Susan B. Anthony Signed Photograph, Dated With Her 77th Birthday, and Inscribed to Her Young Housekeeper

Anthony says she is the younger woman’s “friend & elder sister”

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From the housekeeper’s collection and never before offered for sale; Signed images of Anthony are not common.

Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820 and died in Rochester in 1906. She is perhaps the most widely known suffragist and has become an icon of the women’s suffrage movement. She and...

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Susan B. Anthony Signed Photograph, Dated With Her 77th Birthday, and Inscribed to Her Young Housekeeper

Anthony says she is the younger woman’s “friend & elder sister”

From the housekeeper’s collection and never before offered for sale; Signed images of Anthony are not common.

Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820 and died in Rochester in 1906. She is perhaps the most widely known suffragist and has become an icon of the women’s suffrage movement. She and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, seeking a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women’s right to vote. Anthony was arrested for voting in 1872 and was tried and convicted, a move that brought national attention to the suffrage cause. In the 1880s she, Stanton and Matilda Gage wrote and published the comprehensive “History of Woman Suffrage”. In 1890 Anthony presided over the unification of the suffrage associations, which fused under the new banner of National American Woman Suffrage Association. She presided over this group for a decade. During that period Anthony gathered signatures on suffrage petitions at the state and national levels, lobbied Congress, and undertook arduous state tours to organize suffrage campaigns in the states and nationally. In 1897 Anthony began work on her biography, which was published the next year as “The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, A Story of the Evolution of the Status of Women”. She also established a press bureau to feed articles on woman suffrage to the national and local press. In 1900 Anthony pledged the cash value of her life insurance to meet the University of Rochester’s financial demands for the admission of women.

Margaret E. O’Neil (known as Maggie) was educated in Geneva, New York which is near Rochester, and passed her exam for a regent’s certificate in 1894. She came to work for Anthony as her housekeeper in 1900 and continued in that post for two years. Anthony developed a fondness for her, and in 1901 Anthony would tell O’Neil she was her “friend and elder sister.” O’Neil is mentioned in Anthony’s correspondence and identified in the “The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.”

Rochester’s most acclaimed 19th century portrait photographer was John Howe Kent. He moved to Rochester in 1868 and there he operated nine different studios until his death. His precision CDVs and cabinet card photographs earned him lavish praise – with one early biographer lauding Mr. Kent as “the leading photographic artist of the country” – and photographs with his stamp are works of art. This note gained him access to some of the most important celebrity residents and visitors to Rochester, most notably Anthony and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Kent also collaborated with George Eastman on development of the Kodak camera. He died in 1910.

Anthony developed a practice of having photographs of herself taken on her birthday. The earliest one appears to be from 1848, when she was 28 and headmistress at Canajoharie Academy. She continued the tradition in 1897, having the Kent studio photograph her on her 77th birthday.

She presented this photograph to O’Neil at Christmas 1901, signed and inscribed with her birth year and the date the photograph was taken, which was the same year she began work on her biography – “1820 – Feb. 15, 1897.” On the verso she inscribed it, “To Miss Margaret O’Neil, with a pleasant Christmas, from her friend & elder sister. Susan B. Anthony, Christmas 1901, Rochester, N.Y.” The photograph has the Kent studio marking on the recto and its backstamp on the verso.

This is a beautiful image of Anthony. It came from an album put together by O’Neil herself, and it has never before been offered for sale. Signed images of Anthony are not common.

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