Visiting The Susan B Anthony Museum & House In Rochester, NY

With only five days in Rochester, NY and a couple of those being work days, we didn’t have a ton of time to explore the city. One thing we wanted to make sure we visited though was the Susan B Anthony Museum & House.

Susan B Anthony was a campaigner for women’s rights and was a key member in the suffrage movement in the US. Although she was born in Massachusetts, her family moved to New York state when she was six years old. They subsequently moved to Rochester when she was 25 and she lived in the city until she passed away in 1906 at the age of 86.

To honor her legacy, you can visit the Susan B Anthony Museum & House which are two buildings right next to each other. The building on the right is where the museum and gift shop is and was formerly the home of her sister Hannah. There’s a small parking lot to the right of the museum, but there’s also street parking in the residential neighborhood where the museum and house are located.

If you don’t have time to go on a tour of the house, you can see the house from the outside and learn a little bit more about Susan B Anthony’s life courtesy of an information board.

If you do have time though, we’d recommend going on a guided tour so that you can see the inside of the house and learn about her life in more detail. We arrived at 11:30am not realizing that they offer tours at specific times and going on a self-guided tour isn’t an option.

The next tour after we arrived wasn’t until 1pm. That wasn’t such a bad thing though because we also wanted to visit her grave in nearby Mt Hope Cemetery. It’s a massive cemetery, so one of the employees inside the visitor area gave us a map to show the location of Susan B Anthony’s grave. Many other notable people are buried in Mt Hope Cemetery including Frederick Douglass, John Bausch and Henry Lomb (of Bausch & Lomb) and more.

If you don’t have a long time to wait for your tour, rather than heading to the cemetery you can check out the small museum area which has information about her life. After returning from the cemetery, we only had a few minutes left to start looking around there before our tour started, so we finished off the museum part after our guided tour ended.

At 1pm our group (there were six of us) walked from the museum next door to the Susan B Anthony House. The house was built in 1859, with Susan and her family moving there in 1866. Susan never married and lived in the house with her mother Lucy and sister Mary.

The tour started off downstairs where we saw both the front and back parlor rooms and the dining room.

There’s still a number of original pieces in the house such as her sewing machine and Bible stand. Susan and her family were Quakers, a Christian denomination that’s been deeply involved with promoting equal rights over the centuries including abolitionism and – Susan B Anthony’s primary focus – women’s rights (she did also campaign for the ending of slavery).

Throughout her life Susan B Anthony played a key role in women’s rights and particularly with regards to campaigning for the ability to vote. She worked closely with Elizabeth Cady Stanton on these issues who lived in somewhat nearby Seneca Falls.

In the 1872 Presidential election, dozens of women in Rochester registered to vote, with Susan B Anthony being one of them. 15 of them managed to convince the people inspecting the election to let them cast a vote, but she was subsequently indicted and arrested on November 18, 1872. Her indictment and judgment can be seen in the museum before or after your visit of the house. Although she was found guilty and fined, she refused to pay the fine and no further action was taken against her.

On the second floor of the house we got to see her study, as well as several bedrooms and a bathroom.

One of the bedrooms had been her mother’s until she passed away in 1880. After that the bedroom was used to host many other pioneers of the women’s suffrage movement including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ida B Wells Barnett, Ida Husted Harper and more.

One of the things that Susan B Anthony was known for at the time was her alligator purse. In fact, the alligator purse became associated with her so much that it was referred to in a jump rope song. There are various versions of the song, but here’s one of them:

Miss Lucy had a baby, she called him Tiny Tim.
She put him in the bathtub to see if he could swim.
He drank up all the water, he ate up all the soap
He tried to swallow the bathtub but it wouldn’t go down his throat
Call for the doctor! Call for the nurse!
Call for the lady with the alligator purse!
“Mumps” said the doctor. “Measles” said the nurse.
“Vote!” said the lady with the alligator purse

Also on that second floor was her own bedroom. It was in this bedroom that she passed away on March 13, 1906 at the age of 86. It sadly wasn’t until more than a decade after her death that the 19th Amendment was passed and ratified which gave women the right to vote. Even that wasn’t the end of the matter though as African Americans – and particularly African American women – continued to be discriminated against and struggled to be able to vote until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed. That’s sadly still not the end of the matter as many states continue to pass legislation making it harder to vote, gerrymander districts along with numerous other methods to suppress people’s votes.

In 1895 a third story was added to the property which served as a workroom.

One of the artifacts on that floor is Susan’s travel trunk. This still has stickers on it from hotels she stayed at overseas including the Grand Hotel Hungaria in Budapest.

Final Thoughts

Growing up in the UK, I never learned about the women’s suffrage movement in the US, although I had heard of Susan B Anthony since during my years of living in the US. It was therefore very interesting getting to visit the house where she lived and learning more about her life and work – it’s definitely worth a visit if you live in Rochester, NY or will be visiting there.