"Failure is impossible," Susan B. Anthony stated. She was talking about a battle she fought her entire life: the right for women to vote. With women like Susan B. Anthony leading the charge, failure really was impossible!

Anthony was born in 1820, and as a young woman, her Quaker family encouraged her involvement in the fight against slavery. She also spoke out for the temperance movement to end the sale or use of alcohol. But Anthony faced a problem as she worked in these movements: women were not allowed to speak in public meetings. It just wasn't considered proper. That made her angry.

When she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton—another woman who believed women should speak out against society's wrongs—Susan formed a state temperance society. She came to believe that women would not be able to improve society until they could vote. She decided to devote her efforts to women's rights.

With Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and others, Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. Anthony, who never married or had children, traveled across the country working for passage of a federal law to give women the right to vote. In 1872, she tried to vote in the presidential election but was arrested, jailed, and fined $100. She refused to pay.

She helped write a huge, four-volume book on the history of the woman's suffrage movement. She died before seeing the Nineteenth Amendment adopted, but she had been right: failure was impossible! Women won the right to vote in 1920. In 1979, the United States government issued the Susan B. Anthony silver dollar—the first American coin to feature a woman.