Susan Brownell Anthony (1820 – 1906) was an American civil rights activist, very involved in the fight for women's suffrage.
First feminist struggles
Second daughter of Lucy Read and Daniel Anthony who would have seven children, Susan was born on February 15, 1820 in West Grove, in Massachusetts. Strict about the education of their children, his parents are nevertheless open-minded and particularly abolitionist.
A precocious child, Susan showed a predisposition for studies very early on and, when a teacher refused to teach her mathematics because of her gender, her father decided to continue her education at home. Already committed, in 1836, when she was 16, Susan organized a petition against slavery when the House of Representatives banned these means of pressure. In 1837, she was sent to a Quaker school in Philadelphia, but a financial crisis that same year ruined her family and forced her to return home.
In 1839, Susan's family moved to New York State and the young girl left home to teach and support her parents financially. In 1846, she became director of the female school department at the Canajoharie Academy where she led her first feminist fights for equal pay between women and men.
Defending the rights of women and African Americans
In 1849, Susan B. Anthony quit teaching and began attending temperance league meetings , opposed to the consumption of alcohol. The same year, she became secretary of the Daughters of Temperance. Inspired by feminist activist Lucy Stone, Susan decided to dedicate her life to the fight for women's rights. With her friend Elisabeth Cady Stanton, she began to travel the country and give conferences in favor of gender equality. In 1856, she joined the American anti-slavery society and tries to unite its fights.
The 1 st January 1868, Susan established a weekly called The Revolution , which she dedicated to promoting the rights of women and African Americans, including the right to vote. She also focuses on equal pay, divorce, the right of women to refuse a sexual relationship with their husband. In 1869, she founded, with Elisabeth Stanton, the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), an association whose objective is the right to vote for women. She was first the vice-president and then, in 1892, the president.
Arrested for voting
On November 18, 1872, Susan B. Anthony was arrested for having voted thirteen days earlier, during the American presidential election. Arrested and tried, she presented a series of legal arguments to the court but was fined one hundred dollars. She then announces to the judge that she will not pay a penny of this “unjust penalty” (“May it please your honor, I will never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty”); she will actually never pay it and the fine will not be claimed from her.
Thereafter, Susan travels the United States and Europe to give conference after conference. She also tries, with more or less success, to unify the various associations fighting for women's suffrage and publishes a History of women's suffrage . She retired in 1900, at the age of 80.
March 13, 1906, 14 years before the adoption of the 19th th amendment to the United States Constitution granting women the right to vote, Susan B. Anthony dies of heart disease and pneumonia. She is enshrined in the National Women's Hall of Fame.