Born into a strict Quaker family on February 15, 1820 Susan Brownell Anthony learned to read by the age of three. In 1826 the Anthonys moved to Battenville, NY where Susan's male teacher refused to teach her long division because she was a girl. Her father Daniel Anthony believed that his daughters should have the right to an equal education. He set up a school at the Anthony homestead and hired Miss Mary Perkins to teach there. This new image of womanhood offered by Miss Perkins was a inspiration to Susan and her sisters.
Another defining moment in Miss Anthony's life came when at 12 she asked her Father why he had picked a gentleman named Elijah to be overseer of his cotton mill operation when a woman named Sally Ann seemed to know so much more about weaving. Her father replied that "It would never do to have a woman overseer in the mill." While Daniel Anthony's views on Abolition, Temperance, and equal educational opportunities for both sexes made sense to Susan this matter of management did not.
As a teenage schoolteacher Susan protested the inequity of wages between male and female teachers and went on from there to champion many causes including Temperance, Women's Property Rights and Abolition. By the 1850's she became a national leader and the most powerful organizers of the women's movement lecturing extensively throughout the United States and Europe. Her upper most objective - to pave the way for women's right to vote.
Having devoted nearly 70 years of her life to the advancement of women she died on March 13, 1906 shortly after her 86th birthday and fourteen years before the 19 Amendment was ratified giving women of the United States the right to vote.
Selected Susan B. Anthony Quotations
"[T]here never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers."
"Men their rights and nothing more; women their rights and nothing less."
"Independence is happiness."
"Failure is impossible."
"Suffrage is the pivotal right by which all other rights are protected."
"The right to vote for representatives is a primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce one to a state of helpless servitude."