Susan Brownell Anthony Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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American political reformer and “Napoleon of the women’s rights movement,” Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) was born in Massachusetts. Over the course of a sixty-year career as a reformer, Anthony traveled an average of thirteen thousand miles (twenty-one thousand kilometers) a year to garner support for women’s causes. Her reformist nature was nurtured from an early age by her activist Baptist mother and her abolitionist father, a liberal Quaker who had been run out of the local meeting house for allowing young people to hold dancing lessons in his attic.

At age fifteen, Anthony began teaching in her father’s school during summer breaks. The part-time job turned into a full-time profession three years later when her father became impoverished during a financial recession. In 1848, Anthony’s career as a reformer was launched when she joined the local chapter of the Daughters of Temperance. She also became an ardent abolitionist, expressing her support for the controversial John Brown. She did not, however, take part in the first women’s rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 under the leadership of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. Although her interest in women’s rights was ignited after her parents and sister returned from Seneca Falls, it was not until reformer Amelia Bloomer introduced her to suffragists Stanton and Lucy Stone in 1851 that Anthony became actively involved in the fledgling movement.

Anthony and Stanton became lifelong friends and colleagues, actively lobbying for women’s suffrage, abolition, and equal rights for women and African Americans, often under the auspices of the American Equal Rights Association, which they cofounded. To promote their views, they published the radical newspaper, The Revolution, from 1868 to 1870.

The women’s movement split amid the furor over the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, which guaranteed suffrage to black men but not to women. Anthony and Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1869.The breech among the women’s groups was healed over the next two decades. In 1890, NWSA merged with the American Woman Suffrage Association, which under the leadership of Lucy Stone had supported the Fifteenth Amendment, to create the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association. It was not until the 1960s that the women’s movement and civil rights movement again supported one another’s struggle for equal rights.

Anthony wrote a number of articles and speeches, most notably The True Woman (1859) and the Declaration of the Rights of Woman (1876) with Stanton and Matilda Jocelyn Gage. Anthony’s most significant work was her contribution to the multiauthored six-volume History of Woman’s Suffrage published between 1881 and 1922. In 1896, with Anthony’s consent, Husted Harper authored a two-volume biography of her; a third volume was published after Anthony’s death.

In 1872, Anthony challenged the ban on female suffrage by voting illegally. She was arrested and convicted. The decades long collaboration of Anthony and Stanton culminated in 1920 when the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, known familiarly as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, gave white women the right to vote. Neither woman lived to experience the success that had taken seventy-two years to accomplish.

Bibliography:

DuBois, Ellen Carol, ed. The Elizabeth Cady Stanton–Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches. Boston: Northwestern University Press, 1992.
Harper, Ida Husted. Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony. Reprint of 1898–1908 eds. New York: Arno, 1969.
Harper, Judith E. Susan B. Anthony: A Biographical Companion. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 1998.
Sherr, Lynn. Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words. New York: Times Books, 1995.
Ward, Geoffrey C. Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. New York: Knopf, 1999.