Susan B. Anthony

• 1. Introduction

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  Susan B. Anthony was arrested on the 18th of November 1872 for the crime of casting a ballot. A U.S. Deputy Marshal came to her door in Rochester, New York, and charged her with voting illegally in the presidential election held just days before. She had walked into a polling place, persuaded the inspectors to accept her vote, and then waited. She knew what was coming.

  The charge carried a fine of $100. When Justice Ward Hunt sentenced her, she told him plainly: "I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty." She never did.

  Anthony had been fighting for this moment since she was a teenager collecting anti-slavery petitions in the 1830s. She would spend the next three decades after her trial pushing for a constitutional amendment granting women the vote. She died in 1906, fourteen years before that amendment passed. But the words she spoke at her birthday celebration just days before her death took on a life of their own: "Failure is impossible."

  How did a woman born into a modest Quaker family in Adams, Massachusetts, become what historian Eleanor Flexner called the suffrage movement's "incomparable organizer, who gave it force and direction for half a century"? And why did that organizer choose, again and again, to break every rule rather than wait for permission?

• 2. A Family Made for Reform

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  Daniel Anthony raised his children, girls and boys alike, to be self-supporting. He taught them business principles and gave them real responsibilities from early ages. It was an unusual household by the standards of the 1820s, and it shaped Susan B. Anthony in ways that ran far deeper than politics.

  Her father was a Quaker abolitionist who had been disowned by his congregation for allowing a dance school to operate in his home. He kept attending meetings anyway and grew more radical as the years went on. Her mother was a Baptist, and the family's religious life was a blend of traditions rather than a single settled creed.

  When Anthony was six, the family moved to Battenville, New York, where her father managed a large cotton mill. When she was seventeen, she was sent to a Quaker boarding school in Philadelphia, an experience she found strict and sometimes humiliating. A single term was all she managed: the Panic of 1837 wiped out the family finances, forcing an auction of all their belongings. A maternal uncle stepped in and bought most of what they owned, returning it to them.

  Her brothers Daniel and Merritt both moved to Kansas to fight against slavery. Merritt took up arms alongside John Brown during the Bleeding Kansas crisis. Her sister Mary became a public school principal and a women's rights activist. The Anthony children did not drift into reform; they were raised inside it.

  When the family moved to a farm on the outskirts of Rochester in 1845, the farmstead quickly became a Sunday gathering place for local activists. Frederick Douglass, a formerly enslaved man and prominent abolitionist, became Anthony's lifelong friend through those meetings. That farm, and the community around it, gave Anthony a network and a purpose she would build on for the rest of her life.

• 3. The Organizer Emerges

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  Anthony gave her first public speech in 1849 at a meeting of the Daughters of Temperance in Canajoharie. Three years later, she was elected a delegate to the state temperance convention and walked to the podium to speak. The chairman stopped her. Women, he said, were there only to listen and learn.

  Anthony and several other women walked out immediately. Within weeks she had organized a convention of 500 women in Rochester, which created the Women's State Temperance Society with Elizabeth Cady Stanton as president and Anthony as state agent. She and her co-workers collected 28,000 signatures on a petition to prohibit the sale of alcohol in New York State and organized the first hearing on that petition before the state legislature ever initiated by a group of women.

  When the organization's conservative wing forced Stanton out the following year over her advocacy of divorce rights for abused wives, Anthony resigned alongside her. She had already spotted the pattern: institutions would accept women's participation up to the point where women actually proposed anything.

  At the New York State Teachers' Association meeting in 1853, Anthony tried to speak and triggered a half-hour debate among the men about whether it was appropriate for a woman to address the assembly. When she was finally allowed to continue, she pointed out that if society considered women competent to teach but not to practice law or medicine, every man who chose teaching as a career was implicitly claiming he had no more ability than a woman. The room did not respond warmly.

  Her 1857 resolution calling for the admission of Black students to public schools and colleges was rejected as not a proper subject for discussion. Her resolution calling for co-education at all levels was described by one opponent as "a vast social evil... the first step in the school which seeks to abolish marriage." Anthony kept coming back.

• 4. The Partnership

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  Amelia Bloomer introduced Anthony to Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1851, and the two women recognized almost at once that their skills were mirror images of each other. Stanton's biographer estimated that over the course of her lifetime, Stanton spent more time with Anthony than with any other adult, including her own husband.

  One biography put it plainly: "Stanton provided the ideas, rhetoric, and strategy; Anthony delivered the speeches, circulated petitions, and rented the halls. Anthony prodded and Stanton produced." Stanton's husband described the dynamic with humor: "Susan stirred the puddings, Elizabeth stirred up Susan, and then Susan stirs up the world!" Stanton herself reduced it to a single line: "I forged the thunderbolts, she fired them."

  Anthony was dissatisfied with her own writing and published relatively little. She was also unmarried, which gave her the legal status of feme sole and the practical freedom to sign contracts that a married woman, under the legal category of feme covert, could not. Because Stanton had seven children and could not easily travel, Anthony supervised the children so Stanton could write. One of Anthony's biographers noted that she became "almost another mother to Mrs. Stanton's children."

  Stanton later teased Anthony at her 70th birthday celebration: "Well, as all women are supposed to be under the thumb of some man, I prefer a tyrant of my own sex, so I shall not deny the patent fact of my subjection."

  The partnership was productive but not frictionless. As Anthony built alliances with more conservative groups to advance suffrage, Stanton complained that Anthony was growing more conservative while she herself grew more radical. When Stanton published The Woman's Bible in 1895, a highly controversial bestseller that challenged the use of scripture to subordinate women, the NAWSA voted to disavow it. Anthony strongly objected to that vote but told Stanton privately that she disagreed with the underlying argument: "women must be enfranchised before they can be emancipated from their superstitions." 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."

• 5. The Trial That Backfired

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  Nearly fifty women in Rochester registered to vote in the presidential election of 1872, following the example set by Anthony and her sisters. On election day, Anthony and fourteen other women from her ward persuaded the election inspectors to accept their ballots. Women in other wards were turned back.

  The NWSA had already adopted this tactic deliberately in 1871: encourage women to attempt to vote, get arrested, and then challenge the laws in federal court under the Fourteenth Amendment. The legal theory was that the Amendment's guarantee of the privileges and immunities of citizenship should include the right to vote.

  Justice Ward Hunt, newly appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, presided over the trial that began on the 17th of June 1873. Hunt had never served as a trial judge before reaching the nation's highest court; he had been a politician and had started his judicial career on the New York Court of Appeals. In the trial's most contested moment, Hunt directed the jury to deliver a guilty verdict without allowing them to deliberate. He also refused to let Anthony speak until the verdict had been delivered.

  When he finally asked her if she had anything to say, she delivered what Ann D. Gordon, a historian of the women's movement, called "the most famous speech in the history of the agitation for woman suffrage." Ignoring repeated orders to stop and sit down, she told Hunt: "you have 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 pointed out that even if the jury had been allowed to deliberate, she still would not have faced a jury of her peers, because women were barred from serving as jurors.

  Hunt fined her $100. She refused to pay. He declined to jail her, which closed the path to an appeal before the Supreme Court. In 1875, that court ended the strategy entirely by ruling in Minor v. Happersett that the Constitution did not confer the right of suffrage on anyone. The NWSA pivoted to the harder road: a constitutional amendment.

• 6. Petition, Lecture, Repeat

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  Anthony estimated that she averaged between 75 and 100 speeches per year over the course of her career. Travel in the early years was sometimes brutal. She once delivered a speech from the top of a billiard table when no other platform was available. On another occasion her train was snowbound for days and she survived on crackers and dried fish.

  She funded the movement largely through her own lecture fees, paying off the debts she had accumulated running The Revolution, the weekly newspaper she and Stanton published from 1868. She drew a salary from neither the NWSA nor its successor, the NAWSA. There was no national office; the organization's mailing address was simply whichever officer happened to hold the correspondence at the time.

  At the centennial celebration in Philadelphia in 1876, the NWSA was refused permission to present a Declaration of Rights for Women at the official ceremony. Anthony and four other women walked onto the platform anyway during the ceremony, handed the Declaration to the startled official in charge, and distributed copies to the crowd as they left. Finding an unoccupied bandstand outside, Anthony mounted it and read the Declaration aloud to a large crowd before inviting everyone to a NWSA convention at the nearby Unitarian church.

  In 1896, Anthony spent eight months on the California suffrage campaign, speaking as many as three times per day in more than 30 localities. In 1878, she and Stanton had arranged for Senator Aaron A. Sargent to introduce before Congress an amendment granting women the right to vote. Nicknamed the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, it would not be ratified until 1920 as the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

  As her reputation grew, conditions improved. She sometimes traveled in the private railroad car of Jane Stanford, whose husband owned a major railroad. A free suite of rooms at the Riggs Hotel was made available to her during lobbying sessions in Washington. She trained a cohort of younger activists she called her "nieces," two of whom, Carrie Chapman Catt and Anna Howard Shaw, went on to lead the NAWSA after she stepped down.

• 7. Building the World Stage

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  Anthony traveled to Europe in 1883 for a nine-month stay, linking up with Stanton to visit women's institutions including the newly founded Somerville College and Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford. The trip planted the seed of something larger.

  With preparatory work handled primarily by Anthony and two NWSA colleagues, Rachel Foster Avery and May Wright Sewall, delegates from fifty-three women's organizations in nine countries gathered in Washington in 1888 to form the International Council of Women. The American Woman Suffrage Association, which had been a rival to the NWSA for nearly two decades, participated in the founding congress. President Cleveland and his wife hosted a reception at the White House for the delegates.

  When the World's Columbian Exposition opened in Chicago in 1893, Anthony's role in shaping the women's presence there was deliberately hidden. Fearing that a public campaign would generate opposition, she had worked quietly behind the scenes, covertly circulating a petition signed by wives and daughters of Supreme Court justices, senators, and cabinet members to pressure Congress into including women. The result was the World's Congress of Representative Women, a week-long event that seated delegates from 27 countries, ran 81 sessions, and drew over 150,000 attendees. Women's suffrage was discussed at nearly every session.

  Anthony also had time for less formal moments at the Exposition. "Buffalo Bill" Cody invited her to his Wild West Show, located just outside the fairgrounds. When the show opened, Cody rode his horse directly to her and greeted her with a flourish. A co-worker described Anthony as "for the moment as enthusiastic as a girl" as she waved her handkerchief while the crowd applauded.

  In 1904, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance was founded in Berlin, with Anthony chairing the meeting. She was declared the organization's honorary president and its first member. Her biographer recorded that "no event ever gave Miss Anthony such profound satisfaction as this one."

• 8. Legacy and What Remained

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  Susan B. Anthony died on the 13th of March 1906 at her home in Rochester, at the age of 86. The cause was heart failure and pneumonia. She was buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester. Just days before her death, at a birthday celebration in Washington, she had told the crowd: "There have been others also just as true and devoted to the cause... but with such women consecrating their lives, failure is impossible."

  At the time of her death, women could vote in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho. About 36,000 women were attending colleges and universities, a number that had been essentially zero a few decades earlier. Legal rights for married women had been established in most states. Anthony had seen this much accomplished and called it a revolution in itself.

  The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, was widely called the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. The NAWSA, which she had shaped over decades, was transformed after ratification into the League of Women Voters, which remains active in U.S. politics.

  Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, said shortly before Anthony's death: "A few days ago someone said to me that every woman should stand with bared head before Susan B. Anthony. 'Yes,' I answered, 'and every man as well.'"

  On the 18th of August 2020, the 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment's ratification, President Donald Trump announced a pardon for Anthony. The president of the National Susan B. Anthony Museum and House declined on the grounds that accepting a pardon would wrongly validate the trial, just as paying the $100 fine would have. Anthony's refusal to pay that fine, it turned out, was still making arguments 148 years later.