Susan B. Anthony (Rheta Childe Dorr, 1928)

What it is

This is a 1928 popular biography of Susan B. Anthony by Rheta Childe Dorr, held as a text on Wikisource. Dorr drew on personal acquaintance with her subject and on primary sources, so the book is a later account rather than something Anthony wrote. The text opens with a petition addressed to the Congress of the United States. In it, Anthony explains that she had asked the board of registry in Rochester to place her name on the voter register, that the board agreed, and that she then offered her ballots on election day. She describes an indictment that followed for this act.

Why it matters

Dorr's book shows how Anthony was remembered in the decades after her death in 1906. Because the book begins with Anthony's own petition, readers meet her argument in her own words before the author's narration begins. The voting case it describes links Anthony to the wider women's suffrage movement and to the courts and Congress that had to respond to such cases.

Look closer

• Why might a biographer open a book with a petition instead of with the subject's early life?
• What does Anthony say she did on election day, and what does she say the board of registry decided?
• What might a 1928 author include or leave out when writing about a movement that was still being debated?