Anthony, Susan B. (1820–1906)

Susan B. Anthony was an advocate of temperance and abolition before she turned her attention to women's suffrage. Her dedication to the socially and politically marginalized grew out of her faith, which was shaped by the Quaker and then Unitarian faiths of her father as well as the Universalist upbringing of her mother. Her parents supported the temperance movement, a cause to which she was very devoted at a young age. Later, and again inspired by her parents, she focused her energy on the abolitionist movement, and as a result, in 1856 she was selected to be the New York State agent for the American Anti-Slavery Association. Although her work for these causes is not ignored, she is best known for her contribution to what is now known as the first wave of feminism. Her first encounter with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the woman she would end up associated with in the suffrage movement and in mainstream narratives of women's history, was in 1851, 3 years after her parents and sister attended a women's rights convention in Rochester, New York, where Stanton spoke. One year after meeting Stanton, Anthony attended a women's rights convention in Syracuse. It would be the first of many such conventions for the teacher-turned-reformer.

In 1868, Anthony and Stanton launched The Revolution, a weekly feminist newspaper. The next year, Anthony and Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), an event that was followed in the same year by the creation of the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) by Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe. Whereas the NWSA wanted Congress to pass a suffrage amendment, the more conservative AWSA focused its efforts on converting the country state by state. Later, largely due to the collaboration of Anthony and Stone, the two associations merged under the name of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

After black men received suffrage, Anthony and 14 other suffragists claimed that women were able to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment—the first federal document to define citizenship. Anthony claimed that because the definition did not exclude women, women could no longer be prohibited from voting. On November 5, 1872, Anthony cast her ballot in Rochester, New York, only to be served a warrant on November 18 for doing so. Her willingness to violate the law caused the public to think of Anthony as a militant, a label that would be used to describe future advocates of women's rights who loudly and visibly protested the status quo.

Although she was not allowed to speak at her year-long trial, she addressed many audiences during that year, publicly refuting the indictment that she voted illegally. Anthony was not the first woman to vote before women's suffrage, nor was she the first to argue that women are citizens and, like black men, have a right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment. Yet, unlike those who came before her, Anthony had the distinct ability to draw substantial numbers of male and female listeners to speaking engagements.

In her frequently delivered speech during the year of her trial, titled “Is It a Crime for a U.S. Citizen to Vote?” Anthony asserted that women are dissatisfied with the current form of government—a government [Page 112]that enforces taxation without representation, forces women to follow laws that were created by men only, and grants men complete power within the institution of marriage. She asks her audiences, Are women persons? If the audience members can only conclude that women, indeed, are persons, then Anthony says women must also be considered citizens and therefore have the right to vote that is provided to all citizens by the Fourteenth Amendment. Anthony maintains that women are also covered under the Fifteenth Amendment, which states that citizens cannot be prevented from voting due to race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Women, asserted Anthony, should be considered people in servitude because women are subjected to the will of others, including their husbands and politicians who create the laws that disempower women.

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