Susan B. Anthony
Early life

Susan Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, to Daniel Anthony and Lucy Read Anthony in Adams, Massachusetts, the second-oldest of seven children. She was named for her maternal grandmother Susanah, and for her father's sister Susan. In her youth, she and her sisters responded to a "great craze for middle initials" by adding middle initials to their own names. Anthony adopted "B." as her middle initial because her namesake Aunt Susan had married a man named Brownell. Anthony never used the name Brownell herself, and did not like it.

Her family shared a passion for social reform. Her brothers Daniel and Merritt moved to Kansas to support the anti-slavery movement there. Merritt fought with John Brown against pro-slavery forces during the Bleeding Kansas crisis. Daniel eventually owned a newspaper and became mayor of Leavenworth. Anthony's sister Mary, with whom she shared a home in later years, became a public school principal in Rochester, and a woman's rights activist.

Anthony's father was an abolitionist and a temperance advocate. A Quaker, he had a difficult relationship with his traditionalist congregation, which rebuked him for marrying a non-Quaker, and then disowned him for allowing a dance school to operate in his home. He continued to attend Quaker meetings anyway and became even more radical in his beliefs. Anthony's mother was a Baptist and helped raise their children in a more tolerant version of her husband's religious tradition. Their father encouraged them all, girls as well as boys, to be self-supporting, teaching them business principles and giving them responsibilities at an early age.

When Anthony was six years old, her family moved to Battenville, New York, where her father managed a large cotton mill. Previously he had operated his own small cotton factory.

When she was seventeen, Anthony was sent to a Quaker boarding school in Philadelphia, where she unhappily endured its strict and sometimes humiliating atmosphere. She was forced to end her studies after one term because her family was financially ruined during an economic downturn known as the Panic of 1837. They were forced to sell everything they had at an auction, but they were rescued by her maternal uncle, who bought most of their belongings and restored them to the family. To assist her family financially, Anthony left home to teach at a Quaker boarding school.

In 1845, the family moved to a farm on the outskirts of Rochester, New York, purchased partly with the inheritance of Anthony's mother. There they associated with a group of Quaker social reformers who had left their congregation because of the restrictions it placed on reform activities, and who in 1848 formed a new organization called the Congregational Friends. The Anthony farmstead soon became the Sunday afternoon gathering place for local activists, including Frederick Douglass, a former slave and a prominent abolitionist who became Anthony's lifelong friend.

The Anthony family began to attend services at the First Unitarian Church of Rochester, which was associated with social reform. The Rochester Women's Rights Convention of 1848 was held at that church in 1848, inspired by the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights convention, which was held two weeks earlier in a nearby town. Anthony's parents and her sister Mary attended the Rochester convention and signed the Declaration of Sentiments that had been first adopted by the Seneca Falls Convention.

Anthony did not take part in either of these conventions because she had moved to Canajoharie in 1846 to be headmistress of the female department of the Canajoharie Academy. Away from Quaker influences for the first time in her life, at the age of 26 she began to replace her plain clothing with more stylish dresses, and she quit using "thee" and other forms of speech traditionally used by Quakers. She was interested in social reform, and she was distressed at being paid much less than men with similar jobs, but she was amused at her father's enthusiasm over the Rochester women's rights convention. She later explained, "I wasn't ready to vote, didn't want to vote, but I did want equal pay for equal work."

When the Canajoharie Academy closed in 1849, Anthony took over the operation of the family farm in Rochester so her father could devote more time to his insurance business. She worked at this task for a couple of years but found herself increasingly drawn to reform activity. With her parents' support, she was soon fully engaged in reform work. For the rest of her life, she lived almost entirely on fees she earned as a speaker.
detectable_content:number_placeholders[6]