Feminist foresister Susan B. Anthony was born on this day -- February 15, 1820 -- in Adams, Massachusetts. Anthony is best known for her half century of work on women's suffrage, which included an arrest and conviction for the crime of voting while female in the 1872 presidential election. But she worked on many other issues involving women's equality, including married women's property rights. She was also a tireless activist for the abolishment of slavery.
The slogan of her short-lived feminist newspaper -- The Revolution -- was: “Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.”
Anthony refused to marry. She vowed that as long as men were considered by law and custom to be her political and social superiors, she could not and would not marry. And because she did not marry, she had more rights under the law than did her feminist sisters. As a single woman, she could sign contracts and book the hotel rooms for suffrage conferences and speaking engagements. Her married sisters had no such rights because the law regarded the wife and husband as one, and the one was the husband.
In an era when marital rape was sanctioned by law and custom and wives who ran away from abusive husbands were hunted down by the law and returned to their
While the anti choice feminists claim Anthony was one of them, the scholarly evidence does not support the claim. Moreover, in Anthony's day, abortion was a dangerous and life threatening procedure. Women had precious little information and no recourse to safe abortions. Women and doctors were prosecuted by the law even for the 'crime' of spreading information about birth control. The pro choice position did not exist in Anthony's day because the availability of effective birth control and safe abortions did not exist. Nevertheless, the pro life feminists continue to claim her as one of them and in 2006, purchased the Adams, Massachusetts home in which Anthony was born.
Susan B. Anthony died on March 13, 1906. That was 14 years, 5 months and five days before women's demand for the right to vote was finally granted with the passage of the 19th Amendment, aka, the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.
Despite the fact that Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husted Harper, went to great trouble to leave behind an extensively documented record of their historic struggle for women's citizenship rights, their lives and their efforts continue to be largely ignored by mainstream historians. (See: The History of Woman Suffrage, 4 vols., New York, 1884–1887).
The history of all humankind has taught that the consequence of an ignorance of one's history is a deep and profound disempowerment. Historians will not give women our rightful place in the history books until women are equally represented among the historians.
While I couldn't find an online trailer, the best video account of the lives of Anthony and Stanton I've seen is Ken Burns' Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony DVD
TGW Women's History Cafe Press shop and here too.
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