Welcome back to my blog on Women’s Rights. On today’s post, I am going to talk about an influential figure in the Women’s Rights movement, Susan B. Anthony. feel it is extremely important to look back on our past leaders to follow their example in the fight to further gender equality.
Susan B. Anthony was an extremely important figure in the fight for women’s right to vote. However, her first activism was in pursuit of the end of slavery. She was a very outspoken member of the group working towards abolition. She was even friends with William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. In 1856, she was the chief New York agent of the American Anti-slavery society and she was a part of creating the Woman’s National Loyal League.
Susan B. Anthony began her journey on the way to women’s right to vote after the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. This was the first convention in pursuit of women’s rights. All the women at this convention were extremely influential and important woman in history. However, not all are as famous as the leaders of the convention, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. While most believe Susan B. Anthony attended the convention, she in fact did not. She did however meet Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1851.
In 1852, Anthony created the Women’s New York Temperance Society which pushed her into women’s rights activism. Anthony’s most frequent form of activism for women’s suffrage was very passionate speeches delivered in public settings. She also shared her beliefs through the newspaper of the organization, American Equal Rights Association. She founded this association with Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In 1869, she organized her own women’s suffrage convention in D.C. and she created the National Woman Suffrage Association alongside Stanton. In 1872, she cast a vote in the presidential election but was arrested. She was a very outspoken activist and fought for what she felt was right. Unfortunately, Susan B. Anthony died fourteen years before the nineteenth amendment was passed, so she never truly saw the fruits of her labor. However, she died with a very powerful legacy and is now known as national hero for her efforts. I believe we should all follow in her footsteps and speak out when we believe that there is injustice in the world. I hope to one day to create a legacy that is even a tenth of what she left for gender equality and equal rights.
Alexis, as a third-wave feminist, do you often find yourself feeling like you have to live up the first and second-wave feminists, like Susan B. Anthony? In my women’s studies class, we discussed that it is often hard to relate the personal to the political, and in this era of consumerism, it is often so hard to not feel like dupes of the patriarchy. Do you have any advice on how we can use Anthony’s example, not as a comparison of her work to ours, but as inspiration and a plan for action?