Susan B. Anthony
From Philosopedia
Anthony, Susan Brownell (15 February 1820 - 13 March 1906)
A major feminist, Anthony is author of History of Woman Suffrage (1881—1902). With Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she secured the first laws in New York guaranteeing women’s rights over their children and control of property and wages. She once called marriage an institution of “legalized prostitution,” and she actively supported the abolitionist movement.
Chided by a prominent male abolitionist that “you are not married; you have no business discussing marriage,” she retorted, “and you are not a slave. Suppose you quit lecturing on slavery.”
Many hold that Susan, who met the beautiful Anna Dickinson during her anti-slavery work, developed a close and probably a sexual relationship with her.
Another of her close friends, Amelia Bloomer, supplied her with a kind of puritanical garment, a kind of pants that then came to be called “bloomers.”
An agnostic, Anthony was associated with various liberal religious causes and was a friend of Robert G. Ingersoll. In the presidential election of 1872, she was fined $100 for casting a vote, and she continued her efforts for women’s suffrage until her death.
Although nominally a Quaker, Anthony sometimes attended Unitarian churches both in Rochester, New York, and in San Francisco. The Bible, she complained is a “ ‘He-book’ from beginning to end. It has a He-God, a He-Christ, He-angels. Woman has no glory anywhere in the pages of the Bible. Jesus said to his own mother: ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?’ ” Anthony further depicted her freethinking by observing,
- Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.
- They never seem to think we have any feelings to be hurt when we have to sit under their reiteration of orthodox cant and dogma. The boot is all on one foot with the dear religious bigots.
Traveling home from a National Suffrage Convention in Baltimore, Anthony fell ill and died of pneumonia three weeks later at her home in Rochester. At that convention, she had said,
- The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God. I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do to their fellows, because it always coincides with their own desires.
Aware that she was dying, she bequeathed her total estate to the suffrage movement. To her sister, she said in her final days,
- To think that I have had more than sixty years of hard struggle for a little liberty, and then to die without it seems so cruel.”
It took another thirteen years before the 19th Amendment was passed to guarantee women the right to vote. She was buried at Mt. Hope Cemetery, Rochester, New York, the epitaph reading, “Liberty, Humanity, Justice, Equality.”
What Anthony never could have guessed is that she would be the first woman ever to appear depicted on United States currency.
{BDF; CE; EG; FFRF; JM; EU, Gordon Stein; PUT; RAT; RE; TRI; U; UU; WWS}
