3c Susan B. Anthony stamp

Abolitionist, educator, labor leader, temperance worker and women's rights advocate Susan B. Anthony was born into a Massachusetts Quaker family in 1820. She grew up in an activist household where important abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison were common visitors in her parents' parlor.

Susan dedicated her life to social causes. In the years before the Civil War she was active in the American Anti-Slavery Society, and after emancipation, pushed for equal rights to educational opportunities regardless of race or gender. After years of campaigning, she was responsible for the admittance of women to the University of Rochester in 1900. Through her activist paper, The Revolution, she pushed for an eight-hour workday, equal pay for equal work, trade schools for women, and allowing women to join labor unions. She was also active in the Daughters of Temperance, speaking out against the negative effects of alcohol on the family and society.

Susan is best remembered, however, for her work as a suffragist and women's rights advocate. Though many women were passionately involved in the struggle for women's voting rights, it was Susan's fifty-year collaborative working relationship with suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton that played the greatest role in earning American women the right to vote in 1920. Unfortunately, neither woman lived to see the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. Active to the end, Susan died in 1906 at the age of 86.

Scott Catalogue USA: 784
mint; perf 11 x 10.5

Museum ID: 1980.2493.2678