DOZ Leadership Lessons
SUSAN B
ANTHONY
Eturuvie Erebor
S
usan B Anthony is best known for
fighting for the rights of women to
vote. She was one of the key leaders in
the women’s suffrage movement of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Together with Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Susan Anthony founded the National
Women’s Suffrage Association in 1869. She is quoted
to have said concerning her fight for the rights of
women to vote, “it is my life, all that I live for.” In her
day, women were viewed and treated as second-
class citizens. They had less access to education and
opportunities for employment than men and when
they worked earned a quarter of what their male
colleagues earned and for the same job. When a
woman married her plight worsened as she gave up
more rights. Married women could not own property,
initiate a divorce or have custody of their children. A
man could write in his will that he wished a member
of his family to look after his children instead of
their mother! When a married woman worked, her
salary was paid directly to her husband. Without the
rights to vote, it meant that women would never be
able to get these unjust laws changed in their favour.
In 1860, Susan along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton
would pressure the New York State legislature to
pass the Married Women’s Property Law which
protected the rights of women to keep their earnings
and share custody of their children. But two years
later the law was terminated sending a distressing
DOZ Magazine | March 2019
warning to Susan that without the rights to vote, any
progress made was subject to change at the impulse
of male politicians. Susan once said, “Women, we
might as well be great Newfoundland dogs out baying
to the moon as to be petitioning for the passage of bills
without the power to vote.” She was not one to quit
easily and would continue her fight, enduring arrest
and verbal onslaught along the way. She did not like
speaking in public, but her passion for seeing women
liberated would cause her to stand on many stages
in her lifetime, turning her into an eloquent speaker
with time. She would continue to organise, agitate
and educate women to fight for their rights. She said
at one lecture, “the women of this nation must be
awakened to a sense of their degradation. Or at least
we who are awake must make an effort to awaken
those who are dead asleep.”
In 1897 the suffrage movement would succeed
in getting three states to grant women the right
to vote. This was a small victory but a victory
nonetheless. Come 1920 there would be the nineteen
amendments to the constitution which gave women
the right to vote, but Susan would not live to see
it having died in 1906. But in her honour, the
amendment was officially added to the constitution
on what would have been her 100 th birthday, August
20, 1920. In 1979 she received another posthumous
honour when the United States Mint issued the Susan
B. Anthony dollar as a coin with her image on it. Her
statue sits at the United States Capitol.
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