Great American Women of Susan B.’s Era
During Women’s History Month we will use this space to celebrate several great American women who were comrades of Susan B. Anthony. (Click here for an earlier blog post on Women’s History Month.) Though Miss Anthony did not know all of them, each one came from her era and worked to make us a more […]
Susan B. Anthony’s brother, as she viewed him
Susan B. Anthony’s brother has fascinated me for years, enough to merit writing a trilogy. My interest in Daniel Read (D.R.) Anthony began about 20 years ago with scattered hints about him in Susan’s biography, letters, and diaries.
This week in History: John Brown at Harpers Ferry
John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry shook the Anthony family’s roots when on this day in 1859 he broke into a federal arsenal in Virginia and was captured. Lucy and Daniel Anthony had raised
The Anthonys’ Quaker Roots
Susan B. Anthony’s Quaker roots came to the forefront when I spoke at Susan’s birthplace museum in Adams, MA, near the border of New York State. After my talk, my friend and I received a private tour by Adams Historical Society president Eugene Michalenko of the East Hoosuk Quaker Meetinghouse not far from Susan’s home. […]
Not His Father’s Quaker
Daniel Anthony, the father of Susan B. and her siblings, was of such an independent mind that he married “out of Meeting,” i.e. someone who was not a Quaker. In fact, he married a girl who had been his student, a Baptist named Lucy Read. For this he was temporarily ousted from the Meeting, as […]
Tracking Women’s Rights
Recently I had the pleasure of presenting Susan B. Anthony in costume at the World of Inquiry School in the Rochester City School District. Approximately 100 seventh-graders, in groups of 20, cycled through several costumed speakers who introduced students to a variety of 19th century issues, including temperance, antislavery, physical abuse, unequal access to education, […]
African American Solidarity, 19th Century Style
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass was as well-known as Martin Luther King. For many years he lived in Rochester near the Anthony family and frequently dined with them and their Quaker friends.
A Christmas Tale
The Rochester Anthonys were not in the habit of celebrating Christmas until the end of the 19th century. “We Quakers don’t make much of Christmas,” Susan said as late as 1899. It should come as no surprise, then, that on Christmas Day in 1860 Susan became embroiled in one of the most unpopular causes of her life. To […]
Quakers At Heart
Quakerism was at the center of the Anthony family. It was a bee in the bonnet of Susan’s antislavery activities that began in New York State, and a spur atop the saddle for Merritt and Daniel as they rode with the Kansas cavalry in the Civil War.
Susan B. Anthony Family Origins: Massachusetts
The Anthony story begins in Adams, Massachusetts at the family homestead and Friends’ Cemetery. That home represents a fairly stable period in the relationship between the Anthonys and the Quakers.