Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony was an American social reformer who spent more than half a century campaigning against slavery and for women's rights, above all the right to vote. Working closely with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she became the leading organiser of the women's suffrage movement in the United States, and her arrest for voting in 1872 made her a national figure. She died in 1906, fourteen years before the constitutional amendment popularly named after her gave American women the vote.

Susan Anthony was born on 15 February 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts, the second of seven children of Daniel Anthony, a Quaker who ran cotton mills, and Lucy Read Anthony. Her father, an abolitionist, raised his daughters to be self-supporting. When she was six the family moved to Battenville, New York, and the Panic of 1837 ruined them, ending her schooling in Philadelphia. She then taught for years, resenting that men earned far more.

In 1845 the family settled on a farm near Rochester, New York, where local reformers gathered on Sunday afternoons, among them the formerly enslaved abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who became a lifelong friend. Her parents attended the 1848 women's rights convention in Rochester, held two weeks after the Seneca Falls Convention, while she was teaching elsewhere.

Anthony's public career began in the temperance movement. In 1852 she was stopped from speaking at a state temperance meeting because she was a woman, and she helped set up a separate women's society. The previous year she had met Stanton, and the two formed one of the great partnerships of American reform: Stanton wrote, while Anthony organised meetings, gathered petitions and travelled.

From 1856 she was the New York agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, demanding immediate emancipation and, in 1861, full citizenship for Black Americans. Mobs broke up her meetings across the state on the eve of the American Civil War. In 1863 she and Stanton founded the Women's Loyal National League, whose petition of nearly 400,000 signatures helped win the Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery.

After the war Anthony helped found the American Equal Rights Association to seek the vote for both women and Black Americans. When proposed amendments enfranchised Black men but not women, she opposed the Fifteenth Amendment, a highly controversial stand, and in 1869 the movement split. She and Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, which sought a federal amendment, while Lucy Stone's rival American Woman Suffrage Association worked state by state. The two groups merged in 1890, and Anthony led the united body as president from 1892 to 1900.

In November 1872 Anthony and fourteen other women persuaded election inspectors in Rochester to let them vote, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment protected the rights of all citizens. She was arrested, and at her trial in June 1873 the judge directed the jury to find her guilty and fined her $100. She told him she would never pay a dollar of it, and she never did. In 1878 she and Stanton had a women's suffrage amendment introduced in Congress, later called the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.

Unmarried and unpaid by her organisations, Anthony lived largely on lecture fees, giving 75 to 100 speeches a year. With Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage she compiled the History of Woman Suffrage, a multi-volume record that preserved vast material but favoured their own wing of the movement. She helped create the International Council of Women in 1888 and chaired the founding of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Berlin in 1904. Once widely mocked, she celebrated her 80th birthday at the White House.

Anthony died at home in Rochester on 13 March 1906. At her last birthday celebration in Washington she had declared that "failure is impossible", words that became a rallying cry. The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, and in 1979 her portrait on a new dollar coin made her the first female citizen depicted on United States coinage.

Our 1880 and 1900 maps show the United States as it stood during her long suffrage campaign.