Susan B. Anthony

Susan Brownell Anthony died in Rochester, New York, on March 13, 1906, in the brick house on Madison Street that had been headquarters as much as home. She was eighty-six. Friends sat with her through a pneumonia that followed a last winter of travel. She had been born in Adams, Massachusetts, on February 15, 1820, taught school, signed temperance pledges, and then gave the rest of a long life to the proposition that a woman was a citizen who could mark a ballot. With Elizabeth Cady Stanton she organized, lectured, and edited the Revolution. In 1872 she voted in Rochester and was tried for it; the judge directed a guilty verdict and she refused to pay the fine. The Nineteenth Amendment would not be ratified until fourteen years after her death. She knew the arithmetic and kept the trains anyway, carrying a satchel of petitions through towns that had already heard her once. She never married. She cut her hair and her speeches to the same practical length. She quarreled with allies over the Fifteenth Amendment and over whether the movement could afford to leave Black women behind; the record of those fights is part of the work, not a footnote. Rochester's house is a museum now because she kept the correspondence that proved a campaign is mostly paper. The ballot she did not live to cast is the unfinished sentence she left the next generation. Mount Hope Cemetery holds the stone. Madison Street still looks like a place a person could run a country from a parlor.