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Who really said it

Organize, agitate, educate must be our war cry

Written by Susan B. Anthony 1820–1906 · American suffrage leader & abolitionist
Verified Free to reuse

Anthony wrote this in a spring 1893 fund-raising appeal printed in the Woman’s Tribune and reproduced verbatim in her authorized biography, Ida Husted Harper’s Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, Vol. 2 (1898). The familiar one-line version simply drops her closing words, “…from this to the day of the election.”

Last verified 8 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“Organize, agitate, educate must be our war cry” Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry. —Susan B. Anthony, appeal in the Woman's Tribune, 1893

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Provenance

The source

Author
Susan B. Anthony (in an appeal to the Woman’s Tribune)
Source
The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, Vol. 2
Location
Ch. XLI, “World’s Fair” (events of 1893); published 1898
Wording
Popular version trims “…from this to the day of the election”

… we must organize every school district of every county of each State in which the battle of the ballot for woman is to be fought. Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry from this to the day of the election.

From Anthony’s spring 1893 appeal in the Woman’s Tribune, urging supporters to fund the Colorado, Kansas and New York campaigns.

Digitized book
Read Vol. 2 at Project Gutenberg
The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, Vol. 2 (1898)

How we traced it

Public domain

The line is from Anthony’s 1893 appeal, first printed in the Woman’s Tribune and reproduced in Harper’s biography (Bowen-Merrill, 1898). Both were published in the United States well before 1931, so the text is in the public domain.

Fact-check

Genuine — but often tidied

The attribution to Anthony is correct. Two smaller things get muddled, though:

Quote-aggregator sites Truncated

The popular form drops Anthony’s closing words, “…from this to the day of the election,” turning a campaign-specific rallying cry into a timeless maxim. The primary text shows the full sentence.

British socialists & later B. R. Ambedkar Different slogan

The reversed-order slogan “Educate! Agitate! Organise!” traces to the Social Democratic Federation’s 1883 pamphlet Socialism Made Plain — a separate lineage from Anthony’s suffrage “war cry.”

Anthony really wrote “Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry” — in a spring 1893 fund-raising appeal to the Woman’s Tribune, reproduced in her authorized biography.

Context

Why she said it

In the spring of 1893 Anthony was seventy-three and driving three simultaneous state suffrage campaigns — Colorado, Kansas and New York. The “war cry” was, quite literally, a plea for cash: printed in the Woman’s Tribune, it begged supporters to send money so organizers could reach “every school district of every county” before the ballots were cast.

The appeal worked where it mattered most: that November, Colorado’s male voters approved woman suffrage by popular referendum — the first state ever to do so at the ballot box.

Who will send the next $100?

The full appeal

Anthony’s letter closes: “Do let us all take to ourselves new hope and courage for the herculean task before us. Who will send the next $100? O, that we had $10,000 to start with!”

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Justice Leadership Knowledge

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, Vol. 2gutenberg.org

Full text of Harper’s authorized 1898 biography containing the quote (Ch. XLI).
Susan B. Anthonyen.wikiquote.org

Curated quote collection — useful as a check (this line is absent from it).
Susan B. Anthonyen.wikipedia.org

Biographical overview of Anthony and the suffrage movement.
The meaning of ‘Educate, Agitate, Organize’springmag.ca

History of the separate socialist triad slogan (SDF, 1883) it is sometimes confused with.
Susan B. Anthony biographywomenon20s.org

Example of the quote circulating in one-line form without a source.

The author

About Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony

1820–1906 · American suffrage leader & abolitionist

Susan B. Anthony was the tireless organizer of the American woman-suffrage movement, co-founder (with Elizabeth Cady Stanton) of the National Woman Suffrage Association, and co-author of the multi-volume History of Woman Suffrage. Arrested in 1872 for voting, she spent the next three decades crisscrossing the country raising money and campaigning state by state. She died in 1906, fourteen years before the Nineteenth Amendment enshrined the vote she never got to cast legally.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, vol. 2 (Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill, 1898), ch. XLI, quoting Anthony’s spring 1893 appeal in the Woman’s Tribune.

MLA (9th ed.)

Harper, Ida Husted. The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony. Vol. 2, Bowen-Merrill, 1898.

APA (7th ed.)

Harper, I. H. (1898). The life and work of Susan B. Anthony (Vol. 2). Bowen-Merrill.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Organize, agitate, educate must be our war cry’?” Last verified 8 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/organize-agitate-educate-must-be-our-war-cry

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