"Susan B. Anthony was born in South Adams, Massachusetts, February 15, 1820. Her father, Daniel Anthony, a cotton manufacturer, was a liberal Quaker who educated his daughter by private teachers to be self-supporting. Her education was completed at a Friends' boarding school in Philadelphia. Miss Anthony taught school in this State from 1835 to 1840. In 1845 her father settled in this city [Rochester, NY] and two years later she made her first public speech, the subject being temperance. From that time until the present she had been working in the cause of temperance and other public reforms. In 1851 she called a temperance convention in Albany, having been refused admission to a previous convention because of her sex. In 1852, assisted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she organized the Woman's New York State Temperance society. In 1857 she became prominent among the agitators for the abolition of slavery, but the chief work of her life has been in connection with the movement to obtain for women equal political rights to those enjoyed by men. In 1868, associated with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Parker Pillsbury and George Francis Train, she began the publication in New York City of a weekly paper called The Revolution, and voted to the enfranchisment of women. In 1872 Miss Anthony cast a ballot at the congressional election in Rochester, her purpose being to test the application of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the constitution. She was indicted for illegal voting, denied the right of trial by jury, and sentenced by Associate Justice Hunt of the United States Court to pay a fine of one hundred dollars. But she never paid the fine. In 1881 with the assistance of her co-editors, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage, she published The History of Woman Suffrage, in three volumes. In 1888 Miss Anthony was the prime mover and manager of the Woman's International Council, which met at Washington, D. C., in March, to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the first Woman's Rights convention. When, in 1891, Mrs. Stanton retired from the presidency of the National American Woman Suffrage association, Miss Anthony was chosen as her successor. She started and led the movement to induce the New York constitutional convention to submit an amendment the people granting woman suffrage."

The recipients of the Friends of Susan B. Anthony Award, featured speakers (which began in 1991) and venues are: