By Mallika Kallingal

Google is honoring a key leader of the women’s suffrage movement, Susan B. Anthony, and celebrating her 200th birthday with a Google Doodle. Anthony worked tirelessly for voting rights for women, but died 14 years before the 19th Amendment — later known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment — was ratified.

Susan B. Anthony with Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Susan B. Anthony with Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Anthony was one of America’s key social reformers, also fighting to abolish slavery. She was influenced by her family and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whom she met in 1851. Anthony and Stanton were passionate in their fight for women’s rights. They co-founded the American Equal Rights Association, started the magazine “The Revolution” and remained friends throughout their lives. Stanton was not Anthony’s only friend who believed in her views on equality. She was influenced by other social reformers and abolitionists, such as Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.

American abolitionist and suffragette Susan B. Anthony in 1898.
American abolitionist and suffragette Susan B. Anthony in 1898.

Anthony defied the laws of her time by voting in the 1872 elections in her home of Rochester, New York. She was arrested and tried, and told the judge, “You have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually, but all of my sex, are, by your honor’s verdict, doomed to political subjection under this, so-called, form of government.”

Portrait of Susan B. Anthony sitting at a desk.
Portrait of Susan B. Anthony sitting at a desk.

She refused to pay the $100 fine. The federal government put Anthony on the 1979 dollar — making her the first woman to appear on US coins.

See also  Michelle Obama Present the United State of Women and 6 Pillar Focus

Article

Cover Photo

Verified by MonsterInsights