Girls -- United States -- Biography -- Juvenile literature
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.
Susan began to teach in a district school when she was seventeen years
old. She was boarded in turn at the homes of her pupils, being paid in
addition only one dollar and a half a week. Susan was a very successful
teacher, and often she grew indignant to see that men who did not do
their work so well as she received four times as much pay. Equal pay for
equal work was one of the rights that she began to demand for her
fellow-women from that time on.
When Susan’s father failed in business, she saw his creditors take all
of her mother’s personal things. Susan was enraged with the injustice of
it and declared that there should be a law to make a wife’s belongings
her own.
In 1851 Miss Anthony made a trip to Seneca Falls, New York, to urge the
admission of girls to the People’s College then being founded. There she
met Miss Lucy Stone and had an opportunity to become well acquainted
with her and also with Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whom she had met a
few months before.
Mrs. Stanton and Miss Stone believed that women should have a share in
making the laws of the land, and Miss Anthony soon became their most
ardent co-worker. Twenty-five years later, Miss Anthony drafted the
federal suffrage amendment. However, it was forty-five years from the
time that the amendment was drafted until it became a part of our
Constitution.
Susan B. Anthony was one of the greatest friends that women have ever
had. When she was born there were only three things that a girl who
wanted to earn her living could do: be a millhand, a servant, or a
teacher. Before the close of Miss Anthony’s life, a girl might fit
herself to be a doctor, a lawyer, a business woman, or, in fact, almost
anything that she chose.
When Miss Anthony was a young girl, the doors of nearly all colleges
were closed to women. The girl who dared to ask for as much education as
was given to her brother was considered a great oddity. However, Miss
Anthony lived to see girls admitted to college quite as a matter of
course.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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