Born into a Quaker family with strong reformist convictions, Anthony devoted her life to abolition and women's rights. She co-founded the National Woman Suffrage Association and was arrested in 1872 for illegally voting, a deliberate act of civil disobedience that helped galvanize the decades-long campaign that eventually produced the 19th Amendment, ratified fourteen years after her death.
Susan Brownell Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, in Adams, Massachusetts, into a Quaker household that valued education and social reform equally for sons and daughters. That upbringing shaped a woman who would spend nearly fifty years traveling the country, giving as many as 75-100 speeches a year, demanding the vote for women.
Her partnership with Elizabeth Cady Stanton became the engine of the suffrage movement; together they founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 and later co-authored the multi-volume History of Woman Suffrage. Anthony's method was relentless and practical: petitions, lecture tours, and legal challenges.
In November 1872, she voted in the presidential election in Rochester, New York, knowing it was illegal for women to do so. She was arrested, tried, and fined $100, which she refused to pay, using the trial as a public platform. She died in 1906, fourteen years before the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, granting American women the right to vote — a victory she had spent her life engineering but never lived to see.