Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony was a pioneer in the women’s suffrage movement in the United States and president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, which she founded with Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Anthony’s work helped pave the way for the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, giving women the right to vote. The amendment was known as the “Susan B. Anthony Amendment” to honor her work on behalf of women’s rights, and on July 2, 1979, she became the first woman to be featured on a circulating coin from the U.S. mint.
== Early life ==
Anthony was reared in the Quaker tradition in a home pervaded by a tone of independence and moral zeal. She was a precocious child and learned to read and write at the age of three. After the family moved from Massachusetts to Battensville, New York, in 1826, she attended a district school, then a school set up by her father, and finally a boarding school near Philadelphia. In 1839 she took a position in a Quaker seminary in New Rochelle, New York. From 1846 to 1849 she taught at a female academy in upstate New York. In 1845, the family moved to a farm on the outskirts of Rochester, New York, purchased partly with the inheritance of Anthony's mother. There they associated with a group of Quaker social reformers who had left their congregation because of the restrictions it placed on reform activities, and who in 1848 formed a new organization called the Congregational Friends. The Anthony farmstead soon became the Sunday afternoon gathering place for local activists, including Frederick Douglass, a former slave and a prominent abolitionist who became Anthony's lifelong friend.
The Anthony family began to attend services at the First Unitarian Church of Rochester, which was associated with social reform. The Rochester Women's Rights Convention of 1848 was held at that church in 1848, inspired by the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights convention, which was held two weeks earlier in a nearby town. Anthony's parents and her sister Mary attended the Rochester convention and signed the Declaration of Sentiments that had been first adopted by the Seneca Falls Convention.
Anthony did not take part in either of these conventions because she had moved to Canajoharie in 1846 to be headmistress of the female department of the Canajoharie Academy. Away from Quaker influences for the first time in her life, at the age of 26 she began to replace her plain clothing with more stylish dresses, and she quit using "thee" and other forms of speech traditionally used by Quakers. She was interested in social reform, and she was distressed at being paid much less than men with similar jobs, but she was amused at her father's enthusiasm over the Rochester women's rights convention. She later explained, "I wasn't ready to vote, didn't want to vote, but I did want equal pay for equal work." When the Canajoharie Academy closed in 1849, Anthony took over the operation of the family farm in Rochester so her father could devote more time to his insurance business. She worked at this task for a couple of years but found herself increasingly drawn to reform activity. With her parents' support, she was soon fully engaged in reform work. For the rest of her life, she lived almost entirely on fees she earned as a speaker.
== Abolition, temperance, and women’s suffrage ==
Anthony subsequently settled in her family home, now near Rochester, New York. There she met many leading abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, Parker Pillsbury, Wendell Phillips, William Henry Channing, and William Lloyd Garrison. Soon the temperance movement enlisted her sympathy and then, after meeting Amelia Bloomer and through her Elizabeth Cady Stanton, so did that of women’s suffrage. The rebuff of Anthony’s attempt to speak at a temperance meeting in Albany in 1852 prompted her to organize the Woman’s New York State Temperance Society, of which Stanton became president, and pushed Anthony farther in the direction of women’s rights advocacy. In a short time she became known as one of the cause’s most zealous, serious advocates, a dogged and tireless worker whose personality contrasted sharply with that of her friend and coworker Stanton. She was also a prime target of public and newspaper abuse. While campaigning for a liberalization of New York’s laws regarding married women’s property rights, an end attained in 1860, Anthony served from 1856 as chief New York agent of Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society. During the early phase of the Civil War she helped organize the Women’s National Loyal League, which urged the case for emancipation. After the war she campaigned unsuccessfully to have the language of the Fourteenth Amendment altered to allow for woman as well as African American suffrage, and in 1866 she became corresponding secretary of the newly formed American Equal Rights Association. Her exhausting speaking and organizing tour of Kansas in 1867 failed to win passage of a state enfranchisement law.
=== Women's Loyal National League ===
Anthony and Stanton organized the Women's Loyal National League in 1863 to campaign for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would abolish slavery. It was the first national women's political organization in the United States. In the largest petition drive in the nation's history up to that time, the League collected nearly 400,000 signatures to abolish slavery, representing approximately one out of every twenty-four adults in the Northern states. The petition drive significantly assisted the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which ended slavery. Anthony was the chief organizer of this effort, which involved recruiting and coordinating some 2000 petition collectors.
The League provided the women's movement with a vehicle for combining the fight against slavery with the fight for women's rights by reminding the public that petitioning was the only political tool available to women at a time when only men were allowed to vote. With a membership of 5000, it helped develop a new generation of women leaders, providing experience and recognition for not only Stanton and Anthony but also newcomers like Anna Dickinson, a gifted teenaged orator. The League demonstrated the value of formal structure to a women's movement that had resisted being anything other than loosely organized up to that point. The widespread network of women activists who assisted the League expanded the pool of talent that was available to reform movements, including the women's suffrage movement, after the war.
=== American Equal Rights Association ===
Anthony stayed with her brother Daniel in Kansas for eight months in 1865 to assist with his newspaper. She headed back east after she learned that an amendment to the U.S. Constitution had been proposed that would provide citizenship for African Americans but would also for the first time introduce the word "male" into the constitution. Anthony supported citizenship for blacks but opposed any attempt to link it with a reduction in the status of women. Her ally Stanton agreed, saying "if that word 'male' be inserted, it will take us a century at least to get it out."
Anthony and Stanton worked to revive the women's rights movement, which had become nearly dormant during the Civil War. In 1866, they organized the Eleventh National Women's Rights Convention, the first since the Civil War began. Unanimously adopting a resolution introduced by Anthony, the convention voted to transform itself into the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), whose purpose was to campaign for the equal rights of all citizens, especially the right of suffrage. The leadership of the new organization included such prominent activists as Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, and Frederick Douglass.
The AERA's drive for universal suffrage was resisted by some abolitionist leaders and their allies in the Republican Party. During the period before the 1867 convention to revise the New York state constitution, Horace Greeley, a prominent newspaper editor, told Anthony and Stanton, "This is a critical period for the Republican Party and the life of our Nation... I conjure you to remember that this is 'the negro's hour,' and your first duty now is to go through the State and plead his claims." Abolitionist leaders Wendell Phillips and Theodore Tilton met with Anthony and Stanton in the office of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, a leading abolitionist newspaper. The two men tried to convince the two women that the time had not yet come for women's suffrage, that they should campaign not for voting rights for both women and African Americans in the revised state constitution but for voting rights for black men only. According to Ida Husted Harper, Anthony's authorized biographer, Anthony "was highly indignant and declared that she would sooner cut off her right hand than ask the ballot for the black man and not for woman." Anthony and Stanton continued to work for the inclusion of suffrage for both African Americans and women.
In 1867, the AERA campaigned in Kansas for referendums that would enfranchise both African Americans and women. Wendell Phillips, who opposed mixing those two causes, blocked the funding that the AERA had expected for their campaign. After an internal struggle, Kansas Republicans decided to support suffrage for black men only and formed an "Anti Female Suffrage Committee" to oppose the AERA's efforts. By the end of summer, the AERA campaign had almost collapsed, and its finances were exhausted. Anthony and Stanton created a storm of controversy by accepting help during the last days of the campaign from George Francis Train, a wealthy businessman who supported women's rights. Train antagonized many activists by attacking the Republican Party and openly disparaging the integrity and intelligence of African Americans. There is reason to believe, however, that Anthony and Stanton hoped to draw the volatile Train away from his cruder forms of racism, and that he had actually begun to do so.
After the Kansas campaign, the AERA increasingly divided into two wings, both advocating universal suffrage but with different approaches. One wing, whose leading figure was Lucy Stone, was willing for black men to achieve suffrage first and wanted to maintain close ties with the Republican Party and the abolitionist movement. The other, whose leading figures were Anthony and Stanton, insisted that women and black men should be enfranchised at the same time and worked toward a politically independent women's movement that would no longer be dependent on abolitionists. The AERA effectively dissolved after an acrimonious meeting in May 1869, and two competing woman suffrage organizations were created in its aftermath.
=== The Revolution ===
Anthony and Stanton began publishing a weekly newspaper called The Revolution in New York City in 1868. It focused primarily on women's rights, especially suffrage for women, but it also covered other topics, including politics, the labor movement and finance. Its motto was "Men, their rights and nothing more: women, their rights and nothing less." One of its goals was to provide a forum in which women could exchange opinions on key issues from a variety of viewpoints. Anthony managed the business aspects of the paper while Stanton was co-editor along with Parker Pillsbury, an abolitionist and a supporter of women's rights. Initial funding was provided by George Francis Train, the controversial businessman who supported women's rights but who alienated many activists with his political and racial views.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, major periodicals associated with the radical social reform movements had either become more conservative or had quit publishing or soon would. Anthony intended for The Revolution to partially fill that void, hoping to grow it eventually into a daily paper with its own printing press, all owned and operated by women. The funding Train had arranged for the newspaper, however, was less than Anthony had expected. Moreover, Train sailed for England after The Revolution published its first issue and was soon jailed for supporting Irish independence.
Train's financial support eventually disappeared entirely. After twenty-nine months, mounting debts forced Anthony to transfer the paper to Laura Curtis Bullard, a wealthy women's rights activist who gave it a less radical tone. The paper published its last issue less than two years later. Despite its short life, The Revolution gave Anthony and Stanton a means for expressing their views during the developing split within the women's movement. It also helped them promote their wing of the movement, which eventually became a separate organization.
=== Split in the women's movement ===
In May 1869, two days after the final AERA convention, Anthony, Stanton and others formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). In November 1869, Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe and others formed the competing American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). The hostile nature of their rivalry created a partisan atmosphere that endured for decades, affecting even professional historians of the women's movement.
The immediate cause for the split was the proposed Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would prohibit the denial of suffrage because of race. In one of her most controversial actions, Anthony campaigned against the amendment. She and Stanton called for women and African Americans to be enfranchised at the same time. They said that by effectively enfranchising all men while excluding all women, the amendment would create an "aristocracy of sex" by giving constitutional authority to the idea that men were superior to women. In 1873, Anthony said, "An oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor; an oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant; or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but surely this oligarchy of sex, which makes the men of every household sovereigns, masters; the women subjects, slaves; carrying dissension, rebellion into every home of the Nation, cannot be endured."
The AWSA supported the amendment, but Lucy Stone, who became its most prominent leader, also made it clear that she believed that suffrage for women would be more beneficial to the country than suffrage for black men. The two organizations had other differences as well. The NWSA was politically independent, but the AWSA at least initially aimed for close ties with the Republican Party, hoping that the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment would lead to a Republican push for women's suffrage. The NWSA focused primarily on winning suffrage at the national level while the AWSA pursued a state-by-state strategy. The NWSA initially worked on a wider range of women's issues than the AWSA, including divorce reform and equal pay for women. Events soon removed much of the basis for the split in the women's movement. In 1870, debate about the Fifteenth Amendment was made irrelevant when that amendment was officially ratified. In 1872, disgust with corruption in government led to a mass defection of abolitionists and other social reformers from the Republicans to the short-lived Liberal Republican Party. As early as 1875, Anthony began urging the NWSA to focus more exclusively on women's suffrage rather than a variety of women's issues. The rivalry between the two women's groups was so bitter, however, that a merger proved to be impossible for twenty years. The AWSA, which was especially strong in New England, was the larger of the two organizations, but it began to decline in strength during the 1880s. In 1890, the two organizations merged as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), with Stanton as president but with Anthony as its effective leader. When Stanton retired from her post in 1892, Anthony became NAWSA's president.
=== National suffrage movement ===
"By the end of the Civil War," according to historian Ann D. Gordon, "Susan B. Anthony occupied new social and political territory. She was emerging on the national scene as a female leader, something new in American history, and she did so as a single woman in a culture that perceived the spinster as anomalous and unguarded ... By the 1880s, she was among the senior political figures in the United States." After the formation of the NWSA, Anthony dedicated herself fully to the organization and to women's suffrage. She did not draw a salary from either it or its successor, the NAWSA, but on the contrary used her lecture fees to fund those organizations. There was no national office, the mailing address being simply that of one of the officers.
That Anthony had remained unmarried gave her an important business advantage in this work. A married woman at that time had the legal status of feme covert, which, among other things, excluded her from signing contracts (her husband could do that for her, if he chose). As Anthony had no husband, she was a feme sole and could freely sign contracts for convention halls, printed materials, etc. Using fees she earned by lecturing, she paid off the debts she had accumulated while supporting The Revolution. With the press treating her as a celebrity, she proved to be a major draw. Over her career she estimated that she averaged 75 to 100 speeches per year. Travel conditions in the earlier days were sometimes appalling. Once she gave a speech from the top of a billiard table. On another occasion her train was snowbound for days, and she survived on crackers and dried fish.
Both Anthony and Stanton joined the lecture circuit about 1870, usually traveling from mid-autumn to spring. The timing was right because the nation was beginning to discuss women's suffrage as a serious matter. Occasionally they traveled together but most often not. Lecture bureaus scheduled their tours and handled the travel arrangements, which generally involved traveling during the day and speaking at night, sometimes for weeks at a time, including weekends. Their lectures brought new recruits into the movement who strengthened suffrage organizations at the local, state and national levels. Their journeys during that decade covered a distance that was unmatched by any other reformer or politician. Anthony's other suffrage work included organizing national conventions, lobbying Congress and state legislatures, and participating in a seemingly endless series of state suffrage campaigns.
A special opportunity arose in 1876 when the U.S. celebrated its 100th birthday as an independent country. The NWSA asked permission to present a Declaration of Rights for Women at the official ceremony in Philadelphia, but was refused. Undaunted, five women, headed by Anthony, walked onto the platform during the ceremony and handed their Declaration to the startled official in charge. As they left, they handed out copies of it to the crowd. Spotting an unoccupied bandstand outside the hall, Anthony mounted it and read the Declaration to a large crowd. Afterwards she invited everyone to a NWSA convention at the nearby Unitarian church where speakers like Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton awaited them. The work of all segments of the women's suffrage movement began to show clear results. Women won the right to vote in Wyoming in 1869 and in Utah in 1870. Her lectures in Washington and four other states led directly to invitations for her to address the state legislatures there. The Grange, a large advocacy group for farmers, officially supported women's suffrage as early as 1885. The Women's Christian Temperance Union, the largest women's organization in the country, also supported suffrage.
Anthony's commitment to the movement, her spartan lifestyle, and the fact that she did not seek personal financial gain, made her an effective fund-raiser and won her the admiration of many who did not agree with her goals. As her reputation grew, her working and travel conditions improved. She sometimes had the use of the private railroad car of Jane Stanford, a sympathizer whose husband owned a major railroad. While lobbying and preparing for the annual suffrage conventions in Washington, she was provided with a free suite of rooms in the Riggs Hotel, whose owners supported her work. To ensure continuity, Anthony trained a group of younger activists, who were known as her "nieces," to assume leadership roles within the organization. Two of them, Carrie Chapman Catt and Anna Howard Shaw, served as presidents of the NAWSA after Anthony retired from that position.
==== United States v. Susan B. Anthony ====
The NWSA convention of 1871 adopted a strategy of urging women to attempt to vote, and then, after being turned away, to file suits in federal courts to challenge laws that prevented women from voting. The legal basis for the challenge would be the recently adopted Fourteenth Amendment, part of which reads: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States".
Following the example set by Anthony and her sisters shortly before election day, a total of nearly fifty women in Rochester registered to vote in the presidential election of 1872. On election day, Anthony and fourteen other women from her ward convinced the election inspectors to allow them to cast ballots, but women in other wards were turned back. Anthony was arrested on November 18, 1872, by a U.S. Deputy Marshal and charged with illegally voting. The other women who had voted were also arrested but released pending the outcome of Anthony's trial. Anthony's trial generated a national controversy and became a major step in the transition of the broader women's rights movement into the women's suffrage movement.
Anthony spoke throughout Monroe County, New York, where her trial was to be held and from where the jurors for her trial would be chosen. Her speech was entitled "Is it a Crime for a U.S. Citizen to Vote?" She said, "We no longer petition Legislature or Congress to give us the right to vote. We appeal to women everywhere to exercise their too long neglected 'citizen's right to vote.'" The U.S. Attorney arranged for the trial to be moved to the federal circuit court, which would soon sit in neighboring Ontario County with a jury drawn from that county's inhabitants. Anthony responded by speaking throughout that county also before the trial began.
Responsibility for that federal circuit was in the hands of Justice Ward Hunt, who had recently been appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Hunt had never served as a trial judge; originally a politician, he had begun his judicial career by being elected to the New York Court of Appeals. The trial, United States v. Susan B. Anthony, began on June 17, 1873, and was closely followed by the national press. Following a rule of common law at that time which prevented criminal defendants in federal courts from testifying, Hunt refused to allow Anthony to speak until the verdict had been delivered. On the second day of the trial, after both sides had presented their cases, Justice Hunt delivered his lengthy opinion, which he had put in writing. In the most controversial aspect of the trial, Hunt directed the jury to deliver a guilty verdict.
On the second day of the trial, Hunt asked Anthony if she had anything to say. She responded with "the most famous speech in the history of the agitation for woman suffrage", according to Ann D. Gordon, a historian of the women's movement. Repeatedly ignoring the judge's order to stop talking and sit down, she protested what she called "this high-handed outrage upon my citizen's rights", saying, "you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored." She castigated Justice Hunt for denying her a trial by jury, but said that even if he had allowed the jury to discuss the case, she still would have been denied a trial by a jury of her peers because women were not allowed to be jurors.
On the centennial of the Boston Tea Party     I stand before you tonight a convicted criminal... convicted by a Supreme Court Judge... and sentenced to pay $100 fine and costs. For what? For asserting my right to representation in a government, based upon the one idea of the right of every person governed to participate in that government. This is the result at the close of 100 years of this government, that I, a native born American citizen, am found guilty of neither lunacy nor idiocy, but of a crime—simply because I exercised our right to vote.When Justice Hunt sentenced Anthony to pay a fine of $100 (equivalent to $2,500 in 2023), she responded, "I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty", and she never did. If Hunt had ordered her to be jailed until she paid the fine, Anthony could have taken her case to the Supreme Court. Hunt instead announced he would not order her taken into custody, closing off that legal avenue.
The U.S. Supreme Court in 1875 put an end to the strategy of trying to achieve women's suffrage through the court system when it ruled in Minor v. Happersett that "the Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon anyone". The NWSA decided to pursue the far more difficult strategy of campaigning for a constitutional amendment to achieve voting rights for women. On August 18, 2020—the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment—President Donald Trump announced that he would pardon Anthony, 148 years after her conviction. The president of the National Susan B. Anthony Museum and House wrote to "decline" the offer of a pardon on the principle that, to accept a pardon would wrongly "validate" the trial proceedings in the same manner that paying the $100 fine would have.
=== International women's organizations ===
==== International Council of Women ====
Anthony traveled to Europe in 1883 for a nine-month stay, linking up with Stanton, who had arrived a few months earlier. Together they met with leaders of European women's movements and began the process of creating an international women's organization. The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) agreed to host its founding congress. The preparatory work was handled primarily by Anthony and two of her younger colleagues in the NWSA, Rachel Foster Avery and May Wright Sewall. Delegates from fifty-three women's organizations in nine countries met in Washington in 1888 to form the new association, which was called the International Council of Women (ICW). The delegates represented a wide variety of organizations, including suffrage associations, professional groups, literary clubs, temperance unions, labor leagues and missionary societies. The American Woman Suffrage Association, which had for years been a rival to the NWSA, participated in the congress. Anthony opened the first session of the ICW and presided over most events.
The ICW commanded respect at the highest levels. President Cleveland and his wife sponsored a reception at the White House for delegates to the ICW's founding congress. The ICW's second congress was an integral part of the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. At its third congress in London in 1899, a reception for the ICW was held at Windsor Castle at the invitation of Queen Victoria. At its fourth congress in Berlin in 1904, Augusta Victoria, the German Empress, received the ICW leaders at her palace. Anthony played a prominent role on all four occasions. Still active, ICW is associated with the United Nations.
==== World's Congress of Representative Women ====
The World's Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World's Fair, was held in 1893. It hosted several world congresses, each dealing with a specialized topic, such as religion, medicine and science. At almost the last moment, the U.S. Congress decided that the Exposition should also recognize the role of women. After it was over, one of the organizers of the Exposition's congress of women revealed that Anthony had played a pivotal but hidden role in that last-minute decision. Fearing that a public campaign would rouse opposition, Anthony had worked quietly to organize support for this project among women of the political elite. Anthony increased the pressure by covertly initiating a petition that was signed by wives and daughters of Supreme Court judges, senators, cabinet members and other dignitaries.
A large structure called the Woman's Building, designed by Sophia Hayden Bennett, was constructed to provide meeting and exhibition spaces for women at the Exposition. Two of Anthony's closest associates were appointed to organize the women's congress. They arranged for the International Council of Women to make its upcoming meeting part of the Exposition by expanding its scope and calling itself the World's Congress of Representative Women. This week-long congress seated delegates from 27 countries. Its 81 sessions, many held simultaneously, were attended by over 150,000 people, and women's suffrage was discussed at almost every session. Anthony spoke to large crowds at the Exposition.
"Buffalo Bill" Cody invited her as a guest to his Wild West Show, located just outside the Exposition. When the show opened, he rode his horse directly to her and greeted her with dramatic flair. According to a co-worker, Anthony, "for the moment as enthusiastic as a girl, waved her handkerchief at him, while the big audience, catching the spirit of the scene, wildly applauded."
==== International Woman Suffrage Alliance ====
After Anthony retired as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Carrie Chapman Catt, her chosen successor, began working toward an international women's suffrage association, one of Anthony's long-time goals. The existing International Council of Women could not be expected to support a campaign for women's suffrage because it was a broad alliance whose more conservative members would object. In 1902, Catt organized a preparatory meeting in Washington, with Anthony as chair, that was attended by delegates from several countries. Organized primarily by Catt, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance was created in Berlin in 1904. The founding meeting was chaired by Anthony, who was declared to be the new organization's honorary president and first member. According to Anthony's authorized biographer, "no event ever gave Miss Anthony such profound satisfaction as this one". Later renamed the International Alliance of Women, the organization is still active and is affiliated with the United Nations.
=== Later life ===
Having lived for years in hotels and with friends and relatives, Anthony agreed to settle into her sister Mary Stafford Anthony's house in Rochester in 1891, at the age of 71. Her energy and stamina, which sometimes exhausted her co-workers, continued at a remarkable level. At age 75, she toured Yosemite National Park on the back of a mule. She remained as leader of the NAWSA and continued to travel extensively on suffrage work. She also engaged in local projects. In 1893, she initiated the Rochester branch of the Women's Educational and Industrial Union. In 1898, she called a meeting of 73 local women's societies to form the Rochester Council of Women. She played a key role in raising the funds required by the University of Rochester before they would admit women students, pledging her life insurance policy to close the final funding gap.
In 1896, she spent eight months on the California suffrage campaign, speaking as many as three times per day in more than 30 localities. In 1900, she presided over her last NAWSA convention. During the six remaining years of her life, Anthony spoke at six more NAWSA conventions and four congressional hearings, completed the fourth volume of the History of Woman Suffrage, and traveled to eighteen states and to Europe. As Anthony's fame grew, some politicians (certainly not all of them) were happy to be publicly associated with her. Her seventieth birthday was celebrated at a national event in Washington with prominent members of the House and Senate in attendance. Her eightieth birthday was celebrated at the White House at the invitation of President William McKinley.
== Death and legacy ==
Susan B. Anthony died at the age of 86 of heart failure and pneumonia in her home in Rochester, New York, on March 13, 1906. She was buried at Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester. At her birthday celebration in Washington, D.C., a few days earlier, Anthony had spoken of those who had worked with her for women's rights: "There have been others also just as true and devoted to the cause—I wish I could name every one—but with such women consecrating their lives, failure is impossible!" "Failure is impossible" quickly became a watchword for the women's movement.
Anthony did not live to see the achievement of women's suffrage at the national level, but she still expressed pride in the progress the women's movement had made. At the time of her death, women had achieved suffrage in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Idaho, and several larger states followed soon after. Legal rights for married women had been established in most states, and most professions had at least a few women members. 36,000 women were attending colleges and universities, up from zero a few decades earlier." Two years before she died, Anthony said, "The world has never witnessed a greater revolution than in the sphere of woman during this fifty years". Part of the revolution, in Anthony's view, was in ways of thinking. In a speech in 1889, she noted that women had always been taught that their purpose was to serve men, but "Now, after 40 years of agitation, the idea is beginning to prevail that women were created for themselves, for their own happiness, and for the welfare of the world." Anthony was sure that women's suffrage would be achieved, but she also feared that people would forget how difficult it was to achieve it, as they were already forgetting the ordeals of the recent past:We shall someday be heeded, and when we shall have our amendment to the Constitution of the United States, everybody will think it was always so, just exactly as many young people think that all the privileges, all the freedom, all the enjoyments which woman now possesses always were hers. They have no idea of how every single inch of ground that she stands upon today has been gained by the hard work of some little handful of women of the past.Anthony's death was widely mourned. Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, said just before Anthony's death, "A few days ago someone said to me that every woman should stand with bared head before Susan B. Anthony. 'Yes,' I answered, 'and every man as well.' ... For ages he has been trying to carry the burden of life's responsibilities alone... Just now it is new and strange and men cannot comprehend what it would mean but the change is not far away." In her history of the women's suffrage movement, Eleanor Flexner wrote, "If Lucretia Mott typified the moral force of the movement, if Lucy Stone was its most gifted orator and Mrs. Stanton its most outstanding philosopher, Susan Anthony was its incomparable organizer, who gave it force and direction for half a century."
The Nineteenth Amendment, which prohibited the denial of suffrage because of sex, was colloquially known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. After it was ratified in 1920, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, whose character and policies were strongly influenced by Anthony, was transformed into the League of Women Voters, which is still an active force in U.S. politics. Anthony's papers are held in library collections of Harvard University and its Radcliffe Institute, Rutgers University, the Library of Congress, and Smith College. She is the author of a 6 volume work History of Woman Suffrage (1881).
== Commemoration ==
In 1950, Anthony was inducted into the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. A bust of her that was sculpted by Brenda Putnam was placed there in 1952. In 1973, Anthony was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. The first memorial to Anthony was established by African Americans. In 1907, a year after Anthony's death, a stained-glass window was installed at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church in Rochester that featured her portrait and the words "Failure is Impossible", a quote from her that had become a watchword for the women's suffrage movement. It was installed through the efforts of Hester C. Jeffrey, the president of the Susan B. Anthony Club, an organization of African American women in Rochester. Speaking at the window's dedication, Jeffrey said, "Miss Anthony had stood by the Negroes when it meant almost death to be a friend of the colored people." This church had a history of involvement in issues of social justice: in 1847, Frederick Douglass printed the first editions of The North Star, his abolitionist newspaper, in its basement. Anthony is commemorated along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott in the Portrait Monument sculpture by Adelaide Johnson at the United States Capitol, unveiled in 1921. Originally kept on display in the crypt of the US Capitol, the sculpture was moved to its current location and more prominently displayed in the rotunda in 1997. 
In 1922, sculptor Leila Usher donated a bas-relief of Susan B. Anthony to the National Woman's Party, which was installed at their headquarters near Washington, DC. Usher was also responsible for the creation of a similar bronze medallion donated to Bryn Mawr College in 1901.A sculpture by Ted Aub commemorating the introduction of Anthony to Elizabeth Cady Stanton by Amelia Bloomer on May 12, 1851, was unveiled In 1999. Called "When Anthony Met Stanton", it consists of life-size bronze statues of the three women near Van Cleef Lake in Seneca Falls, New York, where the introduction occurred.
In 2001, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, one of the world's largest, added a sculpture honoring Anthony and three other heroes of the twentieth century: Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Einstein, and Mahatma Gandhi. An installation artwork by Judy Chicago called The Dinner Party, first exhibited in 1979, features a place setting for Anthony. A bronze sculpture of a locked ballot box flanked by two pillars marks the place where Anthony voted in 1872 in defiance of laws that prohibited women from voting. Called the 1872 Monument, it was dedicated in August, 2009, on the 89th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment. Leading away from the 1872 Monument is the Susan B. Anthony Trail, which runs beside the 1872 Café, named for the year of Anthony's vote. Near the Susan B. Anthony Museum and House is the "Let's Have Tea" sculpture of Anthony and Frederick Douglass created by Pepsy Kettavong. On February 15, 2020, Google celebrated Anthony's 200th birthday with a Google Doodle. Anthony's home in Rochester is a National Historic Landmark called the National Susan B. Anthony Museum and House. The house of her birth in Adams, Massachusetts, and her childhood home in Battenville, New York, are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
In 2007, the new Frederick Douglass–Susan B. Anthony Memorial Bridge replaced the old Troup–Howell Bridge as the conveyor of expressway traffic on Interstate 490 through downtown Rochester. Since 1970, the Susan B. Anthony Award is given annually by the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women to honor "grassroots activists dedicated to improving the lives of women and girls in New York City." New York Radical Feminists, founded in 1969, was organized into small cells or "brigades" named after notable feminists of the past. The Stanton-Anthony Brigade was led by Anne Koedt and Shulamith Firestone. In 1971, Zsuzsanna Budapest founded the Susan B. Anthony Coven #1 – the first feminist, women-only, witches' coven. The Susan B. Anthony List is a non-profit organization that seeks to reduce and ultimately end abortion in the U.S. Susan B. Anthony Day is a commemorative holiday to celebrate the birth of Anthony and women's suffrage in the United States. The holiday is February 15—Anthony's birthday. In 2016, Lovely Warren, the mayor of Rochester, put a red, white and blue sign next to Anthony's grave on the day after Hillary Clinton obtained the nomination at the Democratic National Convention. The sign stated, "Dear Susan B., we thought you might like to know that for the first time in history, a woman is running for president representing a major party. 144 years ago, your illegal vote got you arrested. It took another 48 years for women to finally gain the right to vote. Thank you for paving the way." The city of Rochester put pictures of the message on Twitter and requested that residents go to Anthony's grave to sign it.
Category:Activist
Category:Female
Category:Caucasian-American