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Suffragist Susan B. Anthony influenced by childhood Quaker roots in Adams

The Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum in Adams, Massachusetts .
Susan B Anthony Birthplace Museum, Adams Historical Society
/
Submitted
The Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum in Adams, Massachusetts.

Susan B. Anthony, who was born in Adams, Massachusetts, devoted her life to fighting for a woman's right to vote. The Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum is celebrating what would have been her 205th birthday this month. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820.

Anthony was the second oldest of seven children. She lived in Adams until age 6, where she and her family were part of the Quaker community.

Author Jeanne Gehret, who wrote "Susan B. Anthony And Justice For All," said Anthony's Quaker childhood in the Berkshires influenced her activism.

"Susan was predisposed, by being a Quaker, to be thinking about the rights of everyone, everywhere," Gehret said,

Martin Loughman, a docent at the Birthplace Museum said, "The Quakers were very encouraging of women doing things like public speaking or getting an education equal to that of men."

He said Anthony got involved with many different social reforms to try and improve people's lives.

"Like the abolition of slavery, the temperance movement to try and reduce alcohol abuse," Loughman said. "And... the death penalty and how that was a violation of human rights."

But she was most well-known for her work in the women's suffrage movement.

In 1872, she and more than a dozen other women, including some of her sisters, marched down Main Street in Rochester, New York to register to vote. They entered a barber shop, which was the office for voter registration, and told the men in charge they wanted to register.

"They met with some objections. At which point, Susan pulled out the Constitution and read it to them and overcame their objections," Gehret said.

A few days later, on November 5, 1872, Anthony voted for president. Ulysses S. Grant was re-elected to a second term that year.

According to the National Archives Anthony was "arrested, indicted, tried, and convicted for voting illegally."

She was also fined $100, but refused to pay it because she hoped to bring the issue before the Supreme Court. That didn't happen.

Decades later, in 1920, the 19th amendment gave women the right to vote. Anthony, who died in 1906, didn't live to see it.

Nancy Eve Cohen is a former NEPM senior reporter whose investigative reporting has been recognized with an Edward R. Murrow Regional Award for Hard News, along with awards for features and spot news from the Public Media Journalists Association (PMJA), American Women in Radio & Television and the Society of Professional Journalists.

She has reported on repatriation to Native nations, criminal justice for survivors of child sexual abuse, linguistic and digital barriers to employment, fatal police shootings and efforts to address climate change and protect the environment. She has done extensive reporting on the EPA's Superfund cleanup of the Housatonic River.

Previously, she served as an editor at NPR in Washington D.C., as well as the managing editor of the Northeast Environmental Hub, a collaboration of public radio stations in New York and New England.

Before working in radio, she produced environmental public television documentaries. As part of a camera crew, she also recorded sound for network television news with assignments in Russia, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba and in Sarajevo during the war in Bosnia.
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