Susan Brownell Anthony was born on February 15, 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts. After attending the Friends’ Boarding School in Philadelphia from 1837 to 1838, she taught at several academies and headed the Female Department of the Canajoharie Academy in New York from 1846 to 1849. Anthony left teaching to work for the temperance movement in Rochester, New York, and was a delegate to the 1852 Sons of Temperance meeting in Albany, New York. Having suffered gender discrimination at the conference, she organized the Woman’s State Temperance Society of New York later that year. In addition to the temperance movement, she took part in the abolitionist movement, serving as an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society (1856-61) and organizing the Women’s National Loyal League during the Civil War to support the emancipation of African-Americans. Anthony also campaigned to secure equal pay for female teachers and to give women equal property rights.
After the Civil War, Anthony’s efforts became focused on achieving suffrage for women. She spoke in favor of expanding the Fourteenth Amendment to include guaranteeing women the right to vote. She published The Revolution, a women’s rights periodical, from 1868 to 1870. With her friend and associate Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she organized the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, and served as chair of its executive committee. Arrested in 1877 for registering to vote in Rochester, she refused to pay the $100 fine and it was never collected. Anthony helped organize the International Council of Women in London in 1888, and became vice president of the new organization created by the 1890 merging of the National and the American Woman Suffrage Associations. In 1904, she and Carrie Chapman Catt formed the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Berlin. Along with other feminists, including Stanton, Anthony compiled and edited the four-volume History of Woman Suffrage (1881-1902). Sprightly and impressive even as an octogenarian, she celebrated her 86th birthday at a meeting in Baltimore in her honor, where she continued to inspire others with her dedication, dignity and strength. Anthony died at the age of 86 on March 13, 1906, in Rochester, New York. Fourteen years later, the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, giving women the right to vote, was adopted.