Susan B. Anthony Birthplace

Susan B. Anthony Birthplace.

Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum

Quick Facts

Location:

Adams, Massachusetts

Significance:

Birthplace of suffragist Susan B. Anthony

Designation:

National Register of Historic Places

MANAGED BY:

Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum

This rural, Federal-style home was the birthplace and childhood home of Susan Brownell Anthony, an advocate for temperance and the rights of women. She was born in 1820 and lived in the house until the age of seven. She later returned here several times throughout her life. Anthony’s family had a long tradition in the Quaker Society of Friends, and she was raised to value the precepts of society, humility, simplicity, and in particular, equality. Anthony received a broad education and undoubtedly incorporated the instruction she received in this rural home into her later career.

As an adult, Anthony went on to be educated as a teacher in Philadelphia and taught in various schools from 1835 to 1860, earning 1/3 of the salary paid to her male cohorts. Frustrated by the restrictions placed on her because of her gender, Anthony moved to her family’s home in New York in 1849. There, she became an associate of Fredrick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, leaders in the anti-slavery movement before the Civil War. Already an advocate of temperance and a good friend of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she also endorsed rights for women and in 1869 helped found the National Woman’s Suffrage Association.

Anthony cast a ballot in the 1872 presidential election and was arrested and fined $100 by a judge who directed the jury to find her guilty. She refused to pay, but because the judgement was never enforced, she could not appeal to the Supreme Court. In 1892, she became the National Woman’s Suffrage Association’s president. Susan B. Anthony did not live to see women get the right to vote, for she died in 1906, thirteen years before the 19th amendment was passed.