Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Equal Rights

Explores the diversity of thought and action in women's involvement in 19th-century reform movements.

Though Susan B. Anthony is best remembered for leading the campaign for women's suffrage, she worked in multiple movements for equality beyond women's right to vote, including antislavery, Native American rights, temperance, and labor reform. In doing so she forged alliances with other activists to forward a broad social justice agenda, but she also faced opposition from these reformers on how best to achieve this goal.

Susan B. Anthony and theStruggle for Equal Rights explores the diversity of women's activism in nineteenth-century American reform movements, focusing on how Anthony and other women reformers shaped those movements and our memories of them. The essays here chart the long career of Anthony in this rich historical context of women's activism and display the efforts of a wide variety of women, and the challenges they faced, in the continued struggle for equality.

Christine L. Ridarsky, Rochester City Historian, is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Rochester. Mary M. Huth is retired assistant director of the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester.

The multifaceted portrait it paints of Anthony as an activist and a politician is an important contribution to the history of women's rights in the United States. JOURNAL OF AMERICAN HISTORY This significant and timely collection puts Susan B. Anthony at the center as it interrogates, expands, refines, and revises the grand narrative of the women's rights movement. Important essays here broaden our view of the world in which Anthony lived and worked, bringing issues of race and ethnicity into the purview of nineteenth-century feminism; other chapters analyze Anthony's richly textured life along with the successes -- and frustrations -- of her efforts to secure control over her legacy. --Carol B. Lasser, Oberlin College