Born in North Adams, Massachusetts, Susan B. Anthony (1820 - 1906) became a spokesperson for temperance, abolition, and woman suffrage. Although she did not attend the Woman's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls in 1848 because she was head schoolmistress at Canajahorie Academy, she soon quit teaching and devoted her life to the reform movement. Along with her best friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton, these two women published the first feminst newspaper called The Revolution, and organized numerous women's groups to advance the cause of female suffrage for fifty years.

Arrested in 1872 for voting illegally in Rochester, New York, in the reelection of President Ulysses S. Grant, Anthony spoke in her own defense. Although she did not live to see the day, her tireless struggle for women's rights legalized the vote for American women in 1920.