Susan B. Anthony
© Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ggbain-30124
Susan B. Anthony was born into an antislavery, activist Quaker household. From her
parents and other Quaker abolitionists she was exposed to activism at an early age. In
her twenties, she became involved in antislavery activism and the temperance
movement. While living in Rochester, New York, she helped enslaved African
Americans pass through the city and was the principal New York agent for the
American Anti-Slavery Society. Through her activism she befriended Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, who helped her organize the Women’s National Loyal League in 1863. After
the Civil War Anthony devoted her life to women’s suffrage.
1
Susan Brownell Anthony was born on February 15, 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts.
Her father was an antislavery Quaker who started a home-school for his children
after Anthony’s teacher refused to teach her long-division because she was a girl. At
the age of seventeen, Anthony attended Deborah Moulson’s Quaker boarding school
in Philadelphia. There, she witnessed a speech by the famous Quaker abolitionist
Lucretia Mott, who left a profound impression on the eighteen year-old Anthony
(Barry 29-31).
At the age of twenty-nine, Anthony became actively involved in abolitionism and the
temperance movement. Quaker abolitionists Stephen and Abby Foster invited
Anthony to join them as an antislavery lecturer after hearing her outspoken views
during a series of meetings in Rochester, New York. Anthony declined their offer,
indicating that she needed to have a better understanding of the economics of
slavery before becoming a formal antislavery orator (Barry 60-61).
In the early 1850s, as movement on the Underground Railroad increased in
response to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, Anthony helped runaway slaves as
they passed through Rochester. However, she was more firmly committed to
working towards institutional and structural change, a role less accepted for women
at the time (Barry 63). From 1856 until the end of the war, she was the principal
New York agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Anthony lectured endlessly
against the evils of slavery, and sometimes found herself facing unruly mobs that
tried to break up meetings, especially in New York City, Utica and Syracuse.
With the assistance of her friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anthony helped organize
the Women's National Loyal League in May of 1863. The first national women's
political organization in the United States, the League sponsored a highly successful
national antislavery petition, which gained approximately 400,000 signatures and
largely influenced the passage of the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery in 1865.
Anthony was primarily responsible for the league’s strategy and fundraising (Barry
154).
As an Anti-Slavery Society agent and speaker, Anthony worked with such famous
abolitionists as Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips.
Anthony openly chastised President Lincoln for his hesitancy to abolish slavery, and
famously criticized the president at a Fourth of July rally in Framingham,
Massachusetts, proclaiming, “The weak and wicked failures of our fifteen months of
war, prove one of two things: either we have no leaders or they are crushed out of
place and power by mere slave partisanship” (reprinted in Barry 151).
Following the end of the war until her death in Rochester, New York in 1906,
Anthony devoted her life to the Women's Suffrage Movement.
2
WORKS CITED & FURTHER READING
Barry, Kathleen. Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist. New York:
New York University Press, 1988.
3