er husband, a member of the Continental Congress,
"to remember the ladies" in the "new code of laws"; and Hannah Lee
Corbin of Virginia pleaded with her brother, Richard Henry Lee, to
make good the principle of "no taxation without representation" by
enfranchising widows with property.[3]

Yet the legal bondage of women continued to be overlooked. It seemed a
less obvious threat to free institutions and democratic government
than the Negro in slavery. In fact, Negro slavery presented a problem
which demanded attention again and again, flaring up alarmingly in
1820, the year Susan B. Anthony was born, when Missouri was admitted
to the Union as a slave state.[4]

* * * * *

These were some of the forces at work in the minds of Americans during
Susan's childhood. Her father, a liberal Quaker, was concerned over
the extension of slavery, and she often heard him say that he tried to
avoid purchasing cotton raised by slave labor. This early impression
of the evil of slavery was never erased.

The Quakers' respect for women's equality with men before God also
left its mark on young Susan. As soon as she was old enough she went
regularly to Meeting with her father, for all of the Anthonys were
Quakers. They had migrated to western Massachusetts from Rhode Island,
and there on the frontier had built prosperous farms, comfortable
homes, and a meeting house where they could worship God in their own
way. Susan, sitting with the women and children on the hand-hewn
benches near the big fireplace in the meeting house[5] which her
ancestors had built, found peace and consecration in the simple
unordered service, in the long reverent silence broken by both the men
and the women in the congregation as they were led to say a prayer or
give out a helpful message. Forty families now worshiped here, the
women sitting on one side and the men on the other; but women took
their places with men in positions of honor, Susan's own grandmother,
Hannah Latham Anthony, an elder, sitting in the "high seat," and her
aunt, Hannah Anthony Hoxie, preaching as the spirit moved her. With
this valuation of women accepted as a matter of course in her church
and family circle, Susan took it for granted that it existed
everywhere.

Although her father was a devout Friend, she discovered that he had
the reputation of thinking for himself, following the "inner light"
even when its leading differed from the considered judgment