Susan B. Anthony Day

Emree P. Downey

Red & Black Diversity Staff Writer

Susan Brownell Anthony was an American social reformer and women’s rights activist. She is very well-known for her pivotal role in the women’s suffrage movement, a nearly decade-long fight to win the right for women to vote. Susan B. Anthony also served as an American anti-slavery agent where she arranged meetings, gave public orations, and hung posters. Though Anthony was faced with much opposition and hostility from those who did not agree with her message, she never quit.

Susan B. Anthony’s birthday, Feb. 15, was dubbed a commemorative state holiday by Representative Carolyn Bosher Maloney in 2011. Though the holiday is only observed by a handful of states, the gist is well understood across the country.

Anthony was raised as a Quaker, and they believed that everyone was equal under God. This is the idea that guided her throughout life and many of her brothers and sisters did as well; many of them became activists for justice and emancipation for slaves in the 1800s. She was fortunate enough to become acquainted with several renowned persons, including Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. These rendezvous are what inspired her to become an abolitionist activist, even though it was very unorthodox for women of this time period to give speeches in public, especially those as passionate as hers.

It was not until 1848 when a group of women held the famous Seneca Falls Convention in New York and officially began the Suffrage Movement. Oddly enough, Anthony did not even attend this convention, however she did become good friends with a fellow women’s suffragist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. These two women would work alongside one another for the next fifty years and fight for women’s rights. They even risked being arrested for publicly sharing their ideas. Anthony and Stanton even cofounded the American Equal Rights Association in 1866.

Susan B. Anthony was a leader, she was good at strategy and organizing. This along with sheer perseverance were catalysts for her idea of equal rights for all.

“Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.” – Susan Browell Anthony.

Courtesy Erin Jones Susan B. Anthony during a suffrage protest

Courtesy Bettman Archive