Who Worked for Sixty Years to Secure Rights for Women
Young Susan vigorously attacked, with her broom, the cobweb in the corner of the schoolroom ceiling. It was a stubborn cobweb and Susan had to step upon the teacher’s desk to reach it. No girl trained by so good a housekeeper as Susan’s mother could be happy in the same room with a cobweb.
“Deborah will be pleased to have the room clean,” thought Susan. However, Deborah, her Quaker teacher, was not pleased. Susan’s heavy shoes had broken the desk hinges, and the girl who had tried to do well was severely scolded.
It was often very much like this in Susan B. Anthony’s later life. When she tried her hardest to brush away the cobwebs that kept the world from seeing that women did not have the same rights as men, she was jeered and scorned. Nevertheless, she kept on wielding her broom, the broom she used being her clever tongue. This little Quaker girl grew up to be an interesting and eloquent lecturer, who never lost an opportunity to speak a good word for her fellow-women.
Susan Brownell Anthony was born February 15, 1820, in Adams, Massachusetts, in the midst of the Berkshire Hills. She was the second of eight children. Every night, as a little girl, she used to watch the sun go down behind “Old Greylock.” She came to love the great mountain, and all her life she liked to think of its rugged strength.
Mrs. Anthony was a very busy woman. In addition to caring for her lively little children she also cooked and washed for a number of factory hands. However, she found time to read good books and to be interested in all her children’s doings. Susan’s father was a Quaker, a man much liked and respected.
At an early age little Susan learned to be a good cook and housekeeper, like her mother. Once, when Mrs. Anthony was ill, twelve-year-old Susan with the help of her two sisters, ten and fourteen years of age, did all the household tasks, including packing the lunch boxes for the factory hands. Susan was so anxious that everything should be done exactly right that she and her sisters carried samples of the food to their mother for her approval.
At three years of age Susan, who was very bright and quick, learned her letters and also some words, while on a visit at her grandmother’s. When she was a little older she attended a district school, and then a private school conducted in the Anthony home. Later, she joined her sister at a boarding school near Philadelphia, where she studied for a year.