Susan B. Anthony was born in 1820, in a rundown little town in Massachusetts where she was raised by her loving parents Daniel and Lucy, along with her 6 other siblings. Her father Daniel was a farmer and was raised Quaker which inspired Susan to believe the Quaker faith that everyone was under equal God.

Throughout her childhood, she moved multiple times including Battenville, New York. She lived on a farm there in a brick house as large as a castle. It became a meeting place for anti-slavery activists like Frederick Douglas.

She started to begin her own life when she was 26 and moved to upstate New York where she taught at a female academy. Over the next 3 years, she began to become unsatisfied with teaching when her father offered for her to come back to their family farm.

After many years of teaching, she returned to the farm where she met William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, who were good friends of her father. Listening to them inspired and motivated Susan to want to do more to help end slavery.

      Frederick Douglass               William Lloyd Garrison               Susan B. Anthony

She became an abolitionist activist, fighting back against slavery. Even though most people thought it was wrong for women to give speeches in public, she made many passionate, heartfelt speeches against slavery.

In 1852, she attended the state convention of Sons of Temperance and was told to “listen and learn”. This went against her Quaker upbringing and because of that, she dropped everything and left the Society. Being the independent woman she was, she never wanted to live in chains, so she formed the Woman’s New York State Temperance Society.

She quickly became more interested in women's rights and attended her first woman's rights convention in Syracuse, New York shortly after. During the same year, she incorporated women's rights into three other main things...

Labor

Temperance

Education

Along the way, Susan met a lady by the name of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They traveled the country long and far and gave speeches demanding that women be given the right to vote.

She spent a lot of time organizing petitions to drive for women's rights but never forgot about her commitment to being an anti-slavery advocate as well. As the civil war began, she organized the Women’s Loyalty National league. This organized petitions for the freedom of slaves and they began to drown in success.

After the aftermath of the Civil War, Anthony and Stanton found themselves increasingly at odds with many of their former reform allies. Many reformers wanted to focus on winning rights, including the right to vote, for newly freed African- American men. 

These strong efforts led to the passing of the 14th and 15th amendments, but these weren't the amendments everyone dreamed of. Anthony and Stanton had an issue with them. They included the word “male”.

They believed that the word “male” written in these amendments would make it even harder for women to get the right to vote.

"Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less."

- Susan B. Anthony

At this time, they began to heavily concentrate on women's rights. By now, Anthony had become a brilliant organizer and political strategist and showed tireless, constant devotion to the cause. In 1868, they began to publish a newspaper for women's rights.

The newspaper was called “The Revolution” and first appeared in January. It talked about women's suffrage, equal pay for equal work, women's education, the rights for working women, and the opening of new occupations for women, as well as the liberalization of divorce laws.

Anthony served as a member of the executive committee and later as vice-president, while Stanton was the president. For the next thirty years, Susan traveled the country, speaking tirelessly to promote women's suffrage and women’s rights.

May of 1869, was a big moment in both Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth C. Stanton's lives. They finally formed the organization they've always dreamed of, the National Woman's Suffrage Association. This would focus on securing a federal woman suffrage amendment as well as working on key state campaigns for the vote.