SUSAN BROWNELL ANTHONY
1820 ~ 1906
Susan Brownell Anthony
was born in Adams, Massachusetts
on 15 February 1820
and grew up in New York
in her Quaker family
that had a long list
of activist traditions.
Early in her life she developed
a sense of justice and moral zeal
for she was aggressive
and compassionate by nature
with an exceptionally keen mind
and a great ability to inspire.
She saw things that were wrong
in the world around her
and worked all her life
to make things better.
When Susan was a girl
women in our country
were thought
less important than men
and certainly thought
to be less intelligent.
Men ran the world
while women watched.
A woman could not go to college
and very few worked.
If a woman worked,
she was paid very little
faced with more than equal work
but nowhere near equal pay.
Women were not allowed
to inherit money,
own property
or to vote.
Women owned nothing
and if they chose divorce,
they left with nothing
but the clothes on their back.
They had no right to take
their children with them.
Women were, quite simply,
the property
of their husbands.
At the age of nineteen,
Susan became a teacher
since that was the only profession
a woman could participate in.
Susan taught for ten years,
joined The Temperance Movement
to curb family violence
and wasted family income.
Susan became highly involved
in woman's rights
after she left her teaching profession.
There was no lack of suitors,
but Susan chose not to marry.
If a woman marries a poor man,
she becomes a drudge
to cook and clean and bear children.
If a woman marries a rich man,
she becomes a pampered doll.
I choose to be neither
drudge nor doll.
In 1851,
Susan Brownell Anthony
met Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
a woman's rights leader.
Stanton and Anthony
became very close friends.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
was the author of speeches
and Susan Brownell Anthony
delivered those speeches.
Elizabeth fashioned the ligtning bolts
and Susan Brownell Anthony
sent them home.
Theirs was a pure marriage
of the mind
and the spirit.
One complimented the other
and while Elizabeth disliked
appearing in front of crowds,
Susan thrived on it.
Susan published
a weekly journal called
~ The Revolution ~
from 1868 and 1870.
In Rochester, New York in l872
Susan Brownell Anthony
led a group of women
who attempted to vote.
She was arrested and sent to court
where she lost her case,
was fined 100 dollars
which she refused to pay.
In the years of 1979 and 1980,
Susan Brownell Anthony's face
appeared on a silver dollar.
Susan Brownell Anthony
was the first women in history
to be pictured on any form
of American money.
The word suffrage
means the right to vote.
Susan Brownell Anthony
named her organization
The National Women's Suffrage
whose members became known
as Suffragettes, who fought
for women's rights until 1920
when it became the law of the land
and women were given
the right to vote.
Susan Brownell Anthony
died in Rochester, New York
on 13 March 1906.
Fourteen years after she died,
The Anthony Amendment
providing for women's suffrage
became the 19th Amendment
to the Constitution.
She never got to legally vote.
Susan Brownell Anthony
struggled her entire life
and ignoring opposition and abuse,
she traveled, lectured
and traversed the nation
as either an abolitionist,
a labor activist,
an educational reformer,
a temperance worker,
a suffragist activist,
but always as
a women's rights
campaigner.
ABOLITIONIST
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 Susan 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
and was hung in effigy.
In Syracuse, New York
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 Amendment
and the Fifteenth Amendment.
They were bitterly disappointed
and disillusioned
when women were excluded.
Susan 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.
Susan attacked lynchings
and racial prejudice
in the Rochester newspapers
in the 1890s.
EDUCATIONAL REFORMER
In 1846, at age 26,
Susan 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
Susan 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 Susan spoke
before the state teachers' convention
at Troy, New York and at
the Massachusetts teachers' convention,
arguing for coeducation and claiming
there were no differences
between the minds of men
and the minds of women.
Susan 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 campaigned for
the right of children of ex-slaves
to attend public schools.
In the 1890s Susan Brownell 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 Susan 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.
LABOR ACTIVIST
Susan's paper
~ The Revolution ~
first published in 1868,
advocated an 8 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 Susan
encouraged working women
of 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
Susan 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 Susan formed
and was elected president of
The Workingmen's Central Association.
The Association drew up
reports on working conditions
and provided educational opportunities
for working women.
Susan encouraged
a cooperative workshop founded by
The Sewing Machine Operators Union
and boosted the newly-formed
women typesetters' union
in The Revolution.
Susan 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 had
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,
Susan 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.
TEMPERANCE WORKER
Susan Brownell Anthony
was brought up a Quaker
and her family believed
drinking liquor was sinful.
While Susan 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 Susan 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 Susan 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 Susan Brownell 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.
Susan 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 Susan 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.
Although Susan Brownell Anthony did not live
to see the consummation of her efforts
to win the right to vote for women,
the eventual establishment of
The 19th Amendment
is deeply owed to her efforts.
SUFFRAGIST
Susan Brownell 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.
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,
with 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.
The American Woman Suffrage Association
adopted 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
Susan campaigned vigorously
for women's suffrage
on speaking tours in the West.
Susan, three of her sisters,
and other women
were arrested in Rochester
in 1872 for voting.
Susan refused to pay
her streetcar fare to the police station
insisting that 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 ordered her to pay courtroom fees,
but did not imprison her
when she refused to pay,
thereby 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 Susan and Ida Husted Harper
was published in 1902.
In the year of 1887
the two suffrage organizations merged as
The National American Woman Suffrage Association
with Stanton as president
and Susan as vice-president.
Susan became president in 1892
when Stanton retired.
Susan 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 at the age of eighty
Susan retired as President of
The National American Woman Suffrage Association.
In 1904 Susan presided over
the International Council of Women in Berlin
and became honorary president of
Carrie Chapman Catt's
International Woman Suffrage Alliance.
Susan Brownell Anthony died in 1906
at her home on Madison Street in Rochester.
All American adult women
finally got the vote in 1920
with the Nineteenth Amendment
~ also known as ~
the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.
WOMEN'S RIGHTS CAMPAIGNER
Susan Brownell Anthony advocated
dress reform for women.
She cut her hair
and wore the bloomer costume for a year
before ridicule convinced her
that it detracted from
the causes she supported.
In 1853 Susan 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.
Susan Brownell Anthony
and Elizabeth Cady Stanton campaigned
for more liberal divorce laws in New York.
In 1869 Susan Brownell 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 Susan 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.
Sources:
Encyclopedia Americana
World Book Encyclopedia
The New Book of Knowledge
New Standard Encyclopedia
