Susan B. Anthony was an American social reformer and women's rights activist who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. Born into a Quaker family committed to social equality, she collected anti-slavery petitions at the age of 17.

Early Life

Anthony was reared in the Quaker tradition in a home pervaded by a tone of independence and moral zeal. She was a precocious child and learned to read and write at the age of three. After the family moved from Massachusetts to Battensville, New York, in 1826, she attended a district school, then a school set up by her father, and finally a boarding school near Philadelphia. In 1839 she took a position in a Quaker seminary in New Rochelle, New York. From 1846 to 1849 she taught at a female academy in upstate New York.

Abolition, Temperance, and Women’s Suffrage

Anthony subsequently settled in her family home, now near Rochester, New York. There she met many leading abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, Parker Pillsbury, Wendell Phillips, William Henry Channing, and William Lloyd Garrison. Soon the temperance movement enlisted her sympathy and then, after meeting Amelia Bloomer and through her Elizabeth Cady Stanton, so did that of women’s suffrage.

The rebuff of Anthony’s attempt to speak at a temperance meeting in Albany in 1852 prompted her to organize the Woman’s New York State Temperance Society, of which Stanton became president, and pushed Anthony farther in the direction of women’s rights advocacy. In a short time she became known as one of the cause’s most zealous, serious advocates, a dogged and tireless worker whose personality contrasted sharply with that of her friend and coworker Stanton. She was also a prime target of public and newspaper abuse. While campaigning for a liberalization of New York’s laws regarding married women’s property rights, an end attained in 1860, Anthony served from 1856 as chief New York agent of Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society. During the early phase of the Civil War she helped organize the Women’s National Loyal League, which urged the case for emancipation. After the war she campaigned unsuccessfully to have the language of the Fourteenth Amendment altered to allow for woman as well as African American suffrage, and in 1866 she became corresponding secretary of the newly formed American Equal Rights Association. Her exhausting speaking and organizing tour of Kansas in 1867 failed to win passage of a state enfranchisement law.

In 1868 Anthony became publisher, and Stanton editor, of a new periodical, The Revolution, originally financed by the eccentric George Francis Train. The same year, she represented the Working Women’s Association of New York, which she had recently organized, at the National Labor Union convention. In January 1869 she organized a women’s suffrage convention in Washington, D.C., and in May she and Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). A portion of the organization deserted later in the year to join Lucy Stone’s more conservative American Woman Suffrage Association, but the NWSA remained a large and powerful group, and Anthony continued to serve as its principal leader and spokeswoman.

In 1870 she relinquished her position at The Revolution and embarked on a series of lecture tours to pay off the paper’s accumulated debts. As a test of the legality of the suffrage provision of the Fourteenth Amendment, she cast a vote in the 1872 presidential election in Rochester, New York. She was arrested, convicted (the judge’s directed verdict of guilty had been written before the trial began, and she called the proceedings “the greatest judicial outrage history has ever recorded”), and fined, and although she refused to pay the fine, the case was carried no farther. She traveled constantly, often with Stanton, in support of efforts in various states to win the franchise for women: California in 1871, Michigan in 1874, Colorado in 1877, and elsewhere. In 1890, after lengthy discussions, the rival suffrage associations were merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and after Stanton resigned in 1892, Anthony became president. Her principal lieutenant in later years was Carrie Chapman Catt.

By the 1890s Anthony had largely outlived the abuse and sarcasm that had attended her early efforts, and she emerged as a national heroine. Her visits to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and to the Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland, Oregon, in 1905 were warmly received, as were her trips to London in 1899 and Berlin in 1904 as head of the U.S. delegation to the International Council of Women (which she helped found in 1888). In 1900, at age 80, she retired from the presidency of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, passing it on to Catt. Anthony died in 1906, 14 years before the Nineteenth Amendment was passed.

Writings, Dollar Coin, and Museum

Principal among Anthony’s written works are the first four volumes of the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage, written with Stanton and Matilda J. Gage. Various of her writings are collected in The Elizabeth Cady Stanton–Susan B. Anthony Reader (1992), edited by Ellen Carol DuBois, and The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (1997), edited by Ann D. Gordon. With the issue of a new dollar coin in 1979, Anthony became the first woman to be depicted on United States currency, although the honour was somewhat mitigated by popular rejection of the coin because its size was so similar to that of the 25-cent coin.

The opening in 2010 of the Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum in Adams, Massachusetts, on the occasion of the 190th anniversary of Anthony’s birth, stirred controversy when the owner of the property and president of the museum led with an exhibit presenting Anthony as an antiabortion feminist in 21st-century terms. Further controversy followed in 2020 when U.S. Pres. Donald Trump pardoned Anthony for her 1872 conviction. The move was criticized by historians and others who argued that Anthony did not believe she had committed a crime and that the pardon validated the trial.

Death

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. At her birthday celebration in Washington, D.C., a few days earlier, Anthony had spoken of those who had worked with her for women's rights: "There have been others also just as true and devoted to the cause—I wish I could name every one—but with such women consecrating their lives, failure is impossible!" "Failure is impossible" quickly became a watchword for the women's movement.