How Did Susan B. Anthony Work?

The amendment was named the Anthony Amendment in her honor, and years later, Anthony's stern image found a home on the United States dollar coin, replacing President Dwight Eisenhower. So how in one century did the woman who claimed failure is impossible go from espousing revolutionary ideas to becoming an honoree on US currency. Born in Adams, Massachusetts, on February fifteenth of eighteen twenty, Anthony spent most of her childhood in New York. Her father's Quaker upbringing I pressed upon

her the belief that everyone is equal under God. She worked as a teacher in upstate New York during her twenties before returning home, where she became involved in the abolition movement, working alongside important figures like William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglas. Along with abolishing slavery, Anthony also sought to rid the country of alcohol. She and her family

were active in the temperance movement. Oh When she was denied the chance to speak at a Temperance meeting because she was a woman, she partnered with Elizabeth Catty Stanton and founded the Women's New York State Temperance Society in eighteen fifty three. She had met Stanton, who had become a lifelong friend and collaborator, at an anti slavery conference the previous year. At that point, Stanton had already given her famed Declaration of Sentiments speech at the Seneca Falls

Convention in eighteen forty eight. Anthony continued to be active in both movements. For example, during the Civil War, she helped collect more than three hundred thousand signatures on petitions

to abolish slavery with the Constitutional Amendment. After the war, Anthony and Stanton founded the American Equal Rights Association in eighteen sixty six, an organization initially aiming to secure equal rights and voting rights for all black and white men and women in America, but the Reconstruction era was a sticky political time, there were fissures in the suffrage movement, with disagreement among activists over whether to focus on the

easier goal of attaining black men's rights first and then working on getting women the vote. Anthony's biographer, a contemporary journalist by the name of Ida Husted Harper, wrote that Anthony said she would sooner cut off her right arm before she would ever work for or demand the ballot for the black man and not the woman. The split between the suffrage movement was deep, as are the roots

of racism in America. Anthony and Stanton chose to oppose the Fifteenth Amendment, which eventually did give black men the right to vote in eighteen seventy. Other activists like Douglas and Lucy Stone decried their decision, and the American Equal Rights Association disbanded. In eighteen sixty nine, Anthony and Stanton formed the more radical National Woman Suffrage Association, and Lucy

Stone started rival group, the American Woman Suffrage Association. A Stone in her group supported the fifteenth Amendment as a step in the right direction and focused on a state by state strategy to gain voting rights for women. By contrast, Anthony and Stanton's group sought voting and other rights for women,

and a federal constitutional amendment to ensure them. Sort of a side note, Anthony was also an adopter of reform dress, which consisted of wearing bloomers and a shorter dress instead of the cumbersome woman's ensemble of the period, which could weigh up to twenty five pounds that's about eleven kilos. She even cut her hair short, but after criticism, Anthony determined that the dress distracted from the message and gave

it up. Although she never had the opportunity to vote legally, Anthony cast a ballot in the eighteen seventy two presidential election of voting for Ulysses S. Grant. For this criminal act, she was arrested, tried, and fined one hundred dollars. She never paid the fine. Anthony died in nineteen oh six,

fourteen years before the amendment she wanted was ratified. Before it, amendments allowing for income tax the sixteenth of the Popular Election of Senators the seventeenth and prohibition the eighteenth were added to the Constitution. Although several states had already legalized women's suffrage, on a national level, women gained the right to vote with the Nineteenth Amendments, passing on August eighteenth

of nineteen twenty. It reads, the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this Article by pro legislation. Of course, merely having the law in place didn't make accessing that right easy for everyone.

Native Americans weren't recognized as US citizens with voting access until the Snyder Act of nineteen twenty four, and all kinds of legal and social restrictions in the Jim Crow South excluded black women and men from the polls until the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five. But back to Anthony for her contributions to the passage of what became the Nineteenth Amendment. Anthony was the first non mythical

woman to appear on a US coin. Figures like Miss Columbia and Lady Liberty had appeared on coins in the eighteen hundreds, and First Lady Martha Washington appeared on paper notes around the same time, but the Susan B. Anthony dollar was issued by the United States Mint in nineteen seventy nine to replace the Eisenhower Dollar. At that time, the second wave of the women's movement was underway and the academic discipline of women's studies was in its infancy.

A Choosing Anthony as a founding figure for the movement and for the dollar coin emerged as a logical choice because she had been so committed to suffrage for so long. However, with a modest marketing campaign surrounding its launch and the coins similarity in size to a quarter, her dollar was considered a flop within months, which was probably more related to the coin itself than to Anthony's image being on it. A suffragist, abolitionist, Tito Toller, and renegade, Anthony never married

or had children. And in case you're wondering, the bee in Susan B. Anthony is for Brownell. There was a bit of a fad from middle initials during her youth, and she adopted the bee in honor of the aunt she had been named after, whose married name was Susan Brownell. Today's episode is based on the article Susan B. Anthony, Suffragist, Abolitionist and Renegade on hostuffworks dot Com, written by Kerry Whitney. Brainstuff is production by Heart Radio in partnership with how

stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Former podcasts from my heart Radio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.