“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”

She ended up being fined $100—a fine she never paid.

Later the pair edited three volumes of History of Woman Suffrage together alongside activist Matilda Joslyn Gage.

The National Woman Suffrage Association

When Susan B. Anthony was denied a chance to speak at a temperance convention because of her gender, she was inspired to shift her focus to the fight for women’s rights.

The Anthonys were also part of the temperance movement, which attempted to cease the production and sale of alcohol in the United States.

The nineteenth amendment was known as the “Susan B. Anthony Amendment” to honor her work on behalf of women’s rights, and on July 2, 1979, she became the first woman to be featured on a circulating coin from the U.S. mint.

Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) was a pioneer in the women’s suffrage movement in the United States and president (1892-1900) of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which she founded with Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Anthony spent her life working for women’s rights. In 1888, she helped to merge the two largest suffrage associations into one, the National American Women’s Suffrage Association. She led the group until 1900. She traveled around the country giving speeches, gathering thousands of signatures on petitions, and lobbying Congress every year for women. Anthony died in 1906, 14 years before women were given the right to vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920.

“Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.”

When Congress passed the 14th and 15th amendments which give voting rights to African American men, Anthony and Stanton were angry and opposed the legislation because it did not include the right to vote for women.

In 1848, a group of women held a convention at Seneca Falls, New York. It was the first Women’s Rights Convention in the United States and began the Suffrage movement.

She became an abolition activist, even though most people thought it was improper for women to give speeches in public. Anthony made many passionate speeches against slavery.

After many years of teaching, Anthony returned to her family who had moved to New York State. There she met William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, who were friends of her father. Listening to them moved Susan to want to do more to help end slavery.

People who consider themselves of “mixed race” and experience some form of psychic stress be-cause they feel they have no identity in American society, perhaps more than most, need to have un-derstanding of this history. . . .

One of the more tragic aspects of the racial world-view has been the seeming dilemma of people whose parents are identifi ably of different “races.

56 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Differencelonger possible. American society had made “race” (and the physical features connected to it) equiva-lent to, and the dominant source of, human identity, superseding all other aspects of identity. The problems that this has entailed, especially for the low-status “races,” have been enormous, im-mensely complex, and almost intractable. Constant and unrelenting portrayals of their inferiority condi-tioned them to a self-imagery of being culturally backward, primitive, intellectually stunted, prone to violence, morally corrupt, undeserving of the benefi ts of civilization, insensitive to the fi ner arts, and (in the case of Africans) aesthetically ugly and animal-like. Because of the cultural imperative of race ideology, all Americans were compelled to the view that a ra-cial status, symbolized by biophysical attributes, was the premier determinant of their identity. “Race” identity took priority over religion, ethnic origin, education and training, socioeconomic class, occupa-tion, language, values, beliefs, morals, lifestyles, geo-graphical location, and all other human attributes that hitherto provided all groups and individuals with a sense of who they were. The dilemma for the low-status races was, and still is, how to construct a posi-tive identity for themselves in the light of the “racial” identity imposed on them by the dominant society. In recent decades, one response to this dilemma on the part of some African Americans has been Afrocentrism (which is not the same as an older version of “Negritude” that black intellectuals had developed earlier in this century). And for some Indians a new form of “Nativism” has emerged, har-kening back to a Native American lifestyle. Afro-centrism seeks to reidentify with the peoples and cultures of Africa and to elevate Africans to a posi-tion of esteem by emphasizing valuable aspects of African cultures. Some Afrocentrists also make assertions about the positive qualities of African people and seek to recognize and objectify African-isms in the behavior of African-descended peoples who have been scattered all over the New World. Many assume or operate on the premise that all peoples who descended from Africans during the diaspora maintain certain behaviorisms that mark them off from other peoples. Their arguments seem of most colonies and transformed into property as slaves in a state of permanent bondage. Edmund Morgan (1975) also interpreted the ac-tions of the early colonists in the process of estab-lishing “racial” identities as stemming from the propertied colonists’ fear of poor whites and pos-sibly slaves engaging in rebellions together. Colo-nial leaders consciously formulated policies that would separate poor whites from Indians, blacks, and mulattoes and proceeded to provide the white poor, whom they had hitherto treated with contempt and hatred, with some privileges and special advan-tages. 4 In time, class divisions diminished in the minds of poor whites and they saw themselves as having something in common with the propertied class, symbolized by their light skins and common origins in Europe. With laws progressively continuing to reduce the rights of blacks and Indians, it was not long before the various European groups coalesced into a white “racial” category whose high-status identity gave them access to wealth, power, opportunity, and privilege. 5 By the mid-nineteenth century virtually all Americans had been conditioned to this arbitrary ranking of the American peoples, and racial ideol-ogy had diffused around much of the world, includ-ing to the colonized peoples of the Third World and among Europeans themselves.

We in the contemporary Western world have often found it diffi cult to understand this phenom-enon and assume that differences in skin color must have had some important meaning.

No structur-ing of inequality, whether social, moral, intellec-tual, cultural or otherwise, was associated with people because of their skin color, although all “barbarians” varied in some ways from the somatic norm of the Mediterranean world. But barbarians were not irredeemably so, and, as we have seen, nothing in the values of the public life denied the transformability of even the most backward of barbarians.

What seems strange to us today is that the bio-logical variations among human groups were not given signifi cant social meaning.

What was absent from these different forms of human identity is what we today would perceive as classifi cations into “racial” groups, that is, the orga-nization of all peoples into a limited number of un-equal or ranked categories theoretically based on differences in their biophysical traits.

Yet Christians, Jews, and Muslims had lived together in relative amity, and even inter-married, for several hundred years after the Muslim conquests and before the rise of the Christian king-doms to challenge Muslim power.

And various sects that developed within each large religious community complicated matters by fostering internal dissension and even warfare inter alia

One-third of the population of Athens were foreigners as early as the Classical period, fi ve hundred years before the Christian era (Boardman et al. 1986:222). And the city of Alexandria was (and still is) a heterogeneous, sophisticated, and complex community under the Greeks, Romans, Christians, and Arabs.

Peoples of different cultures coexisted for the most part without strife, with alien segments often functioning in distinct roles in the larger cities.

52 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference When Alexander conquered peoples and lands all the way to the Indus Valley in India, interacting with “civilized” populations, nomadic pastoralists, settled villagers, and a variety of hunting and fi shing peo-ples, he exhorted his warriors to intermarry with the peoples they conquered in order to learn their lan-guages and cultures

Until the rise of market capitalism, wage labor, the Protestant Ethic, private property, and posses-sive individualism, kinship connections also oper-ated as major indices that gave all peoples a sense of who they were

That is that “ethnic” identity was not perceived as in-eluctably set in stone. Individuals and groups of individuals often moved to new areas or changed their identities by acquiring membership in a dif-ferent group. People of the ancient world seemed to have understood that cultural characteristics were external and acquired forms of behavior, and that “barbarians” could learn to speak the lan-guage of the Romans or the Greeks and become participants in those cultures, and even citizens of these states.

As Joseph Stalin raced to turn an agricultural backwater into an industrialized nation, his government downsized the week from seven to five days. Saturday and Sunday were abolished.