By: Jaden Majewski, Valery Warner, and Daylun Armstrong
March 4, 2020
“No man is good enough to govern any woman without her consent.”
Throughout this month, we celebrate women. This month celebrates women’s contributions to history, culture, and society. In 1987, March was established as Women’s History Month in the United States of America.
Susan B. Anthony was one of the biggest activists during her 50 years of fighting for women’s rights. She was an American writer and lecturer who was one of the leading figures in the Women’s Voting Rights Movement.
Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, in Adams, Massachusetts. She grew up in a Quaker household and was the second oldest out of eight children. Anthony was raised by her parents, Daniel and Lucy Read Anthony. She excelled at reading and writing by the age of three.
Her family moved from Massachusetts to Battensville, New York, in 1826. She attended three schools, including a boarding school in Philadelphia.
In 1839, she took a job in a Quaker seminary in New Rochelle, New York. From 1846 to 1849, she taught at an all-girls academy in Upstate New York.
In 1852, the Women’s New York State Temperance Society was formed by Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (American suffragist, social activist, and a leading figure of the early Women’s Rights Movement). This society fought and petitioned for women’s rights.
In 1869, Anthony and Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, and in 1872, Anthony voted illegally in the presidential election. She was then arrested and fined $100, a fee that she never paid.
Anthony never gave up on her fight for women’s suffrage, and in 1905, she met with President Theodore Roosevelt to discuss an amendment that would give women the right to vote.
Unfortunately, this amendment (the 19th amendment) was not established until 14 years after Anthony had passed away in 1920. It is extremely important to know that the 19th amendment when passed did not include voting rights for Black women due to racism and discrimination. Many women of color had to fight for their own rights and create their own movements, which does not get talked about enough.
Pneumonia took Susan B. Anthony’s life on March 13, 1906, at the age of 86 in her Rochester home.
The words of Susan B. Anthony will always be remembered, “I declare to you that woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself, and there I take my stand.”
FUN FACTS
- The U.S. Treasury Department recognized Anthony by putting her portrait on dollar coins in 1979, making her the first woman to have this honor.
- In the early 1880s, Anthony published the first volume of History of Woman Suffrage; several more volumes would follow.
- Anthony also helped Ida Husted Harper (American author, journalist, columnist, and suffragist) to record her own story, which resulted in the 1898 work The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony: A Story of the Evolution of the Status of Women.
THE RETURN OF THE EYE 