Susan B. Anthony's Legacy PDF

# Susan B. Anthony February 15, 1820 - March 13, 1906 ## Men, Their Rights, and Nothing More; ## Women, Their Rights, and Nothing Less. * Susan Brownell Anthony came home from school one day and told her parents that her teacher wouldn't let her learn long division. Girls didn't need to know adv...

# Susan B. Anthony February 15, 1820 - March 13, 1906 ## Men, Their Rights, and Nothing More; ## Women, Their Rights, and Nothing Less. * Susan Brownell Anthony came home from school one day and told her parents that her teacher wouldn't let her learn long division. Girls didn't need to know advanced math, he'd told her. * Her parents were Quakers who believed that men and women had equal abilities. They pulled her out of school and educated her in a school they started for local children. * Susan's father owned a cotton mill in Battenville, New York, but in 1837 he lost the business in a recession. The family became innkeepers, housing and feeding travelers and mill workers. * Susan "baked 21 loaves of bread ... wove three yards of carpet ... got my quilt out of the frame... had 20 men to supper," * She took a teaching job to help with her family's debts. * At her school, Susan found that male teachers earned $10 a month, while female teachers were paid only $2.50. She complained and was promptly fired. She taught elsewhere for a few more years, but eventually quit to take up reform causes. * Dressed all in black, with glasses perched on her nose and hair pulled back into a bun, Susan cultivated a severe manner that suited her crusading role. * She began her activism with the temperance movement, which aimed to ban the sale of alcohol. But at rallies, she wasn't allowed to speak because she was a woman. One day, a legislator refused her temperance petition because the signatures were those of women. "I vowed then and there that women should be equal," she said. ## Western New York State: A Hotbed of Social Activism * Western New York State was a hotbed of social activism. In the early 1800s, it earned the nickname "The Burned-Over District," * Rochester was the home of both Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass, who published an antislavery and women's rights newspaper called *The North Star*. * Elizabeth Cady Stanton lived in Seneca Falls. * Suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage was from Cicero. * Homer was the hometown of Amelia Bloomer, who published the first newspaper for women. * Frances Willard, who founded the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, was born in Churchville. * Florence Chauncey, the first woman to vote legally in New York State, cast her vote at 6:10 a.m. on January 5, 1918, in Lisle, New York, on the question of whether the town should be alcohol free. * Rhoda Palmer, who signed the Declaration of Sentiments and voted at the age of 102 in the U.S. Senate elections in 1918, lived in Geneva. * Harriet Tubman, the former slave who conducted slaves to safety on the Underground Railroad, lived in Auburn. * Emily Howland, who established schools for African American girls, was born in Sherwood. * Margaret Sanger, who founded Planned Parenthood, was born in Corning. * Clara Barton, the founder of the Red Cross, lived in Dansville. ## Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton * In 1851, Susan met Elizabeth Cady Stanton on a street corner in Seneca Falls, New York, three years after the women's convention there. It was the start of a fierce friendship and partnership that lasted more than fifty years. * In Elizabeth, Susan found someone who could put her thoughts into words. For the rest of her life, Susan traveled the country, speaking out for the vote. * In 1868, the two women started a magazine, *The Revolution*, into which they poured their opinions. Its masthead proclaimed: “Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.” Their views on women's rights were so radical for the time that *The New York Times* called *The Revolution* “literary nitroglycerin." ## Susan B. Anthony's Fight for the Right To Vote * In letters to friends, Susan wrote passionately about the vote. “Now wouldn't it be splendid for us to be free & equal citizens, with the power of the ballot to back our hearts, heads & hands?" she wrote to a friend. * Susan's strong personality and rigid opinions caused some rifts. For a while, the movement, which had started as the American Equal Rights Association, split apart into the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association. * The two groups differed on whether African American men should get the vote before women did. Susan and Elizabeth opposed the Fifteenth Amendment, not because it gave the vote to African American men, but because it didn't grant the vote to women at the same time. * To give the vote to all men and deny it to all women, they said, was to create an “aristocracy of sex." * But eventually their stand became racist. The most intelligent class of people should get the vote first, Susan declared, so therefore, "Let woman be first and the negro last." * Opponents countered that it was immoral for women to claim they had a greater need for the vote. “When women...are dragged from their homes and are hung from lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms, and their brains bashed out upon the pavement... then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own," protested their great friend and ally, Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave and abolitionist. ## The Aftermath of the Fifteenth Amendment * After the Fifteenth Amendment passed in 1870, Susan pleaded with people to finally see the justice of the woman's vote: "Put into the hands of all women, as you have into those of all men, the ballot, that symbol of perfect equality, that right protective of all other rights." * Susan's most memorable act came on November 5, 1872, when she went into a barbershop in Rochester, New York, to vote in a presidential election. It was illegal, Susan knew, but she hoped her action would bring the suffrage fight to the courts. She convinced the male registrars to allow her and fourteen other women to vote. "Well, I have been & gone & done it!!" she wrote excitedly to Elizabeth. ## The Aftermath of Susan B. Anthony's Arrest * All was quiet for about three weeks. But then a marshal showed up at Susan's house to arrest her. She went gladly - even holding out her hands to be handcuffed. Ashamed to be arresting a woman, the marshal wouldn't do it. They took a trolley to the police station, which delighted Susan, who loudly made known her plight. Susan was tried, found guilty, and given a $100 fine. She refused to pay it, yet the judge wouldn't jail her. He wanted to keep the matter from going on to higher courts. * Susan lived for thirty-two years after her act of rebellion, with woman suffrage still not in sight. Adorned in a red silk shawl, she haunted the halls of power. In 1878, she was among a group of women who first proposed an amendment to the Constitution. It came to be known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. She never gave up hope. In her last public outing, she praised the young women who were carrying on the fight, certain that they would complete what her generation had started. “Failure is impossible!” she insisted.