American Minute: Susan B. Anthony

March 13, 1906

Susan B. Anthony, who died MARCH 13, 1906, is depicted on a U.S. dollar coin, and on a 3-cent stamp.

Her statue is in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, together with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.

Susan B. Anthony was raised a Quaker. Her father owned a cotton mill and refused to buy cotton from farmers who owned slaves.

Susan B. Anthony’s religious upbringing instilled in her the concept that every one is equal before God and motivated her to crusade for freedom for slaves.

After the Civil War, Susan B. Anthony worked hard for the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

Opposing liquor, drunkenness and abortion, Susan encountered mobs, armed threats, objects thrown at her, and was hung in effigy.

Her efforts helped bring about the 18th Amendment (Prohibition), ratified in 1919.

She succeeded in having women admitted to the University of Rochester and campaigned for a woman’s right to vote.

Susan B. Anthony was arrested for voting in the 1872 Presidential Election, saying she “positively voted the Republican ticket-straight.”

Fourteen years after her death, women won the right to vote with the 19th Amendment, ratified in 1920.

After learning her sister-in-law had had an abortion, Susan B. Anthony wrote in her diary:

She will rue the day she forces nature.

Susan B. Anthony was quoted in The Revolution, July 1869:

I deplore the horrible crime of child-murder …

No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed.

It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death;

But oh! Thrice guilty is he who … drove her to the desperation which impels her to the crime.

Public relations portrait of Susan B. Anthony as used in the History of Woman Suffrage by Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Volume I, published in 1881. (Wikipedia Image)

In a speech she gave repeatedly in the 1870s, Susan B. Anthony stated:

The prosecutions on our courts for breach of promise, divorce, adultery, bigamy, seduction, rape;

the newspaper reports every day of every year of scandals and outrages, of wife murders and paramour shooting, of abortions and infanticides,

are perpetual reminders of men’s incapacity to cope successfully with this monster evil of society.

In 1889, Susan B. Anthony wrote to Frances Willard, who was the national president of Woman’s Christian Temperance Union:

Sweeter even than to have had the joy of caring for children of my own has it been to me to help bring about a better state of things for mothers generally, so that their unborn little ones could not be willed away from them.

Frances Willard, whose family changed from Congregational Christian to Methodist, wrote in A White Life for Two (Chicago:  Women’s Temperance Publishing Association, 1890):

God sets male and female side by side throughout his realm of law.

An earlier woman leader was Emma Willard (1787-1870), who was an American educator and historian.

She was a leader in the movement to provide higher education among women. Emma Willard was born in Berlin, Connecticut, and began teaching at the age of sixteen.

She was married to John Willard in 1809 and with his help she established a girl’s boarding school and later a girl’s seminary at Middleton, Vermont.

The seminary was moved to New York and became the Emma Willard School. She wrote many successful books and later built a school for women in Athens, Greece.

In 1843, Emma Willard wrote:

The government of the United States is acknowledged by the wise and good of other nations, to be the most free, impartial, and righteous government of the world;

but all agree, that for such a government to be sustained for many years, the principles of truth and righteousness, taught in the Holy Scriptures, must be practiced.

The rulers must govern in the fear of God, and the people obey the laws.

In commenting on the United States, Emma Willard stated:

In observing the United States, there is much to convince us, that an Almighty, Overruling Providence, designed from the first, to place here a great, united people.

In 1857, Emma Willard published a book for children titled, Morals for the Young:  or, Good Principles Instilling Wisdom, in which she wrote:

My Dear Children and Youth:-

Since, then, wisdom teaches us to rate everything at its just value, it is wise to seek the favor and fear the frown of God, rather than to seek the favor, and fear the frown of men …

Look upon a Savior’s cross … ask pardon … and the Holy Spirit’s guidance … receive the Christian’s armor.