by Silva Payne

Created on: January 10, 2009   Last Updated: July 17, 2010

"Failure is impossible."

Susan Brownell Anthony was born in February 1820, the first surviving child of Daniel and Lucy Anthony, near Adams, Massachusetts. They were a Quaker family, although Susan's mother married into the religion. Over the next 12 years, Susan became the eldest of seven children. Her father Daniel was a cotton manufacturer who also ran a small school, where he and Susan's mother Lucy had met.

Daniel was also an abolitionist, and this fervent belief permeated through the children. Not only did Susan become one of the best known women's rights activists, but her sister Mary Stafford did too, and their brother Daniel Read Anthony was active in the anti-slavery movement in Kansas. Their mother Lucy also shared their zeal for women's rights, later attending the Rochester women's rights convention in 1848 and signing the Declaration of Sentiments there.

Susan could read and write when she was three years old. At six, when her family moved to New York, Susan went to a local district school but her father removed her after discovering that the teacher would not instruct the girl pupils in long division simply because of their gender. From then on Susan was home-schooled in a group taught by her father and also another teacher named Mary Perkins. The adults shared the same opinions on progressive womanhood and anti-slavery, and Susan was further exposed to ideas of equality for women. When she was 16, Susan collected petitions that opposed slavery, despite the so called 'gag' rule which prohibited petitions in the House of Representatives.

After being sent to a Quaker boarding school in Philadelphia aged 17, Susan unexpected had to return to her family after the "Panic of 1837" wiped out their financial security almost overnight. They were forced to put everything they owned up for auction and were only spared the ordeal of losing everything by an uncle who put in a bid for their most personal items at the last minute.

The economic depression that followed the Panic, saw the family move to another part of New York and Susan left home to take a teaching job, and later a Headmistress position in the female department of the Canajoharie Academy in 1846. After entering the world of wok, Susan was inspired to take up the fight for equal pay for women, as she earned around of that paid to her male counterparts.

When Susan was 29 she gave up teaching and moved to the family farm in Rochester, New York. Here she began to take part in temperance meetings

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