Susan B. Anthony Biography Quotes 26 Report mistakes

Overview
Susan Brownell Anthony (1820-1906) was a central architect of the U.S. movement for women's rights and suffrage, a tireless organizer whose name became synonymous with the long campaign that culminated in the Nineteenth Amendment. Raised in a reform-minded Quaker household, she married moral conviction to logistical skill, transforming scattered agitation into a durable national movement. Anthony worked closely with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Lucy Stone, Henry Browne Blackwell, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and later leaders such as Carrie Chapman Catt and Anna Howard Shaw. Her career bridged abolition, temperance, legal reform, and the fight for political equality, and she helped build the organizations, literature, and public presence that sustained the cause across decades.

Early Life and Formation
Anthony was born in Adams, Massachusetts, and grew up in a large Quaker family led by her father, Daniel Anthony, and mother, Lucy Read. The family later moved to New York State, where a culture of reform and dissent was flourishing. Quaker practice, with its emphasis on moral equality and conscience, shaped her early sense of justice. As a young woman she taught school, encountering the sharp inequities in pay and authority between male and female teachers. Those experiences deepened her interest in reform beyond private charity, urging her toward collective action.

Temperance and the Turn to Women's Rights
Anthony's early activism developed through the temperance movement. When she and other women were silenced at a temperance convention, the lesson was plain: women could not effectively reform society without political voice. In 1851, introduced by Amelia Bloomer, Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had been a principal organizer of the Seneca Falls women's rights convention of 1848. Their partnership blended Stanton's philosophical and legal imagination with Anthony's talent for organization and travel. Together they launched petition drives, lectured widely, and pressed state legislators for women's rights in property, wages, and guardianship, helping spur reforms in New York law in 1860.

Abolition, the Civil War, and Universal Rights
Before and during the Civil War, Anthony worked with the American Anti-Slavery Society, allying with Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips. She organized meetings, braved hostile crowds, and urged voters and lawmakers to end slavery. With Stanton, she helped form the Women's National Loyal League in 1863 to mobilize petition campaigns for the Thirteenth Amendment. Anthony's Rochester home welcomed abolitionist speakers, including Douglass, who remained a lifelong friend and sometimes a principled opponent when tactics diverged.

Postwar Divisions and Movement-Building
After the war, Anthony and Stanton helped found the American Equal Rights Association in 1866, calling for universal suffrage without distinction of sex or race. Disagreement over priorities during Reconstruction fractured the reform coalition. Anthony opposed enfranchising men alone on the basis of race, fearing women's political exclusion would be cemented. Douglass argued that black men faced an urgency that required immediate remedy. The movement split in 1869: the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), led by Anthony and Stanton, pursued a federal amendment and broader women's rights, while the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), led by Lucy Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell, emphasized a state-by-state strategy and supported the Fifteenth Amendment. Despite the schism, Anthony remained cordial with figures across the divide and often worked in the same states where AWSA organizers labored.

Press, Petition, and Strategy
To give women's rights a permanent public voice, Anthony and Stanton launched The Revolution in 1868, a weekly newspaper that championed equal rights in work, law, and the ballot. The paper's motto, "Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less", captured Anthony's insistence on principled parity. Funding was precarious, and the association with the flamboyant financier George Francis Train proved controversial, but the enterprise taught the movement how to use media, cultivate readers, and speak with clarity to both allies and skeptics. Anthony also organized national and regional conventions, kept meticulous records, and coordinated travel schedules that carried her to hundreds of towns, building local societies that sustained the cause between headline events.

Civil Disobedience and the 1872 Trial
In 1872, Anthony tested the meaning of citizenship by registering and voting in Rochester under the Fourteenth Amendment's promise of equal protection. She was arrested, tried in federal court before Judge Ward Hunt, and convicted after the judge directed the jury to find her guilty. Anthony refused to pay the fine, declaring the proceedings unconstitutional. The case put women's disfranchisement on front pages across the nation and provided a legal and moral focal point for suffrage arguments. Her lectures afterward distilled the experience into a persuasive claim that governance without women's consent contradicted American principles.

Declarations, Histories, and the Federal Amendment
Anthony and her allies seized public anniversaries to press their case. At the nation's Centennial in 1876, she, Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage presented the Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States, asserting that liberty was incomplete while half the people lacked the vote. In 1878, Senator Aaron A. Sargent of California introduced a woman suffrage amendment in Congress. Anthony treated that text as a lodestar, returning year after year to congressional committees to testify and petition for its adoption. Alongside the oratory and lobbying, she collaborated with Stanton and Gage on the multivolume History of Woman Suffrage and later worked with Ida Husted Harper to document the movement's labors, preserving sources and narratives that might otherwise have vanished.

Unifying the Movement and Mentoring Successors
In 1890, the two national wings merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), reuniting activists who had been separated for two decades. After Elizabeth Cady Stanton's term, Anthony served as NAWSA president from 1892 to 1900, professionalizing its operations, expanding membership, and guiding campaigns in western states where victories began to accumulate. She welcomed and mentored a rising generation of leaders, including Carrie Chapman Catt and Anna Howard Shaw, encouraging systematic organizing, legislative vigilance, and disciplined public messaging. Although she was a staunch advocate of a federal amendment, she also supported state initiatives when they could advance public understanding and build momentum.

Family and Network
Anthony's activism was sustained by a dense network of family and friends. Her sister Mary S. Anthony was a pillar of Rochester's local movement. Her brother Daniel R. Anthony, a newspaper publisher active in Kansas, mirrored the family's reforming energy on the frontier. She navigated alliances and disagreements with peers such as Lucy Stone, maintaining respect across strategic divides, and remained in dialogue with Frederick Douglass through decades of change. Amelia Bloomer's early introduction to Stanton proved pivotal, while colleagues like Victoria Woodhull brought notoriety and debate to the movement's edges. Through setbacks and controversies, Anthony's steadiness helped keep coalitions from dissolving entirely.

Final Years and Legacy
In her eighties, Anthony continued to travel, raise funds, and speak for suffrage in every region that would receive her. At the NAWSA convention in 1906, she summed up a lifetime of persistence with the phrase often associated with her final public address: "Failure is impossible". She died shortly thereafter in Rochester, New York, leaving behind a movement with national infrastructure, a congressional amendment on the docket, and state campaigns underway. The amendment she had championed was ratified in 1920, enfranchising women nationwide and commonly nicknamed the Susan B. Anthony Amendment in acknowledgment of her central role.

Her influence persists in organizations she helped forge, in biographies and archives assembled with Ida Husted Harper, and in the public memory that honors her as a builder rather than a solitary icon. The U.S. Mint's Susan B. Anthony dollar, issued decades after her death, signaled her entry into everyday civic symbolism, while museums and historic sites in Rochester preserve the rooms where strategies were drafted and alliances formed. Anthony's greatest monument, however, is the ongoing practice of political participation that she believed was the rightful inheritance of all citizens, an ideal she pursued with audacity, discipline, and a lifelong faith in the nation's capacity to grow toward its promises.

Our collection contains 26 quotes who is written by Susan, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Never Give Up - Freedom - Honesty & Integrity - Equality.

Other people realated to Susan: Robert G. Ingersoll (Lawyer), Sojourner Truth (Activist), Frances E. Willard (Activist), Lucretia Mott (Activist), Victoria Woodhull (Activist), Anna H. Shaw (American), Katharine Anthony (Writer), Olympia Brown (Activist), Antoinette Brown Blackwell (Clergyman), Anna Garlin Spencer (Writer)