Susan B. Anthony

Susan Brownell Anthony was born in Massachusetts into a Quaker family that believed in equality and plain living. She worked as a teacher and became active in the temperance movement against alcohol and in the movement to abolish slavery. In 1851 she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the two became lifelong partners in reform: Stanton was the better writer, Anthony the tireless organizer. Anthony collected petitions, gave thousands of speeches, and traveled across the country by train and wagon. After the Civil War she helped found the National Woman Suffrage Association. In 1872 she voted in the presidential election in Rochester, New York, was arrested, and was fined one hundred dollars; she refused to pay. She also pressed for women's right to own property and keep their own wages. She never married. She died in 1906, fourteen years before the Nineteenth Amendment gave American women the vote; it was often called the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. In 1979 she became the first real woman pictured on a circulating U.S. coin.

Faith: Daughter of a liberal Quaker; she was educated at a Friends' boarding school. Source: Appletons' Cyclopaedia of American Biography (via Wikisource)