Day: August 20, 2011

I have given the best of myself and the best work of my life to help obtain political freedom for women, knowing that upon this rests the hope not only of the freedom of men but of the onward civilization of the world.

Mary S. Anthony
Mary S. Anthony (1827–1907), U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 5, ch. 7, by Ida Husted Harper (1922).

From a statement dictated a few days before her death in February 1907 and sent to the thirty-ninth annual convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association, which was convened later that month. It was read aloud by the association’s president, the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw. Sister of the much better-known suffragist, Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906), Mary S. Anthony had become involved in women’s rights activity even earlier. She had attended the famous Seneca Falls, N.Y., convention in 1848, which was the first American convention dedicated to women’s rights, and for many years had presided over the Political Equality Club of Rochester, N.Y….