Susan B Anthony

Susan B. Anthony was born February 15, 1820 in Adams Massachusetts to Daniel and Lucy Anthony. Susan was the second born of eight children in a strict Quaker family. Her father, Daniel Anthony, was a stern man, a Quaker abolitionist and cotton manufacturer. He believed in guiding his children, not directing them. He did not allow them to experience the childish amusements of toys, games, and music, which were seen as distractions from the Inner Light. Instead he enforced self-discipline.

Susan learned to read and write at the age of three. In 1826, the Anthony’s moved from Massachusetts to Battensville, New York. Where Susan attended a district school, when the teacher refused to teach Susan long division, she was taken out of school and taught in home school set up by her father. A woman teacher, Mary Perkins, ran the school. Perkins offered a new image of womanhood to Susan and her sisters.

She was independent, educated, and held a position that had been traditionally been reserved to young men. Susan was sent to a boarding school in Philadelphia. She taught at a female academy boarding school, in up state New York when she was fifteen years old intill she was thirty. After she settled in her family home in Rochester, New York. It was here that she began her first public crusade on behalf of temperance.

This was one of the first expressions of feminism in the United States, and it delt with the abuses of woman and children who suffered from alcoholic husbands. In 1849, Susan gave her first public speech for the Daughters of Temperance, and then help found the Woman’s State Temperance Society of New York. It was one of the first organizations of its time.

In 1851 she went to Syracus to attend a series of antislavery meetings. During this time Susan meet Cady Stanton. They became best friends. Susan joined Stanton and Amelia Bloomer in campaigns for women’s rights. She would often deliver speeches written by Stanton, who was occupied with her young children. In 1854, She devoted herself to the antislavery movement serving from 1856 to the outbreak of the civil war, 1861. Here, she served as an agent for the American Antislavery Society. After, She worked with Stanton and published the New York liberal weekly, “The Revolution” (1868-1870) which called for equal pay for women.

In 1872, Susan demanded that women be given the same civil and political rights that had been extended to black men under the 14th and 15th amendments.