10 Women to Consider for the $20 Bill
5. Susan B. Anthony
Though she was an ardent abolitionist and temperance campaigner, Anthony is most remembered as a suffragist, who in her 50-year partnership with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, laid down and executed the strategy that would eventually lead to gaining women the right to vote.
She lobbied yearly before Congress. She voted in the 1872 presidential election, for which she was arrested, tried, convicted, and fined $100. She refused to pay the fine, but because no enforcement action was taken, the case never made it to U.S. Supreme Court as she had hoped. Anthony knew that women’s suffrage was inevitable; she is immortalized with a quote from her final suffrage speech: “Failure is impossible.”
She died in 1906, and 14 years later the 19th Amendment, granting women the vote, was signed into law and became known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. In 1979, the U.S. Mint issued the Susan B. Anthony dollar, the first coin to honor a real (as opposed to an allegorical) woman.
