Suffrage Movement Rallies: Anthony and Stanton Found Their Association

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in New York on May 15, 1869, splitting the women's rights movement over a bitter disagreement about the Fifteenth Amendment. The amendment, which would guarantee voting rights regardless of race, did not include sex. Stanton and Anthony argued that women's suffrage should not be sacrificed to secure Black male suffrage. Their former allies, including Frederick Douglass, countered that this was "the Negro's hour" and that combining the causes would doom both. The split revealed deep fractures within the reform community that had been papered over during the abolition movement. Stanton and Anthony's NWSA pursued a federal constitutional amendment for women's suffrage and also championed broader reforms including divorce liberalization and labor rights. A rival organization, the American Woman Suffrage Association led by Lucy Stone and Henry Ward Beecher, focused on winning suffrage state by state and avoided controversial positions. The NWSA's approach was confrontational. Anthony registered to vote in Rochester, New York, in 1872 and was arrested, tried, and fined. The trial, in which the judge directed a guilty verdict without allowing the jury to deliberate, became a cause celebre. Anthony refused to pay the fine and the government declined to jail her, denying her the martyrdom that would have drawn greater attention to the cause. The two organizations reunited in 1890 as the National American Woman Suffrage Association, but the goal remained distant. State-by-state victories came slowly, with Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho granting women the vote before 1900. Neither Anthony nor Stanton lived to see the Nineteenth Amendment ratified in 1920, fifty-one years after they founded the NWSA. Anthony died in 1906 at eighty-six, her final public words reportedly: "Failure is impossible."