Susan B. Anthony
Susan B. Anthony, 1820 to 1906, was the organizer of the American campaign for women's suffrage, and this page is about what she did: the conventions she ran, the petitions she filed, the states she canvassed, the vote she cast illegally in Rochester, New York on 5 November 1872, and the trial at which the judge refused to let the jury decide her case.
She was not the movement's writer: Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted a great deal of what Anthony delivered. What Anthony supplied was the machine: the travel, the money, the lists, the annual appearance before congressional committees, and the discipline of showing up for the rest of her life.
What Susan B. Anthony actually did
Anthony did the work that does not photograph well. She came into public organizing through the temperance and antislavery societies, where she learned to run a meeting, raise a subscription and hold a mailing list, and she then applied that trade to the vote for the rest of her life. The record of what she did is a record of structures rather than speeches.
- Organized state canvasses and petition drives, carrying signatures to legislatures and to Congress.
- Founded the National Woman Suffrage Association with Stanton in May 1869, after the movement split.
- Opposed the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, because it enfranchised Black men and not women, and argued against it in explicitly racist terms.
- Negotiated the merger of the two rival associations into the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890.
- Compiled, with Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage, the multi volume History of Woman Suffrage, which is why so much of the campaign's paperwork survives at all.
- Appeared before congressional committees year after year, so that the federal amendment stayed on the agenda between elections.
The vote in Rochester on 5 November 1872
The vote in Rochester was planned as a test case, not a protest. Anthony and a group of other women registered and then cast ballots in the presidential election on 5 November 1872, on the argument that the Fourteenth Amendment had already made women citizens and that voting was a privilege of citizenship which no state could abridge. She was arrested on 18 November 1872. The Fourteenth Amendment was also the reason the argument was hard, because its second section had introduced the word male into the Constitution for the first time, in the phrase:
the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age
The trial at Canandaigua, and what Justice Ward Hunt actually did
The trial was held at Canandaigua in June 1873 before Justice Ward Hunt, and the thing that made it matter is procedural. Hunt directed a verdict of guilty. He did not let the jury decide, and he did not let the jury be polled. A criminal defendant in a United States court was convicted without a jury ever returning a verdict against her, which is the fact worth carrying away from the whole episode.
Hunt then fined her one hundred dollars. She never paid it, and he did not commit her to custody for nonpayment. That second decision was as deliberate as the first: a prisoner held for an unpaid fine could have applied for a writ of habeas corpus and carried the case upward, and by leaving her at liberty the court closed her route of appeal. The conviction therefore stood and was never tested, and no higher court ever ruled on whether the Fourteenth Amendment gave her the vote.
The speech she gave between the arrest and the trial
Between the arrest and the trial Anthony delivered one speech, repeatedly, across the whole county, titled Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote? She gave it in town after town, which had a practical purpose beyond persuasion: she was saturating the district from which her jurors would be drawn. The argument in it is legal rather than sentimental. It treats the vote as a right already possessed rather than a favor to be requested, and it is the clearest surviving statement of the case she was arrested for making.
Anthony or Stanton: which one did what
Anthony and Stanton are frequently treated as interchangeable and they were not. Stanton wrote and Anthony moved. Anthony was not at the Seneca Falls convention of 19 and 20 July 1848, where Stanton drafted the Declaration of Sentiments and Frederick Douglass spoke for the ninth resolution; the two women met afterward and worked together for the rest of Stanton's life.
| Question | Susan B. Anthony | Elizabeth Cady Stanton |
|---|---|---|
| At Seneca Falls in 1848? | No | Yes, she drafted the Declaration of Sentiments |
| Main contribution | Organization, travel, petitions, lobbying | Writing, argument, doctrine |
| Public role | Delivered speeches Stanton often wrote | Wrote for platforms she did not always occupy |
| 1869 split | Founded the National Woman Suffrage Association with Stanton | Founded it with Anthony and led it as president |
| Fifteenth Amendment | Opposed it, in explicitly racist terms | Opposed it, in explicitly racist terms, in print |
| Prosecuted for voting | Yes, in 1872 and 1873 | No |
| Died | 1906 | 1902 |
What she did not live to see
Anthony died in 1906, and the amendment she had lobbied for was not passed by Congress until 4 June 1919. Tennessee ratified it as the thirty sixth state on 18 August 1920 and it was certified on 26 August 1920. The Nineteenth Amendment forbids the denial of the vote on account of sex, and campaigners had been reintroducing that language in Congress since her lifetime, which is why the text has often been named for her. It did not settle the question for every woman: it says nothing about race, literacy or the poll tax, and the instruments that kept Black women in the South from the polls survived it by decades. Sojourner Truth, who had spoken for the same cause at Akron on 29 May 1851, had died in 1883, and the campaign both women worked in ran on without either of them.