Susan B. Anthony List

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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    ... in every State there are more women who can read and write than the whole number of illiterate male voters; more white women who can read and write than all Negro voters; more American women who can read and write than all foreign voters.
    —National Woman Suffrage Association. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)

    The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.
    Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)

    There is great fear expressed on all sides lest this war shall be made a war for the negro. I am willing that it shall be. It is a war to found an empire on the negro in slavery, and shame on us if we do not make it a war to establish the negro in freedom—against whom the whole nation, North and South, East and West, in one mighty conspiracy, has combined from the beginning.
    —Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)

    Religious literature has eminent examples, and if we run over our private list of poets, critics, philanthropists and philosophers, we shall find them infected with this dropsy and elephantiasis, which we ought to have tapped.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)