by Sheree Zielke

Created on: May 13, 2007   Last Updated: May 16, 2007

Imagine if you will, just for a moment, what the world would be like today, if a woman couldn't vote, couldn't hold office, couldn't speak out in public, couldn't defend herself in a court of law, couldn't enter a profession, and had no legal rights to property, including her own children. Gives you pause, doesn't it? But that's the world a baby girl entered into on February 15, 1820.

Her name was Susan B. Anthony; the "B" stands for Brownell. Most school children today may know her as the lady who appears on a 1979 one dollar coin. But do they know that she devoted her life to the pursuit of equal rights in America?

Susan B. Anthony was a bright child born to Quaker parents, Daniel and Lucy Anthony, of Adams, Massachusetts. Luckily, for the young Anthony, her father was a forward-thinking man, who believed that girls should be educated, despite societal beliefs. He ensured she got her education, even to the point of denying her toys.

As a result, Miss Anthony was reading by the age of 3, and by the age of 19, she was teaching school. By the age of 26, she was the headmistress of the girls' programs of Canajoharie Academy, for which she received the grand sum of $110 per year. (www.susanbanthonyhouse.org/biography.shtml)

The amount was less than a quarter of what male teachers were receiving at the time. The inequity acted as the stimuli necessary to set Anthony on the road to women's suffrage. After a decade of teaching, Anthony quit and focused all her attention on the pursuit of equal rights; not just for women, but for black slaves, as well.

In 1849, in spite of the fact that women had no legal right to speak in public, she was giving her very first speech to the Daughters of Temperance. Her interest in seeing a ban on alcohol was motivated by the high incidents of abuse of women and children, by the drunken men in their lives. (www.history.rochester.edu/class/sba/third.html)

In 1851, Miss Anthony formed an alliance with Elizabeth Cody Stanton, a mother of four, who had begun her own quest for women's equality.
In 1853, the pair founded the "Women's State Temperance Society of New York." (www.susanbanthonyhouse.org/biography.shtml)

During this time, a failed petition attempt imploring the American government for stronger liquor laws, and signed by non-people (women and children), helped Anthony determine that to succeed in obtaining rights for women, women would first need the right to vote.

But there were other issues that irked her, and in 1854, she began to

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