How suffragist Susan B. Anthony was influenced by her childhood Quaker roots in Adams

Susan B. Anthony, who was born in Adams, Massachusetts, devoted her life to fighting for a woman's right to vote. The Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum is celebrating what would have been her 205th birthday this month. Anthony was born on Feb. 15, 1820.

Anthony was the second-oldest of seven children. She lived in Adams until age 6, where she and her family were part of the Quaker community.

Author Jeanne Gehret, who wrote "Susan B. Anthony And Justice For All," said Anthony's Quaker childhood in the Berkshires influenced her activism.

"Susan was predisposed, by being a Quaker, to be thinking about the rights of everyone, everywhere," Gehret said,

Martin Loughman, a docent at the Birthplace Museum said, "The Quakers were very encouraging of women doing things like public speaking or getting an education equal to that of men."

He said Anthony got involved with many different social reforms to try and improve people's lives.

"Like the abolition of slavery, the temperance movement to try and reduce alcohol abuse," Loughman said. "And... the death penalty and how that was a violation of human rights."

But she was most well-known for her work in the women's suffrage movement.

In 1872, she and more than a dozen other women, including some of her sisters, marched down Main Street in Rochester, New York to register to vote. They entered a barber shop, which was the office for voter registration, and told the men in charge they wanted to register.

"They met with some objections. At which point, Susan pulled out the Constitution and read it to them and overcame their objections," Gehret said.

A few days later, on Nov. 5, 1872, Anthony voted for president. Ulysses S. Grant was re-elected to a second term that year.

According to the National Archives Anthony was "arrested, indicted, tried, and convicted for voting illegally."

She was also fined $100, but refused to pay it because she hoped to bring the issue before the Supreme Court. That didn't happen.

Decades later, in 1920, the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote. Anthony, who died in 1906, didn't live to see it.

This story comes via the New England News Collaborative and was first published by New England Public Radio.