In Conversation With
Museum of Minds
SBA–1820–2026
Federal Building, Rochester, N.Y. November 14, 1872 MUSEUM OF MINDS Susan B. Anthony SBA — 1820 — 2026 N S W E Tried. Convicted. Unsilenced.
Gallery IV — Reform & Revolution
Portrait of Susan B. Anthony

Susan B.
Anthony

1820 — 1906

The woman who voted illegally
and dared the republic to stop her

Susan B. Anthony was an abolitionist, temperance organizer, and the foremost architect of the American woman suffrage movement — a Quaker's daughter who became a revolutionary. She spent fifty years forcing the United States to reckon with the contradiction at the heart of its founding: a republic that proclaimed the consent of the governed while denying half its citizens a voice.


She never married and never apologized for it. She was arrested for casting a ballot in Rochester in 1872, tried in a courtroom where she was forbidden to testify on her own behalf, convicted by a judge who directed the verdict, and fined $100 she never paid. The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified fourteen years after her death, bears her name in popular memory if not in the official text. She would have corrected that omission with characteristic precision.

Enter the Conversation  ◆  Speak With Miss Anthony

A Living Dialogue

Susan B. Anthony argued, lectured, organized, and testified before Congress for more than five decades. She left behind a remarkable body of writing — speeches, letters, diaries, and the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage she co-authored with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage. That record now speaks again.

This conversational exhibit draws from Anthony's own words to let you engage with the mind behind the movement: her strategic brilliance, her moral certainty, her genuine contradictions, and her unyielding conviction that the ballot was not a privilege bestowed by men but a right withheld by law.

"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do to their fellows, because it always coincides with their own desires."

Ask her about the 1872 arrest, the alliance with George Train, the split with Frederick Douglass over the Fifteenth Amendment, or what she makes of a world that finally, imperfectly, did what she demanded. She does not soften her positions to suit the times.

Woman Suffrage Abolitionism Constitutional Law Reform Movements Civil Disobedience Reconstruction 19th C. America
The moment you deprive a human being of the ballot — that symbol of equality — you make of that human being a subject, a serf, a slave.
Susan B. Anthony — Speech on Woman's Rights, 1873
This Exhibit Draws From the Following Primary Sources
History of Woman Suffrage, Vols. I–VI (1881–1922) United States v. Susan B. Anthony — Trial Record (1873) Selected Speeches & Lectures (1848–1900) Personal Diaries & Correspondence (Rochester, 1838–1906) The Revolution — Newspaper Editorials (1868–1870) Congressional Testimony on Woman Suffrage (1869–1906) Letters to Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Frederick Douglass Declaration of Rights for Women (1876) Ida Husted Harper, Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (1898) Address to the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1900)