Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony was an American activist who fought for women's right to vote. She lived from 1820 to 1906. For more than 50 years, she traveled the country giving speeches, writing newspapers, and pushing lawmakers to change the rules. She did not live to see women win the vote, but the law that finally gave it to them is often called the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.

Anthony was born in Massachusetts and raised as a Quaker. Quakers believed men and women were equal in the eyes of God. That idea shaped her whole life. As a young woman, she worked as a teacher and noticed that male teachers were paid four times as much as she was for the same job. She decided this was wrong and started speaking up.

In 1851, Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton at an anti-slavery meeting. The two became close friends and partners. Stanton was a brilliant writer who stayed home to raise her children. Anthony was a tireless traveler with no children of her own. Stanton wrote the speeches. Anthony delivered them. Together, they led the women's rights movement in America for the next 50 years.

Anthony also worked to end slavery. She gave anti-slavery speeches across the North, sometimes facing angry crowds that threw eggs and rocks at her. After the Civil War, she was upset when new amendments gave Black men the right to vote but left out all women, both Black and white. She spent the rest of her life trying to change that.

In 1872, Anthony made her boldest move. She walked into a polling place in Rochester, New York, and voted in the presidential election. Two weeks later, she was arrested. At her trial, the judge would not let her speak in her own defense and ordered her to pay a $100 fine. She told him she would never pay it, and she never did.

Anthony kept fighting until her death in 1906. Her last public words were, "Failure is impossible." Fourteen years later, in 1920, the 19th Amendment was added to the Constitution. It gave women across the United States the right to vote.

In 1979, Anthony became the first real woman to appear on a U.S. coin, the Susan B. Anthony dollar. Some people did not know what to do with the coin because it looked too much like a quarter. The coin was a flop. Her fight was not.