cover image Susan B Anthony: A Biography

Susan B Anthony: A Biography

Kathleen Barry. New York University Press, $40 (426pp) ISBN 978-0-8147-1105-7

The young women who left their farm homes to work in factories and boarded with Susan Anthony's Quaker family in Massachusetts, unwittingly set an example of women's emancipation for future feminist leaders, notes this comprehensive biography by feminist sociologist Barry, author of Female Sexual Slavery. Her political consciousness aroused early, Anthony's oratory was honed in the causes of temperance and anti-slavery, which she shared with other women's-rights champions such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone. Striving to rescue women from a state she considered marital feudalism, Anthony (1820-1906) organized conventions, petitioned and canvassed for support, ceaselessly campaigning for women's property and other legal rights, and most especially for suffrage. The author recounts the split in the feminist movement, factions that, after three decades, combined to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association of which Anthony was president from 1892-1900. A charismatic figure, loved and hated, internationally acclaimed, she was often ridiculed in the press as a ``strident spinster.'' Although nationwide suffrage for women was not enacted until 1920, Anthony lived to see several of her ambitions for women fulfilled and her own role recognized. Photos not seen by PW. (September)