Suffragist, abolitionist, and union worker Susan B. Anthony also worked tirelessly for many years as a teacher in the classroom. Photo Credit: US National Park Service
Many people are familiar with Susan B. Anthony, a tireless champion for women’s suffrage who lived during the nineteenth century. Her political accomplishments as a suffragist are legendary. But did you know that this American civil rights champion was also a schoolteacher?
Beginning in 1939, Susan taught school, first at Eunice Kenyon’s Friends’ Seminary in New Rochelle, New York, and later at Canajoharie Academy in Canajoharie, New York. In fact, it was while she was teaching in Canahoharie that Susan became involved in the union’s movement to demand equal pay for equal work, when she discovered that male teachers were paid a monthly salary of $10.00, while the female teachers earned only $2.50 a month. That was in 1848.
This amazing educator was involved in other civil rights movements as well. She and other members of her family actively campaigned for the abolition of slavery. On her family’s farm in Rochester, New York, Susan met regularly with Antislavery Quakers, who were sometimes joined by abolitionists Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Two of Susan’s brothers, Daniel and Merritt, were later anti-slavery activists in the Kansas territory.
Susan left the teaching profession in 1849 to devote her energy full-time to the women’s suffrage movement. Although she did not live to see the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment which guaranteed the right to vote to women, this historical achievement would not have been possible without Susan B. Anthony’s many years of devotion to the cause. You just know that someone who worked that hard for women’s rights worked equally diligently in the classroom.
As a tribute to Susan B. Anthony, the Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, was named the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. The former teacher is also the first non-fictional woman to be depicted on US currency. From 1979 to 1981 and again in 1999, her portrait was on the United States dollar coin.
Susan B. Anthony: A true Chalkboard Champion.
