Today’s #stampoftheday honors the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment requiring that women be allowed to vote (and the day after Michelle Obama’s extraordinary speech at the Democratic National Convention). It does so via a 3-cent stamp, issued in 1938, picturing Susan B. Anthony, who played a pivotal role in the women’s suffrage movement. This was only the fourth stamp to picture a woman and was the first to honor an activist – the previous women portrayed on stamps had been Queen Isabella of Spain, Martha Washington, and Pocahontas. (It’s also oddly fitting that this stamp wasn’t carefully mounted in my late father’s albums; rather, I found it among the loose stamps tucked one of the various folders and envelopes that also were part of his collection).

I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for Anthony ever since I was in college when I played “Joe the Loiterer” in an amazing student-directed production of “The Mother of Us All” that used the libretto written by Gertude Stein. Since James Schofield, the student who directed the play couldn’t afford the rights to the original music, which was written by Virgil Thompson, he got a friend named Andy Warshaw to write new music. It’s an amazingly complex play – in truth, I don’t think I really understood it until to sometime in the middle of our one performance, when I saw just how amazing the play was. Thinking back on that moment now, what really amazes me is that a college sophomore had the chutzpah to take on the play and the ability to make it work. (Anyone out there know what happened to James Schofield; I lost track of him years ago).

I don’t remember if, as part of the play, I learned much about Anthony. If I did, I certainly didn’t remember any of it. So here’s what I’ve learned (or perhaps re-learned) in preparing this post. In 1820, Anthony was born in Adams, Massachusetts. In 1845, along with her parents, who were Quakers committed to social equality, she moved to Rochester, New York where their home became gathering place of local activists, including Frederick Douglass, who became one of Anthony’s lifelong friends. The following year she began serving as headmistress of the female department of the Canajoharie Academy. When she realized she was making less money than men doing similar jobs, she grew interested in the women’s rights movement. “I wasn’t ready to vote, didn’t want to vote,” she later recalled, “But I did want equal pay for equal work.”

After the school closed, Anthony briefly ran her family’s farm before choosing to dedicate all of her time to reform work – the abolition of slavery, temperance (the prohibition of alcohol), and women’s rights. In 1851 she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention for women’s rights. They became lifelong friends and co-workers in efforts to not only secure rights for women but also to end slavery and ban alcohol.

After the Civil War ended, they founded the American Equal Rights Association, which campaigned for equal rights for both women and African Americans. In 1868, they began publishing a women’s rights newspaper called The Revolution. And in 1869, they founded the National Woman Suffrage Association after the women’s movement split over the proposed 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would prohibit the denial of suffrage because of race. Anthony, who opposed it, explained: “An oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor; an oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant; or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but surely this oligarchy of sex, which makes the men of every household sovereigns, masters; the women subjects, slaves; carrying dissension, rebellion into every home of the Nation, cannot be endured.”

In 1872, Anthony was arrested for voting in her hometown of Rochester, New York, and convicted in a widely publicized trial. Although she refused to pay the fine, the authorities declined to take further action. (Earlier today, President Trump officially pardoned her.). In 1878, Anthony and Stanton arranged for an ally in Congress to offer an amendment giving women the right to vote. But it did not garner sufficient support. In 1890, the competing women’s groups reconciled and formed the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Anthony, who was a public leader of the new group, giving as many as 75 to 100 speeches per year and working on many state campaigns.

Although she died in 1906, 14 years before the amendment was ratified, Anthony believed the women’s movement had made great progress. At the time of her death, women could vote in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Idaho, and several larger states followed soon after. Legal rights for married women had been established in most states, and most professions had at least a few women members. About 36,000 women were attending colleges and universities, up from zero a few decades earlier. In 1904, two years before she died, she claimed that such changes showed that “the world has never witnessed a greater revolution than in the sphere of woman during this fifty years”

By this point in this post, it should be clear that Anthony had a great way with words. Here’s seven more notable Anthony quotes:

1. No man is good enough to govern any woman without her consent.
2. The true republic: men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.
3. I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
4. Our Job is not to make young women grateful. It is to make the ungrateful so they keep going. Gratitude never radicalized anybody.
5. Forget conventionalisms; forget what the world thinks of you stepping out of your place; think your best thoughts, speak your best words, work your best works, looking to your own conscience for approval.
6. Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry.
7. The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball – the further I am rolled the more I gain.

It’s amazing to me that the words – written more than 100 years ago, still resonate.

Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, “organize, agitate, educate” and work for peace.