A short life of the author
Susan Brownell Anthony (15 February 1820 – 13 March 1906) was an American social reformer, abolitionist, temperance advocate, and women’s rights activist who became the most recognisable figure in the nineteenth-century American women’s suffrage movement. Her partnership with Elizabeth Cady Stanton — lasting over fifty years — was one of the most consequential political collaborations in American history. Together they founded organisations, published newspapers, organised conventions, and produced the monumental History of Woman Suffrage, a six-volume documentary record of the movement. Anthony spent over five decades campaigning for women’s right to vote and did not live to see it achieved: the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1920, is informally known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.
Life and Early Activism
Anthony was born in Adams, Massachusetts, into a Quaker family with strong social justice convictions. Her father, Daniel Anthony, was a cotton manufacturer, abolitionist, and temperance advocate. The Quaker tradition of gender equality — women spoke in Quaker meetings on equal terms with men — shaped her lifelong conviction that women’s subordination was morally indefensible.
She was educated at a Quaker academy near Philadelphia and taught school for several years. She became active in the temperance movement in the 1840s but was frustrated by the refusal of male temperance organisations to allow women to speak at public meetings — an experience that convinced her that women’s political equality was the prerequisite for all other reforms.
In 1851, she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the two formed a partnership that would reshape American politics. Stanton, the intellectual strategist, was often housebound with her seven children; Anthony, unmarried and free to travel, became the movement’s organiser, speaker, and public face. Stanton wrote the speeches; Anthony delivered them.
The Suffrage Campaign
Anthony and Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 and campaigned tirelessly for a constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote. Anthony travelled constantly — by one estimate, she logged over 200,000 miles of travel over her career — giving speeches in church halls, opera houses, school buildings, and open fields across the country.
In 1872, Anthony voted in the presidential election in Rochester, New York, deliberately testing the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship rights. She was arrested, tried, and convicted. The trial — presided over by a hostile judge who directed the jury to find her guilty — became a cause célèbre. Anthony refused to pay the $100 fine, and the government, wisely, did not attempt to collect.
History of Woman Suffrage
Anthony and Stanton’s most enduring written legacy is the History of Woman Suffrage, a massive documentary history of the women’s rights movement. The first three volumes (1881, 1882, 1886) were compiled by Anthony, Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage. Volume IV (1902) was completed by Anthony and Ida Husted Harper. Volumes V and VI (1922) were completed by Harper after Anthony’s death. The work is an invaluable primary source — it reproduces speeches, letters, convention proceedings, and legal documents — and remains essential for any historian of the women’s movement.
Anthony also co-founded and co-edited The Revolution (1868–1872), a weekly newspaper advocating women’s suffrage, equal pay, and other reforms. Its motto was “Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.”
Legacy
Anthony’s achievement was primarily organisational and strategic rather than literary. She was not a great writer — Stanton was the better stylist — but she was an incomparable organiser, a tenacious political tactician, and a figure of enormous moral authority. She died in 1906, fourteen years before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.
Her image appeared on the U.S. dollar coin from 1979 to 1981 (and again in 1999), making her the first woman to appear on U.S. currency. She has become a cultural icon of women’s rights, though contemporary scholars have complicated her legacy by noting her strategic alliances with racist arguments — particularly the claim that educated white women deserved the vote more than illiterate Black men — that marred aspects of the suffrage movement.
Collecting Anthony
Signed letters and documents by Anthony are collected by institutions and private collectors of Americana. Original copies of The Revolution are scarce. The History of Woman Suffrage in first editions (original six volumes) brings $500–$2,000 for complete sets. Anthony memorabilia — campaign pins, ribbons, broadsides — is collected as political Americana.