Susan B. Anthony

On February 15, 1820, in Adams, Massachusetts, Susan B. Anthony was born into a Quaker family committed to discipline, reform, and education. She worked as a teacher, became active in temperance and antislavery circles, and entered public reform through the dense network of northern voluntary associations. Partnership with Elizabeth Cady Stanton soon gave her a national platform.

Anthony organized campaigns for abolition, equal pay for teachers, and after the Civil War for woman suffrage through the American Equal Rights Association and later the National Woman Suffrage Association. Her 1872 arrest for voting in Rochester turned the ballot itself into a constitutional test case about citizenship and the Fourteenth Amendment. She spent the Gilded Age building lecture circuits, petition drives, and national conventions that kept suffrage in the public eye.

Anthony's organizing work helped create the movement structure that eventually produced the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Her activism also linked suffrage to later struggles over labor reform, education, and constitutional equality for women.