Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony an American social reformer and a leading figure of the nineteenth-century movement for women's suffrage (1820-1906). Over more than half a century of campaigning she worked for the vote, for the rights of women in marriage and property, for temperance and against slavery, and her name became synonymous with the struggle for equal citizenship.

Early Life and Reform Circles

Susan Brownell Anthony was born in 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts, into a Quaker family with a strong tradition of social concern. Her father ran a cotton mill and encouraged his daughters to be self-reliant; the household was a meeting place for reformers and abolitionists. She was educated at a Quaker boarding school and then taught for several years to help pay her father's debts.

The family moved to Rochester, New York, where they took part in the antislavery movement and in the temperance cause. Through these circles Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, with whom she would form one of the most productive partnerships in American reform, and the two women began a collaboration that lasted until Stanton's death.

In 1851 she attended a temperance meeting at which women were denied the right to speak, and the experience helped to convince her that women must win the vote before they could advance any other cause. From that time forward the enfranchisement of women became the organising purpose of her life.

Partnership with Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Anthony and Stanton were temperamentally well matched. Stanton, a gifted writer and thinker with a large family, produced speeches, articles and manifestos; Anthony, unmarried and untiring, organised, travelled and spoke across the country. Together they founded the weekly newspaper The Revolution in 1868, with the motto Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.

Their collaboration produced a series of campaigns and a great body of argument for women's rights. They worked first for the abolition of slavery and then, when the Civil War ended, for suffrage for black men and for women alike. Their opposition to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which they believed excluded women, caused a lasting breach with many old antislavery allies.

With Stanton, Anthony compiled the History of Woman Suffrage, a monumental documentary account of the movement they had helped to lead. Their letters and papers record not only the politics of the cause but a friendship and intellectual partnership of unusual depth, and they remain a central source for the history of American feminism.

Campaigns, Trials and Organisations

In 1869 Anthony and Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, which demanded a constitutional amendment granting women the vote. For years Anthony travelled the country, addressing legislatures, conventions and crowds, and urging women to organise. She understood that the struggle would require patience, money, publicity and above all persistence.

In 1872 she was arrested in Rochester for casting a vote, in deliberate defiance of the law, and was tried and convicted in a celebrated trial in which the judge refused to let the jury decide the case. She was fined but refused to pay, and the incident made her a national figure. The tactic of testing the law through civil disobedience had broken new ground.

She served as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1892 to 1900, and she directed the movement toward the state-by-state campaigns that eventually won the vote in the western territories and states. Success came slowly, and Anthony did not live to see the final victory, but she built the organisation and the strategy that made it possible.

Ideas and Public Speaking

Anthony's argument for suffrage rested on the principle that the United States had been founded on the consent of the governed, and that a government which taxed women while denying them the vote was a tyranny of the kind the revolution had been fought against. She pressed this point with relentless clarity, appealing to the Declaration of Independence and to the plain meaning of citizenship.

She also campaigned for the reform of laws that gave husbands control of their wives' property and earnings, for equal pay for women teachers, for the admission of women to universities and professions, and for temperance. She saw the vote as the key that would unlock all these doors, and she subordinated every other cause to the single demand for enfranchisement.

Her speeches were direct and unadorned, and her strength lay in organisation, in persistence and in a moral seriousness that impressed even her opponents. She was willing to be unpopular, and she paid for her independence in hostility and ridicule. Her combination of courage and discipline made her the acknowledged leader of the movement for much of her long career.

Influence and Legacy

Anthony died in 1906 in Rochester, fourteen years before the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granted women the vote in 1920. That amendment, which she had done more than any other person to make conceivable, was widely celebrated as a fulfilment of her life's work. On the centennial of her birth the United States issued a stamp in her honour.

The Nineteenth Amendment became known informally as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, and her image and name were invoked by suffragists around the world. Her partnership with Stanton set the pattern for later reform coalitions, and the organisations she built became the nucleus of the final campaign for the vote.

Her reputation is complex, for her commitment to universal suffrage existed alongside the racial prejudices of her time, and her opposition to the Fifteenth Amendment remains the subject of critical debate. She is nonetheless remembered as one of the foremost American reformers of the nineteenth century and as a founder of the modern movement for women's political equality.

See also

• Women's suffrage in the United States
• Nineteenth Amendment
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• National American Woman Suffrage Association