Wealth & Money Quote by Susan B. Anthony

Anthony’s line is a pressure-point argument disguised as civic optimism: make the powerful share the same institutions as everyone else, and they’ll stop treating “public” as a euphemism for disposable. It’s not a plea for charity; it’s a strategy for accountability. If the rich and the churchgoing elite can’t buy their way out through private academies, tutors, or parochial systems, they’ll have skin in the game. Public schools would become, in her formulation, a mirror held up to social hierarchy: either you invest, or you admit you’re comfortable with inequality as long as it lands on other people’s kids.

The subtext is sharper than it first appears. Anthony singles out “church people” not because she’s anti-faith, but because she’s indicting moral talk without material commitment. In the late 19th century, religious authority and wealth often traveled together, and both could applaud uplift while quietly opting out of the shared commons. Her sentence turns that hypocrisy into a test: if you truly believe in community and virtue, prove it by accepting the same classrooms, the same underpaid teachers, the same leaky roofs.

Context matters. Anthony fought for women’s political power, and public education was one of the few mass institutions shaping citizenship before women could vote. She’s essentially arguing that democracy requires forced proximity: reform doesn’t happen when the influential can exit. The brilliance is its inversion of “choice.” She makes the absence of choice sound like freedom’s precondition: a public worth improving only exists when the privileged can’t leave it behind.