Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum | |
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![]() Interactive map showing Susan B Anthony Birthplace museum | |
Location | Adams, Massachusetts |
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Coordinates | 42°36′55″N73°6′10″W / 42.61528°N 73.10278°W |
Built | 1817 |
Architect | Anthony, Daniel |
Architectural style | Federal |
NRHP reference No. | 85000021 [1] |
Added to NRHP | January 3, 1985 |
The Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum is a historic house museum at 67 East Road in Adams, Massachusetts. It is notable as the birthplace of suffragist Susan B. Anthony in 1820 and for its association with early educators and industrialists in Adams. The property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. [1]
The house is now a learning center and museum dedicated to showcasing Susan B. Anthony's early years. One room is dedicated to Anthony's later activist life.
Built in 1817, the house is a conventional, center hall, 2.5-story colonial in the Federalist style. Twin chimneys rise from the building's center line. A modest 1.5-story ell was added onto the rear of the house, and a porch, added onto the side of the rear ell in the 1950s, was enclosed in the 1960s. A barn on the property was replaced by a modern garage, which houses the museum's gift shop. Inside the house, the original floorplan has been retained, with a central hall flanked by large public rooms in front of the house and smaller service rooms in the rear. The rear ell contains two small rooms. Most of the original woodwork has been retained, although one fireplace has been bricked up. [2]
The museum shows Susan B. Anthony's daily family life and influences, such as her Quaker background, in the early 19th century and how the house was restored in 2006-2009 and museum consists of permanent and changing exhibits. The rooms include Kitchen and Heath, Daniel Anthony's store, the Birthing Room, the Portrait Gallery and the Legacy Room.
Kitchen and Hearth depicts the main gathering space for the Anthony family and their dependents, approximately 23 girls who worked in Daniel Anthony's 26-loom mill on Tophet Brook, across East Road.
Daniel Anthony's store, which Susan's father ran out of the northeast room of the family home to supply the needs of his textile workers and neighbors, has been recreated the way it may have been in 1817.
The Birthing Room is where the first five of the Anthony children were born.
The Portrait Gallery holds reproductions of Anthony family members and friends.
The Legacy Room contains a timeline from 1820 to 1906 with the major events of Anthony's life and important world events; an artifacts collection with period pieces; and ephemera, including suffrage postcards and meeting notices, which provide insight into the issues for which early feminists advocated, such as:
The first of the Anthonys to arrive in Adams, Massachusetts, was David Anthony, the great-grandfather of Susan B. Anthony, in the years before the American Revolutionary War. He came as part of a more general migration of Quakers to the area from Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts. He established a cider mill that remains in the Anthony family to this day. His grandson, David Anthony, built this house in 1817 as a gift to his son, Daniel Anthony, the father of Susan B. Anthony. David was a strong proponent of education, teaching at the East Road School, and joining with others in the tightly knit Quaker community to found the Adams Academy in 1825 on land owned by his father. Daniel Anthony also continued the family interest in mills, establishing a cotton yarn-producing mill, known as the Pump Log Mill, in 1822.
It is in this house that his second child, Susan Anthony, was born on February 15, 1820. In 1827 he was lured by financial interests to Battenville, New York. [2]
The house remained in Anthony family hands until 1895, after which it went through a succession of owners. The Society of Friends Descendants acquired the property in 1926, and established a museum. The building was returned to private hands in 1949. [2] It underwent restoration from 2006 to 2009. It is now home to the nonprofit Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum, showcasing Susan B. Anthony's early years and her legacy as a tireless advocate of women's right to vote. [3]
On October 9, 2019, The Berkshire Eagle reported that Colleen Janz, the director of the museum from 2012 to 2018, was fired on July 23, 2018, for allegedly stealing $31,000 from the museum through falsified transactions. [4]
One of the exhibits is about Restellism, a name for abortion that was first heard in a popular lecture, portions of which were reprinted on March 4, 1869, by editors Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Parker Pillsbury in the pages of Anthony's newspaper The Revolution . [5] [6] The display describes how suffragists took a stance opposing the practice of restellism, the term used at the time for abortion. It shows 122 references taken from Anthony's newspaper—mentions of Restellism which offer insight into how the women's rights activists came to oppose this practice.
The owner of the museum is Carol Crossed who is an anti-abortion feminist. The museum's initial mission statement included "raising public awareness" of Anthony's "wide-ranging legacy" including her being "a pioneering feminist and suffragist as well as a noteworthy figure in the abolitionist, opposition to restellism and temperance movements of the 19th century" [7] (emphasis added.)
A local paper reported that the exhibit about Restellism implies that the rejection of advertisements shows Anthony's personal views about abortion. Three opening day protesters said the museum's leadership was "inferring upon [Anthony] an unproven historical stance." [8] They also said that the directors were pushing an anti-abortion agenda. [6] Answering this assertion, Crossed said, "the pro-life views expressed in Anthony's newspaper, The Revolution, will not be excluded from the exhibition." [9]
Susan B. Anthony was an American social reformer and women's rights activist who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. Born into a Quaker family committed to social equality, she collected anti-slavery petitions at the age of 17. In 1856, she became the New York state agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society.
Adams is a town in northern Berkshire County, Massachusetts, United States. It is part of the Pittsfield, Massachusetts Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 8,166 at the 2020 census.
Alice Stokes Paul was an American Quaker, suffragist, feminist, and women's rights activist, and one of the foremost leaders and strategists of the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits sex discrimination in the right to vote. Paul initiated, and along with Lucy Burns and others, strategized events such as the Woman Suffrage Procession and the Silent Sentinels, which were part of the successful campaign that resulted in the amendment's passage in August 1920.
Feminists for Life of America (FFL) is a non-profit, anti-abortion feminist, non-governmental organization (NGO). Established in 1972, and now based in Alexandria, Virginia, the organization publishes a biannual magazine, The American Feminist, and aims to reach young women, college students in particular.
Anna Howard Shaw was a leader of the women's suffrage movement in the United States. She was also a physician and one of the first women to be ordained as a Methodist minister in the United States.
Pro-life feminism is the opposition to abortion by some feminists. Pro-life feminists may believe that the principles behind women's rights also call them to oppose abortion on right to life grounds and that abortion hurts women more than it benefits them.
Alice Stone Blackwell was an American feminist, suffragist, journalist, radical socialist, and human rights advocate.
Women's suffrage, or the right of women to vote, was established in the United States over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, first in various states and localities, then nationally in 1920 with the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Daniel Read Anthony was an American publisher, women's suffragist, and abolitionist. He moved to Kansas, where he published the Leavenworth Times in Leavenworth, Kansas, as well as other newspapers in the area. He was a leader of the New England Emigrant Aid Company. He was a younger brother of activist Susan B. Anthony.
Susan B. Anthony House, in Rochester, New York, was the home of Susan B. Anthony for forty years, while she was a national figure in the women's rights movement.
Lucretia Mott was an American Quaker, abolitionist, women's rights activist, and social reformer. She had formed the idea of reforming the position of women in society when she was amongst the women excluded from the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in 1840. In 1848, she was invited by Jane Hunt to a meeting that led to the first public gathering about women's rights, the Seneca Falls Convention, during which the Declaration of Sentiments was written.
Ann Dexter Gordon is an American research professor in the department of history at Rutgers University and editor of the papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, a survey of more than 14,000 papers relating to the pair of 19th century women's rights activists. She is also the editor of the multi-volume work, Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and has authored a number of other books about the history of the women's suffrage movement. She worked with popular historian Ken Burns on his 1999 book and appears in his documentary film about Stanton and Anthony. Since 2006, Gordon has repeatedly weighed in on the Susan B. Anthony abortion dispute stating that "Anthony spent no time on the politics of abortion. It was of no interest to her."
Susan B. Anthony was a leader of the American women's suffrage movement whose position on abortion has been the subject of a modern-day dispute. The dispute has primarily been between anti-abortion activists, who say that Anthony expressed opposition to abortion, and acknowledged authorities in her life and work who say that she did not.
Ellen Clark Sargent was an active American women's suffragist. She was influential in advocacy for the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which sought to give women the right to vote.
Mary Stafford Anthony was an American suffragist during the women's rights movement of the 19th century. Anthony was employed as a school teacher in Western New York, and was eventually promoted to the position of principal within the Rochester City School District, where she was the first woman known to receive equal pay with men in the same job.
Charlotte Ives Cobb Kirby was an influential and radical women's rights activist and temperance advocate in the state of Utah as well as a well-known national figure. Charlotte was born in Massachusetts and at seven years of age moved to Nauvoo, Illinois with her mother, an early member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There, without divorcing father Henry Cobb, her mother became Brigham Young's second plural wife. They then moved to Utah in 1848. Charlotte, previously a plural wife herself, spoke out against polygamy and gained much opposition from polygamous women suffragists because of it. Her first marriage was to William S. Godbe, the leader of the Godbeite offshoot from the LDS Church. After divorcing Godbe, Kirby married John Kirby, a non-LDS man, and they were together until Charlotte's death in 1908. Charlotte was a leading figure of the Utah Territory Woman Suffrage Association, and served as a correspondent to the government and other suffragist organizations, including the National Women's Suffrage Association. Charlotte often traveled to the East Coast to deliver lectures regarding women's rights and temperance, the first Utah woman and the first woman with voting rights to speak to national suffragist audiences. Charlotte Ives Cobb Kirby died on January 24, 1908, at age 71 in Salt Lake City, Utah.
While women's suffrage had an early start in Maine, dating back to the 1850s, it was a long, slow road to equal suffrage. Early suffragists brought speakers Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone to the state in the mid-1850s. Ann F. Jarvis Greely and other women in Ellsworth, Maine, created a women's rights lecture series in 1857. The first women's suffrage petition to the Maine Legislature was also sent that year. Working-class women began marching for women's suffrage in the 1860s. The Snow sisters created the first Maine women's suffrage organization, the Equal Rights Association of Rockland, in 1868. In the 1870s, a state suffrage organization, the Maine Women's Suffrage Association (MWSA), was formed. Many petitions for women's suffrage were sent to the state legislature. MWSA and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) of Maine worked closely together on suffrage issues. By the late 1880s the state legislature was considering several women's suffrage bills. While women's suffrage did not pass, during the 1890s many women's rights laws were secured. During the 1900s, suffragists in Maine continued to campaign and lecture on women's suffrage. Several suffrage organizations including a Maine chapter of the College Equal Suffrage League and the Men's Equal Rights League were formed in the 1910s. Florence Brooks Whitehouse started the Maine chapter of the National Woman's Party (NWP) in 1915. Suffragists and other clubwomen worked together on a large campaign for a 1917 voter referendum on women's suffrage. Despite the efforts of women around the state, women's suffrage failed. Going into the next few years, a women's suffrage referendum on voting in presidential elections was placed on the September 13, 1920 ballot. But before that vote, Maine ratified the Nineteenth Amendment on November 5, 1920. It was the nineteenth state to ratify. A few weeks after ratification, MWSA dissolved and formed the League of Women Voters (LWV) of Maine. White women first voted in Maine on September 13, 1920. Native Americans in Maine had to wait longer to vote. In 1924, they became citizens of the United States. However, Maine would not allow individuals living on Indian reservations to vote. It was not until the passage of a 1954 equal rights referendum that Native Americans gained the right to vote in Maine. In 1955 Lucy Nicolar Poolaw (Penobscot) was the first Native American living on a reservation in Maine to cast a vote.