Who Is Susan B. Anthony? 7 Facts And Quotes From The Feminist Leader, Born Feb. 15, 1820
The future is female, as they say, and so was the past, to a limited extent. Women’s rights leader Susan B. Anthony, born Feb. 15, 1820, celebrated her 80th birthday at the White House with President William McKinley, and while it’s unclear whether, if alive, she would have spent this one with a president who has angered feminists the world over, she certainly left women’s rights advocates with much to celebrate — and from which to distance themselves. Read on for seven facts about the feminist icon.
That “B.” is Brownell.
Her middle name was not Beatrice, Bethany or Brittney, but Brownell.
She was a Quaker.
Born in Adams, Massachusetts, Anthony was raised within a Christian sect that saw slavery and alcohol as amoral.
She never married.
“I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man’s housekeeper,” she once said, having deflected a series of suitors at a young age. “When I was young, if a girl married poor, she became a housekeeper and a drudge. If she married wealthy, she became a pet and a doll.”
She never got to vote.
Despite facing a criminal trial for attempting to vote in the November 1872 election and “being then and there a person of the female sex” — which she lost, but for which she did not pay the ordered fine — Anthony never effectively voted. She died in 1906, 14 years before the passage of the 19th Amendment. Nonetheless, Americans in Rochester, New York, pasted stickers reading "I voted" on her grave on Nov. 8, the culmination of the first presidential campaign by a woman of a major political party.
Her face was on a coin.
Her profile decorated the face of the dollar coin after then-President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Susan B. Anthony Dollar Coin Act of 1978. The U.S. replaced her silver dollar with a gold dollar coin, featuring Sacagawea, in 1997.
She was gal pals with Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Anthony and Stanton left the Women’s State Temperance Society, which they founded in 1853, after they were told they talked about women’s rights too much, according to the official website for her former home. Together, the two began campaigning for greater divorce rights, and later the right to vote, founding the American Equal Rights Association in 1868 and publishing a newspaper with the masthead, “Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.”
And they were kind of racist.
Anthony and Stanton were abolitionists but weren’t too familiar with the notion of intersectionality, the notion commonly recognized by today’s feminist movement that different forms of oppression don’t form a hierarchy, but instead tend to intersect and affect individuals in varying ways, depending on their backgrounds.
“I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman,” Anthony once stated. Stanton was guilty of similar rhetoric.
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