SUSAN BROWNELL ANTHONY

(1820-1906)

IN 1852, a new recruit joined the women's rights ranks. She was Susan B. Anthony, a Quaker school teacher. She became an active abolitionist .... however, her primary allegiance soon became the women's movement. She and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were fast friends from the day they met and established a working relationship which was creative to them both for many, many years.  Together they were to form one of the most influential teams in American history. 

Anthony grew up in a Quaker family and began her life of social reform by speaking out against drunkenness and slavery. Recruited by Stanton, her emphasis changed to women's rights and eventually she focused solely on passage of a Constitutional Amendment giving women the right to vote. Anthony remained single during her life which freed her up to travel widely and work to mobilize people on behalf of the movement. In 1869, Stanton and Anthony founded the National Women Suffrage Association and together they published a weekly newspaper which set forth their radical ideas.

No sooner was the Fifteenth Amendment passed than the feminists of whichever persuasion turned their attention to suffrage for women. The battle was fought state by state, as well as on a national level, for more than fifty years and involved many unsung heroines who were willing to circulate petitions, to speak before legislatures, and to withstand a storm of ridicule--some from men, but much, unfortunately, from other women....

These early efforts culminated in 1872 when Susan B. Anthony led a group of sixteen women, most of them Quakers, in a daring escapade ... they actually voted in the 1872 presidential campaign. Susan was made a test case for this illegal activity for having "knowingly, wrongfully, and unlawfully voted for a representative of Congress in the United States." Found guilty, she refused to accept her verdict or pay her fine ... Before pronouncing sentence, the judge asked the prisoner if she had anything to say....

"Yes, your Honor, I have many things to say, for in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of citizen to that of a subject, and not only myself individually but all of my sex are, by your Honor's verdict, doomed to political subjection under this so-called Republican government."

-Margaret Hope Bacon, 1980.

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Updated 5th Month 29, 1999

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