Term Paper on "Susan B. Anthony Was Foundational Member"

Term Paper 5 pages (1450 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Susan B. Anthony was foundational member of the women's rights movement. Though the vote was the first of almost all essential changes in the way women were viewed socially and legally the vote was only the beginning. Susan B. Anthony possessed a much broader understanding of the needs of women and the changes that must take place for women to succeed in their own right in this new nation. She embodied the challenges faced by single women and also held great personal knowledge of the lives of her married contemporaries, as the sort of "aunt" to all the women of the movement, due to her remarkable openness she was the ear for many grievances against the reality of women's lives in her culture. English common law and the cannon laws of the church subjugated women almost completely to the will of the father, if unmarried and the will of the husband if married.

One of the first attempts by women to organize for what they themselves, termed the revolution was the Seneca Falls Convention of July 1848, in which Susan B. Anthony held a crucial role. Anthony not only coordinated most of the event she was crucial in its inception, convincing those who were more afraid than herself of the dire need for collective bargaining and collective work. "In regarding the Seneca Falls convention as the birth of the movement for women's rights, we are on solid ground only if we remember that birth is a stage in the whole process of growth. In this case the process had begun almost a half a century earlier."

Anthony was aware that the world would not change for the good of womankind unless womankind came together and voiced grievances and created a platform of demands for change. It was the Seneca Falls convention that was the cumulation of many years of such thoughts and independent works toward suffrage and greater personal and public control for women.

Susan B. Anthony has often been thought of by the modern world as a foundational voice, second only to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, yet her real role subverted by her appearance as a dowdy spinster, which was only a unintentional subterfuge as in many cases she was the backbone for organization and reality of some of the crowning moments of the women's rights movement. She was in many ways the mind behind the voice for change. Not to exclude the contributions of others, as they were great but Anthony was one of the most well thinking women of her era. She understood the full implications of the challenges before women and she acted intellectually and physically for the cause.

Miss Anthony loved other people and they returned her affection; many of them have left records of that fact. Above all, she was straightforward and honest, with an extraordinarily good memory and with high moral standards of truth; an auditor could accept every statement as true and every promise as binding. She had a well-developed sense of humor, which persisted in spite of a frequently unfavorable environment

Aunt Susan as she was called by many people and by nearly all the newcomers to the revolution was the person who made things come together so other voices could be heard in the sea of masculine. "Ever modest, Anthony once described her life long work as "subsoil plowing" insisting that she had merely prepared the field for her more accomplished coworkers."

Yet, history has born her mark well and this was clearly an oversimplification of her early role in women's rights.

Anthony was the driving force behind the federal movement to secure women's suffrage. After many years of attempting to sway individual states to declare universal suffrage, with some limited success, Anthony was among the first to realize that certain pockets of the country would continue unabated to vote against such a legal change and to begin to demand change on a federal level, first with lobbying and second with an actual constitutional amendment, that would not change in wording until it was passed more than forty years after its first trip to congress in 1878.

Anthony suffered her entire life with physical ailments that weakened her body but certainly not her spirit for the cause.

Challenges for women during this time were many but the activists bore them out to complete their task of… READ MORE

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