Thomas Swiatek
Mr. Sciamanna
History 202
10 February 2015
The Life of Susan B. Anthony When she quit teaching in 1849 to run her father's farm, Anthony Susan had already moved hesitantly into the arena of women's reform. She delivered her first speech to a meeting of the Daughters of Temperance. At home, however, her family introduced her to their new friends including Frederick Douglass, Isaac and Amy Post, and others who formed the core of Rochester's antislavery and women's rights radicals. These members of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society and participants in the women's rights convention at Rochester in 1848 conducted their private, religious, and political lives by a code of sexual equality that presented Anthony with unimagined choices for her own life. In 1851 Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and over the next year the two women discovered the partnership they could forge. Their ideas were converging. In 1852 Anthony and Stanton founded the Women's New York State Temperance Society, which, even in its name, claimed equality with the leading male society and featured women's right to vote on the temperance question and to divorce drunken husbands. Beginning as an agent for this society, Anthony became a full-time reformer. Through the 1850s Anthony and Stanton made New York State the nation's showpiece of women's rights agitation. Through their New York State Woman's Rights Committee, presented the legislature with demands for suffrage, married women's property rights, mothers' custody rights, liberalized divorce laws, and rights associated with specific jobs performed by women. Susan B Anthony not only wanted women the right to vote but also supported women’s labor organizations and for womens right to own property. At this time, married women could not be in possession of their own earnings, so she sought to change this. The “purse” became a symbol for the emancipation of women. Anthony believed strongly in her cause and petitioned for women’s rights. She published “The Revolution” from 1868-1870, which was a weekly paper about the women’s suffrage movement. The publication’s motto was, “Men their rights and nothing more, women their rights and nothing less.” Between 1870 and 1880 she lectured in all the northern and several of the southern states more than one hundred