Susan B. Anthony

Susan Brownell Anthony was born on this day in 1820.

The family were Quakers and when the denomination split during the Hicksite controversy they followed the “inner light” to the liberal faction. Her father was an abolitionist and political and justice issues were constant subject of household concern. As a young adult she worked as a teacher. She also became involved in the Temperance movement and began attending worship services at the Unitarian church in Rochester, New York, which she eventually joined. Already an active abolitionist when she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton (introduced by their mutual friend Amelia Bloomer), she began to throw herself into the suffrage movement.

Susan B. Anthony spent her life devoted to the work of justice for all peoples, although she is best known for her work toward voting rights for women which became her primary focus starting from about 1869. She spent much of the rest of her life speaking, as many as one hundred times a year, on this central issue for American human rights.

She was a tireless worker. While sometimes mocked for stridency, she was in fact a pragmatist who successfully brought more conservative and radical suffrage workers together in a vision that would eventually prevail.

That said, sadly, Anthony died fourteen and a half years before the passage of the 19th Amendment.

As to her religious sensibilities, it seems as she aged she became an infrequent church attendee and was in fact frequently accused by her enemies of being irreligious. A closer look at her spiritual sensibilities suggest her vision was progressive and in fact looked in many ways more like contemporary Unitarian Universalism than the liberal faith of her day Or, so I’d like to think…