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Who Worked for Sixty Years to Secure Rights for Women

Young Susan vigorously attacked, with her broom, the cobweb in the corner of the schoolroom ceiling. It was a stubborn cobweb and Susan had to step upon the teacher’s desk to reach it. No girl trained by so good a housekeeper as Susan’s mother could be happy in the same room with a cobweb.

“Deborah will be pleased to have the room clean,” thought Susan. However, Deborah, her Quaker teacher, was not pleased. Susan’s heavy shoes had broken the desk hinges, and the girl who had tried to do well was severely scolded.

It was often very much like this in Susan B. Anthony’s later life. When she tried her hardest to brush away the cobwebs that kept the world from seeing that women did not have the same rights as men, she was jeered and scorned. Nevertheless, she kept on wielding her broom, the broom she used being her clever tongue. This little Quaker girl grew up to be an interesting and eloquent lecturer, who never lost an opportunity to speak a good word for her fellow-women.

Susan Brownell Anthony was born February 15, 1820, in Adams, Massachusetts, in the midst of the Berkshire Hills. She was the second of eight children. Every night, as a little girl, she used to watch the sun go down behind “Old Greylock.” She came to love the great mountain, and all her life she liked to think of its rugged strength.

Mrs. Anthony was a very busy woman. In addition to caring for her lively little children she also cooked and washed for a number of factory hands. However, she found time to read good books and to be interested in all her children’s doings. Susan’s father was a Quaker, a man much liked and respected.

At an early age little Susan learned to be a good cook and housekeeper, like her mother. Once, when Mrs. Anthony was ill, twelve-year-old Susan with the help of her two sisters, ten and fourteen years of age, did all the household tasks, including packing the lunch boxes for the factory hands. Susan was so anxious that everything should be done exactly right that she and her sisters carried samples of the food to their mother for her approval.

At three years of age Susan, who was very bright and quick, learned her letters and also some words, while on a visit at her grandmother’s. When she was a little older she attended a district school, and then a private school conducted in the Anthony home. Later, she joined her sister at a boarding school near Philadelphia, where she studied for a year.

Susan began to teach in a district school when she was seventeen years old. She was boarded in turn at the homes of her pupils, being paid in addition only one dollar and a half a week. Susan was a very successful teacher, and often she grew indignant to see that men who did not do their work so well as she received four times as much pay. Equal pay for equal work was one of the rights that she began to demand for her fellow-women from that time on.

When Susan’s father failed in business, she saw his creditors take all of her mother’s personal things. Susan was enraged with the injustice of it and declared that there should be a law to make a wife’s belongings her own.

In 1851 Miss Anthony made a trip to Seneca Falls, New York, to urge the admission of girls to the People’s College then being founded. There she met Miss Lucy Stone and had an opportunity to become well acquainted with her and also with Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whom she had met a few months before.

Mrs. Stanton and Miss Stone believed that women should have a share in making the laws of the land, and Miss Anthony soon became their most ardent co-worker. Twenty-five years later, Miss Anthony drafted the federal suffrage amendment. However, it was forty-five years from the time that the amendment was drafted until it became a part of our Constitution.

Susan B. Anthony was one of the greatest friends that women have ever had. When she was born there were only three things that a girl who wanted to earn her living could do: be a millhand, a servant, or a teacher. Before the close of Miss Anthony’s life, a girl might fit herself to be a doctor, a lawyer, a business woman, or, in fact, almost anything that she chose.

When Miss Anthony was a young girl, the doors of nearly all colleges were closed to women. The girl who dared to ask for as much education as was given to her brother was considered a great oddity. However, Miss Anthony lived to see girls admitted to college quite as a matter of course.

Susan B. Anthony found a world where a married woman could not do what she liked with the property that she owned. Neither could she do as she wished with the money that she had earned or received as a gift. She could not even take charge of her own children if anyone objected. Miss Anthony left a world where women’s rights in all these matters were considered and where in four states women could help to make the laws. The Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the vote, came later.

Miss Anthony devoted all of her time to public speaking. She traveled from coast to coast, always making the most of every opportunity to speak in behalf of the various reforms to which she devoted over sixty years of her life. Sometimes she pleaded for the freedom of the slaves, sometimes for temperance, but always for her favorite cause—rights for women.

Susan B. Anthony kept on pleading for women, no matter how much people laughed at her. Gradually, the world began to see some reason in what she said. To-day, all women who cast their vote, control their property, and send their daughters to college, can thank the determined Quaker girl who had such a large share in giving women their rights.