Women of Influence: Susan B. Anthony
Earlier in this series, we looked at the life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Her closest collaborator was also such a strong leader in the fight for women's rights that she became the first woman to be featured on US currency: the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin.
Susan Anthony was born on February 15, 1820. Her parents were Daniel Anthony and Lucy Read in Adams, Massachusetts. She was the second-oldest of seven children and was named for her maternal grandmother Susanah, and for her father's sister Susan. In her youth, she and her sisters followed a trend at the time for adding middle initials to their own names. Anthony adopted "B." as her middle initial because her namesake aunt Susan had married a man named Brownell. Her family shared a passion for social reform. Her brothers Daniel and Merritt moved to Kansas to support the anti-slavery movement there. Merritt fought with John Brown against pro-slavery forces during the Bleeding Kansas crisis. Daniel eventually owned a newspaper in Leavenworth, Kansas and became mayor of the city. Anthony's sister Mary became a public school principal in Rochester, and a woman's rights activist.
Anthony's father, a Quaker, was an abolitionist and a temperance advocate. He was criticized by fellow Quakers for marrying a non-Quaker, and then disowned for allowing a dance school to operate in his home. Anthony's mother was a Methodist. Anthony's father encouraged all of his children to be self-supporting and independent.
When she was seventeen, Anthony was sent to a Quaker boarding school in Philadelphia, but she ended her studies after one term because her family was financially ruined during an economic downturn known as the Panic of 1837. A maternal uncle, who bought most of their belongings and restored them to the family. To assist her family financially, Anthony left home to teach at a Quaker boarding school.
In 1845, the family moved to a farm on the outskirts of Rochester, New York, purchased with help from an inheritance that Anthony's mother had received. There they associated with a group of Quaker social reformers and in 1848 formed a new organization called the Congregational Friends. The Anthony farmstead became a gathering place for local activists, including Frederick Douglass, who formed a lifelong friendship with Anthony.
The Anthony family began to attend services at the First Unitarian Church of Rochester, a social reform organization. The Rochester Women's Rights Convention of 1848 was held at that church in 1848, inspired by the Seneca Falls Convention. Anthony's parents and her sister Mary attended the Rochester convention and signed the Declaration of Sentiments that had been first adopted by the Seneca Falls Convention. Susan Anthony was unable to attend either of these conventions because she had moved to Canajoharie in 1846 to be headmistress of the female department of the Canajoharie Academy. She disliked being paid much less than men with similar jobs, but she was not yet as enthusiastic as her father was about the Rochester women's rights convention.
When the Canajoharie Academy closed in 1849, Anthony took over the operation of the family farm in Rochester so her father could devote more time to his insurance business. She soon found herself increasingly drawn to reform activity. She cultivated friendships with reformers like William Lloyd Garrison, George Thompson and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In 1851, Anthony met Stanton, who had been one of the organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention through a mutual friend, feminist Amelia Bloomer. Anthony and Stanton soon became close friends and co-workers. After the Stantons moved from Seneca Falls to New York City in 1861, a room was set aside for Anthony in every house they lived in.
The two women had complementary skills. Anthony excelled at organizing, while Stanton was a great writer. Anthony was dissatisfied with her own writing ability. Stanton had a family with seven children while Anthony was unmarried and free to travel. Anthony assisted Stanton by supervising her children while Stanton wrote. Stanton's husband famously said of the two, "Susan stirred the puddings, Elizabeth stirred up Susan, and then Susan stirs up the world!" Stanton herself said, "I forged the thunderbolts, she fired them."
Temperance was considered a women's rights issue at that time because of laws that gave husbands complete control of the family and its finances. A woman with an alcoholic husband had little legal recourse even if his alcoholism left the family destitute and he was abusive. If she obtained a divorce, which was difficult to do, the husband usually won sole guardianship of the children. In 1852, Anthony was elected as a delegate to the state temperance convention, but the chairman stopped her when she tried to speak, telling her that women delegates were there only to listen and learn. Anthony and some other women immediately walked out and convened a meeting of their own, which went on to plan a women's state convention. Largely organized by Anthony, the convention of 500 women met in Rochester in April and created the Women's State Temperance Society, with Stanton as president and Anthony as state agent. Anthony and her organization members collected 28,000 signatures on a petition for a law to prohibit the sale of alcohol in New York State. She organized a hearing on that law before the New York legislature, the first initiated in that state by a group of women. But at the organization's convention the following year, a schism developed over the issue of the right of a wife of an alcoholic to obtain a divorce and Stanton was voted out as president. Anthony then resigned from the organization.
In 1853, Anthony attended the World's Temperance Convention in New York City, at which controversy erupted over whether women would be allowed to speak there. After this, Anthony focused her energy on abolitionist and women's rights activities.
When Anthony tried to speak at the New York State Teachers' Association meeting in 1853, a debate ensued over whether it was proper for women to speak in public. Anthony was allowed to speak and four years later, at the 1857 teacher's convention, she introduced a resolution calling for the admission of black people to public schools and colleges. It was voted down as "not a proper subject for discussion". She introduced another resolution calling for males and females to be educated together at all levels, including colleges, it was fiercely opposed and was also rejected. Anthony continued to speak at state teachers' conventions for several years, insisting that women teachers should receive equal pay with men and serve as officers and committee members within the organization.
In 1853, Anthony worked with William Henry Channing, her activist Unitarian minister, to organize a convention in Rochester to launch a state campaign for improved property rights for married women. She lectured in support of this reform in almost every county in New York during the winter of 1855. She presented the petitions to the New York State Senate Judiciary Committee, where its members told her that men were actually the oppressed sex because they did such things as giving women the best seats in carriages. The campaign finally achieved success in 1860 when the legislature passed an improved Married Women's Property Act that gave married women the right to own separate property, enter into contracts and be the joint guardian of their children. The legislature rolled back much of this law in 1862, however, mainly because the women's movement was largely inactive due to the Civil War.
In 1851, Anthony was a key organizer of an anti-slavery convention in Rochester. She was also part of the Underground Railroad, where she worked with Harriet Tubman. In 1856, Anthony agreed to become the New York State agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Anthony organized anti-slavery meetings throughout the state. In 1859, after John Brown was executed for leading a violent raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Anthony presided over the meeting, which raised money for Brown's family. As an anti-slavery activist, Anthony faced considerable intimidation. Mobs sometimes shut down her meetings in every town from Buffalo to Albany in early 1861. In Rochester, the police had to escort Anthony and other speakers from the building for their own safety. In Syracuse, according to a local newspaper, "Rotten eggs were thrown, benches broken, and knives and pistols gleamed in every direction."
Anthony vision of a racially integrated society was far ahead of her times. In a speech in 1861, Anthony said, "Let us open to the colored man all our schools. Let us admit him into all our mechanic shops, stores, offices, and lucrative business avocations, let him rent such pew in the church, and occupy such seat in the theatre. Extend to him all the rights of Citizenship." There was tensions between leaders of the women's movement and male abolitionists who believed that a vigorous campaign for women's rights would interfere with the campaign against slavery. In 1860, Anthony sheltered a woman who had fled an abusive husband, William Lloyd Garrison insisted that the woman give up the child she had brought with her, because the law gave husbands complete control of children. Anthony reminded Garrison that he helped slaves escape to Canada in violation of the law.
When Stanton introduced a resolution at the National Woman's Rights Convention in 1860 favoring more lenient divorce laws, leading abolitionist Wendell Phillips opposed it and attempted to have it removed from the record. When Stanton, Anthony, and others supported a bill before the New York legislature that would permit divorce in cases of desertion or inhuman treatment, Horace Greeley, an abolitionist newspaper publisher, campaigned against it in the pages of his newspaper.
Anthony and Stanton organized the Women's Loyal National League in 1863 to campaign for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would abolish slavery. It was the first national women's political organization in the United States. In what was the largest petition drive in the nation's history up to that time, the League collected nearly 400,000 signatures to abolish slavery, representing approximately one out of every twenty-four adults in the Northern states. The petition significantly assisted the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Anthony was the chief organizer of this effort, which required recruiting and coordinating some 2000 petition collectors.
Anthony stayed with her brother Daniel in Kansas for eight months in 1865 to assist with his newspaper. She returned to New York after she learned that an amendment to the U.S. Constitution had been proposed that would provide citizenship for African Americans but would also for the first time introduce the word "male" into the constitution. Elizabeth Cady Stanton said "if that word 'male' be inserted, it will take us a century at least to get it out." Anthony and Stanton worked to revive the women's rights movement, which had become inactive during the Civil War. In 1866, they organized the Eleventh National Women's Rights Convention, the first since the Civil War began. The convention voted to transform itself into the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), whose purpose was to campaign for the equal rights of all citizens, especially the right of suffrage. The leadership of the new organization included such prominent activists as Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone and Frederick Douglass.
Leading male abolitionists such as Horace Greeley, Wendell Phillips and Theodore Tilton tried to convince Anthony and Stanton that the time had not yet come for women's suffrage, that they should campaign for voting rights for black men only. Anthony is described as being "highly indignant" at notion and the two continued to work for the inclusion of suffrage for both African Americans and women.
The AERA increasingly divided into two wings, both advocating universal suffrage but with different approaches. One wing, whose leading figure was Lucy Stone, was willing for black men to achieve suffrage first and wanted to maintain close ties with the Republican Party and the abolitionist movement. The other, whose leading figures were Anthony and Stanton, insisted that women and black men should be enfranchised at the same time. The AERA effectively dissolved after an acrimonious meeting in May 1869, and two competing woman suffrage organizations were created in its aftermath.
Anthony and Stanton began publishing a weekly newspaper called The Revolution in New York City in 1868. It focused primarily on women's rights, especially suffrage for women. It offered a forum in which women could exchange opinions on key issues from a variety of viewpoints. Anthony managed the business aspects of the paper while Stanton was co-editor along with Parker Pillsbury, an abolitionist and a supporter of women's rights. After twenty-nine months, mounting debts forced Anthony to transfer the paper to Laura Curtis Bullard, a wealthy women's rights activist who gave it a less radical tone. The paper published its last issue less than two years later.
The National Labor Union (NLU), which was formed in 1866, began reaching out to farmers, African Americans and women, with the intention of forming a broad-based political party. The Revolution enthusiastically supported the movement. Anthony and Stanton were seated as delegates to the NLU Congress in 1868, with Anthony representing the Working Women's Association (WWA), which had recently been formed in the offices of The Revolution. But the attempted alliance did not last long. During a printers' strike in 1869, Anthony voiced approval of an employer-sponsored training program that would teach women skills that would enable them in effect to replace the strikers. This angered the labor unions and at the next NLU Congress, Anthony unseated as a delegate because of strong opposition from those who accused her of supporting strikebreakers.
In May 1869, Anthony, Stanton and others formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). In November 1869, Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe and others formed the competing American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). It was a terrible schism in the women's movement and the hostile rivalry endured for decades. The cause for the split was the proposed Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would prohibit the denial of suffrage because of race. Anthony campaigned against the amendment. She and Stanton called for women and African Americans to be enfranchised at the same time. The AWSA supported the amendment, though Lucy Stone, who became its most prominent leader, also made it clear that she believed that suffrage for women would be more beneficial to the country than suffrage for black men. The two organizations had other differences as well. The NWSA was politically independent, while the AWSA sought close ties with the Republican Party, hoping that the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment would lead to a Republican push for women's suffrage. The NWSA focused primarily on winning suffrage at the national level while the AWSA pursued a state-by-state strategy. The NWSA initially worked on a wider range of women's issues than the AWSA, including divorce reform and equal pay for women.
In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was officially ratified and in 1872, disgust with corruption in government led to a mass defection of abolitionists and other social reformers from the Republican Party, but the rivalry between the two women's groups was so bitter, that a merger proved to be impossible for twenty years. In 1890, the two organizations merged as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), with Stanton as president but with Anthony as its effective leader. When Stanton retired from her post in 1892, Anthony became NAWSA's president.
After the formation of the NWSA, Anthony dedicated herself fully to the organization and to women's suffrage. She did not draw a salary from either it or its successor, the NAWSA, and in fact used her lecture fees to fund those organizations. The press treated her as a celebrity and she was a major draw at speaking engagements. Over her career she estimated that she averaged 75 to 100 speeches per year. Both Anthony and Stanton joined the lecture circuit about 1870, usually traveling from mid-autumn to spring. Occasionally they traveled together but most often not.
In 1876 when the U.S. celebrated its 100th birthday as an independent country, the NWSA asked permission to present a Declaration of Rights for Women at the official ceremony in Philadelphia, but was refused. Nevertheless, five women, headed by Anthony, walked onto the platform during the ceremony and handed their Declaration to the startled official in charge. As they left, they handed out copies of it to the crowd. Anthony then took to an unoccupied bandstand outside the hall and read the Declaration to a large crowd. Afterwards she invited everyone to a NWSA convention at the nearby Unitarian church where speakers like Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton spoke, The work of the women's suffrage movement generated results. Women won the right to vote in Wyoming in 1869 and in Utah in 1870. Her lectures in Washington and four other states led directly to invitations for her to address the state legislatures. The Grange, a large advocacy group for farmers, officially supported women's suffrage as early as 1885. The Women's Christian Temperance Union, the largest women's organization in the country, also supported suffrage.
The NWSA convention of 1871 adopted a strategy of urging women to attempt to vote, and then, after being turned away, to file suits in federal courts to challenge laws that prevented women from voting. The legal basis for the challenge was the recently adopted Fourteenth Amendment, part of which reads: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States". A total of nearly fifty women in Rochester registered to vote in the presidential election of 1872. On election day, Anthony and fourteen other women from her ward convinced the election inspectors to allow them to cast ballots. Anthony was arrested on November 18, 1872, by a U.S. Deputy Marshal and charged with illegally voting. The other women who had voted were also arrested but released pending the outcome of Anthony's trial. Anthony's trial generated a national controversy and became a major step in the transition of the broader women's rights movement into the women's suffrage movement. Anthony spoke throughout Monroe County, New York, where her trial was to be held. Her speech was entitled "Is it a Crime for a U.S. Citizen to Vote?" The U.S. Attorney arranged for the trial to be moved to the federal circuit court, which would soon sit in neighboring Ontario County with a jury drawn from that county's inhabitants. Anthony responded by speaking throughout that county also before the trial began.
The trial was presided over by Justice Ward Hunt, who had recently been appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Hunt had never served as a trial judge and had been a politician, he had begun his judicial career by being elected to the New York Court of Appeals. The trial, United States v. Susan B. Anthony, began on June 17, 1873, and was closely followed by the national press. A rule of common law at that time prevented criminal defendants in federal courts from testifying, and Hunt refused to allow Anthony to speak until the verdict had been delivered. On the second day of the trial, after both sides had presented their cases, Justice Hunt delivered his lengthy opinion, which he had put in writing. Hunt directed the jury to deliver a guilty verdict.
On the second day of the trial, Hunt asked Anthony if she had anything to say. We all know the answer to that question. She responded with what became her most famous speech for woman suffrage. She repeatedly ignoring the judge's order to stop talking and sit down, she protested what she called "this high-handed outrage upon my citizen's rights", accusing the judge of having "trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored." She also criticized Justice Hunt for denying her a trial by jury, and said that even if he had allowed the jury to discuss the case, she still would have been denied a trial by a jury of her peers because women were not allowed to be jurors.
Justice Hunt sentenced Anthony to pay a fine of $100 (equivalent to $2,200 in 2020), she responded, "I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty", and she never did. If Hunt had ordered her to be jailed until she paid the fine, Anthony could have taken her case to the Supreme Court, but instead he announced he would not order her taken into custody.
The U.S. Supreme Court in 1875 put an end to the strategy of trying to achieve women's suffrage through the court system when it ruled in Minor v. Happersett that "the Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon anyone".[121] The NWSA decided to pursue the far more difficult strategy of campaigning for a constitutional amendment to achieve voting rights for women.
On August 18, 2020, the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, President Donald Trump announced that he would pardon Anthony, 148 years after her conviction. The president of the National Susan B. Anthony Museum and House wrote to "decline" the offer of a pardon on the principle that, to accept a pardon would wrongly "validate" the trial proceedings in the same manner that paying the $100 fine would have.
Anthony and Stanton initiated the project of writing a history of the women's suffrage movement in 1876. Anthony hated the project and in a letter to a friend, she wrote that the project "makes me feel growly all the time" adding, "I love to make history but hate to write it." She acted as her own publisher. This history evolved into a six-volume work of more than 5700 pages written over a period of 41 years. The first three volumes, which cover the movement up to 1885, were published between 1881 and 1886 and were produced by Stanton, Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage. Anthony handled the production details and the extensive correspondence with contributors. Anthony published Volume 4, which covers the period from 1883 to 1900, in 1902, after Stanton's death, with the help of Ida Husted Harper, Anthony's designated biographer. The last two volumes, which bring the history up to 1920, were completed in 1922 by Harper after Anthony's death.
Anthony traveled to Europe in 1883 for a nine-month stay, meeting up with Stanton, who had arrived a few months earlier. Together they met with leaders of European women's movements and began the process of creating an international women's organization. Delegates from fifty-three women's organizations in nine countries met in Washington in 1888 to form the new association, which was called the International Council of Women (ICW). Anthony opened the first session of the ICW and presided over most events. President Grover Cleveland and First Lady Frances Folsom Cleveland sponsored a reception at the White House for delegates to the ICW's founding congress. The ICW's second congress was an integral part of the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. At its third congress in London in 1899, a reception for the ICW was held at Windsor Castle at the invitation of Queen Victoria. At its fourth congress in Berlin in 1904, Augusta Victoria, the German Empress, received the ICW leaders at her palace. Anthony played a prominent role on all four occasions.
At the World's Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World's Fair, held in 1893, the U.S. Congress decided that the Exposition should also recognize the role of women. Anthony had played a pivotal in this decision, but took no credit publicly for fear that a public campaign would cause opposition. A large structure called the Woman's Building, designed by Sophia Hayden Bennett, was constructed to provide meeting and exhibition spaces for women at the Exposition. This week-long congress seated delegates from 27 countries. Its 81 sessions were attended by over 150,000 people, and Anthony spoke to large crowds at the Exposition. "Buffalo Bill" Cody invited Anthony as a guest to his Wild West Show, located just outside the Exposition. When the show opened, he rode his horse directly to her and greeted her with dramatic flair, while the audience applauded wildly.
Anthony retired as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and Carrie Chapman Catt was her chosen successor. In 1902, Catt organized a preparatory meeting in Washington, with Anthony as chair, that was attended by delegates from several countries. Organized primarily by Catt, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance was created in Berlin in 1904. The founding meeting was chaired by Anthony, who was declared to be the new organization's honorary president and first member. Later renamed the International Alliance of Women, the organization is still active and is affiliated with the United Nations.
Anthony and Stanton grew apart as they grew older. Anthony began to form alliances with more conservative groups, such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the nation's largest women's organization and a supporter of women's suffrage. Thus upset Stanton, who said, "I get more radical as I get older, while she seems to grow more conservative." In 1895 Stanton published The Woman's Bible, which attacked the use of the Bible to relegate women to an inferior status. It became a highly controversial best-seller. The NAWSA voted to disavow any connection with it despite Anthony's strong objection that such a move was unnecessary and hurtful. However Anthony refused to assist with the book's preparation. Despite these disagreements, when Stanton died in 1902, Anthony wrote to a friend: "Oh, this awful hush! It seems impossible that voice is stilled which I have loved to hear for fifty years. Always I have felt I must have Mrs. Stanton's opinion of things before I knew where I stood myself. I am all at sea."
Anthony moved into the home of her sister Mary Stafford Anthony's house in Rochester in 1891, at the age of 71. Her energy and stamina remained remarkably high, and at age 75, she toured Yosemite National Park on the back of a mule. She remained as leader of the NAWSA and continued to travel extensively on suffrage work. She also engaged in local projects. She played a key role in raising the funds required by the University of Rochester before they would admit women students, pledging her life insurance policy to close the final funding gap. In 1896, she spent eight months on the California suffrage campaign, speaking as many as three times per day in more than 30 localities. In 1900, she presided over her last NAWSA convention. She celebrated her seventieth birthday at a national event in Washington with prominent members of the House and Senate in attendance. Her eightieth birthday was celebrated at the White House at the invitation of President William McKinley.
Susan B. Anthony died at the age of 86 of heart failure and pneumonia in her home in Rochester, New York, on March 13, 1906. She was buried at Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester. She did not live to see the achievement of women's suffrage at the national level, but at the time of her death, women had achieved suffrage in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Idaho. Several larger states followed soon after. Legal rights for married women had been established in most states, and most professions had at least a few women members. 36,000 women were attending colleges and universities.
The Nineteenth Amendment, which prohibited the denial of suffrage because of sex, was colloquially known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. It was ratified in 1920, and the National American Woman Suffrage Association, whose character and policies were strongly influenced by Anthony, was transformed into the League of Women Voters, still an active force in U.S. politics.
In 1979, the United States Mint began issuing the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin, the first US coin to honor a female citizen.
Susan Anthony was born on February 15, 1820. Her parents were Daniel Anthony and Lucy Read in Adams, Massachusetts. She was the second-oldest of seven children and was named for her maternal grandmother Susanah, and for her father's sister Susan. In her youth, she and her sisters followed a trend at the time for adding middle initials to their own names. Anthony adopted "B." as her middle initial because her namesake aunt Susan had married a man named Brownell. Her family shared a passion for social reform. Her brothers Daniel and Merritt moved to Kansas to support the anti-slavery movement there. Merritt fought with John Brown against pro-slavery forces during the Bleeding Kansas crisis. Daniel eventually owned a newspaper in Leavenworth, Kansas and became mayor of the city. Anthony's sister Mary became a public school principal in Rochester, and a woman's rights activist.
Anthony's father, a Quaker, was an abolitionist and a temperance advocate. He was criticized by fellow Quakers for marrying a non-Quaker, and then disowned for allowing a dance school to operate in his home. Anthony's mother was a Methodist. Anthony's father encouraged all of his children to be self-supporting and independent.
When she was seventeen, Anthony was sent to a Quaker boarding school in Philadelphia, but she ended her studies after one term because her family was financially ruined during an economic downturn known as the Panic of 1837. A maternal uncle, who bought most of their belongings and restored them to the family. To assist her family financially, Anthony left home to teach at a Quaker boarding school.
In 1845, the family moved to a farm on the outskirts of Rochester, New York, purchased with help from an inheritance that Anthony's mother had received. There they associated with a group of Quaker social reformers and in 1848 formed a new organization called the Congregational Friends. The Anthony farmstead became a gathering place for local activists, including Frederick Douglass, who formed a lifelong friendship with Anthony.
The Anthony family began to attend services at the First Unitarian Church of Rochester, a social reform organization. The Rochester Women's Rights Convention of 1848 was held at that church in 1848, inspired by the Seneca Falls Convention. Anthony's parents and her sister Mary attended the Rochester convention and signed the Declaration of Sentiments that had been first adopted by the Seneca Falls Convention. Susan Anthony was unable to attend either of these conventions because she had moved to Canajoharie in 1846 to be headmistress of the female department of the Canajoharie Academy. She disliked being paid much less than men with similar jobs, but she was not yet as enthusiastic as her father was about the Rochester women's rights convention.
When the Canajoharie Academy closed in 1849, Anthony took over the operation of the family farm in Rochester so her father could devote more time to his insurance business. She soon found herself increasingly drawn to reform activity. She cultivated friendships with reformers like William Lloyd Garrison, George Thompson and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In 1851, Anthony met Stanton, who had been one of the organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention through a mutual friend, feminist Amelia Bloomer. Anthony and Stanton soon became close friends and co-workers. After the Stantons moved from Seneca Falls to New York City in 1861, a room was set aside for Anthony in every house they lived in.
The two women had complementary skills. Anthony excelled at organizing, while Stanton was a great writer. Anthony was dissatisfied with her own writing ability. Stanton had a family with seven children while Anthony was unmarried and free to travel. Anthony assisted Stanton by supervising her children while Stanton wrote. Stanton's husband famously said of the two, "Susan stirred the puddings, Elizabeth stirred up Susan, and then Susan stirs up the world!" Stanton herself said, "I forged the thunderbolts, she fired them."
Temperance was considered a women's rights issue at that time because of laws that gave husbands complete control of the family and its finances. A woman with an alcoholic husband had little legal recourse even if his alcoholism left the family destitute and he was abusive. If she obtained a divorce, which was difficult to do, the husband usually won sole guardianship of the children. In 1852, Anthony was elected as a delegate to the state temperance convention, but the chairman stopped her when she tried to speak, telling her that women delegates were there only to listen and learn. Anthony and some other women immediately walked out and convened a meeting of their own, which went on to plan a women's state convention. Largely organized by Anthony, the convention of 500 women met in Rochester in April and created the Women's State Temperance Society, with Stanton as president and Anthony as state agent. Anthony and her organization members collected 28,000 signatures on a petition for a law to prohibit the sale of alcohol in New York State. She organized a hearing on that law before the New York legislature, the first initiated in that state by a group of women. But at the organization's convention the following year, a schism developed over the issue of the right of a wife of an alcoholic to obtain a divorce and Stanton was voted out as president. Anthony then resigned from the organization.
In 1853, Anthony attended the World's Temperance Convention in New York City, at which controversy erupted over whether women would be allowed to speak there. After this, Anthony focused her energy on abolitionist and women's rights activities.
When Anthony tried to speak at the New York State Teachers' Association meeting in 1853, a debate ensued over whether it was proper for women to speak in public. Anthony was allowed to speak and four years later, at the 1857 teacher's convention, she introduced a resolution calling for the admission of black people to public schools and colleges. It was voted down as "not a proper subject for discussion". She introduced another resolution calling for males and females to be educated together at all levels, including colleges, it was fiercely opposed and was also rejected. Anthony continued to speak at state teachers' conventions for several years, insisting that women teachers should receive equal pay with men and serve as officers and committee members within the organization.
In 1853, Anthony worked with William Henry Channing, her activist Unitarian minister, to organize a convention in Rochester to launch a state campaign for improved property rights for married women. She lectured in support of this reform in almost every county in New York during the winter of 1855. She presented the petitions to the New York State Senate Judiciary Committee, where its members told her that men were actually the oppressed sex because they did such things as giving women the best seats in carriages. The campaign finally achieved success in 1860 when the legislature passed an improved Married Women's Property Act that gave married women the right to own separate property, enter into contracts and be the joint guardian of their children. The legislature rolled back much of this law in 1862, however, mainly because the women's movement was largely inactive due to the Civil War.
In 1851, Anthony was a key organizer of an anti-slavery convention in Rochester. She was also part of the Underground Railroad, where she worked with Harriet Tubman. In 1856, Anthony agreed to become the New York State agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Anthony organized anti-slavery meetings throughout the state. In 1859, after John Brown was executed for leading a violent raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Anthony presided over the meeting, which raised money for Brown's family. As an anti-slavery activist, Anthony faced considerable intimidation. Mobs sometimes shut down her meetings in every town from Buffalo to Albany in early 1861. In Rochester, the police had to escort Anthony and other speakers from the building for their own safety. In Syracuse, according to a local newspaper, "Rotten eggs were thrown, benches broken, and knives and pistols gleamed in every direction."
Anthony vision of a racially integrated society was far ahead of her times. In a speech in 1861, Anthony said, "Let us open to the colored man all our schools. Let us admit him into all our mechanic shops, stores, offices, and lucrative business avocations, let him rent such pew in the church, and occupy such seat in the theatre. Extend to him all the rights of Citizenship." There was tensions between leaders of the women's movement and male abolitionists who believed that a vigorous campaign for women's rights would interfere with the campaign against slavery. In 1860, Anthony sheltered a woman who had fled an abusive husband, William Lloyd Garrison insisted that the woman give up the child she had brought with her, because the law gave husbands complete control of children. Anthony reminded Garrison that he helped slaves escape to Canada in violation of the law.
When Stanton introduced a resolution at the National Woman's Rights Convention in 1860 favoring more lenient divorce laws, leading abolitionist Wendell Phillips opposed it and attempted to have it removed from the record. When Stanton, Anthony, and others supported a bill before the New York legislature that would permit divorce in cases of desertion or inhuman treatment, Horace Greeley, an abolitionist newspaper publisher, campaigned against it in the pages of his newspaper.
Anthony and Stanton organized the Women's Loyal National League in 1863 to campaign for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would abolish slavery. It was the first national women's political organization in the United States. In what was the largest petition drive in the nation's history up to that time, the League collected nearly 400,000 signatures to abolish slavery, representing approximately one out of every twenty-four adults in the Northern states. The petition significantly assisted the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Anthony was the chief organizer of this effort, which required recruiting and coordinating some 2000 petition collectors.
Anthony stayed with her brother Daniel in Kansas for eight months in 1865 to assist with his newspaper. She returned to New York after she learned that an amendment to the U.S. Constitution had been proposed that would provide citizenship for African Americans but would also for the first time introduce the word "male" into the constitution. Elizabeth Cady Stanton said "if that word 'male' be inserted, it will take us a century at least to get it out." Anthony and Stanton worked to revive the women's rights movement, which had become inactive during the Civil War. In 1866, they organized the Eleventh National Women's Rights Convention, the first since the Civil War began. The convention voted to transform itself into the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), whose purpose was to campaign for the equal rights of all citizens, especially the right of suffrage. The leadership of the new organization included such prominent activists as Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone and Frederick Douglass.
Leading male abolitionists such as Horace Greeley, Wendell Phillips and Theodore Tilton tried to convince Anthony and Stanton that the time had not yet come for women's suffrage, that they should campaign for voting rights for black men only. Anthony is described as being "highly indignant" at notion and the two continued to work for the inclusion of suffrage for both African Americans and women.
The AERA increasingly divided into two wings, both advocating universal suffrage but with different approaches. One wing, whose leading figure was Lucy Stone, was willing for black men to achieve suffrage first and wanted to maintain close ties with the Republican Party and the abolitionist movement. The other, whose leading figures were Anthony and Stanton, insisted that women and black men should be enfranchised at the same time. The AERA effectively dissolved after an acrimonious meeting in May 1869, and two competing woman suffrage organizations were created in its aftermath.
Anthony and Stanton began publishing a weekly newspaper called The Revolution in New York City in 1868. It focused primarily on women's rights, especially suffrage for women. It offered a forum in which women could exchange opinions on key issues from a variety of viewpoints. Anthony managed the business aspects of the paper while Stanton was co-editor along with Parker Pillsbury, an abolitionist and a supporter of women's rights. After twenty-nine months, mounting debts forced Anthony to transfer the paper to Laura Curtis Bullard, a wealthy women's rights activist who gave it a less radical tone. The paper published its last issue less than two years later.
The National Labor Union (NLU), which was formed in 1866, began reaching out to farmers, African Americans and women, with the intention of forming a broad-based political party. The Revolution enthusiastically supported the movement. Anthony and Stanton were seated as delegates to the NLU Congress in 1868, with Anthony representing the Working Women's Association (WWA), which had recently been formed in the offices of The Revolution. But the attempted alliance did not last long. During a printers' strike in 1869, Anthony voiced approval of an employer-sponsored training program that would teach women skills that would enable them in effect to replace the strikers. This angered the labor unions and at the next NLU Congress, Anthony unseated as a delegate because of strong opposition from those who accused her of supporting strikebreakers.
In May 1869, Anthony, Stanton and others formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). In November 1869, Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe and others formed the competing American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). It was a terrible schism in the women's movement and the hostile rivalry endured for decades. The cause for the split was the proposed Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would prohibit the denial of suffrage because of race. Anthony campaigned against the amendment. She and Stanton called for women and African Americans to be enfranchised at the same time. The AWSA supported the amendment, though Lucy Stone, who became its most prominent leader, also made it clear that she believed that suffrage for women would be more beneficial to the country than suffrage for black men. The two organizations had other differences as well. The NWSA was politically independent, while the AWSA sought close ties with the Republican Party, hoping that the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment would lead to a Republican push for women's suffrage. The NWSA focused primarily on winning suffrage at the national level while the AWSA pursued a state-by-state strategy. The NWSA initially worked on a wider range of women's issues than the AWSA, including divorce reform and equal pay for women.
In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was officially ratified and in 1872, disgust with corruption in government led to a mass defection of abolitionists and other social reformers from the Republican Party, but the rivalry between the two women's groups was so bitter, that a merger proved to be impossible for twenty years. In 1890, the two organizations merged as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), with Stanton as president but with Anthony as its effective leader. When Stanton retired from her post in 1892, Anthony became NAWSA's president.
After the formation of the NWSA, Anthony dedicated herself fully to the organization and to women's suffrage. She did not draw a salary from either it or its successor, the NAWSA, and in fact used her lecture fees to fund those organizations. The press treated her as a celebrity and she was a major draw at speaking engagements. Over her career she estimated that she averaged 75 to 100 speeches per year. Both Anthony and Stanton joined the lecture circuit about 1870, usually traveling from mid-autumn to spring. Occasionally they traveled together but most often not.
In 1876 when the U.S. celebrated its 100th birthday as an independent country, the NWSA asked permission to present a Declaration of Rights for Women at the official ceremony in Philadelphia, but was refused. Nevertheless, five women, headed by Anthony, walked onto the platform during the ceremony and handed their Declaration to the startled official in charge. As they left, they handed out copies of it to the crowd. Anthony then took to an unoccupied bandstand outside the hall and read the Declaration to a large crowd. Afterwards she invited everyone to a NWSA convention at the nearby Unitarian church where speakers like Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton spoke, The work of the women's suffrage movement generated results. Women won the right to vote in Wyoming in 1869 and in Utah in 1870. Her lectures in Washington and four other states led directly to invitations for her to address the state legislatures. The Grange, a large advocacy group for farmers, officially supported women's suffrage as early as 1885. The Women's Christian Temperance Union, the largest women's organization in the country, also supported suffrage.
The NWSA convention of 1871 adopted a strategy of urging women to attempt to vote, and then, after being turned away, to file suits in federal courts to challenge laws that prevented women from voting. The legal basis for the challenge was the recently adopted Fourteenth Amendment, part of which reads: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States". A total of nearly fifty women in Rochester registered to vote in the presidential election of 1872. On election day, Anthony and fourteen other women from her ward convinced the election inspectors to allow them to cast ballots. Anthony was arrested on November 18, 1872, by a U.S. Deputy Marshal and charged with illegally voting. The other women who had voted were also arrested but released pending the outcome of Anthony's trial. Anthony's trial generated a national controversy and became a major step in the transition of the broader women's rights movement into the women's suffrage movement. Anthony spoke throughout Monroe County, New York, where her trial was to be held. Her speech was entitled "Is it a Crime for a U.S. Citizen to Vote?" The U.S. Attorney arranged for the trial to be moved to the federal circuit court, which would soon sit in neighboring Ontario County with a jury drawn from that county's inhabitants. Anthony responded by speaking throughout that county also before the trial began.
The trial was presided over by Justice Ward Hunt, who had recently been appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Hunt had never served as a trial judge and had been a politician, he had begun his judicial career by being elected to the New York Court of Appeals. The trial, United States v. Susan B. Anthony, began on June 17, 1873, and was closely followed by the national press. A rule of common law at that time prevented criminal defendants in federal courts from testifying, and Hunt refused to allow Anthony to speak until the verdict had been delivered. On the second day of the trial, after both sides had presented their cases, Justice Hunt delivered his lengthy opinion, which he had put in writing. Hunt directed the jury to deliver a guilty verdict.
On the second day of the trial, Hunt asked Anthony if she had anything to say. We all know the answer to that question. She responded with what became her most famous speech for woman suffrage. She repeatedly ignoring the judge's order to stop talking and sit down, she protested what she called "this high-handed outrage upon my citizen's rights", accusing the judge of having "trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored." She also criticized Justice Hunt for denying her a trial by jury, and said that even if he had allowed the jury to discuss the case, she still would have been denied a trial by a jury of her peers because women were not allowed to be jurors.
Justice Hunt sentenced Anthony to pay a fine of $100 (equivalent to $2,200 in 2020), she responded, "I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty", and she never did. If Hunt had ordered her to be jailed until she paid the fine, Anthony could have taken her case to the Supreme Court, but instead he announced he would not order her taken into custody.
The U.S. Supreme Court in 1875 put an end to the strategy of trying to achieve women's suffrage through the court system when it ruled in Minor v. Happersett that "the Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon anyone".[121] The NWSA decided to pursue the far more difficult strategy of campaigning for a constitutional amendment to achieve voting rights for women.
On August 18, 2020, the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, President Donald Trump announced that he would pardon Anthony, 148 years after her conviction. The president of the National Susan B. Anthony Museum and House wrote to "decline" the offer of a pardon on the principle that, to accept a pardon would wrongly "validate" the trial proceedings in the same manner that paying the $100 fine would have.
Anthony and Stanton initiated the project of writing a history of the women's suffrage movement in 1876. Anthony hated the project and in a letter to a friend, she wrote that the project "makes me feel growly all the time" adding, "I love to make history but hate to write it." She acted as her own publisher. This history evolved into a six-volume work of more than 5700 pages written over a period of 41 years. The first three volumes, which cover the movement up to 1885, were published between 1881 and 1886 and were produced by Stanton, Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage. Anthony handled the production details and the extensive correspondence with contributors. Anthony published Volume 4, which covers the period from 1883 to 1900, in 1902, after Stanton's death, with the help of Ida Husted Harper, Anthony's designated biographer. The last two volumes, which bring the history up to 1920, were completed in 1922 by Harper after Anthony's death.
Anthony traveled to Europe in 1883 for a nine-month stay, meeting up with Stanton, who had arrived a few months earlier. Together they met with leaders of European women's movements and began the process of creating an international women's organization. Delegates from fifty-three women's organizations in nine countries met in Washington in 1888 to form the new association, which was called the International Council of Women (ICW). Anthony opened the first session of the ICW and presided over most events. President Grover Cleveland and First Lady Frances Folsom Cleveland sponsored a reception at the White House for delegates to the ICW's founding congress. The ICW's second congress was an integral part of the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. At its third congress in London in 1899, a reception for the ICW was held at Windsor Castle at the invitation of Queen Victoria. At its fourth congress in Berlin in 1904, Augusta Victoria, the German Empress, received the ICW leaders at her palace. Anthony played a prominent role on all four occasions.
At the World's Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World's Fair, held in 1893, the U.S. Congress decided that the Exposition should also recognize the role of women. Anthony had played a pivotal in this decision, but took no credit publicly for fear that a public campaign would cause opposition. A large structure called the Woman's Building, designed by Sophia Hayden Bennett, was constructed to provide meeting and exhibition spaces for women at the Exposition. This week-long congress seated delegates from 27 countries. Its 81 sessions were attended by over 150,000 people, and Anthony spoke to large crowds at the Exposition. "Buffalo Bill" Cody invited Anthony as a guest to his Wild West Show, located just outside the Exposition. When the show opened, he rode his horse directly to her and greeted her with dramatic flair, while the audience applauded wildly.
Anthony retired as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and Carrie Chapman Catt was her chosen successor. In 1902, Catt organized a preparatory meeting in Washington, with Anthony as chair, that was attended by delegates from several countries. Organized primarily by Catt, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance was created in Berlin in 1904. The founding meeting was chaired by Anthony, who was declared to be the new organization's honorary president and first member. Later renamed the International Alliance of Women, the organization is still active and is affiliated with the United Nations.
Anthony and Stanton grew apart as they grew older. Anthony began to form alliances with more conservative groups, such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the nation's largest women's organization and a supporter of women's suffrage. Thus upset Stanton, who said, "I get more radical as I get older, while she seems to grow more conservative." In 1895 Stanton published The Woman's Bible, which attacked the use of the Bible to relegate women to an inferior status. It became a highly controversial best-seller. The NAWSA voted to disavow any connection with it despite Anthony's strong objection that such a move was unnecessary and hurtful. However Anthony refused to assist with the book's preparation. Despite these disagreements, when Stanton died in 1902, Anthony wrote to a friend: "Oh, this awful hush! It seems impossible that voice is stilled which I have loved to hear for fifty years. Always I have felt I must have Mrs. Stanton's opinion of things before I knew where I stood myself. I am all at sea."
Anthony moved into the home of her sister Mary Stafford Anthony's house in Rochester in 1891, at the age of 71. Her energy and stamina remained remarkably high, and at age 75, she toured Yosemite National Park on the back of a mule. She remained as leader of the NAWSA and continued to travel extensively on suffrage work. She also engaged in local projects. She played a key role in raising the funds required by the University of Rochester before they would admit women students, pledging her life insurance policy to close the final funding gap. In 1896, she spent eight months on the California suffrage campaign, speaking as many as three times per day in more than 30 localities. In 1900, she presided over her last NAWSA convention. She celebrated her seventieth birthday at a national event in Washington with prominent members of the House and Senate in attendance. Her eightieth birthday was celebrated at the White House at the invitation of President William McKinley.
Susan B. Anthony died at the age of 86 of heart failure and pneumonia in her home in Rochester, New York, on March 13, 1906. She was buried at Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester. She did not live to see the achievement of women's suffrage at the national level, but at the time of her death, women had achieved suffrage in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Idaho. Several larger states followed soon after. Legal rights for married women had been established in most states, and most professions had at least a few women members. 36,000 women were attending colleges and universities.
The Nineteenth Amendment, which prohibited the denial of suffrage because of sex, was colloquially known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. It was ratified in 1920, and the National American Woman Suffrage Association, whose character and policies were strongly influenced by Anthony, was transformed into the League of Women Voters, still an active force in U.S. politics.
In 1979, the United States Mint began issuing the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin, the first US coin to honor a female citizen.