Susan B. Anthony
Susan B. Anthony died at the age of 86 of heart failure and pneumonia in her home in Rochester, New York, on March 13, 1906. She was buried at Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester. At her birthday celebration in Washington D.C. a few days earlier, Anthony had spoken of those who had worked with her for women's rights: "There have been others also just as true and devoted to the cause — I wish I could name every one — but with such women consecrating their lives, failure is impossible!" "Failure is impossible" quickly became a watchword for the women's movement.
Susan B. Anthony abortion dispute
A 2006 article by Allison Stevens for "Women's eNews" said "a scholarly disagreement ...is growing into a heated skirmish over the famous suffragist's position on reproductive rights." Stevens said pro-choice activists were "outraged over what they say is an unproven claim and concerned that their heroine is being appropriated by a community led by the very people Anthony battled during her lifetime: social conservatives." Nora Bredes, the director of the Susan B. Anthony Center for Women's Leadership at the University of Rochester in New York and a pro-choice Democratic politician, said that she wished to "reclaim" Anthony's legacy. In the anti-alcohol Temperance speech "Social Purity", which Anthony gave repeatedly in the 1870s, she includes "infanticides and abortions" among the examples of "perpetual reminders of men's incapacity to cope successfully with this monster evil of society," meaning drunkenness which leads to licentiousness. However, Anthony scholars Lynn Sherr and Ann Gordon contend that Anthony expressed her disapproval of an abortion only once, privately in a diary entry which is open to other interpretations, and that she did not publicly or politically work against abortion.