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Susan B. Anthony
Thinker

Susan B. Anthony

1820–1906 · American · activist

Susan B. Anthony was the foremost leader of the American women's suffrage movement, an abolitionist-turned-organizer who spent fifty years turning votes for women from radical idea into inevitable reform

Susan Brownell Anthony was the most recognized leader of the American women's suffrage movement, devoting over 50 years to the cause of women's right to vote. Raised in a Quaker family committed to social reform, Anthony began as an abolitionist and temperance activist before focusing on women's rights.

With Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anthony founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 and edited The Revolution newspaper. In 1872, she was arrested for voting illegally in Rochester, New York—her trial brought national attention to the cause. She traveled constantly, speaking, organizing, and petitioning.

Anthony never saw victory—the 19th Amendment granting women's suffrage passed in 1920, fourteen years after her death. The amendment is sometimes called the 'Susan B. Anthony Amendment' in her honor. Her single-minded dedication and organizational genius transformed women's rights from radical idea to inevitable reform. Her image appears on the U.S. dollar coin.

Major works1
  1. History of Woman Suffrage (6 vols)
Traditions2
Liberal FeminismClassical Liberalism

How these connect

  • Liberal Feminismdescends fromClassical LiberalismWollstonecraft's argument is that a doctrine of natural rights which stops at the sexes has refuted itself — liberalism held to its own standard.

Where Liberal Feminism sits

Descends fromClassical LiberalismEnlightenment PhilosophyUtilitarianism
Gave rise toCapabilities ApproachRadical Feminism
Provoked a reaction inMulticulturalism
Archetypes1
Archetype

Progressive Activist

Organized decades of women's-suffrage agitation and cast an illegal ballot in 1872 to challenge laws barring women from full citizenship.

Influences & connections4

A selection of notable, documented connections — not an exhaustive map.

Intellectual lineage

  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

    Supplied the movement's arguments and manifestos while Anthony organized: Stanton drafted the speeches and resolutions that gave Anthony's campaigning its theoretical spine across their half-century partnership.

  • Frederick Douglass

    The former-slave abolitionist orator whose Rochester circle drew Anthony into radical reform; his insistence that suffrage was a natural right shaped hers, though they split over the Fifteenth Amendment's priorities.

Influenced

Betty FriedanIda B. Wells
Sources & further reading3

Primary material and secondary scholarship on Susan B. Anthony — not necessarily written by them.

  • The Revolution newspaper
  • Trial transcript
  • Kathleen Barry's Susan B. Anthony: A Biography
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