Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony: The Woman Who Would Not Wait

Born in 1820 into a Quaker family that believed in equality, Susan B. Anthony spent her life refusing the limits placed on women. She taught, then left the classroom to fight slavery, temperance, and the legal fiction that a wife was her husband's property. With Elizabeth Cady Stanton she built the organized women's rights movement, traveled thousands of miles by train and wagon, and was arrested in 1872 for the crime of voting.

She never married, never had children, and never stopped. She co-edited the multi-volume History of Woman Suffrage, commissioned her own authorized biography so the record would not be lost, and lived long enough to see four states grant women the vote. Fourteen years after her death the Nineteenth Amendment—often called the Susan B. Anthony Amendment—became law.

This biography traces the Quaker girl from Adams, Massachusetts, through the conventions, the bitter split in the movement, the courtroom, and the long last campaigns. It shows the private woman behind the public icon: her friendships, her finances, her stubbornness, and the price she paid for insisting that "failure is impossible."