Susan Brownell Anthony was born in 1820 to a Massachusetts Quaker family that taught her early that men and women were spiritually equal. She trained as a teacher, then in her twenties pivoted to activism: first against slavery, then against alcohol, then for women's rights — the last fifty years of her life were spent on the third. With Elizabeth Cady Stanton she co-founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 and was its president from 1892 to 1900; the two women edited together the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage. In November 1872 Anthony illegally cast a ballot in the US presidential election and was arrested, tried, convicted, and fined $100, which she refused to pay. She lectured up to a hundred times a year, lobbied every Congress, drafted the constitutional amendment that would in 1920 — fourteen years after her death — give American women the vote. She died in Rochester, New York in 1906 at eighty-six. Her last public words were 'Failure is impossible.'
All Figures
Suffragist · Abolitionist
Susan B. Anthony
1,820 CE – 1,906 CE
The Quaker schoolteacher who organised, fund-raised and lobbied for fifty years to win American women the vote — and died fourteen years before they got it.
Lifetime
Date source not yet attached to this catalogue record.