Questions to ask Susan B. Anthony

Who she was

Susan Brownell Anthony was born on 15 February 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts, into a Quaker family that believed women and men were equal before God. She taught school for about fifteen years, then worked for the temperance and anti-slavery movements. In 1851 Amelia Bloomer introduced her to Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Seneca Falls, New York; Stanton wrote the speeches and Anthony organised, travelled and raised money. She never married. She died in Rochester on 13 March 1906, fourteen years before the Nineteenth Amendment, often called the Anthony Amendment, gave women the vote.

The vote and the trial, step by step

Most interview projects come back to these seven months. Know the dates before you write questions.

Questions about growing up and first causes

• 1. How did being raised a Quaker shape what you thought women could do?
• 2. As a teacher you were paid a fraction of what men earned. When did you notice?
• 3. In 1852 you were told women at a temperance meeting in Albany were there to listen, not speak. What did you do next?
• 4. What did you do as an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society?

What the record says: her father, Daniel Anthony, ran a cotton mill and hosted reformers at the family farm near Rochester. Ida Husted Harper's authorised Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (vol. 1, 1898) tells the Albany story: she walked out and helped found the Woman's State Temperance Society. From 1856 she organised anti-slavery meetings across New York State, sometimes facing mobs.

Questions about the partnership with Stanton

• 5. Stanton once said that she forged the thunderbolts and you fired them. Is that how you divided the work?
• 6. You were not at Seneca Falls in 1848. When did you come round to the demand for the vote?
• 7. Stanton had seven children. How did you help her find time to write?
• 8. In 1863 you gathered 400,000 signatures for an amendment to end slavery. How?
• 9. Your newspaper The Revolution lost money. Was it worth it?

What the record says: the Women's Loyal National League, founded by Anthony and Stanton in 1863, sent Congress petitions with about 400,000 signatures supporting what became the Thirteenth Amendment. The Revolution ran from 1868 to 1870 under her management and left her about 10,000 dollars in debt, which she paid off by lecturing. Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848; Anthony did not sign it, and she was not there.

Questions about the 1872 vote

• 10. Why did you believe the Fourteenth Amendment already gave you the right to vote?
• 11. Did you expect to be arrested?
• 12. What happened to the election inspectors who accepted your vote?
• 13. Why did the judge not let you speak in your own defence until after the verdict?
• 14. What did you tell Judge Hunt when he asked if you had anything to say?
• 15. Why did you refuse to pay the fine?

What the record says: the full trial record, published in 1874 as An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony, is free on Project Gutenberg. Her argument, set out in the 1873 lecture, was that the Fourteenth Amendment made women citizens and voting was a right of citizens. The three inspectors were tried, convicted and fined; they refused to pay, spent time in jail and were later pardoned by President Grant. In 1875 the Supreme Court ruled in Minor v. Happersett that citizenship did not carry the right to vote, closing that route.

Questions about the 1869 split, and race

• 16. You worked beside Frederick Douglass for twenty years. Why did you oppose the Fifteenth Amendment that he supported?
• 17. You said you would cut off your right arm before you would ask the vote for Black men and not for women. Do you stand by that?
• 18. Stanton and others used racist language in that fight. Did you object?
• 19. In 1895 you held a convention in Atlanta and kept Black women's groups at a distance. Why?

What the record says: the argument came to a head at the American Equal Rights Association meeting in New York in May 1869, recorded in the History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2. Days later Anthony and Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association; Lucy Stone and others formed the rival American Woman Suffrage Association. Ida B. Wells later wrote that Anthony told her she had asked Douglass not to attend the 1895 Atlanta convention, to avoid offending white Southern women. An honest interview asks about this, and lets her defend herself, as she did then. You can hear both sides in the Equal Rights debate of 1869.

Questions about her last years

• 20. In 1876 you pushed onto the stage at the Centennial in Philadelphia to hand over a declaration of women's rights. How did you get in?
• 21. Why did you and Stanton spend years editing the History of Woman Suffrage?
• 22. Why did you defend Stanton when the suffrage association disowned her Woman's Bible in 1896?
• 23. You travelled and spoke for fifty years. What kept you going?
• 24. At your 86th birthday you told the crowd “failure is impossible”. What did you mean?

What the record says: on 4 July 1876 she and other women presented the Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States at Independence Hall and read it outside to a crowd. The History of Woman Suffrage ran to three volumes by 1886, with three more later. The 1906 speech was on 15 February in Washington; she died less than a month later.

Sample answers in her own words

For question 14, from the trial record:

For question 23, on why reformers cannot play safe:

For question 2, on working women:

For question 23, as a closing line, she once wrote that the older she got, “the greater power I seem to have to help the world”, comparing herself to a snowball that gains the further it is rolled (as given in Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony).

Questions she could not answer

• How the Nineteenth Amendment was won in 1920, or the 1979 dollar coin with her face.
• What she thinks of modern political arguments that use her name. Groups on different sides of the abortion debate cite her; historians note the evidence for her views on it is thin and disputed. Leave it out, or present it as a dispute among historians.
• If your Anthony speaks from 1872, she does not yet know she will lose at trial or that “failure is impossible” will be her last public words.

Practising the trial scene

The sentencing exchange with Judge Hunt makes a strong two-person scene for a class. To rehearse the follow-up questions, you can talk with an AI recreation of Susan B. Anthony on Yuga by voice or text. It is built from her speeches, letters and the historical record, but it is not her and can make mistakes. Quote the trial record and her speeches in your project.

Where to read Anthony's words

• An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony (1874), free on Project Gutenberg, with her lecture “Is It a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?”
• History of Woman Suffrage, vols. 1 to 3, edited by Stanton, Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage, free on Project Gutenberg.
• The Susan B. Anthony Papers at the Library of Congress, including her diaries and scrapbooks.
• Ann D. Gordon (ed.), The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, 6 vols. (1997 to 2013).
• Women's Rights National Historical Park, Seneca Falls, run by the National Park Service.

For more women to interview, see our Women's History Month figures.