The Susan B. Anthony List (SBA List) is a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization that seeks to eliminate abortion in the U.S. by supporting pro-life politicians, primarily women, through its SBA List Candidate Fund political action committee. In 2011, it reported it had 333,000 members.
Founded in 1993 by sociologist and psychologist Rachel MacNair, the SBA List was a response to the success of the pro-choice group EMILY's List, which was partly responsible for bringing about the 1992 "Year of the Woman" in which a significant number of women, all pro-choice, were elected to Congress. MacNair wished to help pro-life women gain high public office. She recruited Marjorie Dannenfelser and Jane Abraham as the first experienced leaders of SBA List. Dannenfelser is now president of the organization and Abraham is chairman of the board.
Named for suffragist Susan B. Anthony, SBA List identifies itself with Anthony and several 19th-century women's rights activists; SBA List believes Anthony and other early feminists were opposed to abortion. Regarding Anthony's abortion beliefs, SBA List has been challenged by scholars and pro-choice activists; Anthony scholar Ann D. Gordon and Anthony biographer Lynn Sherr write that Anthony "spent no time on the politics of abortion".
Read more about Susan B. Anthony List: Founding, Elections, See Also
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“The anti-suffragist talk of sheltering women from the fierce storms of life is a lot of cant. I have no patience with it. These storms beat on woman just as fiercely as they do on man, and she is not trained to defend herself against them.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
“Can you conceive what it is to native-born American women citizens, accustomed to the advantages of our schools, our churches and the mingling of our social life, to ask over and over again for so simple a thing as that “we, the people,” should mean women as well as men; that our Constitution should mean exactly what it says?”
—Mary F. Eastman, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 ch. 5, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“No genuine equality, no real freedom, no true manhood or womanhood can exist on any foundation save that of pecuniary independence. As a right over a man’s subsistence is a power over his moral being, so a right over a woman’s subsistence enslaves her will, degrades her pride and vitiates her whole moral nature.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1907)
“Every morning I woke in dread, waiting for the day nurse to go on her rounds and announce from the list of names in her hand whether or not I was for shock treatment, the new and fashionable means of quieting people and of making them realize that orders are to be obeyed and floors are to be polished without anyone protesting and faces are to be made to be fixed into smiles and weeping is a crime.”
—Janet Frame (b. 1924)