Susan B. Anthony(1820 — 1906)
Susan B. Anthony
États-Unis
9 min read
American civil rights activist (1820–1906), Susan B. Anthony is one of the founding figures of the American suffragist movement. She devoted her life to the abolition of slavery and to securing the right to vote for women.
Famous Quotes
« Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less. »
« I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do to their fellows, because it always coincides with their own desires. »
Key Facts
- 1820: born in Adams, Massachusetts, into an anti-slavery Quaker family
- 1848: attends the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights congress in the United States
- 1872: arrested for illegally voting in the presidential election
- 1890: co-founds the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)
- 1906: dies without having seen the passage of the 19th Amendment, ratified in 1920
Works & Achievements
A suffragist newspaper founded by Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, published weekly in New York. Despite its short two-year run, it was the first major media platform for the women's rights movement in the United States.
A monumental work co-written with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage, chronicling the history of the American suffrage movement from its origins. This documentary landmark remains an essential historical source on the struggle for women's rights.
Delivered in the weeks leading up to her trial, this speech — which Anthony gave in twenty-nine cities across New York State — systematically dismantles the legal argument that women had no right to vote. It remains one of the founding texts of American feminist rhetoric.
A text drafted by Anthony, Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage and read aloud during the American Centennial celebrations in Philadelphia, demanding civil and political equality for women. Anthony distributed copies of the text to the official assembly without having been invited.
For forty years, Anthony organized signature drives across every American state, collecting hundreds of thousands of signatures that she personally delivered to Congress. These petitions were an unprecedented tool of political pressure for the time.
Anecdotes
On November 5, 1872, Susan B. Anthony walked into the polling place in Rochester, New York, and successfully cast a ballot in the presidential election, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment granted her that right as a citizen. Arrested two weeks later, she was fined $100, which she categorically refused to pay, declaring: “I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty.”
During her trial in 1873, Judge Ward Hunt wrote his verdict in advance and prevented the jury from deliberating — a flagrantly illegal act. He directly ordered a guilty verdict. Anthony asked to address the court, and despite repeated attempts by the judge to silence her, she delivered a passionate speech on the injustice done to women that remains a landmark in the history of feminism.
Susan B. Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1851 on a sidewalk in Seneca Falls, and the two women forged a fifty-year friendship that would transform the American suffrage movement. They complemented each other perfectly: Stanton wrote the speeches, while Anthony organized them and carried them to audiences across the entire country.
At her 86th birthday celebration, during her final public appearance in 1906, Anthony declared with absolute conviction: “With such an army of women behind me, how can I fail?” She died a few weeks later, without having seen the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment — which would finally grant American women the right to vote, fourteen years after her death.
Shaped by her family's Quaker values, Anthony was one of the first activists to draw a direct link between the abolition of slavery and women's rights. She organized massive anti-slavery petitions during the Civil War, and was then horrified when the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) granted the right to vote to Black men while deliberately excluding all women.
Primary Sources
Friends and fellow-citizens: I stand before you tonight under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen's rights.
The prolonged slavery of woman is the darkest page in human history. A survey of the condition of the race through those barbarous periods, when physical force governed the world, when the motto, 'might makes right,' was the law, enables us to account, for the origin of woman's subjection to man without referring the fact to the general inferiority of the female sex.
The Revolution will go for a Republican form of Government, and take no backward step to Monarchy, Oligarchy, or Aristocracy. It will demand equal rights for all, without distinction of sex, color, or nationality. Its motto shall be: Men, their rights and nothing more; Women, their rights and nothing less.
We ask of our rulers, at this hour, no special favors, no special privileges, no special legislation. We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all the civil and political rights that belong to citizens of the United States, be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever.
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do to their fellows, because it always coincides with their own desires.
Key Places
Susan B. Anthony's birthplace, where she was born on February 15, 1820, into a Quaker family actively opposed to slavery. Her father Daniel Anthony, a weaver and abolitionist, instilled in her from childhood a deep sense of social justice.
Anthony's primary residence for most of her adult life, where she lived with her sister Mary. It was here that she was arrested in 1872 after casting her vote, and where she died in 1906. The house is today a national museum.
Site of the first Women's Rights Convention (1848), whose ranks Anthony quickly rose to become one of its most iconic figures. The Declaration of Sentiments adopted at that convention inspired her entire activist career.
The federal capital where Anthony traveled regularly to advocate for women's suffrage before the U.S. Congress. It was here that in 1878 the constitutional amendment that would bear her name was introduced for the first time.
The town where Anthony taught as a schoolteacher from 1846 to 1849 — her first professional experience, which opened her eyes to the glaring wage inequality between male and female teachers doing identical work.