From teaching to reform networks
Born in Adams, Massachusetts, Anthony grew up in a Quaker family that later moved to Rochester, New York. Teaching exposed her to pay inequality; temperance and antislavery work brought further reform contacts. Frederick Douglass attended abolitionist gatherings at the family farm.
Amelia Bloomer introduced her to Stanton in 1851. Anthony circulated petitions and lobbied for married women's property and voting rights, becoming an American Anti-Slavery Society agent in 1856. Arranging meetings, distributing print and confronting hostile audiences were practical parts of this work.
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Organization and political conflict
Anthony and Stanton cooperated on equal rights and the newspaper The Revolution. Reconstruction-era constitutional debates divided former allies. Their arguments against giving male suffrage priority over women's voting rights included disparaging claims about African Americans, drawing objections from Douglass.
They helped form the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. It merged with the American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890 to create NAWSA. Anthony became its president in 1892 and retired in 1900, succeeded by Carrie Chapman Catt.
References: [1]
The 1872 vote and trial
After voting in Rochester in 1872, Anthony was prosecuted. She argued that Fourteenth Amendment citizenship included voting rights. At her 1873 trial Justice Ward Hunt directed a guilty verdict without independent jury deliberation and imposed a $100 fine.
Hunt distinguished citizenship from state voter qualifications and rejected her good-faith defence. The fine was never collected; because he did not imprison her, she could not seek Supreme Court review through habeas corpus. Anthony continued campaigning and died in 1906, before the Nineteenth Amendment's ratification in 1920.