Numismatic Nostalgia

Bucking the Establishment.

- Ray Levato

Failure is impossible.” With those three words, Susan B. Anthony carved her niche in history. And although Anthony died in 1906 at age 86—14 years before the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote—she came to symbolize the fight for equality at the ballot box for millions of American women. 

In 1979, Anthony became the first woman other than Lady Liberty to have her likeness immortalized on regular U.S. coinage. A bill for production of a new $1 coin was approved by Congress and signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1978. The U.S. Mint stopped production of the bulkier Eisenhower dollar that same year. 

Susan Brownell Anthony was born in 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts, but lived most of her adult life in Rochester, New York, where she is buried in historic Mount Hope Cemetery. 

Anthony was raised in the Quaker tradition of morality and social justice, and began collecting antislavery petitions at the age of 16.

SHE BECAME A social reformer and crusaded for causes such as temperance. But her fight for a woman’s right to vote was crystallized in the presidential election of 1872. 

Anthony and 14 other women appeared at a polling station in Rochester’s Eighth Ward and demanded to be registered as part of a strategy to force a court case on the issue. 

She arm-twisted the election inspectors, threatening to sue them under the New York State constitution, and she and several other women were eventually allowed to cast their votes. (She voted for Ulysses S. Grant.)