biography
| name: |
Anthony, Susan B(rownell)
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| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1820–1906)
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| biography:
| Women's rights leader, born in Adams, Massachusetts, USA. Raised as a Quaker, she observed the working conditions of the women in her father's cotton mill. She briefly attended Deborah Moulson's Seminary for Females in Philadelphia (1837), then took up teaching, becoming headmistress at the Canajoharie Academy in New York (1845–8). Her parents were acquainted with the prominent abolitionists and had attended the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, NY (1848), and when she returned home in 1850 she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton. After she was denied a chance to speak at meetings of temperance advocates, she dedicated herself to winning full rights for women. Teamed with Stanton, she gained her first success with the passage of New York State's Married Women's Property Act (1860). An ardent abolitionist, she opposed the male-only Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. During 1868–70 she was publisher of Revolution, a women's suffrage paper, and with Stanton she founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (1869). Dissatisfaction with Stanton and Anthony's methods and goals led to a schism within the movement, but in 1890 the two main groups were united as the National American Woman Suffrage Association, of which Anthony served as president (1892–1900). She constantly spoke out against injustices of all kinds, but concentrated most of her energies in her final years in seeking a constitutional amendment to allow women to vote. Although stronger in organizational skills than as a public speaker, she seemed indefatigable in travelling throughout the country to promote her cause. In the election of 1872 she cast a ballot and was arrested and fined, and in 1905 she personally visited President Theodore Roosevelt to urge his support for women's suffrage. She initiated the History of Woman Suffrage (4 vols, 1881–1902), organized the International Council of Women (1888), and as late as 1904 was in Berlin helping to found the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. The ridicule that had greeted her in her first decades was replaced by respect, and she became internationally known as the symbol of the women's rights movement. |
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