She had rich friendships with her female friends

Anthony grew up in an era before the term "lesbian" had taken off. Whether the "romantic friendships" and "Boston marriages" of the era would have been seen as lesbian relationships today is difficult to distinguish. Anthony spent a significant portion of her adult life with her sister Mary. It's difficult to tell what Susan B. Anthony meant when she wrote in a letter that she "will go to Chicago and visit my new lover, lovely Mrs. Gross," because women (and men) wrote in more romantic terms about friendships than we do today.

Anthony had close emotional connections with a few other women. Anthony also expressed her displeasure when other feminists got married to men or had children and wrote in highly flirty ways, including requests to share her bed, as Lillian Falderman demonstrates in the contentious "To Believe in Women."

Such partnerships were nothing new to her; in fact, her niece Lucy Anthony was married to Methodist clergyman and suffragist Anna Howard Shaw. Faderman hypothesizes that Susan B. Anthony may have dated Rachel Avery, Emily Gross, and Anna Dickinson at various points in her life. Emily Gross and Anthony are depicted in pictures together, and a statue of them was even made in 1896. Her relationships with women, however, never had the stability of a "Boston marriage," in contrast to others in her society. Her relationships with her female pals were deep. Even though those letters are not as flirty, she also had some genuine friendships with guys.