At a Glance
Adams, Quaker Formation, and a Childhood of Equality
Susan Anthony grew up in a household that was, by the standards of the 1820s and 1830s, unusually egalitarian in its treatment of women and unusually committed to the social reform movements of the era. The Society of Friends — the Quakers — had been treating women as spiritual equals of men since the seventeenth century, allowing them to speak and preach in meeting, to exercise leadership in Quaker institutions, and to develop the public presence and the expectation of being heard that most Protestant denominations denied their female members. Growing up in this tradition gave Anthony a baseline assumption that women were capable of the same intellectual and moral engagement as men, and that the society's denial of that capability was not merely unjust but false.
Her father Daniel's commercial antislavery commitment — refusing to use slave-grown cotton in his manufacturing business — demonstrated the connection between moral conviction and economic practice that characterised the most serious antislavery positions of the era, and it showed the young Susan that one's commitments had to be expressed not merely in words but in the choices one made about how to live and how to do business. This lesson — that genuine conviction required consistent action across all the domains of one's life, not merely in the designated spaces of religious observance or political advocacy — was one of the most important inheritances of her Quaker upbringing, and it shaped her approach to every cause she subsequently took up.
She was educated at a Quaker boarding school and then worked as a teacher — one of the few respectable professional options available to women of her class and generation — before becoming involved first in the temperance movement and then, through her connections to the reform world that temperance and antislavery shared, in the organised antislavery movement. Her work as an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society in the 1850s was the practical school in which she developed the organisational skills — canvassing, petition collecting, meeting organisation, public speaking — that she would deploy in the women's suffrage cause for the rest of her life.
Stanton and Anthony: The Most Productive Reform Partnership in American History
The partnership between Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, which began when they met in Seneca Falls in 1851 and lasted until Stanton's death in 1902, was the most productive reform partnership in American history and one of the most remarkable personal collaborations of any kind in the nineteenth century. The two women were complementary in their gifts and their situations in ways that made the partnership more than the sum of its parts: Stanton had the intellectual range, the philosophical depth, and the capacity for original argument; Anthony had the organisational capacity, the physical endurance, and the willingness to do the grinding, unglamorous work of campaign building that Stanton's domestic situation — she had seven children — made impossible for her to do alone.
Their division of labour was explicit and acknowledged: Stanton wrote the speeches and the arguments; Anthony delivered them and organised the campaigns around them. Stanton stayed home and thought; Anthony went on the road and organised. Stanton provided the intellectual framework; Anthony built the institutional structure. The arrangement worked because each woman understood and acknowledged what the other contributed, and because their fundamental convictions were deeply aligned even when their tactical judgments differed.
The tactical disagreements were real and sometimes significant. Anthony was more focused on the single issue of women's suffrage than Stanton, who consistently pushed toward a broader critique of the social and theological foundations of women's subordination. Anthony thought Stanton's radicalism — particularly The Woman's Bible — was politically counterproductive; Stanton thought Anthony's single-issue focus was intellectually narrow. But these disagreements operated within a framework of mutual respect and genuine affection that sustained the partnership through five decades of shared work, and the movement they built together was more durable and more effective than what either could have built alone.
The 1872 Vote: Civil Disobedience as Constitutional Argument
Anthony's decision to vote in the 1872 presidential election was not an impulsive act of defiance — it was a carefully planned piece of constitutional litigation, designed to force the courts to rule on the question of whether the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of citizenship applied to women's voting rights. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, had declared that all persons born or naturalised in the United States were citizens and entitled to equal protection under the law. The suffragist position — which Anthony shared with Victoria Woodhull, who had articulated it most clearly in a memorial to Congress in 1871 — was that this language, properly understood, already granted women the right to vote, and that no additional amendment was necessary, only a willingness to enforce the amendment already in place.
She arrived at the Rochester polling place on 1 November 1872 and voted, along with approximately fourteen other women from her ward. The registration officials, after some legal argument that Anthony won by showing them a copy of the Fourteenth Amendment, allowed the women to register and vote. She was arrested three weeks later, charged with voting illegally, and brought to trial in June 1873 before Judge Ward Hunt in Canandaigua, New York.
The trial was a remarkable exercise in judicial power. Judge Hunt directed the jury to find Anthony guilty without deliberation — effectively taking the decision from the jury and making it himself — and refused to allow Anthony to testify in her own defence. Before sentencing, he asked Anthony if she had anything to say; she delivered a sustained speech arguing that he had denied her every right to which she was entitled and that his entire proceeding was a violation of the constitutional principles he was supposedly enforcing. He interrupted her multiple times; she continued. He sentenced her to a fine of one hundred dollars. She refused to pay it, stating that she would never pay a dollar to a government that denied women equal rights. The government declined to imprison her — which would have allowed an appeal to a higher court — and the constitutional argument she had hoped to make through the appellate process was effectively foreclosed.
The Revolution, NWSA, and Building the Movement's Institutions
The newspaper that Anthony founded in 1868, The Revolution, was one of the most ambitious and most radical publishing ventures in the history of the women's rights movement. Its motto — "Men their rights and nothing more; women their rights and nothing less" — captured the combination of principled equity and assertive demand that characterised the most radical edge of the suffrage movement, and the paper's editorial positions on equal pay, divorce law reform, and the broader transformation of women's social and economic situation went considerably beyond the more cautious mainstream of suffrage advocacy.
The paper's financial difficulties — it ran up debts of approximately ten thousand dollars before Anthony was forced to close it in 1870 — reflected both the challenges of sustaining a radical publication without a comfortable institutional backing and the specific hostility that its positions generated in the mainstream press and in the broader commercial culture that suffragist publications had to navigate. Anthony accepted personal responsibility for the debts and spent the following years on the lecture circuit specifically to pay them off — a demonstration of the financial discipline and the personal integrity that characterised her approach to every aspect of her public life.
The National Woman Suffrage Association that she and Stanton co-founded in 1869 was the institutional expression of the more radical wing of the suffrage movement — the wing that maintained Stanton's broader critique of women's subordination alongside the specific demand for the vote, and that refused to accept the argument that the suffrage movement should distance itself from the more contentious aspects of women's rights advocacy in order to build a broader coalition. The more moderate American Woman Suffrage Association, founded by Lucy Stone in the same year, took the opposite position. The two organisations spent twenty years in parallel competition before merging in 1890 to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association, with Anthony as its eventual president.
Fifty Years of Campaign Work: The Scale of What She Did
The scale of Anthony's organisational work over fifty years of suffrage campaigning is almost impossible to convey without descending into lists of meetings and miles and petition signatures that obscure rather than illuminate the human reality of what she did. She travelled constantly — by train, by wagon, by whatever means of transport were available — to speak at meetings in small towns and large cities, to organise local suffrage societies, to canvass state legislators, to testify before congressional committees, to attend state and national conventions, to conduct the state referendum campaigns that were the primary mechanism through which women's suffrage was sought to be achieved before the federal constitutional approach ultimately succeeded.
She did this work in conditions that were often uncomfortable, frequently hostile, and occasionally dangerous. She was booed, heckled, and threatened at meetings. She was denied the use of public halls. She was caricatured in the press and dismissed as a crank by the political establishment. She operated without the financial resources that her opponents in the political system possessed, sustained primarily by lecture fees, donations from sympathetic wealthy women, and her own extraordinary physical endurance. She was, in the most literal and most unglamorous sense of the term, a movement builder — the person who did the work that movements require to be more than a set of arguments and a collection of inspiring speeches.
The work she did created the institutional infrastructure — the state organisations, the national conventions, the training of local organisers, the cultivation of sympathetic politicians, the development of the movement's political strategy — that made it possible for the Nineteenth Amendment campaign to succeed in 1920. She died fourteen years before that success, but the movement that succeeded was the movement she had built, and its success was in a very real sense her achievement.
The Racial Contradictions: A Movement's Painful Compromise
The history of Susan B. Anthony's relationship to racial equality is complicated in ways that her admirers have sometimes minimised and her critics have sometimes exaggerated. She came to the women's rights movement through antislavery, and her early commitments were to universal equality — the position that the rights she was demanding for women applied to all women, including and especially Black women, who faced the double subordination of race and gender that the mainstream suffrage movement was too often willing to ignore.
But as the suffrage movement developed its political strategy in the post-Civil War years — as it calculated what alliances were necessary to achieve the constitutional amendment it was seeking — Anthony and others made compromises with the white Southern women whose participation in the movement was sought and whose racial assumptions were incompatible with the universalism of the movement's founding principles. The explicit willingness, in certain phases of the campaign, to accept a strategy that prioritised white women's suffrage over Black women's — to accept the support of white Southern suffragists who wanted the vote for white women specifically — was a departure from the universalism that should have been non-negotiable, and it left a mark on the movement's legacy that subsequent generations have rightly found troubling.
These contradictions do not erase what Anthony achieved or invalidate the cause she spent her life advancing. But they are part of the honest account of her career, and they are part of the honest account of the suffrage movement's relationship to the broader struggle for racial equality — a relationship that was always more complex and more compromised than the movement's own mythology acknowledged.
Legacy: Failure Is Impossible
Susan B. Anthony died on 13 March 1906, in Rochester, New York, at the age of eighty-six. Her last major public speech, delivered at a suffrage celebration in Washington, D.C. in February 1906, reportedly ended with the words "failure is impossible" — a statement of the conviction that had sustained her through fifty years of political work that had not yet achieved its central goal. The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified fourteen years later, in August 1920, when women across America voted for the first time in a presidential election.
Her face has appeared on the dollar coin since 1979, making her the first real woman to appear on a circulating American coin — a form of recognition that was simultaneously a tribute and a somewhat ironic one, given that she had spent fifty years of her life being denied the full rights of citizenship by the government whose currency now bore her image. The recognition was real and was deserved. But the more important recognition is the one that needs to be stated plainly: that the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave thirty million American women the right to vote, was made possible by the work that Susan B. Anthony did over fifty years — the meetings attended, the petitions circulated, the campaigns organised, the institutions built, the arguments made, and the arrests accepted — and that no one did more of that work than she did.