Susan B. Anthony

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Image:Susan Brownell Anthony - Age 28 - Project Gutenberg eText 15220.jpg Susan Brownell Anthony, (February 15, 1820 – March 13, 1906) was a prominent, independent and well educated American civil rights leader who, along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, led the effort to secure Women's suffrage in the United States.

Anthony was born and raised in Adams, Massachusetts, the daughter of Quakers. Susan B. Anthony was the second born of eight children in a strict Quaker family. Susan was a precocious child and she learned to read and write at the age of three. Her father, Daniel Anthony, was a stern man, a Quaker Abolitionist and a cotton manufacturer. He believed in guiding his children instead of directing them. He did not allow them to experience the childish amusements of toys, games, and music, which were seen as distractions from the “Inner Light”. Instead, he enforced self-discipline, principled convictions, and belief in one's own self-worth.

In 1826, the Anthonys moved from Massachusetts to Battensville, N.Y. where Susan attended a district school. When the teacher refused to teach Susan long division, Susan was taken out of school and taught in a "home school" set up by her father. A woman teacher named Mary Perkins ran the school. Perkins offered a new image of womanhood to Susan and her sisters. Ultimately, Susan was sent to boarding school near Philadelphia.

Anthony was independent and educated and held a position that had traditionally been reserved to young men. She taught for 15 years and worked at a female academy, called Eunice Kenyon's Quaker boarding school, in upstate New York from 1846-1849. After, she settled in her family home in Rochester, New York. It was here that she began her first public crusade on behalf of temperance. While in Rochester, she attended the Unitarian Church.

Anthony was very self-conscious, both of her looks (one eye always pointed slightly outwards) and of her speaking abilities. She long resisted public speaking for fear her speech would not be good enough. However, throughout her lifetime, Anthony worked endlessly. She traveled thousands of miles each year throughout the United States and Europe giving speeches on suffrage (75 to 100 speeches per year for 45 years). She traveled by carriage, wagon, train, mule, stagecoach, ship, submarine, ferry boat and sleigh.

Anthony died at Rochester, New York, on March 13, 1906 and is buried there in Mount Hope Cemetery. Anthony is known as "The Mother of us all."

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Early social activism

Image:Susan Brownell Anthony - Project Gutenberg eText 15220.jpg In the decade preceding the outbreak of the American Civil War, Anthony began and took a prominent part in the anti-slavery and temperance movements in New York, organizing in 1852 the first woman's state temperance society in America. In addition, she attended her first women's rights convention in Syracuse in 1852. In 1856 she became the agent for New York state of the American Anti-Slavery Society.

In 1851, Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They were introduced, on a street in Seneca Falls, by mutual acquaintance Amelia Bloomer, also a feminist. The two women were to remain close friends and colleagues for the remainder of their lives, although unlike Anthony, Stanton wanted to push a broader platform of women's rights than suffrage. Together, the two women traveled the United States giving speeches about women's rights and attempting to persuade the government that women should be treated equally to men in society.

After 1854, Anthony devoted herself almost exclusively to the agitation for women's rights, and became recognized as one of the ablest and most zealous advocates of complete legal equality, and as a public speaker and writer. She was also active in zealously opposing abortion, regarded by her as an imposition of men onto women: "No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death, but oh, thrice guilty is he who ... drove her to the desperation that impelled her to the crime!" (The Revolution, IV, No. 1 (July 8, 1869), 1)

From 1868 to 1870, Anthony was the proprietor of a weekly paper, The Revolution, published in New York City, edited by Stanton, and having as its motto:

"The true republic — men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less."
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National suffrage organizations

In 1869, Anthony and Stanton founded the National Woman's Suffrage Association, an organization dedicated to gaining women the right to vote. Anthony was vice-president-at-large of the National Woman's Suffrage Association (NWSA) from the date of its organization until 1892, when she became president.

Image:Susan B Anthony Older Years.gif In the early years of the NWSA, Anthony made attempts to unite women in the labor movement with the suffragist cause, but with little success. Along with Stanton, she was a delegate at the 1868 convention of the National Labor Union. Anthony alienated the labor movement, not only because suffrage was seen as a concern for middle-class rather than working women, but because she openly encouraged women to achieve economic independence by entering the printing trades, where male workers were on strike. Anthony was part of the National Labor Union for a while but then was expelled over this controversy.

For casting a Republican vote in the presidential election held on November 5, 1871, in Rochester, New York, Anthony was served a warrant on November 18 and was actually fined $100 on June 18 1873. She never paid the fine, asserting the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution entitled her to vote. She was defended at trial by Matilda Joslyn Gage, who asserted that it was the United States that was truly on trial, not Anthony. At the trial, she made her famous "On Women's Right to Vote" speech. Being a citizen of the United States and having the lawfully given right to vote as a citizen, Anthony was faced with the constraint of a gender-biased society when it came to legal issues when presenting this speech. Her speech mainly focused on the fact that casting her vote in the previous presidential election was not a crime, simply a legal right of a United States citizen. Her speech was an attempt to persuade the government that she was not unlawful in her action, in the fact that if she were to have been a male, her action would have never been questioned. By not having the government and not having men in general in her favor, Anthony presented a strong defense to her speech through the use of statements from the Constitution to support the fact that her actions were in fact not wrong.

In collaboration with Stanton, Gage, and Ida Husted Harper, Anthony published The History of Woman Suffrage (4 vols., New York, 1884–1887). Anthony was also a friend of Josephine Brawley Hughes, an advocate of women's rights and of alcohol abolition from Arizona.

In 1890, Anthony orchestrated the merger of the NWSA with the American Woman Suffrage Association, creating the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Anthony's strategy for suffrage was to unite the suffrage movement where possible, and to focus on the goal of gaining the vote, leaving aside other women's rights issues. Her pursuit of alliances with conservative suffragists created long lasting tension between herself and more radical suffragists such as Stanton. Stanton criticized this stance, writing that Anthony and Lucy Stone, leader in the more conservative American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), "see suffrage only. They do not see woman's religious and social bondage." Anthony argued to Stanton,

"We number over 10,000 women and each one has opinions...we can only hold them together to work for the ballot by letting alone their whims and prejudices on other subjects."

The controversial merger occurred after Anthony created a special National Woman Suffrage Association executive committee to decide whether they should unite with the AWSA (using a committee instead of a full NWSA vote went against the NWSA constitution). Gage (a prominent member who opposed the merger) was denied funds to enable her to attend the NWSA convention leading to these decisions, motions to make it possible for members to vote by mail were strenuously opposed by Anthony and her adherents, and the committee was stacked with members who favoured the merger (two who decided against it were asked to resign).

The union of the two organizations effectively marginalized radical elements of the movement, including Stanton. Anthony pushed for Stanton to be voted in as the first NAWSA president, and stood by her as Stanton was belittled by the large conservative factions within the new organization.

Throughout her life, Anthony fought social injustice, including attacking the injustice women of the period faced from their fellow man. It was difficult for an outspoken woman in 1800s society to live as secondary to men in society. Anthony was a constant target of abuse from political leaders, media representatives and private individuals. But as a leading advocate of abolition, women's rights, a founder of the National Woman Suffrage Association, and New York State's agent for the American anti-slavery Association, Susan B. Anthony led an effective and challenging life.

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Legacy

Image:Anthony dollar coin.jpg Susan B. Anthony was honored as the first real (non-allegorical) American woman on circulating U.S. coinage with her appearance on the Anthony dollar. The dollar coin, approximately the size of a U.S. quarter, was minted for only four years, 1979, 1980, 1981, and 1999. Anthony dollars were produced at the Philadelphia and Denver mints for all four of these years, and at the San Francisco mint for all production years except 1999.

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References

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External links

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