The American Minute: Susan B. Anthony – “I deplore the horrible crime of child-murder…”

Susan B. Anthony, who died MARCH 13, 1906, is depicted on a U.S. dollar coinand on a 3-cent stamp.

Her statue is in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, together with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.

Susan B. Anthony was raised a Quaker. Her father owned a cotton mill and refused to buy cotton from farmers who owned slaves.

Susan B. Anthony’s religious upbringing instilled in her the concept that every one is equal before God and motivated her to crusade for freedom for slaves and a woman’s right to vote.

Opposing liquor, drunkenness and abortion, Susan encountered mobs, armed threats, objects thrown at her and was hung in effigy.

After the Civil War, Susan B. Anthony worked hard for the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.

She succeeded in having women admitted to the University of Rochester.

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Susan B. Anthony was arrested for voting in the 1872 Presidential Election, saying she “positively voted the Republican ticket-straight.”

Fourteen years after her death, women won the right to vote.

After learning her sister-in-law had had an abortion, Susan B. Anthony wrote in her diary:

“She will rue the day she forces nature.”

Susan B. Anthony was quoted in The Revolution, July 1869:

“I deplore the horrible crime of child-murder…

No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed.

It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death;

But oh! Thrice guilty is he who…drove her to the desperation which impels her to the crime.”

In a speech she gave repeatedly in the 1870s, Susan B. Anthony stated:

“The prosecutions on our courts for breach of promise, divorce, adultery, bigamy, seduction, rape;

the newspaper reports every day of every year of scandals and outrages, of wife murders and paramour shooting, of abortions and infanticides,

are perpetual reminders of men’s incapacity to cope successfully with this monster evil of society.”

In 1889, Susan B. Anthony wrote to Frances Willard, who was the national president of Woman’s Christian Temperance Union:

“Sweeter even than to have had the joy of caring for children of my own has it been to me to help bring about a better state of things for mothers generally, so that their unborn little ones could not be willed away from them.”