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Spring 2004
  Articles on this page: • Hometown of Women's Rights Activist
Hometown of Women's Rights Activist While the town where she spent her childhood celebrates her life each year, the home where women's-rights activist Susan Brownell Anthony was born stands ready for a more than $750,000 renovation as a museum. The suffrage leader and lifelong Quaker was born in Adams February 15, 1820. She was a precocious child who learned to read and write at the age of three. In 1826, the Anthony family moved from Massachusetts to Battensville, N.Y. Susan was taken out of school and taught in a "home school" set up by her father. A woman teacher, Mary Perkins, ran the school. Perkins offered a new image of womanhood to Susan and her sisters. She became independent, educated and held positions that had traditionally been reserved to young men. She settled in her family home in Rochester, N.Y. It was here that she began her first public crusade on behalf of temperance. Discouraged by the limited role for women in social movements, Susan joined Elizabeth C. Stanton and A. Bloomer in campaigning for women's rights in 1852, and helped to form the Woman's State Temperance Society of New York and the New York Working Women's Association. In 1872, she boldly led groups of women to the polls, and was subsequently arrested and fined for violating voting laws. She served as president of the National American Woman's Suffrage Association from 1892-1900, and lectured throughout the country for a federal women's-suffrage amendment. The plain, four-room farmhouse where she was born was built by her father in 1817 on land provided by one grandparent and with boards from the other. It now stands on a half acre and is owned by the Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Corp., a 501(c)3 not-for-profit entity managed by James and Linda McConchie of Concord, Mass., who bought it with their daughters, Elizabeth and Lindsay, from a previous owner and created the charitable organization to eventually establish an Anthony museum.  RETURN TO TOP |
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