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Susan B

Susan B. Anthony (15 February 1820-13 March 1906) was an American women's suffrage activist and social reformer.

Biography[]

Susan B. Anthony was born in Adams, Massachusetts in 1820, and she came from a Quaker family. The sister of Daniel Read Anthony, who fought for the Jayhawkers in Bleeding Kansas, Anthony was raised in a family of abolitionists and temperance activists. Anthony worked as a teacher at the Canajoharie Academy and operated her family farm before becoming increasingly active in the women's rights movement, living off of speaking fees for the rest of her life. In 1851, Anthony met and befriended Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and they founded the New York Women's State Temperance Society after Anthony was prevented from speaking at a temperance conference because she was female. During the American Civil War, Anthony oversaw the collection of 400,000 signatures for a petition to abolish slavery, and, after the war, she campaigned for equal rights for both women and African-Americans. In 1869, Anthony and Stanton cofounded the National Woman Suffrage Association, which merged with the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890. In 1872, Anthony was convicted of illegally voting in her hometown of Rochester, New York, but she was not punished for her "crime", and US Senator Aaron A. Sargent sympathized with her cause and proposed an amendment to the US Constitution that would allow women to vote; this amendment was eventually adopted as the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. While Anthony was initially reviled as a radical who sought to destroy the institution of marriage, she came to be widely respected by the end of her life, being invited to the White House by President William McKinley. She died in Rochester in 1906.

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