Susan B. Anthony

A Quaker meeting rebuked her father for marrying outside the faith and then disowned him for letting a dance school use his house. He kept attending anyway, and taught his daughters business on the principle that a woman should be able to support herself. The Panic of 1837 wiped the family out, everything went to auction, and her single term at a strict Philadelphia boarding school ended with it. She taught for a living after that, and at 26 ran the female department of an academy at Canajoharie, New York, where she gave up plain dress and the Quaker thee. What she wanted then was narrow and exact. "I wasn't ready to vote, didn't want to vote," she said later, "but I did want equal pay for equal work."

Her instrument was structure. In 1863 she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton built the Women's Loyal National League and drove nearly 400,000 signatures toward an amendment ending slavery, the largest such drive the country had yet seen. Then the American Equal Rights Association, the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, a 20-year war with a rival organization, and the merged NAWSA she ran as president from 1892. She drew no salary and paid their bills from her lecture fees. BriefHistory has the campaign and the trial that made her a household name. This page is about the woman working the machinery.

The alliance that built the movement broke over the vote for Black men. When Republicans and abolitionists told her the hour belonged to the freedman and that women should wait, Anthony refused, and in 1869 she campaigned against the Fifteenth Amendment, which barred denying the vote on grounds of race. She and Stanton had taken money and platform from George Francis Train, a financier who openly disparaged the intelligence of African Americans. Her own argument set the injuries in rank order. An oligarchy of race, she said in 1873, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured, but the oligarchy of sex could not. Frederick Douglass, a friend since the Sunday gatherings at her father's farm, took the other side. The movement split in two and stayed split for two decades.

The first memorial to her was put up by Black women. In 1907 Hester C. Jeffrey and the Susan B. Anthony Club installed a stained-glass window bearing her portrait in a Rochester A.M.E. Zion church, in whose basement Frederick Douglass had printed the first issues of The North Star. What followed was contested. The anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List took her name on the strength of statements that Ann D. Gordon, who edited her papers, and biographer Lynn Sherr say are not hers, not about abortion, or quoted out of context. In August 2020 Donald Trump announced a pardon for her conviction. The museum in her Rochester house declined, on the ground that accepting would concede the trial was lawful.

Susan B. Anthony's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Women's Loyal National League company
  The first national women's political organization in the United States 1863
• The Revolution other
  The weekly she ran with Stanton — its debts took her six years of lecturing to clear 1868
• National Woman Suffrage Association company
  Founded two days after the last convention of the American Equal Rights Association 1869
• Declaration of Rights for Women speech
  Refused a place on the Centennial program, she handed it to the presiding official and read it from a bandstand outside 1876
• History of Woman Suffrage book
  Six volumes, begun with Stanton. She finished the fourth in her last years 1881
• National American Woman Suffrage Association company
  The merger that ended the split. She was its president from 1892 1890

• 1837 aged ~17 The Panic ruins the family and ends her schooling after one term The household goods went to auction. An uncle bought most of them back.
• 1846 aged ~26 Becomes headmistress of the female department at Canajoharie Academy Away from Quaker influence for the first time, she dropped plain dress and the plain speech.
• 1851 aged ~31 Amelia Bloomer introduces her to Elizabeth Cady Stanton Every house the Stantons afterward lived in kept a room for her.
• 1857 aged ~37 Her resolution to admit Black students to public schools is ruled out of order The New York State Teachers' Association called it not a proper subject for discussion.
• 1863 aged ~43 Organizes the largest petition drive the country had yet seen Nearly 400,000 signatures for an amendment abolishing slavery, gathered by some 2,000 collectors.
• May 1869 aged 49 Founds the National Woman Suffrage Association after campaigning against the Fifteenth Amendment
• 1892 aged ~72 Becomes president of the merged NAWSA at 72
• 1895 aged ~75 Tours Yosemite on the back of a mule at 75
• March 13, 1906 aged 86 Dies at her sister's house in Rochester Heart failure and pneumonia, 14 years before the amendment passed.

• Carrie Chapman Catt 1859–1947
  Suffrage leader whose national organizing was instrumental in securing ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. succeeded her as NAWSA president
• Alice Paul 1885–1977
  Strategist of the final campaign for women's suffrage and author of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. successor movement
• Ida B. Wells 1862–1931
  Journalist and anti-lynching crusader whose investigative reporting exposed racial terror in the South. uneasy ally
• Jane Addams 1860–1935
  Social worker and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who founded Hull House and the settlement house movement. reform contemporary
• Pauli Murray 1910–1985
  Lawyer and activist whose legal arguments laid groundwork for Brown v. Board and LGBTQ rights. carried the argument into the courts