Susan B. Anthony
When the U.S. chief marshal came to Susan B. Anthony’s door to arrest her for voting illegally in the presidential election of 1872, she refused to go quietly. Instead, she insisted that she and the other women who had voted with her be arrested like any criminals. She even requested to be handcuffed. For someone born at a time when women were supposed to be wives and mothers with no public voice outside the home, Anthony stepped out of that traditional role and became a major voice for the women’s suffrage movement.
Anthony’s first experience with social activism was in the antislavery and temperance movements. But in 1850, she read about the Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, and a year later, she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in Seneca Falls, New York. Women’s suffrage became her lifelong goal. Together, Stanton and Anthony formed a partnership that worked well: Stanton wrote effective speeches, articles, and letters, while Anthony traveled the country, attended conventions, and delivered Stanton’s speeches in support of women’s rights. Stanton said of Anthony, “I forged the thunderbolts; she fired them.”
Anthony also campaigned for women’s rights to hold their own property and earnings. She helped organize women’s labor groups to campaign for equal pay for equal work and better working conditions. In 1900, she persuaded the University of Rochester to admit women.
Although Anthony died in 1906—14 years before the 19th Amendment to the Constitution giving women the right to vote was passed—her work paved the way for the success of the suffrage movement. When the U.S. Mint honored Anthony in 1979 by putting her face on a dollar coin, she became the first American woman ever to appear on a circulating U.S. coin.