The papers of Susan Brownell Anthony (1820-1906) span the period from 1846 to 1934, although the bulk of the material dates from 1846 to 1906. The papers include correspondence, a daybook, diaries, scrapbooks, speeches, and miscellaneous items.

A volume of correspondence is dated 1846-1905 and consists primarily of Anthony's letters to Rachel Foster Avery concerning the details of Anthony's extensive lecture circuit, her finances, the activities of the National Woman Suffrage Association, and her work on the multivolume which she coedited with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others. The file also includes several letters from Anthony to the Reverend Anna Howard Shaw and letters from Wendell Phillips. Although most letters concern suffrage, a few deal with personal and family matters.

A daybook, 1856-1860, records the financial account Anthony kept of her work for the American Anti-Slavery Society, woman's rights, and personal expenditures for postage, room and board, travel, advertising, rent for lecture halls, and other items. Twenty-five volumes of diaries span the period from 1865 to 1906 with some gaps and omissions. For the most part, the diaries contain brief notations of Anthony's activities and a financial record kept in the back of each volume. Other topics noted in the diaries include family matters, African-American and woman suffrage, lecture tours, and important events of the day, such as Lincoln's assassination. Among her associates mentioned in the diaries are Amelia Jenks Bloomer, Lucretia Mott, Parker Pillsbury, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucy Stone.

Six scrapbooks assembled by her sister, Mary S. Anthony, contain clippings from newspapers published in all parts of the United States with a heavy concentration of those from New York state and Washington, D.C. Memorabilia for the period 1876-1934 is also included. The scrapbooks primarily document the activities of Susan B. and Mary S. Anthony in behalf of woman suffrage, especially the conventions of the National Woman Suffrage Association and the New York State Woman Suffrage Association. The scrapbooks also contain biographical articles on Anthony and her associates in the suffrage movement and articles on women in higher education and professional employment, particularly in law, medicine, and journalism.

Manuscripts of speeches and other writings complete the collection. Anthony's early focus was temperance and abolition as well as women's suffrage and education. The manuscripts date from her first public address in 1848 to 1895 when she was presented with part one of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's (New York, European Pub. Co., 1895-1898).

Two letters were added to the collection in 1997. A photocopy of a letter dated 1883 from Anthony to Mary Kimball Rogers concerns a speech she thought had been lost in Omaha, Nebraska. A typed letter dated 1896 from Anthony to Adelaide Johnson concerns the charges of illegality that were raised when Johnson's marriage ceremony was performed by a woman. Anthony's lobbying effort to have statues placed in the United States Capitol of herself, Stanton, and Mott as the founders of the woman suffrage movement is also noted in her letter to Johnson.