Susan B Anthony

In its third edition this accessible and engaging collection of the writings of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony provides a critical overview of the lives, ideas and activism of two founders of the American feminist tradition. Introductory material has been extensively revised to reflect recent scholarship and provides historical context to selected letters, speeches, articles, reminiscences, arguments before courts, state legislatures and Congress. Of particular interest is new material concerning Cady Stanton's relationship with Frederick Douglass and Anthony's with Ida B. Wells.

In 1881, three writers and rights activists, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage, came together to publish the first volume in their groundbreaking History of Woman Suffrage series – a series that eventually went on to fill 5700 pages and lend weight to a movement that changed the course of history for ever. Taking its dedication from the first volume of the History – to the memory of pioneering women whose 'earnest lives and fearless words have been, in the preparation of these pages, a constant inspiration' – this volume collects together four essays that give an insight into the work as a whole, and provide a rounded introduction to the history of women's suffrage on both sides of the Atlantic.

An account of the landmark suffragist trial before the U. S. Circuit Court for the Northern District of New York, at Canandaigua in June 1873, that brought the cause of women's voting rights to the forefront of national attention in the United States. A group of women led by preeminent abolitionist and woman's rights advocate Susan B. Anthony 1820-1906], attempted to vote during the presidential election of 1872, claiming they were entitled to do so according to the Fourteenth Amendment. The presiding officials, Jones, Hall, and Marsh, decided by a majority to accept their ballots. The women were soon arrested for this act and indicted for "knowingly voting without having a lawful right to vote." The officials were also indicted. This volume reprints the text of the indictment and a transcript of the testimony with connecting commentary. The appendix offers an address by Anthony delivered before her trial, a speech on her behalf cause by Joslyn Gage, and a critical assessment of the trial by John Hooker. vii, 212 pp.