Susan B. Anthony

Biography

Susan B. Anthony was born in 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts, into a Quaker family devoted to social reform, and grew up in New York State. She briefly attended a Quaker boarding school in Philadelphia, worked as a teacher, and collected anti-slavery petitions as a teenager. From 1851 she worked in close partnership with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and in 1856 she became the New York agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society.

During the Civil War she and Stanton organised the Women's Loyal National League, whose petition drive for the abolition of slavery gathered nearly 400,000 signatures. After the war they launched the American Equal Rights Association and the newspaper The Revolution, and in 1869 founded the National Woman Suffrage Association. In 1872 Anthony was arrested for voting in Rochester, and she was convicted at a widely followed trial the next year; she refused to pay the fine.

In 1878 Anthony and Stanton had a women's suffrage amendment introduced in Congress; it became the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. After the rival suffrage organisations merged in 1890, Anthony led the National American Woman Suffrage Association as its president from 1892 to 1900. She lectured constantly, co-edited the History of Woman Suffrage, and helped found the International Council of Women. She died in Rochester in 1906.