Matilda Joslyn Gage in the context of National Women's Rights Convention

Susan B. Anthony (born Susan Anthony; February 15, 1820 – March 13, 1906) was an American social reformer and women's rights activist who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. Born into a Quaker family committed to social equality, she collected anti-slavery petitions at the age of 17. In 1856, she became the New York state agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society.

In 1851, she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who became her lifelong friend and co-worker in social reform activities, primarily in the field of women's rights. Together they founded the New York Women's State Temperance Society after Anthony was prevented from speaking at a temperance conference because she was female. During the Civil War they founded the Women's Loyal National League, which conducted the largest petition drive in United States history up to that time, collecting nearly 400,000 signatures in support of the abolition of slavery. After the war, they initiated the American Equal Rights Association, which campaigned for equal rights for both women and African Americans. They began publishing a women's rights newspaper in 1868 called The Revolution. A year later, they founded the National Woman Suffrage Association as part of a split in the women's movement. The split was formally healed in 1890 when their organization merged with the rival American Woman Suffrage Association to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association, with Anthony as its key force. Anthony and Stanton began working with Matilda Joslyn Gage in 1876 on what eventually grew into the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage. The interests of Anthony and Stanton diverged somewhat in later years, but the two remained close friends.

The witch-cult hypothesis is a discredited theory that the witch trials of the Early Modern period were an attempt to suppress a pagan religion that had survived the Christianization of Europe. According to its proponents, accused witches were actually followers of this alleged religion. They argue that the witch cult revolved around worshiping a Horned God of fertility and the underworld, whom Christian persecutors identified with the Devil, and whose followers held nocturnal rites at the witches' Sabbath.

The theory was pioneered by two German scholars, Karl Ernst Jarcke and Franz Josef Mone, in the early nineteenth century, and was adopted by French historian Jules Michelet, American feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage, and American folklorist Charles Leland later that century. The hypothesis received its most prominent exposition when it was adopted by British Egyptologist Margaret Murray, who presented her version of it in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), before further expounding it in books such as The God of the Witches (1931) and her contribution to the Encyclopædia Britannica. Although the "Murrayite theory" proved popular among sectors of academia and the general public in the early and mid-twentieth century, it was never accepted by scholars of the witch trials, who publicly disproved it through in-depth research during the 1960s and 1970s.

History of Woman Suffrage is a work begun by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and completed by Ida Husted Harper. Published in six volumes from 1881 to 1922, it is a history of the women's suffrage movement, primarily in the United States. Its more than 5700 pages are the major source for primary documentation of the women's suffrage movement from its beginnings through the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which enfranchised women in the U.S. in 1920. Written from the viewpoint of the wing of the movement led by Stanton and Anthony, its coverage of other groups and individuals is limited.

Realizing that the project was unlikely to make a profit, Anthony used money from a bequest in 1885 to buy the rights from the other authors and also the plates from the publisher of the two volumes that had already been issued. As sole owner, she published the books herself and donated many copies to libraries and people of influence. In her will, Anthony bequeathed the plates for all the volumes together with the existing inventory to the National American Woman Suffrage Association.