14/03/2022
An amazing woman who tirelessly worked for 60 years for our rights…for women to have rights and sovereignty over their lives…
Raised in a Quaker family, Susan B. Anthony was committed to the cause of human equality from an early age. She was an abolitionist and was an active participant in the temperance movement. But it was a champion of women’s rights that she would become best-known and make her greatest historical impact.
In 1869 she and Elizabeth Stanton founded the National Women Suffrage Association. Susan would spend the rest of her life campaigning tirelessly for women’s suffrage and equal rights. Her efforts subjected her to ridicule and abuse, but she never wavered. She was arrested for voting illegally in the 1872 presidential election and her trial became a national sensation. When found guilty by the trial judge Susan exclaimed, “You have trampled underfoot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored.” Ordered to pay a fine of $100, she flatly refused. “I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty,” she declared. And she never did.
In 1878 she convinced Senator Aaron Sergeant of California to introduce a proposed amendment to the Constitution, extending the right to vote to women.
Susan B. Anthony remained active and energetic to the end, never ceasing in her struggle to secure equal rights for American women. In 1904, at age 84 she reflected on the changes she had witnessed. Women had been granted the right to vote in four states. Legal rights for married women had been established around the country that had never before existed. Tens of thousands of women were enrolled in colleges and universities, up from zero a few decades earlier. “The world has never witnessed a greater revolution than in the sphere of woman during this fifty years,” she said. But the prize she most desired had not been won. The U.S. Constitution still did not give women the right to vote. In the final days of her life, Susan told a friend, “To think I have had more than 60 years of hard struggle for a little liberty, and then to die without it seems so cruel.”
But the seeds Susan B. Anthony had sown during her life’s work had germinated and taken root. In 1919, thirteen years after her death, and 41 years after she convinced Senator Sergeant to introduce it, Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote. Ratified by the states in 1920, the Amendment was popularly known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.
Susan B. Anthony died at age 86, on March 13, 1906, one hundred sixteen years ago today.
“We shall someday be heeded, and when we shall have our amendment to the Constitution of the United States, everybody will think it was always so, just exactly as many young people think that all the privileges, all the freedom, all the enjoyments which woman now possesses always were hers. They have no idea of how every single inch of ground that she stands upon today has been gained by the hard work of some little handful of women of the past.” Susan B. Anthony, 1894.
