Susan B. Anthony And The Women's Suffrage Movement

Susan B. Anthony is perhaps one of the most influential and widely known suffragettes of her generation. She traveled around the United States and Europe to hold petitions, give speeches, and help organize women’s rights organizations. She was a pioneer in the fight for women’s suffrage in the United States and has become a well known icon of the women’s suffrage movement.

Susan B. Anthony was born the on 15th of February in 1820 to Daniel Anthony and Lucy Read in Adams, Massachusetts. She was raised in a very strict Quaker home with a history of activism traditions, social reform and a sense of justice and morality. By the time Anthony was six years old her family moved to Battenvile, New York. She would later attend a Quaker boarding school at age 17, which she strongly disliked. However during the Panic of 1837, her family's declining financial situation forced her to stop her studies and return home. To help support her family financially she left home to teach at a Quaker boarding school in New Rochelle, New York.

In 1845 Anthony's family moved to Rochester, New York where they met a group of Quakers who had left their congregation due to strict rules and policies. With the help of them they created an organization called the Congregational Friends. Soon enough the family's farmstead became the meeting place for their Sunday gatherings where she would later meet Isaac and Amy Post and Fredrick Douglas and they would eventually become lifelong friends.

The following year in 1846 Anthony moved to Canajohaire to become the headmistress of the Canajohaire Academy. For the first time in her life she began to dress more like the locals and began leaving behind some of her Quaker traditions. She became very interested in soci...

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... win the right to vote. Anthony and Stanton then switched their focus and energy towards women’s rights. She helped to establish the American Equal Rights Association in 1866 along with Stanton and called for the same rights for everyone regardless of gender or race.

Later the same year Anthony and Stanton published a weekly newspaper called The Revolution whose motto was “Men their rights and nothing more; women their rights and nothing less. Even though the newspaper mainly lobbied equal rights for women, topics that were also discussed included politics, labor movement, finances and abolishment.

When the suffrage movement split in 1869, the American Woman Suffrage Association decided to adopt a strategy that would allow them to go state-by-state and win the women’s right to vote, whilst Anthony and Stanton continued to campaign for a constitutional amendment.