Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) is best known for her key role in the campaign for women’s suffrage, but was first active in the temperance and anti-slavery movements. In May 1869 she organized the National Woman Suffrage Association, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton as president. From 1891 to 1900, she was the second president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In November 1872, Anthony and a group of other women were arrested for voting in a federal election. Anthony was put on trial and the judge sentenced her to pay a fine of $100, which she refused to pay.

Susan B. Anthony died in March 1906, shortly after attending the National American Woman Suffrage Association annual convention in Baltimore, Maryland, and fourteen years before the Nineteenth Amendment gave American women the legal right to vote.

The Schlesinger Library’s Susan B. Anthony collections include diaries, correspondence (with family members and with fellow suffragists, abolitionists, and temperance workers), genealogies, and speeches, as well as photographs and memorabilia, documenting Anthony’s life and work as well as the lives of other suffragists including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anna Howard Shaw, and Carrie Chapman Catt.