Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) was born on February 15, 1820, in Adams, Massachusetts, into a Quaker family with a long history of activist traditions. After teaching for fifteen years, she organized the first women's temperance association, the Daughters of Temperance. The temperance movement organized efforts to persuade people to abstain from drinking alcoholic beverages. Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton at a temperance meeting in 1851, and from that time until Stanton's death in 1902, they were associated as the leaders of the women's movement in the United States and were bound by a close personal friendship.

From 1868 to 1870, Anthony and Stanton published the New York liberal weekly newspaper, The Revolution, which called for equal pay and rights for women. In 1898, Anthony used the cash value on her life insurance to meet the University of Rochester's financial demands for the admission of women. She has been called "The Invincible" and "The Napoleon of the women's rights movement." She lived by her own motto, "Failure is impossible."