Susan Brownell Anthony was born on February 15th, 1820, in a small place in Massachusetts called Adams. Always strong-minded, the girl with big dreams moved from public school to home school to boarding school in a matter of years. She had grown up believing in equality for women, and quickly quit her first job as a teacher then headmistress at the Canajoharie Academy to join the abolition and temperance movements. She traveled from convention to convention, listening to and giving speeches and preaching to all who came to listen. It was a speech written by Lucy Stone that made Susan turn her eye towards the women’s suffrage movement. Susan added talks of this to her speeches, and even voted illegally a time or two. She later met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who would grow to be a close friend and colleague of Susan’s for the rest of her life. Together they started many organizations, including the weekly women’s rights journal The Revolution. Later, in 1869, the two founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, which played a large part in passing the 19th Amendment allowing women to vote many years later. Susan B. Anthony was a prominent activist and leader in the civil rights movement, and deserves a place in United States History.

As we move farther and farther into a more modernized world, we become farther and farther distanced from the history that got us where we are today. Significant birthdays to our youth are 10, 13, 16, and 21- the age of legal adulthood, 18, is getting less significant with every generation. Yes, I will be excited on my eighteenth birthday, just as I will be and have been for any other. However, I won’t be rushing to the ballots either. The fact that I will wake up on my eighteenth birthday and have the ability to submit my opinion on important, nationwide decisions is something I have taken for granted my entire life, just as several generations before me have as well. In all honesty, I didn’t even consider it until faced with writing this paper. The truth is, without civil rights leaders such as Susan B. Anthony, women in our country wouldn’t have such rights as voting equally with men. Such leaders are the reason for our country’s progressiveness- there are countries on haven’t yet had these advances for women, let alone the fact that our country only made them barely 100 years ago. When I take the time to think about all of which many women have done long before my time so that I can have the wonderful, oblivious that women were ever not equal to men mindset that I do, it makes me proud to be an American girl.