After teaching at a female academy in upstate New York (1846-49), she settled in
her family home, near Rochester, N.Y., and began her first public crusade, on
behalf of temperance. Discouraged by the limited role that women were allowed in
the established temperance movement, Anthony helped found the Woman's State
Temperance Society of New York, one of the first organizations of its kind. From
1852 on, she joined her friends Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Amelia Bloomer in
campaigns for women's rights, even for a time donning the "bloomer" costume of
skirt and loose trousers as a sign of protest against the restrictiveness of
women's clothing. After 1854 she devoted herself with vigour and determination
to the antislavery movement, serving from 1856 to the outbreak of the Civil War
(1861) as an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Later, collaborating
with Stanton, she published the New York liberal weekly The Revolution (1868-70)
and, calling for equal pay for women, helped organize the New York Working
Women's Association. In 1872, demanding for women the same civil and political
rights extended to male blacks under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments,
she led a group of women to the polls in Rochester to test the right of women to
vote. She was arrested two weeks later and, while awaiting trial, engaged in
highly publicized lecture tours and, in March 1873, tried to vote again in city
elections. She was thereafter tried and convicted of violating the voting laws
but successfully refused to pay the fine. From then on she campaigned tirelessly
for a federal woman suffrage amendment through the National Woman Suffrage
Association (1869-90) and the National American Woman Suffrage Association
(1890-1906) and by lecturing throughout the country and in the western
territories.