Anthony, Susan B. (1820-1906)

Susan B. Anthony was born into a Quaker family near Adams, Massachusetts, in 1820. Her formal schooling was cut short by the bankruptcy of her father's cotton mill. Anthony spent years teaching and earning wages, which cemented her belief in the importance of women's economic independence. The efforts of Anthony's family to free slaves through the Underground Railroad allowed her to meet abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, fueling her antislavery sentiments. Despite several suitors, Anthony never married and did not regret it. Throughout her years as a reformer, she would lament the valuable time that she felt her compatriots wasted on child rearing.

After being barred from speaking at a temperance meeting because of her sex, Anthony met feminist activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the two formed the New York State Woman's Temperance Society. Stanton's radical views convinced Anthony that female equality necessitated suffrage. Anthony's meticulous planning and limitless energy made her a tireless reformer, willing to travel, lecture, and petition for the causes of temperance, abolition, and suffrage. In 1854, Anthony and others gathered thousands of signatures to petition the legislature to expand the Married Woman's Property Act. After personally addressing the Judiciary Committee in Albany in 1860, the act was expanded to allow women to own property, keep their earnings, share custody of their children, and sue in a court of law.

Meanwhile, Anthony had continued to travel and speak against slavery, becoming the New York State agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1856. After the Civil War, feminists were aware that the lack of suffrage placed blacks and women in a position of liminal citizenship, and they decided that universal suffrage was essential for equality. In 1866, Anthony, Stanton, and other feminists formed the American Equal Rights Association to agitate for universal suffrage. After the Fourteenth Amendment passed without giving women the vote, a bitter split occurred between feminists. Those led by Anthony and Stanton refused to wait any longer for full suffrage for black men before women, while others demanded that women must be patient. Many feminists accused Stanton and Anthony of racism. In response, they formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1869. The NWSA called for woman's suffrage first, as well as fair divorce laws and workers' rights. In 1870 and 1871, Anthony urged hundreds of women to cast ballots illegally. She was arrested for voting and forced to pay a fine.

In 1890, the National American Woman Suffrage Association was formed when the NWSA and its rival group merged, and in 1892, Anthony was named president. She campaigned through Colorado in 1893 at the age of 74, after which the state passed a referendum allowing women the right to vote. Anthony stepped down as president of the NAWSA in 1900 and died in 1906. She is remembered for her never-ceasing activism and resolute leadership during the first wave of the campaign for female suffrage.