Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony developed her reform commitments through Quaker and antislavery environments in New York. She was born on February 15, 1820, into a family that supported abolition, temperance, and educational reform; her father, Daniel Anthony, was a Quaker cotton manufacturer who encouraged intellectual independence.¹ After working as a teacher, Anthony became active in the temperance movement, but she encountered resistance to women speaking publicly at reform meetings. That experience helped direct her toward women's political and civil rights.

Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1851, beginning a partnership that lasted more than half a century. Stanton generally supplied political and philosophical arguments, while Anthony concentrated on organizing, lecturing, petitioning, and building institutions. During the Civil War era they helped establish the Women's Loyal National League, which gathered nearly 400,000 signatures for abolition of slavery.² After the war, Anthony increasingly argued that citizenship and voting rights had to include women as well as formerly enslaved men.

Anthony helped turn women's suffrage from a reform demand into a national campaign. In 1869 she and Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, while Lucy Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell led the rival American Woman Suffrage Association; the organizations reunited in 1890 as the National American Woman Suffrage Association.³ Anthony became the combined organization's president in 1892 and used lecture tours, state campaigns, petitions, and congressional lobbying to sustain pressure across the country.

She and Stanton also edited The Revolution, a short-lived newspaper launched in 1868, and collaborated on the multivolume History of Woman Suffrage. Anthony's activism extended beyond voting: she supported women's access to higher education, property rights, fairer divorce laws, and employment opportunities. Her strategy increasingly framed suffrage as a constitutional right rather than merely a privilege that individual states could choose to grant.

Anthony's most famous act of civil disobedience was voting in the 1872 presidential election. She and fourteen other women cast ballots in Rochester, New York, after Anthony argued that the Fourteenth Amendment already protected citizens' voting rights. She was arrested, tried in federal court, and found guilty in 1873; Judge Ward Hunt directed the jury to convict and then imposed a $100 fine, which Anthony refused to pay.

The case did not establish a legal right for women to vote, but it publicized Anthony's constitutional interpretation and gave the suffrage campaign a powerful symbol. She continued to lecture and campaign despite criticism that her tactics were too confrontational. Her later speeches connected voting with taxation, criminal law, education, and the broader principle that government required the consent of all citizens.

Anthony's public reputation can obscure the breadth and tensions of her reform career. She was a major organizer of the postwar petition campaign against slavery, advocated temperance before suffrage became her central cause, and helped professionalize a movement that depended on newspapers, lecture circuits, annual conventions, and state associations. She also traveled extensively, often paying her own expenses and speaking in communities with little existing suffrage organization.²

Anthony died in Rochester on March 13, 1906, fourteen years before the Nineteenth Amendment prohibited denying the vote on account of sex.¹ The amendment is commonly called the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, although she did not live to see its ratification. Her legacy is also debated because some white suffrage leaders used racialized arguments and disagreed with Black reformers over strategy. The National Susan B. Anthony Museum and House in Rochester preserves the home where she lived and worked, while her image has appeared on United States coinage and commemorative materials.⁴

Nineteenth Amendment

The 1920 amendment to the United States Constitution prohibiting denial of the vote on account of sex.

National Woman Suffrage Association

An organization founded in 1869 by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to campaign for a federal constitutional amendment granting women voting rights.

temperance

A reform movement advocating reduced or prohibited consumption of alcoholic beverages.

suffrage

The right to vote in political elections.