(RNS) — Three extraordinary women from vastly different religious backgrounds changed our nation forever. Indeed, one cannot understand social movements in America today without recognizing the trio’s achievements and the role religion played in their tumultuous histories. And like today’s social activists, they fought religious bigotry, police arrests, courtroom trials and constant threats of physical violence.
Susan B. Anthony’s conviction that all people were equal under God was an inheritance from her upbringing in the Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers. A temperance campaigner and abolitionist in her early career, Anthony had by the late 1860s begun to focus on women’s rights. With her friend and fellow activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she founded the National American Woman Suffrage Association that later became the League of Women Voters.
In 1872, the 52-year-old Susan B. Anthony voted in her hometown of Rochester, New York. She was brought to trial for her “crime” and found guilty, but she refused to pay the $100 fine (about $2,000 in today’s dollars), and the prosecution dropped the case.
Anthony’s struggle for the ballot box was never easy in a male-dominated society that had curtailed women’s right to vote since our nation’s beginnings. But she had remarkable courage and an unshakable commitment to transform the role of women in society.
Susan B. Anthony’s conviction that all people were equal under God was an inheritance from her upbringing in the Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers. A temperance campaigner and abolitionist in her early career, Anthony had by the late 1860s begun to focus on women’s rights. With her friend and fellow activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she founded the National American Woman Suffrage Association that later became the League of Women Voters.
In 1872, the 52-year-old Susan B. Anthony voted in her hometown of Rochester, New York. She was brought to trial for her “crime” and found guilty, but she refused to pay the $100 fine (about $2,000 in today’s dollars), and the prosecution dropped the case.
Anthony’s struggle for the ballot box was never easy in a male-dominated society that had curtailed women’s right to vote since our nation’s beginnings. But she had remarkable courage and an unshakable commitment to transform the role of women in society.
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