Anthony, Susan B.

Anthony, Susan B. (Brownell) (1820–1906) women's rights leader; born in Adams, Mass. Raised as a Quaker and observant of the working conditions of the women in her father's cotton mill, she briefly attended Deborah Moulson's Seminary for Females in Philadelphia (1837) and then took up teaching, becoming headmistress at the Canajoharie (N.Y.) Academy (1845–48). Returning to her family—her parents knew the prominent abolitionists and had attended the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848—she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1850. After she was denied a chance to speak at meetings of temperance advocates, she dedicated herself to winning full rights for women. Teamed with Stanton, she gained her first success with the passage of New York State's Married Women's Property Act (1860). An ardent abolitionist, she nevertheless opposed the male-only Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Between 1868–70 she was publisher of the Revolution, a woman suffrage paper. With Stanton, she founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (1869); dissatisfaction with Stanton and Anthony's methods and goals led to a schism within the movement, but in 1890 the two main groups were united as the National American Woman Suffrage Association, of which Anthony served as president (1892–1900). She constantly spoke out against injustices of all kinds but concentrated most of the energies of her final decades in seeking a constitutional amendment to allow women to vote. Although stronger in organizational skills than as a public speaker, she seemed indefatigable in traveling throughout the country to promote her cause. In 1872 she cast a ballot in the 1872 election and was arrested and fined; in 1905 she personally visited President Theodore Roosevelt to urge his support for women's suffrage. She initiated the History of Woman Suffrage, seeing the first four volumes into print (1881–1902). As late as 1904 she was in Berlin, Germany, helping to found the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. The ridicule that had greeted her in her first decades was replaced by respect, and she became internationally known as the symbol of the women's rights movement.