Susan B. Anthony Defies Law: Votes for Women's Rights

Susan B. Anthony walked into a barbershop serving as a voter registration office in Rochester, New York, on November 1, 1872, and demanded to be registered. When the inspectors hesitated, she read aloud the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee that no state shall abridge the privileges of citizens and threatened to sue anyone who turned her away. The inspectors, uncertain of the law, registered her. Four days later, she voted in the presidential election. Anthony was arrested two weeks later at her home. The charge was "knowingly, wrongfully and unlawfully" voting without having a lawful right. The arrest was precisely what Anthony wanted. She intended to use the trial as a platform to argue that the Constitution already guaranteed women the right to vote and that no additional amendment was needed. Before the trial, Anthony toured Monroe County, delivering her speech "Is It a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?" at every venue that would have her. She argued that the Fourteenth Amendment's citizenship clause, combined with the Fifteenth Amendment's prohibition on denying the vote based on race, logically extended suffrage to all citizens. The prosecution, alarmed by her effectiveness, moved the trial to Ontario County to secure a less sympathetic jury. The trial, held in June 1873, was a judicial travesty. Judge Ward Hunt, a recent Grant appointee, refused to let Anthony testify, directed the jury to find her guilty without deliberation, and denied a motion for a new trial. He fined her $100. Anthony refused to pay, and the government never attempted to collect, denying her the chance to appeal to a higher court. The case failed legally but succeeded politically, galvanizing the suffrage movement and keeping the question of women's voting rights in public discourse for the next 48 years until the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920.