Life & Mortality Quote by Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony turns survival into a work contract: existence is justified by usefulness, and usefulness is defined as labor in the service of a cause. It reads blunt because it is meant to be. Anthony spent decades in a political culture designed to treat women as dependents, not agents; tying her will to live directly to her capacity to work is a refusal of that assigned helplessness. The line is less about morbidity than about autonomy: if you can deny her the vote, she will at least claim the terms of her own life and its ending.

The phrasing carries a puritan discipline that doubles as strategy. “As long as I can work” collapses private desire into public obligation, framing activism not as a hobby but as a moral duty with a clock running. The second clause sharpens into a stark contingency: the moment she “can not,” she wants “to go.” That isn’t just impatience with aging; it’s a rejection of being managed, pitied, or ceremonially parked as a relic. For a movement that had to constantly fight to be taken seriously, incapacity threatened not only her body but her authority.

Historically, this lands in an era when women’s legitimacy in public life was perpetually contested. Anthony’s subtext is: I won’t be turned back into a domestic symbol. She insists that her value is not ornamental, not sentimental, not even biographical. It’s operational. The quote works because it weaponizes plain speech against a world that preferred women grateful, quiet, and endlessly alive for other people’s comfort.