Susan B. Anthony’s Quaker upbringing greatly influenced the role she
played in nineteenth-century America. Quakers, properly known as the
Religious Society of Friends, had founded their religion on the belief that
priests and places of organized worship are not necessary for a person to
experience God. In the Quaker view, all people have an “inner light” that
can guide them to divine truth. Quakers do not believe in armed conflict or slavery, and they were among the first groups to practice equality between men and women. Anthony led a crusade to ensure that all
women were granted the rights she herself had come to expect.
Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820. Her father, a cotton-mill owner, instilled in his children the ideas of self-reliance, self-discipline, and self-worth. Both her parents were strong supporters of the
abolitionist (antislavery) and the temperance (avoidance of alcohol)
movements. (See Abolition Movement and Prohibition.)
Protests inequality
After completing her schooling at the age of seventeen, Anthony began
teaching in schools in rural New York state. Teaching was one of the few
professions open to women at the time, but wages for men and women
differed greatly. Anthony’s weekly salary was equal to one-fifth of that received by her male colleagues. When she protested this inequality, she
lost her job. She then secured a better position as principal of the girls’
division of a private school.
In 1849, after teaching for over ten years, Anthony found her professional future bleak. She joined the local temperance society but was
denied the chance to speak at a meeting because she was a woman.
Unwilling to be silenced, she founded the Daughters of Temperance, the
first women’s temperance organization. She began writing temperance
articles for the Lily, the first woman-owned newspaper in the United
States. Through the paper’s editor, Amelia Bloomer (1818–1894),
Anthony met women involved in the recently formed women’s suffrage
(right to vote) movement. (See Women’s Suffrage Rights.)
Works for women’s suffrage
In 1851, Anthony met women’s rights leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton
(1815–1902). They formed a deep personal friendship and a political
bond that would last for the rest of their lives. From that point on,
Anthony worked tirelessly for women’s suffrage. She lectured on women’s
rights and organized a series of state and national conventions on the
issue. She collected signatures for a petition to grant women the right to
vote and to own property. Her hard work paid off in 1860 when the New
York state legislature passed the Married Women’s Property Act. It allowed women to enter into contracts and to control their own earnings
and property.
During the Civil War (1861–65), Anthony and most other members of the women’s movement worked toward the emancipation of the slaves. In 1863, she helped form the Women’s
Loyal League, which supported the policies of
President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865;
served 1861–65). After the war, Anthony and
others tried to link women’s suffrage with that of
the freed slaves. They were unsuccessful. The
Fifteenth Amendment, finally adopted in
1870, extended voting rights only to black
men—not to women. Anthony and Stanton
continued to fight, forming the National
Woman Suffrage Association.
Brought to trial for voting
The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in
1868, had declared that all people born in the
United States were citizens and that no legal
privileges could be denied to any citizen.
Anthony decided to challenge this amendment.
Saying that women were citizens and the
amendment did not restrict the privilege of voting to men, she and fifteen other women voted in the presidential election of 1872. All sixteen
women were arrested three weeks later, but only Anthony was brought
to trial. The presiding judge opposed women’s suffrage and wrote his decision before the trial even had started. Refusing to let Anthony testify,
he ordered the jury to find her guilty and then sentenced her to pay a
$100 fine. She refused, and no further action was taken against her.
Anthony continued to campaign for women’s rights. Between 1881
and 1886, she and Stanton published a three-volume collection of writings about the movement’s struggle. Through Anthony’s determined
work, many professional fields became open to women by the end of the
nineteenth century. Nevertheless, at the time of her death in 1906, only
four states—Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah—had granted suffrage to women. Fourteen years later, in 1920, Congress adopted the
Nineteenth Amendment, finally giving women throughout America the
right to vote.