Susan began to teach in a district school when she was seventeen years old. She was boarded in turn at the homes of her pupils, being paid in addition only one dollar and a half a week. Susan was a very successful teacher, and often she grew indignant to see that men who did not do their work so well as she received four times as much pay. Equal pay for equal work was one of the rights that she began to demand for her fellow-women from that time on.
When Susan’s father failed in business, she saw his creditors take all of her mother’s personal things. Susan was enraged with the injustice of it and declared that there should be a law to make a wife’s belongings her own.
In 1851 Miss Anthony made a trip to Seneca Falls, New York, to urge the admission of girls to the People’s College then being founded. There she met Miss Lucy Stone and had an opportunity to become well acquainted with her and also with Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whom she had met a few months before.
Mrs. Stanton and Miss Stone believed that women should have a share in making the laws of the land, and Miss Anthony soon became their most ardent co-worker. Twenty-five years later, Miss Anthony drafted the federal suffrage amendment. However, it was forty-five years from the time that the amendment was drafted until it became a part of our Constitution.
Susan B. Anthony was one of the greatest friends that women have ever had. When she was born there were only three things that a girl who wanted to earn her living could do: be a millhand, a servant, or a teacher. Before the close of Miss Anthony’s life, a girl might fit herself to be a doctor, a lawyer, a business woman, or, in fact, almost anything that she chose.
When Miss Anthony was a young girl, the doors of nearly all colleges were closed to women. The girl who dared to ask for as much education as was given to her brother was considered a great oddity. However, Miss Anthony lived to see girls admitted to college quite as a matter of course.
Susan B. Anthony found a world where a married woman could not do what she liked with the property that she owned. Neither could she do as she wished with the money that she had earned or received as a gift. She could not even take charge of her own children if anyone objected. Miss Anthony left a world where women’s rights in all these matters were considered and where in four states women could help to make the laws. The Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the vote, came later.