CHAPTER 3

Elizabeth and Susan

Susan B. Anthony was born in Massachusetts on February 15, 1820. Her family was Quaker, part of a religious movement that believes in peace, justice, and equality.

Quakers also supported education for girls. Susan’s father owned a mill and started a school for the girls and women who worked there. Susan herself started teaching part-time in her teens. Later she supported herself as a teacher. Although she had suitors, Susan never married. She once said, “I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man’s housekeeper.”

One day in 1851, Susan visited Seneca Falls with her friend Amelia Bloomer. Amelia introduced Susan to Elizabeth. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship that changed history.

Bloomers

In the nineteenth century, a woman’s clothes were designed to give her an hourglass shape with a tiny waist. Women wore stiff, tight-fitting undergarments called corsets. Corsets made it hard to breathe!

Some women began to wear loose pants under a short dress. The pants were called bloomers, after Amelia, who started the look. Although bloomers didn’t really catch on, over time women’s fashion did “loosen up.”

As the women’s rights movement grew in the 1850s, Susan and Elizabeth became its leaders. They made a great team.

Elizabeth had seven children and couldn’t travel easily. Susan could—and did. Susan once said, “When she forged the firebolts, I fired them.” In other words, Elizabeth wrote the speeches, and Susan gave them.

And Susan certainly gave lots of speeches! In the first five months of 1855 alone, she visited fifty-four counties in New York State. Susan braved cold, snow, and bad roads.

One newspaper editor accused Susan of trying to “poison the morals” of girls. Even some women were against suffrage. One said Susan had turned her back on her true role in life: being a wife and mother.

Sojourner Truth

In addition to speaking out for women’s rights, Susan gave speeches about the need to end slavery. Other women, including African American leader and former slave Sojourner Truth, were also active in both causes. In 1851, Sojourner spoke at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention. Her powerful words were unforgettable.

She declared, “I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well. And ain’t I a woman?” She was saying that women were the equals of men.

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president. By this time, one issue was on everyone’s minds. And it wasn’t women’s right to vote.

Slavery was about to break America apart.