Susan B. Anthony facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Susan B. Anthony
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Anthony in 1890
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Susan Anthony
February 15, 1820 Adams, Massachusetts, U.S.
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| Died | March 13, 1906 (aged 86) Rochester, New York, U.S.
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| Resting place | Mount Hope Cemetery (Rochester, New York) |
| Known for | Advocacy of |
| Relatives | Daniel Read Anthony (brother) Mary Stafford Anthony (sister) Daniel Read Anthony Jr. (nephew) Susan B. Anthony II (great-niece) |
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Susan B. Anthony (born Susan Anthony; February 15, 1820 – March 13, 1906) was an American social reformer and women's rights activist who played an important role in the women's suffrage movement.
Contents
Early life
Susan Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, to Daniel Anthony and Lucy Read Anthony in Adams, Massachusetts. She was the second-oldest of seven children.
Her father was a Quaker who had married a Baptist. Anthony's parents raised their children in a more tolerant version of her husband's religious tradition. Their father encouraged them all, girls as well as boys, to be self-supporting, teaching them business principles and giving them responsibilities at an early age.
When Susan was six years old, her family moved to Battenville, New York, where her father managed a large cotton mill. Previously he had operated his own small cotton factory.
Family
Her family shared a passion for social reform. Her brothers Daniel and Merritt moved to Kansas to support the anti-slavery movement there. Merritt fought with John Brown against pro-slavery forces during the Bleeding Kansas crisis. Daniel eventually owned a newspaper and became mayor of Leavenworth. Susan's sister Mary, with whom she shared a home in later years, became a public school principal in Rochester and a woman's rights activist.
Susan's father was active in the causes of abolishing slavery and temperance.
Education
When she was seventeen, Susan was sent to a Quaker boarding school in Philadelphia. She attended the strict school for one term before her family had to sell everything they had at an auction because of the economic downturn known as the Panic of 1837. Susan's maternal uncle rescued them by buying most of their belongings and restoring them to the family.
Teaching job
To help her family financially, Anthony left home to teach at a Quaker boarding school.
In 1846, Anthony moved to Canajoharie to be the headmistress of the female department of the Canajoharie Academy. When Susan was 26, she began to move away from Quaker traditions. She dressed less plainly and stopped using formal speech. She became interested in social reform because it bothered her that she was paid less than men with similar jobs.
Activism
In 1845, Anthony's family moved to a farm on the outskirts of Rochester, New York, where they met with other Quaker social reformers who had left their congregation. In 1848, the group formed a new organization called the Congregational Friends and began meeting on Sunday afternoons at the Anthony farmstead.
When the Canajoharie Academy closed in 1849, Anthony took over the operation of the family farm in Rochester so her father could devote more time to his insurance business. However, she found that she was more drawn to reform activity and became actively involved in reform. For the rest of her life, she lived almost entirely on fees she earned as a speaker.
Susan found herself drawn to the more radical ideas of people like William Lloyd Garrison, George Thompson and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Soon she was wearing the Bloomer dress, consisting of pantaloons worn under a knee-length dress. She quit wearing them after about a year, however, because her opponents focused on what she wore rather than her ideas.
Partnership with Elizabeth Cady Stanton
In 1851, she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who became her lifelong friend and co-worker in social reform activities. After Susan was not allowed to speak at a temperance conference because she was female, the founded the New York Women's State Temperance Society. Stanton and Anthony did most of their work in the area of women's rights.
During the Civil War, they founded the Women's Loyal National League. The league collected nearly 400,000 signatures in support of the abolition of slavery. It was the largest petition in the United States up to that time.
After the war, they began the American Equal Rights Association, which campaigned for equal rights for both women and African Americans. They began publishing a women's rights newspaper in 1868 called The Revolution.
A year later, there had been a split in the women's movement. Anthony and Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association to be separate from their rival American Woman Suffrage Association. In 1890, the split was formally healed and the two associations joined together to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association, with Susan as a strong leader. In 1876, Anthony and Stanton began working with Matilda Joslyn Gage to write what eventually grew into the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage.
In 1878, Anthony and Stanton arranged for Congress to be presented with an amendment giving women the right to vote. Sen. Aaron A. Sargent (R-CA) introduced the amendment, which later became known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. It was eventually ratified as the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920.
The interests of Anthony and Stanton separated in later years, but the two remained close friends.
Trial
In 1872, Anthony was arrested in her hometown of Rochester, New York, for voting when the law allowed only men to vote. She was found guilty at trial, but refused to pay the fine. The authorities did not take further action against her.
Speaking engagements
Susan gave as many as 75 to 100 speeches per year in support of women's suffrage. She also worked on many state and international campaigns for women's rights. She took part in the creation of the International Council of Women, which is still active. She also helped to bring about the World's Congress of Representative Women at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
Later life
When Susan first began speaking about women's rights, people ridiculed her and accused her of trying to destroy the institution of marriage. However, during her lifetime, people's opinions changed about her. President William McKinley invited her to the White House to celebrate her 80th birthday. She became the first female citizen to be shown on a U.S. coin when her portrait appeared on the 1979 dollar coin.
When she was 71, after having lived in hotels and with friends and relatives, Anthony agreed live with her sister Mary Stafford Anthony in Rochester. Her energy and stamina, which sometimes exhausted her co-workers, continued at a remarkable level. At age 75, she toured Yosemite National Park on the back of a mule.
She remained active in suffrage work. In 1896, she spent eight months on the California suffrage campaign, speaking as many as three times per day in more than 30 localities. In 1900, she presided over her last NAWSA convention.
During the six remaining years of her life, Anthony spoke at six more NAWSA conventions and four congressional hearings, completed the fourth volume of the History of Woman Suffrage, and traveled to eighteen states and to Europe. As Anthony's fame grew, some politicians (certainly not all of them) were happy to be publicly associated with her.
Personal life
As a teen, Anthony went to parties, and she had offers of marriage when she was older, but there is no record of her ever having a serious romance. Susan B. Anthony never married. She said that she did not want to give up her independence.
Susan said that she loved children. When she was not traveling, she spent time with the children in the Stanton household.
Death
Susan B. Anthony died at the age of 86 of heart failure and pneumonia in her home in Rochester, New York, on March 13, 1906. She was buried at Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester. Many people mourned Susan's death.
Susan B. Anthony quotes
- “Woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself.”
- "I wasn't ready to vote, didn't want to vote, but I did want equal pay for equal work."
- “Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.”
- “There never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers.”
- “Failure is Impossible.”
- “I don't want to die as long as I can work; the minute I can not, I want to go.”
Interesting facts about Susan B. Anthony
- She was named for her maternal grandmother Susanah, and for her father's sister Susan.
- When Susan was young, she and her sisters responded to a "great craze for middle initials" by adding middle initials to their names. Anthony adopted "B." as her middle initial because her namesake Aunt Susan had married a man named Brownell.
- Frederick Douglass, a former slave and a prominent abolitionist was Anthony's lifelong friend.
- Anthony's papers are held in library collections of Harvard University and its Radcliffe Institute, Rutgers University, the Library of Congress, and Smith College.
- She is the author of a six-volume work History of Woman Suffrage (1881).
- Anthony's home in Rochester is a National Historic Landmark called the National Susan B. Anthony Museum and House.
- The house of her birth in Adams, Massachusetts, and her childhood home in Battenville, New York, are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Legacy
At the time of her death, women had achieved suffrage in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho, and several larger states followed soon afterward. Married women had legal rights in most states, and many professions had at least a few women employees. Women were beginning to attend colleges and universities.
The Nineteenth Amendment became known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. After the amendment was ratified in 1920, the National American Woman Suffrage Association was transformed into the League of Women Voters. It is still active in U.S. politics.
Commemoration
- In 1950, Anthony was inducted into the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. A bust of her that was sculpted by Brenda Putnam was placed there in 1952.
- In 1973, Anthony was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
- The first memorial to Anthony was established by African Americans. In 1907, a year after Anthony's death, a stained-glass window was installed at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church in Rochester that featured her portrait and the words "Failure is Impossible".
- Anthony is commemorated along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott in the Portrait Monument sculpture by Adelaide Johnson at the United States Capitol, unveiled in 1921.
- In 1922, sculptor Leila Usher donated a bas-relief of Susan B. Anthony to the National Woman's Party.
- In 2001, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine added a sculpture honoring Anthony and three other heroes of the twentieth century: Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Einstein, and Mahatma Gandhi.
- On February 15, 2020, Google celebrated Anthony's 200th birthday with a Google Doodle.
- Susan B. Anthony Day is a commemorative holiday to celebrate the birth of Anthony and women's suffrage in the United States. The holiday is February 15—Anthony's birthday.
Banknotes, coins, and stamps
- The U.S. Post Office issued its first postage stamp honoring Anthony in 1936 on the 16th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment. A second stamp honoring Anthony was issued in April 1958.
- In 1979, the United States Mint began issuing the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin, the first U.S. coin to honor a female citizen.
Names of awards and organizations
- Since 1970, the Susan B. Anthony Award is given annually by the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women to honor "grassroots activists dedicated to improving the lives of women and girls in New York City."
See also
In Spanish: Susan B. Anthony para niños
- List of civil rights leaders
- List of suffragists and suffragettes
- List of women's rights activists
- Timeline of women's suffrage
- Timeline of women's suffrage in the United States
- Women's suffrage organizations
- Susan B. Anthony dollar
- Susan B. Anthony Day
