Was susan b anthony gay
THE LEGENDARY FEMINIST Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) is too often the silenced gay elephant in the room of U.S. history. As we observe the 200th anniversary of her birth, which is on February 15th, it’s important to ask ourselves whether we as a society are finally willing to witness her not only as a heroic fighter for women’s suffrage but also as a lesbian.
Few historians, especially those reaching a mass audience, have discussed Anthony in the context of LGBT history. She is still straightwashed in most books, media depictions, cultural institutions, and classrooms throughout the U.S. There hasn’t been a major biography for adults since 1988, while more recent biographies and documentaries for young people predictably render her lesbianism invisible.
When I visited the Susan B. Anthony Museum & Dwelling in Rochester, New York, last summer, the tour guide insisted that Anthony and the queer women in her circle were heterosexual. I kept challenging the guide and asking questions, but was made to feel like a gay weirdo who needed to shut up so the tour could change position on. Other staff members seemed equally insistent on maintaining the brick wall of heterosexist denial that the
Susan B. Anthony
Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, in Adams, Massachusetts. She was brought up in a Quaker family with long activist traditions. After learning for fifteen years, she became active in temperance. Because she was a woman, she was not allowed to speak at temperance rallies. This encounter, and her acquaintance with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, led her to join the women's rights movement in 1852. Soon after she assigned her life to women's suffrage.
After they moved to Rochester in 1845, members of the Anthony family were active in the anti-slavery movement. Anti-slavery Quakers met at their farm almost every Sunday, where they were sometimes united by Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Anthony's brothers, Daniel and Merritt, were anti-slavery activists in Kansas.
When Anthony returned to Rochester in 1849, she was elected president of the Rochester branch of the Daughters of Temperance and raised capital for the lead to.
In 1853, Anthony was refused the right to talk at the express convention of the Sons of Temperance in Albany. She left the conference and called her own. In 1853, Anthony and Stanton founded the Women's State Temperance Socie
Susan B. Anthony, Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument
History
Many Unused York City public parks and playgrounds are named in honor of prominent figures in Modern York City and American history. The NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project compiled a list of public parks and playgrounds named after gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals, several of which intentionally honor an LGBT individual. In addition, there are memorials that unintentionally honor LGBT individuals. This list includes Susan B. Anthony in the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument, in Manhattan.
The Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument, by sculptor Meredith Bergmann, was the first monument in Central Park to depict real women instead of allegorical figures. It features three figures – Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Unveiled in 2020 and sponsored by the group Monumental Women, it commemorated the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave women the right to vote.
The monument’s inclusion of Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) inadvertently honors an LGBT individual. Anthony has been ca
Susan B. Anthony
SchlesingerLibrary/Collections
Best acknowledged as an iconic women’s rights activist who played a pivotal role in the campaign for women’s suffrage, Susan B. Anthony (1820‒1906) was also deeply interested in a number of other 19th century social reform movements, including temperance, abolition, and labor rights. The library has digitized several small collections of her papers, consisting of correspondence, diaries, and speeches along with photographs, inscribed books, and akin memorabilia.
Anthony served as publisher of the Revolution, the weekly newspaper of the National Woman Suffrage Association, whose motto stated: "The real republic—men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less." Unlike most publications of the moment, the Revolution covered subjects such as sex education, rape, domestic violence, divorce, prostitution, reproductive rights, and the rights of working men and women.
"You contain trampled under foot every vital concept of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored.”
Portraits of Susan B. Anthony, ca. 189