Letter from Eliza Anna Grier to Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony was a renowned activist for temperance, labor rights, educational reform, abolition, and most famously, women’s rights. Her work writing and speaking on behalf of these reforms convinced her that women needed the right to vote to truly influence legislation. She founded the A leader of the woman suffrage movement, Anthony was arrested in Rochester, NY in 1872 for voting in an election. She founded the American Equal Rights Association in 1866, which eventually became the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Anthony was serving as honorary president of NAWSA at the time she wrote this letter in 1901. Eliza Grier was born into the last years of slavery in North Carolina in 1862. She went on work her way through Fisk University in Tennessee and then attended Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania on scholarship, graduating with her MD in 1897. She eventually set up a practice in Greenville, South Carolina, serving an impoverished community.

Dr. Grier, sick with “La grippe” (the flu) and struggling to keep her practice afloat because most of her patients were poor and presumably not always able to pay for her care, sought the assistance of Susan B. Anthony, one the most famous women’s rights advocate and social reformers of her time. That Grier thought to appeal to this prominent white woman for help speaks to the changes in a society where women of disparate backgrounds found some common cause in the struggle to gain equal rights.