ANTHONY, SUSAN B.

(1820-1906), women's rights leader. Anthony was born in Adams, Massachusetts. Her father, a Quaker, was excluded from his meeting when he married her mother, a Baptist, and Susan, while much affected by her Quaker background, was also shaped by the proud independence this exclusion gave her family. In the depression of 1837, the family's economic security was shaken, and Anthony became a teacher, the only profession open to middle-class women. She never married and was a lifelong self-supporting woman. Her most distinctive contribution to the early women's rights movement was her appreciation of the importance of economic independence to women's emancipation.

In 1851, while visiting in nearby Seneca Falls, New York, Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had organized the first women's rights convention in 1848. Together they led the women's rights movement for the next half century. They first tried to organize a women's temperance society, but that reform proved too church-bound for their feminist concerns. In 1854, they turned to the creation of a women's rights movement per se. While Cady Stanton wrote articles and declarations to legislatures, Anthony discovered her own special genius, the organization of women into a sustained political movement. From 1854 to 1860, she circulated petitions demanding married women's rights to property, wages, and the custody of their children in the event of a divorce, and all women's rights to the suffrage. In 1860, all but the vote were secured by New York's landmark Married Women's Property Act.

The Civil War and its aftermath had a tremendous impact on Anthony and Cady Stanton. At first they believed that women's rights agitation should be suspended during the crisis. Indefatigably active, however, they organized the National Women's Loyal League to demand the constitutional abolition of slavery (and incidentally the emancipation of women). After the war, they expected that congressional Republicans would enfranchise women along with the freedmen, but were horrified to discover that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments did not give women the vote. In response, they severed their ties with old abolitionist allies and organized an independent woman suffrage society, an action with which many other women's rights leaders disagreed.

Without a family to divide her interests and more inclined than Cady Stanton to dedicate herself to a single issue, Anthony spent the rest of her life working for the vote. Believing that women should be enfranchised by federal, not state action, she annually pressed woman suffrage on Congress. As the range of women's public activities grew, she educated college women, "social purity" activists, and women's club members in the necessity of gaining the vote. To this end, she effected an alliance of sorts with the dynamic leader of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Frances Willard. This conflicted with the militant secularism of Cady Stanton, and though their personal bond remained strong, their activities diverged in their final years.

Anthony did not live to see the constitutional enfranchisement of women, but she had helped establish the conditions for victory. She set aside old hurts and encouraged the reunification of the suffrage movement in 1890. She nurtured a second generation of suffrage leaders, treating them virtually as kin. So totally did she merge her personal fate and that of the suffrage movement that dedication to "the cause" and love of "Miss Anthony" became indistinguishable. In 1900, she retired from the presidency of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, but remained active to the end. The respect accorded her was even stronger after her death, and devotees honored her memory long after the vote had been won and the names of other suffrage leaders forgotten.

Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, 3 vols. (1898-1908); Alma Lutz, Susan B. Anthony: Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian (1959).

Ellen Carol DuBois

See also Feminist Movement; Married Women's Property Acts; National American Woman Suffrage Association; National Woman Suffrage Association; Stanton, Elizabeth Cady; Suffrage; Willard, Frances.