women and men were equal in the eyes of God. After only one term she left school to work as a teacher so that she could help to pay debts her father had incurred during the Panic of 1837, and at the age of nineteen she moved away from home to take a better position at a Quaker boarding school in New Rochelle, New York. In 1846, after moving with her family to a new farm near Rochester, New York, she was hired as headmistress of the female department of Canajoharie Academy, on the Mohawk River between Schenectady and Utica. She resigned her position in 1849 and returned to her family’s Rochester farm.

Forming a Women’s Movement. Anthony’s family had been active in abolitionism, which had strong Quaker roots, and by 1849 Anthony herself had become involved in that movement as well as in the temperance crusade. She soon learned that women did not enjoy full equality in those movements—a discovery that motivated her to campaign for woman’s rights. Until the Civil War she focused on improving married women’s property rights. In 1860 she succeeded in convincing the New York State legislature to pass a law granting married women the rights to own property, conduct business, enter into legal contracts, retain their own earnings, sue or be sued, and be joint guardians of their children. Throughout the Civil War, even as she worked for the emancipation of slaves, she strongly opposed giving the vote to illiterate males ahead of educated white women.

Suffrage. After the war Anthony’s fears were confirmed. The American Equal Rights Association, of which she became a founding member in 1866, considered women’s rights to be secondary to those of former slaves. In 1869 Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and opposed the Fifteenth Amendment, which enfranchised male former slaves. Many of her abolitionist friends saw Anthony’s position as elitist, and in the same year they formed an alternative suffrage organization, the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), headed by Lucy Stone. Anthony at first argued for woman suffrage on the basis of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which made former slaves citizens and gave them the right to vote. The Fourteenth Amendment states in part, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States. . . are citizens,” while the Fifteenth forbids the denial of citizens’ right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous servitude.” Since neither amendment assigns a gender to “persons” or “citizens,” she contended, they also applied to women. In 1872 she tested this assumption by casting a ballot in Rochester, New York. She was promptly arrested. While the city pressed no charges against Anthony, she dramatically proved that the Constitution did not mean women when it said “citizens.”

Unifying the Suffrage Movement. Throughout I the 1870s and 1880s Anthony tirelessly worked for woman suffrage by writing and speaking across the country. In 1890 the NWS A and AWSA resolved their differences and merged as the National-American Woman Suffrage Association. In 1892 Anthony became its second president and served until 1900. During the 1890s Anthony traveled throughout the United States and Europe promoting woman suffrage. She lived to see women granted the vote in two nations, New Zealand (1893) and Australia (1902). She died on 13 March 1906 at eighty-six. While she did not live to see the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave American women the vote in 1920, she died believing that failure to reach this goal was impossible.

Source

Kathleen Barry, Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist (New York: New York University Press, 1988).