Susan B. Anthony: a Woman for All Women

Susan B. Anthony: A Woman for All Women

Victoria L. Picott

HISTORY 114

A Woman for All Women

Susan Brownell Anthony was a radical leader of the women’s suffrage movement during the 19th century. Her determination and perseverance is one of the reasons women have the rights they do today.

Susan B. Anthony was born February 15, 1820 in Adams Massachusetts to Daniel and Lucy Anthony. Susan was the second born of eight children she was raised in a Quaker household her father, Daniel Anthony, was a stern man, a Quaker abolitionist and cotton manufacturer. He believed in guiding his children, not directing them. He did not allow his children to experience toys games and music as amusements he felt they were distractions from inner light and instead enforced self-discipline. From an early age Susan B. Anthony was taught that everyone should be treated equally. Her family stressed the importance of education for all and activism. Her parents role modeled these ideas by educating Susan at home when public education was unavailable to her because of her gender. Susan learned to read and write at the age of three l. These roots were influential as she lived her life fighting for the fair treatment of all citizens, particularly African Americans as an abolitionist and women as a suffragist.

Susan went to boarding school in Philadelphia. She went on to teach at a female academy boarding school The Kenyon School in upstate New York when she was fifteen years old until she was thirty. Then she returned to her family Home in Rochester New York. There she began her first public crusade on behalf of temperance.

This was one of the first expressions of feminism in the United States, It delt with the abuses of women and children who suffered from alcoholic husbands. In 1849 Susan gave her first public speech for the Daughters of Temperance, and then helped found the Woman’s State temperance Society of New York one of the first organizations of its time, though she was...