Anthony, Susan B.

Anthony, Susan B. (1820–1906), women's rights activist.Born in Adams, Massachusetts, Anthony was influenced by her father's Quakerism as well as his independence in marrying Lucy Read, a Baptist. When his business failed in 1837, Susan became a teacher. She never married and was a lifelong believer in the importance of self‐support for women. In 1850, she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton and became a passionate subscriber to Stanton's women's rights ideas. The Stanton‐Anthony partnership sustained American feminism for the next half‐century. Starting in 1854, they focused on the denial of basic economic rights to married women. For six years, Anthony collected petitions to the New York state legislature, which in 1860 passed a comprehensive Married Women's Property Act. Simultaneously, she worked for the American Anti‐Slavery Society, viewing women's rights and abolitionist sentiments as closely related. In 1863, she and Stanton collected a half million women's signatures petitioning Congress to abolish slavery.

After the Civil War, following the lead of the antislavery movement, Stanton and Anthony concentrated on equal citizenship and political rights for women. They tried but failed to convince Congress to include women in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Now committed to a focus on political equality and the Constitution as the source of those rights, they formed the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, precipitating a split with Lucy Stone and other women's rights activists not willing to break with longtime abolitionist and Republican party allies. For the next half decade, they advanced the argument that the Fourteenth Amendment included women when it bestowed federal citizenship on “all persons born in the United States.” Since the vote was patently a fundamental right of citizenship, they contended, woman suffrage was already constitutional. Accordingly, in November 1872 Anthony took the most famous act of her life: She convinced election officials to allow her to vote for President. For this she was found guilty of illegal voting in U.S. District Court and fined $100, which she refused to pay. Two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the suffragists' line of argument.

From this point on, Anthony realized the necessity of a separate woman suffrage amendment and dedicated herself to that goal. In 1876, she presented a militant “Woman's Declaration of Rights” at Fourth of July ceremonies held at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. In 1880, she began to compile and publish the multivolume History of Woman Suffrage, an act of historical consciousness unequalled in American reform. In 1890, she oversaw the unification of the suffrage movement, split since 1869, and the election of Stanton as the first President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In 1892, Anthony succeeded Stanton as President. Throughout the 1890s, despite advancing age, Anthony traveled to California, Kansas, South Dakota, and Colorado to work for state suffrage referenda, and to England and France to organize suffragists internationally. She retired in 1900. By the time the Nineteenth Amendment passed in 1920, no name was more identified with woman suffrage than that of Susan B. Anthony.
See also Society of Friends; Woman Suffrage Movement; Women's Rights Movements.

Bibliography

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.

Ellen C. DuBois