Winter, Una R.

Biography / Administrative History

Susan B. Anthony (15 Feb. 1820-13 Mar. 1906), reformer and organizer for woman suffrage, was born Susan Brownell Anthony in Adams, Massachusetts. In 1851 Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In 1852 Anthony and Stanton founded the Women's New York State Temperance Society, which claimed an equality with the leading male society and featured women's right to vote on the temperance question and to divorce drunken husbands. In 1863 Anthony, again with Stanton, founded the Women's Loyal National League; employing a loose network of individuals and soldiers' aid and antislavery societies, the league gathered petitions with 400,000 signatures, which were presented to Congress. This effort marked advent of a focus on the federal government for women's rights. The Thirteenth Amendment and subsequent debate about securing citizenship for freed slaves introduced Anthony and her co-workers to the potential for sweeping change through amendment to the national Constitution.

In 1865 Anthony became convinced that universal suffrage was the only just solution to the challenges of Reconstruction. With a lecture on universal suffrage, she worked her way east. By year's end, the core of women's rights activists in the Northeast had reassembled to launch their first national campaign for woman suffrage. Hopes for universal suffrage bound former abolitionists together in the American Equal Rights Association, established in 1866. As its corresponding secretary Anthony oversaw petitions to Congress and coordinated several campaigns to amend state constitutions. She divided her time in 1867 between campaigns in New York and Kansas, and with Stanton, accepted an offer of capital to launch a newspaper, the Revolution, first appearing in New York in January 1868. Though the Revolution preserves the worst pronouncements of Anthony and Stanton in this period--opposing the Fifteenth Amendment and casting the enfranchisement of freedmen as a threat to the safety of white women--it also captures their excitement about women's potential and their growing rebelliousness. Their convictions about an independent movement led Anthony and Stanton to form the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1869; Henry Blackwell and his wife, Lucy Stone, set up the rival American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), which called for suffrage by state, rather than federal, law. The strategy of the NWSA remained uncertain and subject to change until 1875.

By the 1890s Anthony had access to the platform of any women's organization in the country. Two years of acrimonious negotiations with Lucy Stone's representatives from the AWSA succeeded in merging the rival associations as the National-American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890. Stanton presided over the new organization from 1890 to 1892, when Anthony replaced her. Anthony served until her eightieth birthday in 1900.

When Anthony died, she left an enormous legacy to those other generations. Her image, words, and standards of work permeated the struggle for what women called the "Susan B. Anthony amendment." So thoroughly had she become the embodiment of women's aspirations for political equality that suffragists fought long after their victory in 1920 over their competing claims to be her true political descendants.

(Adapted from the American National Biography Online, http://www.anb.org)