Susan B. Anthony

Chapter 1 · A Quaker Girl Who Expected to Be Heard

Massachusetts, mill towns and a teacher's wage

1820 – 1851 · Adams, Massachusetts · Battenville, New York · Canajoharie

Susan Brownell Anthony was born on 15 February 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts, into a Quaker family. That mattered: among Quakers, women spoke in meeting as equals, and the assumption that a woman's judgement counted was ordinary rather than radical.

Her father Daniel ran a cotton mill and educated his daughters seriously, setting up a home school after a teacher refused to instruct a girl in long division. The family were abolitionists; Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison were visitors to their farm near Rochester.

The financial panic of 1837 ruined the family, and everything they owned was auctioned. Anthony went out to teach, eventually becoming headmistress of the girls' department at Canajoharie Academy, and discovered that she was paid roughly a quarter of what a male teacher received for the same work. She spent years afterwards campaigning inside the state teachers' association, where women were expected to attend and not speak.

Her entry into public life came through temperance — a women's issue in an era when a husband's drinking could destroy a family and a wife had no legal remedy, no property rights and no custody claim. In 1852, at a Sons of Temperance meeting in Albany, she rose to speak and was told that sisters had been invited to listen and learn, not to speak. She walked out and founded a women's temperance society instead.

By then she had already met Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Why this matters

Anthony's route to feminism ran through unequal pay and the temperance movement — the practical discovery that women could not fix anything without legal and political standing.

You have met the teacher before the campaigner. What would you ask her?

Ask Susan

• “What difference did growing up Quaker make?”
• “What did you discover about your teaching salary?”
• “Why was temperance a women's issue?”
• “What happened when you tried to speak in Albany in 1852?”
• “What did your father's bankruptcy change for you?”

Chapter 2 · Stanton and Anthony

Fifty years of a division of labour

1851 – 1865 · Seneca Falls · New York State

Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1851 and the partnership lasted half a century. Stanton, married with seven children and largely housebound, was the writer and theorist. Anthony, unmarried and free to travel, was the organiser: she gathered signatures, booked halls, ran conventions and delivered the speeches Stanton wrote. Stanton said she forged the thunderbolts and Anthony fired them.

Anthony's practical achievements in this period were substantial. She organised the campaign behind New York's Married Women's Property Act of 1860, which gave wives the right to own property, keep their earnings and have joint custody of their children — a law that mattered more to most women's daily lives than the vote would for decades.

She worked as an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society from 1856, speaking in towns where abolitionists were pelted with eggs and where she was burned in effigy.

During the Civil War she and Stanton founded the Women's Loyal National League, which collected around 400,000 signatures on petitions supporting a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery — the largest petition drive in American history at that point, and a significant contribution to the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.

The work was relentless and mostly unglamorous: winter travel by sleigh and railway to small halls, sleeping in cold rooms, negotiating printers' bills. Anthony's talent was administration and stamina, and the American movement existed largely because she supplied both.

Why this matters

The Stanton–Anthony partnership is a model of complementary political work: theory without organisation achieves nothing, and organisation without argument has nothing to say.

You have the partnership at work. What would you ask her?

Ask Susan

• “How did you and Stanton divide the work?”
• “Why did the Married Women's Property Act matter so much?”
• “What was it like campaigning as an abolitionist agent?”
• “How did you gather 400,000 signatures without any modern communication?”
• “Did being unmarried make your work possible?”

Chapter 3 · The Split

The Fifteenth Amendment, and arguments that should not have been made

1866 – 1870 · New York · Kansas

After the Civil War, abolitionists and women's rights campaigners had expected to win universal suffrage together. Instead the Fourteenth Amendment introduced the word 'male' into the Constitution for the first time, and the Fifteenth prohibited denial of the vote on grounds of race — but not of sex. Republican allies told them it was the Negro's hour and that women must wait.

Anthony and Stanton refused, and the way they refused caused lasting damage. Campaigning in Kansas in 1867 they accepted support and funding from George Francis Train, an eccentric financier who was openly racist, and used it to launch their newspaper *The Revolution*. In speeches and print during this period, Stanton in particular contrasted educated white women with formerly enslaved men in explicitly contemptuous racial terms, and Anthony made similar arguments — for instance that she would sooner cut off her right hand than ask for the ballot for the Black man and not for women. Black women, who needed both, were written out of the argument entirely; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper told the movement plainly that if the nation could only handle one question, she would let the race have it.

The movement split in 1869. Anthony and Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, opposing the Fifteenth Amendment and focusing on a federal amendment for women. Lucy Stone and Frederick Douglass supported the amendment and founded the rival American Woman Suffrage Association.

The two organisations did not reunite until 1890. The rift, and the racial arguments used during it, contributed to a suffrage movement that for decades marginalised Black women — a legacy the movement's own historians now examine directly.

Why this matters

The 1869 split shows how a coalition can be broken when rights are offered to one group at a time — and how campaigners under pressure can adopt arguments that damage the cause they claim to serve.

This is the hardest part of the record. What would you ask her?

Ask Susan

• “Why did you oppose the Fifteenth Amendment?”
• “How do you defend the racial arguments you and Stanton used?”
• “Why accept money from George Francis Train?”
• “What did Black women lose in this argument?”
• “How would you answer Frederick Douglass on this?”

Chapter 4 · United States v. Susan B. Anthony

Voting, and being refused the right to appeal

1872 – 1873 · Rochester · Canandaigua

On 5 November 1872 Anthony and fourteen other women voted in Rochester, New York. Her legal argument was that the Fourteenth Amendment made them citizens and that voting was a privilege of citizenship no state could abridge. She had persuaded the local registrars to enter their names by reading the amendment aloud to them.

She was arrested at home two weeks later. Refusing to pay bail, she was bailed by her lawyer anyway — which she was furious about, because it removed her route to a habeas corpus challenge in the Supreme Court.

The trial at Canandaigua in June 1873 was extraordinary. The judge, Ward Hunt, refused to let her testify on the grounds that as a woman she was incompetent to give evidence in her own defence. He then read out an opinion he had written before hearing the case and directed the jury to find her guilty without allowing them to deliberate.

When he asked whether she had anything to say, she delivered a sustained protest that she had been denied a trial by a jury of her peers, denied the right to testify, and subjected to a legal system in which every law was made by men and interpreted by men against women. He fined her one hundred dollars.

She refused to pay, and said so publicly, expecting imprisonment and then an appeal. Judge Hunt declined to order her imprisonment for non-payment — which meant she could never appeal, and the constitutional argument never reached the Supreme Court. It was, as her supporters recognised, a deliberate and effective way of shutting the case down.

“Is it a crime for a citizen of the United States to vote?”

— Title of Susan B. Anthony's lecture tour of 1873, delivered before her trial

Why this matters

Anthony's trial is a case study in how courts can neutralise a legal challenge procedurally — by refusing testimony, directing a verdict and declining to enforce a penalty that would permit an appeal.

You have the trial. What would you ask her?

Ask Susan

• “What was your constitutional argument for voting?”
• “Why did the judge refuse to let you testify?”
• “Why did refusing to imprison you block your appeal?”
• “What did you say when the judge asked if you had anything to add?”
• “Did the trial help the campaign?”

Chapter 5 · Failure Is Impossible

Thirty more years, and a vote she never cast legally

1874 – 1906 and after · Rochester · Washington · Europe

After the trial Anthony spent three decades on the road — often a hundred lectures a year, travelling by train across a country with no reliable heating in its halls, appearing before every Congress from 1869 onwards to ask for a suffrage amendment.

With Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage she compiled the *History of Woman Suffrage*, six volumes of documents that preserved the movement's record — and, as later historians note, shaped it around their own faction. In 1888 she helped found the International Council of Women. In 1890 the two rival American organisations finally merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and she served as its president from 1892 to 1900.

Her last public speech, at her eighty-sixth birthday celebration in Washington in February 1906, ended with the words that became the movement's motto: with such women consecrating their lives, failure is impossible.

She died a month later, on 13 March 1906. Four states had granted women the vote.

The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, fourteen years after her death, and was known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. It should be said plainly that it did not enfranchise all women: Black women in the South were kept from the polls by poll taxes, literacy tests and violence for another forty-five years, until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Native American and Asian American women faced separate barriers to citizenship itself.

Anthony's reputation is now taught with both halves: the organiser without whom American suffrage would have taken longer, and the campaigner whose choices in 1869 helped make it a movement that excluded the women who needed it most.

Why this matters

The gap between 1920 and 1965 is essential: the Nineteenth Amendment removed sex as a legal barrier, and left the racial barriers that kept millions of women from voting entirely intact.

You have fifty years of work and an unfinished result. What would you ask her?

Ask Susan

• “What did fifty years of lecture tours actually involve?”
• “Why did you write the History of Woman Suffrage?”
• “What did you mean by 'failure is impossible'?”
• “Why did the Nineteenth Amendment leave Black women disenfranchised?”
• “What would you do differently after 1869?”

What Susan changed

Anthony built the organisational machinery of American women's suffrage — the conventions, petitions, lecture circuits and national associations — and secured married women's property rights in New York decades before the vote. The Nineteenth Amendment of 1920 was known by her name, and her trial remains a standard case study in constitutional argument and judicial obstruction.

A debate that continues

Modern scholarship focuses on the racial arguments Anthony and Stanton used against the Fifteenth Amendment, and on how far the movement they built excluded Black women — a reassessment that has changed how the suffrage centenary is taught.

Keep exploring — ask Susan

• “How do you keep a movement going for fifty years without a victory?”
• “What did Elizabeth Cady Stanton see that you did not?”
• “How should a movement handle being told to wait its turn?”

Related lives

• Frederick Douglass — The Lion of Anacostia
• Emmeline Pankhurst — Deeds, Not Words
• Harriet Tubman — Moses of Her People

Related themes

Women's suffrage in the United States · Abolition and Reconstruction · Citizenship and the Constitution