Women’s History Month: Susan B. Anthony a crusader for women’s rights

In her long life, Susan B. Anthony was a crusader for temperance, a fighter for the abolition of slavery, a Quaker supporter of the Union cause in the Civil War, and the nation’s most outspoken advocate of women’s rights and suffrage.

She was also, during her teaching career in New York state, a trade union member.

Anthony’s 13-year teaching career brought her to New Rochelle, Centre Falls, Canajoharie and Rochester, where she finished in 1852 with a two-year stint as a substitute teacher in the public schools.

By then, the 32-year-old Anthony had been converted to the feminist cause; she made her first stand in support of the right of women to speak at public gatherings. She attended the Elmira convention of the seven-year-old New York State Teachers Association (NYSTA) and, according to biographer Katherine Anthony, found “three-quarters of the audience dumb and silent women.” She, herself, could not summon up the courage to say anything.

The following year, the teachers’ convention was held in Rochester and Anthony again attended. When the convention took up the question, “Why the professions of teacher is not respected as that of lawyer, doctor or minister,” she asked for the right to speak.

The assembled schoolmasters, chaired by a West Point professor of mathematics in full-dress uniform, debated for half an hour whether to allow a woman’s voice to be heard. By a narrow margin, the schoolmasters voted to hear her out. Anthony remained on her feet during the debate, fearing that she would lose her chance to speak if she sat down. Her speech was a model of brevity.

“It seems to me,” she said, “you fail to comprehend the cause of the disrespect of which you complain. Do you not see that so long as society says woman has not brains enough to be a doctor, lawyer or minister, but plenty to be a teacher, every man of you who condescends to teach tacitly admits before all Israel and the sun that he has no more brains than a woman?”

The following day, the convention passed a resolution, authored by Anthony and fellow Rochester delegate Clarissa Northrop, recognizing the right of women teachers to share in the deliberations of the body. Over the next six years, NYSTA opened more doors to women, allowing them to serve on all committees, on the editorial board of the organization’s publication and to run for any office. In 1856, Anthony ran as an independent candidate for NYSTA president, but received only two votes.

In 1869, as editor of Revolution, the organ of the American Equal Rights Society, Anthony published accounts of the hardships of working women and reported on strikes and union organizing efforts. A group calling itself the Working Women’s Association met once a week at the offices of the paper.

Anthony advocated the establishment of women’s unions, as the predominant craft unions of the time systematically excluded women. But she understood the value of solidarity in the union ranks.

In the early 1880s, Terence Powderly, the labor pioneer, initiated Anthony into the Knights of Labor. Anthony maintained her interest in the growing labor movement and, when the American Federation of Labor supplanted the Knights as the major American labor organization, she took her equal rights message there.

At the 1900 convention of the International Bricklayers and Masons, she said: “Your own interest demands that you should seek to make women your political equals, for then, instead of being, as now, a dead weight to drag down all working men, a stumbling block in their path, a hindrance to their efforts to secure better wages and more favorable legislation, the working woman would be an added strength politically, industrially, morally.”

A month earlier, the AFL convention had overwhelmingly voted support for the campaign for a woman’s suffrage amendment.

Anthony died in 1906 at the age of 86 without seeing the passage of the woman’s vote amendment. That came about Aug. 26, 1920, with the adoption of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

— Antonio Ramirez

(Antonio Ramirez is the editor of the Labor History News Service.)