Susan B. Anthony Votes and Is Put on Trial for It
On November 5, 1872, Susan B. Anthony voted in the presidential election in Rochester, New York, in defiance of laws that barred women from voting. Her arrest and trial in 1873 became one of the best-known events in the women’s suffrage movement.
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Testing the Constitution
By 1872 many suffragists were using a strategy known as the New Departure. They argued that the Fourteenth Amendment, which defined who was a citizen and protected the rights of citizens, already guaranteed women the right to vote, and that all they needed was to be allowed to cast a ballot. Anthony, a leader of the movement, and fourteen other women in Rochester registered to vote at a barber shop in the Eighth Ward on November 1. The election inspectors first hesitated, but after Anthony argued with them, they agreed to enter the women on the rolls.
Casting a Ballot
On November 5 the women went to the polls and voted in the presidential contest, which Ulysses S. Grant won. A local critic complained, and on November 18 a deputy federal marshal came to Anthony’s house in Rochester and arrested her. She was charged under the Enforcement Act of 1870, which made it a crime to vote without the lawful right. Anthony treated the case as a platform. Before the trial she toured Monroe County giving a speech on the question of whether it was a crime for a citizen of the United States to vote.
The Trial at Canandaigua
The trial took place in June 1873 in Canandaigua, New York, before Justice Ward Hunt. Hunt, according to accounts, had already written his opinion. He did not allow Anthony to testify, since defendants could not do so under the law of the time, and he instructed the jury to return a guilty verdict without deliberating. When asked if she had anything to say before sentencing, Anthony spoke at length against the ruling. She was fined one hundred dollars, and she said she would never pay it. The judge did not order her jailed, which prevented her from appealing to the Supreme Court.
What Followed
The three election inspectors who had registered the women were also convicted and fined, and they were later pardoned. In 1875 the Supreme Court decided in Minor v. Happersett that citizenship did not by itself guarantee women the right to vote, which closed the New Departure strategy. Anthony continued to campaign until her death in 1906. Fourteen years later, in August 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteed women the right to vote, and the amendment had long been known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.
A Movement That Kept Going
Anthony had helped found the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 together with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and she kept working for a constitutional amendment, which was first introduced in Congress in 1878 and was reintroduced for decades. She spoke at her last public event in 1906, shortly before she died, and is reported to have said that failure was impossible. Many of the women who carried on the work lived to vote in 1920, and the trial in Canandaigua is often seen as a turning point in making the demand for the vote a national question.
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