"With so many just and true women devoted to the cause, failure is impossible!”
“Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation or social standards never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest are willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathies with despised ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.”
"Oh, if I could but live another century and see the fruition of all the work for women! There is so much yet to be done."
- Susan B. Anthony
Susan B. Anthony
Susan Brownell Anthony was born February 15, 1820 and raised as a young child in Adams, Massachusetts in a strict Quaker family.
Home-Schooled To Be Independent
& Believe In One's Own Self-Worth
Her father, Daniel Anthony, was a stern man, a Quaker Abolitionist and a cotton manufacturer. He believed in guiding his children instead of directing them. He did not allow them to experience the childish amusements of toys, games, and music, which were seen as distractions from the “Inner Light”. Instead, he enforced self-discipline, principled convictions, and belief in one's own self-worth. But, Susan was a precocious child, learning to read and write at the age of three.
In 1826, the Anthony’s moved from Massachusetts to Battenville, N.Y. where Susan attended a district school. When the teacher refused to teach Susan long division, Susan's father promptly took her out of the school and placed her in a group home school where Mary Perkins, a teacher there, conveyed a progressive image of womanhood to Anthony, further fostering Susan's growing belief, even as a child, in women's equality. Ultimately, Susan was sent to boarding school near Philadelphia.
From age 19 to 29 Anthony taught at several academies in upstate New York. [Susan is pictured here at 28 years old in 1848.] Her first occupation as a teacher inspired her to begin fighting for wages equivalent to those of male teachers, since men earned roughly four times more than women for the same duties.
ANTI-SLAVERY ACTIVISM
GIVES WAY TO FOCUS ON WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE
In the decade preceding the
outbreak of the American Civil War, Anthony took a prominent part in the anti-s
lavery and temperance movements in New York. In 1851, she was introduced to Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The two women (shown here with Anthony on the left) were to remain close friends and colleagues for the remainder of their lives, although unlike Anthony, Stanton wanted to push a broader platform of women's rights than suffrage. Together, the two women traveled the United States giving speeches about women's rights and attempting to persuade the government that women should be treated equally to men in society.
After 1854, Anthony devoted herself almost exclusively to the agitation for women’s rights, and became recognized as one of the ablest and most zealous advocates of complete legal equality, and as a public speaker and writer. In 1869, Anthony and Stanton founded the National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA), an organization dedicated to gaining women the right to vote.
Her Arrest, Trial & $100 Fine
Make Susan B. Anthony ... "A Cause Célèbre"
For casting a vote in the presidential election held on November 5, 1872, in Rochester, New York, Anthony was arrested on November 18 and 
pled not guilty, asserting that the 14th amendment entitled her to vote because, unlike the original Constitution, it provides that all "persons" (which includes females) born in the U.S. are "citizens" who shall not be denied the "privileges" of citizenship (which includes voting). However, her defense was all for naught. The judge, Supreme Court Associate Justice Ward Hunt, explicitly instructed the jury to deliver a guilty verdict, refused to poll the jury, delivered an opinion he had written before trial had even begun, and on June 18, 1873, sentenced her to pay a $100 fine. Anthony responded, "May it please your honor, I will never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty." She never did pay the fine, and the government never pursued her for non-payment.
The arrest and trial (portrayed above in a re-created trial flyer from a 2002 trial re-enactment in Indiana) made 
Susan B. Anthony "a cause célèbre," which is a legal case or public controversy that arouses great interest and becomes famous because of the issues or the people involved. Other women followed Anthony's example until the case was finally decided against them by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Following the highly publicized trial, Anthony traveled and lectured throughout the United States and Europe, giving 75 to 100 speeches per year on suffrage and women's rights. She died of pneumonia and heart failure on March 13, 1906 at age 86 in her home in Rochester, New York. Her last public words given at a birthday celebration in her honor - "Failure is impossible!" - were the same ones she had used frequently in her public speeches. And, after her death they became the suffrage rallying cry.
she Took Life-Long Abuse,
While Believing That "Failure is impossible !!"
Throughout her life, Susan B. Anthony
fought social injustices, including attacking the injustice women of the period faced from their fellow man. She was a constant 
target of abuse from political leaders, media representatives and private individuals. But as a leading advocate of abolition and women's rights, Anthony led an effective and challenging life that has now been recognized in many ways, including with a Susan B. Anthony $1 coin ... that is, appropriately, the size of a quarter, or 1/4 of her $100 fine.
The secret of Susan B. Anthony's power, aside from her superior intellect and strong personality, was her unswerving singleness of purpose and steadfast belief that ... "failure is impossible!" On August 26, 1920 - fourteen years after her death - that belief finally came true when the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granting women the right to vote, became the law of the land.