Susan
Brownell Anthony,
the daughter
of Daniel
Anthony, a cotton manufacturer, was born in Adams, Massachusetts,
on 15th February, 1820. Her father was a Quaker
who campaigned against the slave trade.
After an education at her father's school and a Philadelphia boarding
school, she began teaching at a female academy near Rochester, New
York. In 1852 Anthony joined with Elizabeth
Cady Stanton and Amelia Bloomer
in campaigning for women's suffrage and equal pay. Anthony also became
involved in the campaign for prohibition
and was active in the American Anti-Slavery
Society and helped escaped slaves on the Underground
Railroad.
During the American Civil War Anthony
strongly supported the Union cause. She also aided the administration
of President Abraham Lincoln by forming
the Women's
Loyal League.
In 1866 Anthony joined with Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, Lucretia Mott and Lucy
Stone to help establish the American Equal
Rights Association. The following year, the organisation became
active in Kansas where Negro suffrage and women's suffrage was 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 and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
formed a new organisation, the National
Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). The organisation 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. In one year alone, she travelled 13,000 miles and
made over 170 speeches. In 1872 Anthony attempted to vote in a an
election in Rochester. She was arrested, charged and later found guilty
of violating voting rights.
Another group, the American Woman Suffrage
Association (AWSA), was also active in the campaign for women's
rights and by the 1880s it became clear that it was not a good idea
to have two rival groups campaigning for votes for women. After several
years of negotiations, the AWSA and the NWSA merged in 1890 to form
the National American Woman Suffrage Association
(NAWSA). Elizabeth Cady Stanton became
the NAWSA's first president, but Anthony took over in 1892 and held
the post for the next eight years.
Anthony was also a historian and with Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage,
she complied and published the four volume, The
History of Woman Suffrage
(1881-1902). Susan
Brownell Anthony
died on 13th March, 1906.
(1)
Elizabeth
Cady Stanton,
Susan
Anthony, and Matilda
Joslyn Gage,
History of Woman Suffrage (1881)
Susan B. Anthony, having been a successful teacher in the State of
New York fifteen years of her life, had seen
the need of many improvements in the mode of teaching and in the sanitary
arrangements of school buildings.
In 1853, the annual (education)
convention being held in Rochester, her place of residence. Miss Anthony
conscientiously attended all the sessions through three entire days.
After having listened for hours to a discussion as to the reason why
the profession of teacher was not as much respected as that of the
lawyer, minister, or doctor, without once, as she thought, touching
the kernel of the question, she arose to untie for them the Gordian
knot, and said, "Mr. President." If all the witches that
had been drowned, burned, and hung in the Old World and the New had
suddenly appeared on the platform, threatening vengeance for their
wrongs, the officers of that convention could not have been thrown
into greater consternation.
At length President Davies,
of West Point, in full dress, buff vest, blue coat, gilt buttons,
stepped to the front, and said in a tremulous, mocking tone, "What
will the lady have?" "I wish, sir, to speak to the question
under discussion," Miss Anthony replied. The Professor, more
perplexed than before, said: "What is the pleasure of the Convention?"
A gentleman moved that she should be heard; another seconded the motion;
whereupon a discussion pro and con followed, lasting full half an
hour, when a vote of the men only was taken, and permission granted
by a small majority; and lucky for her, too, was it, that the thousand
women crowding that hall could not vote on the question, for they
would have given
a solid "no." The president then announced the vote, and
said: "The lady can speak."
We can easily imagine
the embarrassment under which Miss Anthony arose after that half hour
of suspense, and the
bitter hostility she noted on every side. However, with a clear, distinct
voice, which filled the hall; she said: "It seems to me, gentlemen,
that none of you quite comprehend the cause of the disrespect of which
you complain. Do you not see that so long as society says a woman
is incompetent to be a lawyer, minister, or doctor, but has ample
ability to be a teacher, that every man of you who chooses this profession
tacitly acknowledges that he has no more brains than a woman? And
this, too, is the reason that teaching is a less lucrative profession,
as here men must compete with the cheap labor of woman. Would you
exalt your profession,
exalt those who labor with you. Would you make
it more lucrative, increase the salaries of the women engaged
in the noble work of educating our future Presidents,
Senators, and Congressmen."
This said, Miss Anthony
took her seat, amid the profoundest silence, broken at last by three
gentlemen, walking down the broad aisle to congratulate the speaker
on her pluck and perseverance. . .
To give the women of today
some idea of what it cost those who first thrust themselves into these
conventions at the close of the session Miss A. heard women remarking:
"I was actually
ashamed of my sex." "I felt so mortified I
really wished the floor would open and swallow me up." "Who
can that creature be?" "She must be a dreadful woman
to get up that way and speak in public."
Miss Anthony attended
these teachers' conventions from year to year, at Oswego, Utica, Poughkeepsie,
Lockport, Syracuse, making the same demands for equal place and pay,
until she had the satisfaction to see every right conceded. Women
speaking and voting on all questions; appointed on committees, and
to prepare reports and addresses, elected officers of the Association,
and seated on the platforms. In 1856, she was-chairman of a committee
herself, to report on the question of co-education; and at Troy, she
read her report, which the press pronounced able and conclusive. The
President, Mr. Hazeltine, of New York,
congratulating Miss Anthony on her address, said: "As much as
I am compelled to admire your rhetoric and logic the matter and manner
of your address and its delivery I would rather follow a daughter
of mine to her grave, than to have her deliver such an address before
such an assembly ".
Superintendent Randall,
overhearing the President, added: I should be proud, Madam, if I had
a daughter capable of
making such an eloquent and finished argument, before this or any
assembly of men and women. I congratulate you on
your triumphant success."
(2)
Ida Wells played an active role in the
women suffrage movement. In her autobiography she described a conversation
she had with Susan Anthony about Frederick
Douglass.
Miss Anthony said when women called their first convention back in
1848 inviting all those who thought that women ought to have an equal
share with men in the government, Frederick Douglass, the ex-slave,
was the only man who came to their convention and stood up with them.
"He said he could not do otherwise; that we were among the friends
who fought his battles when he first came among us appealing for our
interest in the antislavery cause. From that day until the day of
his death Frederick Douglass was an honorary member of the National
Women's Suffrage Association. In all our conventions, most of which
had been held in Washington, he was the honored guest who sat on our
platform and spoke in our gatherings.
(3)
Editorial, Time
and Tide
(9th July, 1926)
Feminism, like any other great movement, proceeds at varying
paces and in varying forms in different countries. Few things are
more enlightening than a study of the inter-reactions of the feminist
movement in the two great English speaking peoples during the past
seventy or eighty years. It is curious how closely related have been
the movements on the two sides of the Atlantic. Each has continually
learnt from the other. Beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft in the late
18th century, the feminist movement owed its next big impetus (in
the eighteen forties and fifties) to Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony,
of New England. It was Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth C. Stanton who
organised the first Equal Rights Convention which was held in New
York in 1848; and it was Lucretia Mott who laid down the definite
proposition which American women are still struggling to implement
today: 'Men and Women shall have Equal Rights throughout the United
States.' A few years later Susan B. Anthony, the pioneer Suffragist,
came into the American movement.
It was not till the eighteen
sixties that the political feminist movement came alive in Great Britain.
Dame Millicent Fawcett was even in those early days one of the leading
names connected with it. The British suffragists pushed forward enthusiastically
for some twenty years,
but the failure to achieve success in 1885, when the third Reform
Bill was passed giving the agricultural labourer the vote, seemed
to take the heart out of our early suffragists, and the movement died
down again. Meanwhile, in the nineties the American women were full
of life and enthusiasm, winning victory after victory in State after
State.'
In 1902 Susan B. Anthony
came to England and stayed with Mrs. Pankhurst in Manchester. The
result of that visit was
far-reaching. All unwittingly the old pioneer handed back the torch
to the British suffragists. 'It is unendurable,' declared
Christabel Pankhurst after her departure, 'to think of another generation
of women wasting their lives begging for the vote. We must not lose
any more time. We must act.' Those words heralded the birth of the
British militant movement. From that moment onwards British feminists
went forward without pause till the outbreak of war in 1914 and when
that time came (although the actual Bill was not passed until 1918)
the first installment of victory was virtually won.
Meanwhile in America by
1912 things had died down to very much the same state as the English
movement has been in since 1918. Votes had been achieved in a considerable
number of States, the feeling was widespread that a partial victory
was good enough for the moment and that complete victory would ' come
all in good time without much further trouble. And then in 1912
Alice Paul, lit by the fire of the English militant movement, returned
to America - and America woke up. It took the Americans just eight
years from that date to achieve complete political equality;
but they were under wise leadership (Alice Paul will surely
go down to history as one of the great leaders of the world),
and when they did achieve political equality they did not make
the mistake of supposing that that was the end. They turned
back to the 'declaration of sentiments' laid down by Lucretia
Mott in 1848 and they realised that political equality was
only the first step on the path which they had chosen and that
there could be neither halting nor relaxing their pace until they
had come to the end of that path.
Last updated: 7th January, 2002
Available from Amazon Books
(order below)
