Susan B. Anthony first wanted equal pay, not the vote
As a young teacher she was amused by her father's excitement over a women's rights convention. What angered her was earning far less than men. Within a few years Anthony was the movement's great organiser, arrested for voting in 1872, and the amendment that finally passed in 1920 carried her name.
Born on February 15, 1820, in Adams, Massachusetts, Anthony grew up in a reforming Quaker household. Her father, an abolitionist later disowned by his congregation for letting a dance school use his home, taught his daughters as well as his sons to support themselves. The B was a teenage fad; she took it from an aunt who had married a man named Brownell, a name she disliked. When the Panic of 1837 bankrupted the family, she left boarding school after one term to teach.
In 1846 she became head of the girls' department at Canajoharie Academy, swapped plain Quaker dress for stylish clothes, and fumed at her low pay. She later said she did not yet want to vote, only equal pay for equal work. Temperance drew her into public life, since the law left wives of drunken husbands with almost no protection. In 1852 a chairman silenced her at a state temperance convention because women were there to listen. She walked out and organised a meeting of 500 women in Rochester instead.
Her partnership with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whom she met in 1851, powered the movement for decades. Stanton wrote and strategised; Anthony organised, circulated petitions and booked halls, often minding Stanton's seven children so the writing could get done. Stanton summed it up as forging the thunderbolts while Anthony fired them. Together they ran a Civil War petition drive of nearly 400,000 signatures against slavery, launched the newspaper The Revolution, and founded the National Woman Suffrage Association.
Anthony lived almost entirely on speaking fees, giving as many as 75 to 100 speeches a year. After her 1872 arrest in Rochester she was convicted but refused to pay the fine, and nothing further happened. In 1878 she and Stanton had Senator Aaron Sargent present a suffrage amendment, ratified as the Nineteenth in 1920. Once mocked as a threat to marriage, she celebrated her 80th birthday at the White House, and in 1979 became the first woman citizen on a United States coin.
Source: Susan B. Anthony
