Thoroughly Modern Women

Susan B. Anthony

Fighting for women’s rights in America

1820-1906

Susan was born into a family of Quaker activists, and it was after she was banned from speaking at a temperance convention on account of her sex that Anthony decided to focus her efforts instead on women’s rights. She started a women’s property rights petition, but when she presented it to the State Senate Judiciary Committee, she received a sarcastic response that men are in fact the oppressed sex as they have to give up their carriage seats to women. The campaign finally achieved success in 1860, when the Married Women’s Property Act was passed. In 1866, she created the American Equal Rights Association, which would campaign for both African American and white women’s voting rights. The association split over disputes as to whether the two causes should be fought together. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, which controversially campaigned against the 14th and 15th Amendments, which would give voting rights to African American men but not women, black or white. In 1872, she was arrested for attempting to vote in the presidential election. She lost her trial and was fined $100, which she never paid. By the 1880s, Anthony had become a celebrity and a leading political figure in the USA, but it was