Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony appears in Simone de Beauvoir’s account of American feminism as both a prominent movement leader and a participant in a direct challenge to women’s political exclusion. After the Civil War, she used the ambiguity of a constitutional amendment to vote in Rochester with fourteen comrades; authorities fined her a hundred dollars. The episode makes the conflict tangible: women could claim the language of citizenship, but exercising that claim exposed them to legal punishment.

Political Exclusion and the Suffrage Campaign

American women’s early history of relative emancipation did not translate into control of public life. Pioneer women had shared men’s hard labor, and women retained cultural privileges and a strong position within the family, yet the command of society remained in male hands. Around 1830, women began claiming political rights, in part through antislavery work. Their exclusion from the 1840 antislavery congress in London prompted Lucretia Mott to found a feminist association, and the 1840 Seneca Falls Convention produced a declaration asserting women’s equality and condemning married women’s civil death under the law.

The campaign’s political stakes sharpened after the Civil War. Women had participated ardently, but their demand that sex be included alongside race and color in voting-rights protections was rejected. Against this narrowing of the promised expansion of suffrage, Anthony and fourteen comrades voted in Rochester, relying on ambiguity in an amendment. Her hundred-dollar fine registered the cost of turning a disputed legal claim into an act of political participation.

Organizing and Consequences

Anthony’s vote was one action within a broader movement rather than an isolated gesture. In 1869 she founded the organization later known as the National American Woman Suffrage Association. That same year Wyoming granted women the vote; Colorado followed in 1893, and Idaho and Utah in 1896. Progress slowed thereafter, even as women’s economic participation expanded: in 1900, five million women worked in the United States, including in industry, business, and the professions.

The suffrage campaign grew more militant in 1913, drawing on the English model. Under the leadership of Doris Stevens and Alice Paul, activists pursued lectures, meetings, marches, and demonstrations. Women voters from the nine states where they could vote traveled to the Capitol to demand national suffrage. In Chicago, a gathering organized as a party to liberate women became the Women’s Party. In 1917, suffragettes stationed themselves at the White House gates, sometimes chaining themselves there; after six months they were sent to Occoquan, went on hunger strike, and were released. Renewed demonstrations and riots helped bring a House Committee on Woman Suffrage into being.

Narrative Significance

The account places Anthony’s Rochester vote at the hinge between the assertion of rights and the movement’s institutional work. The fine makes the law’s resistance visible, while the organization she founded points toward sustained collective action. Yet the later chronology guards against treating either the vote or organizational growth as a completed victory: suffrage advanced unevenly, and the struggle for full equality continued for decades.