Susan B. Anthony Quotes, Facts: What To Know About Women's Rights Activist

Susan B. Anthony was an activist at heart. Raised in a politically active family, one of the first issues she ever advocated for was the abolition of slavery, the second was temperance and the campaign against alcohol and the third issue she worked for was women’s rights, including the right to vote.

Anthony was born in 1820, 100 years before women would eventually be awarded the right to vote through the 19th Amendment, a landmark Anthony didn’t live to see. Anthony teamed up with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, together the two worked to set the work in motion that would eventually lead to the 19th Amendment.

Anthony and Stanton met in 1851 and closely worked together on a number of issues until Stanton’s death a few years before Anthony’s, according to the Susan B. Anthony House. Anthony went on speaking tour around the country campaigning for suffrage while Stanton worked more behind the scenes and took on the role of president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Anthony remained unmarried her entire life and dedicated her life to the causes she was passionate about.

Thursday marks what would have been Anthony’s 198th birthday.

Facts and quotes from Susan B. Anthony:

Susan B. Anthony illegally voted in the presidential election of 1872, for the crime she was charged a $100 fine that she never paid. “I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty,” she said of the fine.

“The only chance women have for justice in this country is to violate the law, as I have done, and as I shall continue to do,” she said during her trial for voting illegally.

Anthony was the first woman to ever be depicted on money in the United States, she was put on a dollar coin in 1979.

“Men their rights and nothing more; women their rights and nothing less,” was the motto of the newspaper she published with Stanton.

“Failure is impossible,” she said at the last women’s rights convention before she died.

Anthony advocated for and eventually persuaded the University of Rochester to admit women for the first time in 1900.

Anthony died in 1906 at the age of 86.