The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (volume 1 of 2): Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many from Her Contemporaries During Fifty Years

A biography written during the subject's lifetime is a rare thing, and this volume captures Susan B. Anthony at a pivotal moment in American history. Ida Husted Harper, Anthony's close associate, assembled not only a biographical narrative but also the woman's own letters, public addresses, and correspondence from her contemporaries creating something closer to Anthony's autobiography than any later account could achieve. Volume one traces her from ancestral roots in the Berkshire Hills through her Quaker upbringing, her early years as a schoolteacher, and the first stirrings of her consciousness about women's place in American society. Harper paints a vivid picture of the forces that shaped this most controversial of reformers: a family steeped in Quaker conviction, a nation wrestling with its own contradictions about liberty, and a woman who refused to accept the limits placed on her sex. The result is not merely biography but primary source, a window into how Anthony understood her own journey as it unfolded. For anyone seeking to understand the real woman behind the suffrage movement, these pages offer what no later historian could recreate: Anthony's world rendered from within her own time.