Susan B. Anthony never married, which is an unusual thing to say about the vast majority of women in her time, or indeed in any time.  Marriage was looked on by society as the most desirable state for a woman, so that she may fulfill her God-given role as wife and mother.  Domestic duties were the only ones in which women were thought to excel, and the finding of a good husband was on the minds of almost all young women.  The men, however, including Susan’s brother-in-law Aaron, spoke of marriage as a “trap” or a “contagion” that they must be careful to avoid.  The men feared the loss of the jolly freedoms of bachelorhood, while the women really had no such freedoms to lose.

Susan had been very close to her older sister, Guelma, and felt in many ways that she had lost her when she married Aaron.  As Guelma’s attentions turned to the making of a home and starting a family, they necessarily turned away from Susan.  However, as there were very few avenues for women to make an honest living, marrying a bread-winner was utmost in the mind of almost any woman of marriageable age.  Susan despaired at some of the marriages she observed.  When a friend married someone of whom Susan did not have a high opinion, she wrote to a friend, “‘Tis passing strange that a girl possessed of common sense should be willing to marry a lunatic—but so it is.”

Susan was courted by a few different men in her youth, but she didn’t think that any were willing to enter into a marriage as fully equal partners.  Equal partnership in a marriage was entirely unknown, both by custom and by law.  Nineteenth century married women were essentially the chattel of their husbands.  They surrendered all property rights at the time of their marriage.  They could not, for example, own property, sign a contract, or make a will.  (Don’t forget that as recently as the 1960s a married woman could not obtain a credit card without her husband’s permission!)

As she watched so many of her colleagues in the movement marry, Susan lamented, “There is not one woman left who may be relied on.  All have first to please their husbands, after which there is little time or energy left to spend in any other direction.”  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, her dearest friend and partner-in-the-cause, was married with children.  Although they managed to work together as a powerful team, Susan was surely frustrated by the limits on Stanton’s mobility due to her frequent pregnancies, despite the fact that Stanton’s husband did not generally interfere with her suffrage activities.

The younger women rising in the moment in the later 19^th century found that marriage was not quite so treacherous a choice.  Opportunities for women’s education had vastly improved and some of the professions were slowly opening up to them.  Property laws were changing and more liberal attitudes were starting to prevail.  Carrie Chapman Catt, Susan’s immediate successor as head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, married her second husband with the strict understanding that she could devote four months every year to her suffrage work.  But Miss Anthony remained unmarried to the end.  “These Old Bachelors,” she told her sisters, “are nothing but a nuisance to a society but an Old Maid is the cleverest creature I saw.”