.ltSusan B. Anthony

1820-1906

A pioneer in the cause of women's rights and women's suffrage, Susan B. Anthony was seen as "the woman who changed the mind of a nation". In 1869  in America, the National Woman Suffrage Association was founded by Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. One year earlier, the first issue of Revolution, the suffrage newspaper edited by Anthony, optimistically stated: "We shall show that the ballot will secure for women equal place and equal wages in the world of work; that it will open to her the schools, colleges, professions and all the opportunities and advantages of life". Women were to wait over 50 years to win the vote.

In 1848 Anthony attended the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Two years later she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was to become a lifelong friend and collaborator. Also active in the campaign for the abolition of slavery, Anthony became friends with Ida B. Wells, the founder of the first black women's suffrage club. Personally against racism, Anthony, however, feared that women from southern American states might not support her organisation if black women were included. Wells argued that "although [Anthony] may have made gains for suffrage, she had also confirmed white women in their attitude of segregation." Anthony later took a public stand and  brought all human rights onto the societyÕs agenda. Susan B. Anthony tirelessly campaigned for the abolition of slavery, for equal pay for teachers , and for the Married Women's Property Act, passed in 1860. In 1904 Anthony and Carrie Catt, a fellow suffragist, founded the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Berlin.

"Of all the old prejudices that cling to the hem of the woman's garments and persistently impede her progress," Anthony wrote in 1897, "none holds faster than this. The idea that she owes service to a man instead of to herself, and that it is her highest duty to aid his development rather than her own, will be the last to die."

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