Susan B. Anthony was a champion for women’s rights in America. When she was a child, her Quaker parents wanted to send her to school, but when the teacher refused to teach girls long division, her family hired a private tutor to teach her and other girls. She grew up in a family that believed in education for girls.
Later in life, she became a teacher in Rochester and demanded equal pay for equal work. At the time, Men were paid $10 a week but she was only offered $2 a week. She found a school that would pay her the same as her male counterparts and became the first educational worker in Rochester to receive equal pay.
Anthony met Elizabeth Stanton in Seneca Falls. Stanton wrote the Woman’s Rights Convention, so the two joined forces. Anthony had the poise and the grand vision for equal rights for women and Stanton had an excellent way with words. Stanton would write Anthony’s speeches and advise on what needed to be done. Stanton had seven children but Anthony never married. Anthony would go down to Seneca Falls to help Stanton out with housework while Stanton wrote speeches for Anthony.
In 1872, Anthony registered to vote by virtue of being an American citizen and voted by virtue of being a registered voter. She was arrested in her house in Rochester and thrown in jail – charged for voting illegally because she was a woman. He lawyer posted her $1,000 bail against her will. The village court convicted her and made her pay a fine of $100, which was never enforced because they didn’t want the case to escalate to the Supreme Court.
She kept fighting for women’s rights and spoke in every session of congress until she died. Both her snd Stanton died in the 1900s; neither of them lived to see the nineteenth amendment finally allowing women to vote in 1920.
