Susan B. Anthony Day

Votes for women!!

Ok - we all hear the voice of Mrs. Banks from Mary Poppins (& mentally replay scenes from the movie) when we hear that line. Done beautifully in a nice blending of humor & sheer believability by Glynis Johns. Women's suffrage was only codified into US national law in 1920, thanks to the Nineteenth Amendment. (The UK was a little behind, granting suffrage in 1928.)

The word "suffrage" means the right to vote in political elections. Hence the Suffragette Movement, trying to get voting rights for women. Hence the American Civil Rights Movement, working to overcome so much of the inequities created by Jim Crow - including better access to voting.

And while this could turn into an entire college essay on voting rights and/or women's rights, those are only things that play into today's topic. There have been so many people since the origins of the United States of America that have advocated for the rights of women - some known & sadly, some unknown. One of the more well know people pushing for women's rights in America was Susan B. Anthony & that was just one of the things that she worked on!

Susan B. Anthony was born February 15, 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts. She was influenced by the political, social, & economic issues of her time but was especially influenced by the religious views her family instilled in her. Her father Daniel was a member of the Society of Friends (aka the Quakers). He was concerned about the westward expansion of slavery & was known to say that he tried to avoid purchasing cotton raised by enslaved labor.

Additionally, Quakers demanded education for both boys & girls. In 1837, Susan B. Anthony had the opportunity to expand upon her education when she was sent to the Friends' Seminary near Philadelphia, where she studied arithmetic, algebra, literature, chemistry, philsophy, physiology, astronomy, & bookkeeping.

In 1845, the Anthony family moved to a farm near Rochester, New York. There they associated with a group of Quaker social reformers who had left their congregations because of restrictions the Society of Friends placed on reform activities & the family also became more involved in the abolition movement. The Anthony farm soon became the Sunday afternoon gathering place for local activists, including William Lloyd Garrison & Frederick Douglass - a former slave & prominent abolitionist.

In her mid-thirties, Susan was invited to join the anti-slavery lecture circuit in the decade leading up to the Civil War. (For context: This was the same time period of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Fugitive Slave Law was passed, & Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin.) At this same time, Susan B. Anthony & Elizabeth Cady Stanton met & became lifelong friends. 

Susan spoke out against slavery whenever she could find an audience. She challenged Abraham Lincoln's moderate position on slavery in 1861, demanding "no compromise with slaveholders." She would later refer to this time period as "The Winter of Mobs." (Case in point - a Syracuse, New York mob burned her in effigy & dragged the effigy through the streets.)

Susan founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They also created & produced The Revolution, a weekly publication that lobbied for women's rights under the American Equal Rights Association. The Revolution's masthead read: "Men, their rights, & nothing more; women, their rights & nothing less."

Susan, along with the American Equal Rights Association, advocated for African Americans & women to get the right to vote at the same time but ultimately, the advocacy failed. In May 1869 Susan & Elizabeth, along with others, formed the National Woman Suffrage Association. In November 1869 Lucy Stone & Julia Ward Howe, along with others, formed the competing American Woman Suffrage Association. Both Susan & Elizabeth joined the lecture circuit in roughly 1870, traveling from mid-autumn to spring. At this point, women's suffrage was starting to be seen as a serious topic. Lecture bureaus scheduled the tours (whether Susan & Elizabeth did them together or individually) & handled all of the travel arrangements. The lectures brought new recruits to the women's suffrage movement, which strengthened suffrage organizations at the local, state, & national levels. It should be noted that Susan B. Anthony's & Elizabeth Cady Stanton's travels throughout the 1870's covered a distanced that was not matched by any other reformer or politician.

Susan B. Anthony also organized national conventions, lobbied Congress & state legislatures, gave speeches & participated in an endless series of state suffrage campaigns.

In 1872, Susan voted. She was subsequently arrested on November 18, 1872 by a US Deputy Marshal & charged with illegally voting. The trial generated a national controversy & was widely covered by the national press. (And of course it became a rather large, if not major, step in the transition of the broader women's rights movement.) Susan was found guilty & was fined $100, to which she responded: "I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty." And she did not.

On August 18, 2020, in recognition of the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, President Donald Trump announced that he would pardon Susan B. Anthony. The president of the National Susan B. Anthony Museum & House wrote to "decline the offer of a pardon on the principle that, to accept a pardon would wrongly 'validate' the trial proceedings in the same manner that paying the $100 find would have."

Susan B. Anthony also participated in teachers' conventions & was part of the temperance movement. At one point, she even took to wearing the Bloomer dress (a knee length dress worn over a pair of pantaloons), as she felt it more sensible than the traditional heavy dresses that dragged on the ground. Susan reluctantly quit wearing the bloomer dress after a year because it gave her opponents an opportunity to focus on something other than her thoughts.

Susan B. Anthony passed away on March 13, 1906. She lived long enough to see emancipation but not the Civil Rights Movement or the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote.

Thank you to Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Julia Ward Howe, Lucy Stone, & all of the others who fought for a woman's right to vote. And thank you to everyone who has advocated & fought for women's rights.