Susan B. Anthony
*This date marks the birth of Susan B. Anthony, who was born in 1820 and was a white-American abolitionist and women’s rights advocate.
Born in Adams, Massachusetts, Susan Brownhill Anthony was the daughter of Daniel Anthony, a cotton manufacturer and a Quaker who campaigned against the slave trade. She was educated at her father's school and a Philadelphia boarding school and taught at a girls’ academy near Rochester, New York. In 1852, Anthony began campaigning for women's suffrage and equal pay and was active in the American Anti-Slavery Society, helping escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad.
During the American Civil War, Anthony supported the Union cause and President Abraham Lincoln by forming the Women's Loyal League. In 1866, she joined with others to establish the American Equal Rights Association. The following year, the organization became active in Kansas, where Negro suffrage and woman suffrage were to be decided by popular vote. However, both ideas were rejected at the polls. In 1868, Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton established the political weekly, The Revolution.
In 1869, Anthony helped form a new organization, the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). The organization condemned the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as blatant injustices to women. The NWSA also advocated easier divorce and an end to discrimination in employment and pay. Anthony toured the country, making speeches on women's rights. Anthony was also a historian of the struggle for women's rights and compiled and published the four volumes The History of Woman Suffrage (1881-1902) with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage. She spoke at the funeral of her friend Frederick Douglass in 1895. Susan B. Anthony died on March 13, 1906.
