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Basic Information
On February 15th, 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts Susan Brownell Anthony was born into a Quaker family (Edison, 2013). She was an influential suffragette and abolitionist in the late 1800s. Anthony paved the way for the establishment of the Nineteenth Amendment.
Background Information
Susan B. Anthony’s passion for human rights issues started in her home in Rochester which eventually became a meeting place for anti-slavery meetings. She had six brothers and sisters who were also very involved in civil rights. At the age of twenty five Anthony worked a job as a schoolteacher in order to help her family who was in deep debt due to the economic depression during the time. Her Quaker faith taught her that drinking alcohol was a sin, therefore she supported the temperance movement. She later went on to also support women’s rights and traveled the nation to support various causes through creating petitions, giving speeches and lobbying Congress (Edison, 2013, pg. 7).
Contributions to the First Wave
Anthony’s interest in the temperance movement is what kickstarted her public career when she joined the Daughters of Temperance and performed her first public speech in 1848 at a meeting of the Daughters (Edison, 2013). She soon was elected president of her local Daughters of Temperance branch the next year. One major accomplishment of Susan B. Anthony was that her work in the abolition movements helped end slavery in the United States. Together with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anthony established the Women’s Loyal National League (WLNL) on May 14th, 1863 in order to campaign for an amendment to abolish slavery (Anirudh, 2015). This organization was the first of its kind; no other nationwide women’s political organization existed in the United States at this time. The WLNL collected almost 400,000 signatures in support of abolishing slavery and this petition heavily influenced the decision to pass the Thirteen Amendment. Another achievement of Anthony was she was one of the top leaders of the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) which organized efforts for achieving equal rights for women and African Americans (Anirudh, 2015). In 1866 Anthony introduced a resolution at the eleventh National Women’s Right Convention that resulted in the creation of the AERA (Anirudh, 2015). This organization, and in general the women’s movement, eventually split because of the controversy over the Fifteenth Amendment which led to the establishment of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1869 by Anthony and Stanton, and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) in the same year. The Fifteenth Amendment was controversial because it granted African Americans the right to vote when women did not yet have the right to vote. Deciding how to approach the Fifteenth Amendment is where women disagreed. The NWSA adopted an approach that demanded women should be able to vote before African American men, whereas the AWSA felt this was too radical and favored a “step by step” tactic that suggested they focus on suffrage for African American males first before fighting for women’s suffrage. The establishment of the NWSA is another major accomplishment of Anthony for her organization supported suffrage for women and also worked to create a politically independent women’s rights movement (Anirudh, 2015).
“The women of this nation must be awakened to a sense of their degradation—political—or at least we who we are awake—must make an effort to awaken those who are dead asleep” Quote from Susan Brownell Anthony to a sellout crowd in Michigan (Sherr, 1996, pg.23).
Analysis and Conclusion
Despite her many successes, Anthony also came across many obstacles. In 1853, in Albany at a Sons of Temperance meeting she was refused the right to speak. Instead, she was instructed to “listen and learn” by the Sons. The same year she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton presented a petition with the signatures of 28,000 people that requested the sales of alcohol in New York be limited. The petition was turned away by Congress because it was deemed worthless due to most of the signatures being from women and children (Anirudh, 2015). She might have had an easier time in today’s world because women have more of a voice in society then in her time.
Susan B. Anthony was a brave and influential leader whose actions changed history forever. She is thought to be the primary coordinator of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the United States and without her activism, women’s rights may not be as progressive today. She led and fueled the movement for almost half of a century. Anthony’s ideas were radical for her time and often had to fight hard for other people’s support. Although she did not live to see the Nineteenth Amendment pass in 1920, she was honored in 1979 by the US Mint when they created the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin.
References
Anirudh. (2015, October 5). Major Accomplishments of Susan B Anthony. Retrieved from https://learnodo-newtonic.com/susan-b-anthony-accomplishments
Edison, Erin. (2013). Susan B. Anthony (Pebble books. Great women in history Susan B. Anthony). Place of publication not identified: Capstone Press.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, seated, and Susan B. Anthony, standing, three-quarter length portrait., None. (Between 1880 and 1902) [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/97500087/.
Kern, K., & Levstik, L. (2012). Teaching the New Departure The United States vs. Susan B. Anthony. Journal of the Civil War Era, 2(1), 127-141.
Sherr, L. (1996). Failure is impossible: Susan B. Anthony in her own words. New York: Times Books.