When suffragist Susan B. Anthony was found guilty of “unlawful voting” in her 1873 court case, Justice Ward Hunt ordered her to pay a hefty fine of $100 (the equivalent of $2,267 in today’s dollars).
She vowed: “Not a penny shall go to this unjust claim. I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old revolutionary maxim, that ‘Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.’”
Douglas O. Linder, a distinguished professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, includes the trial of U.S. v. Susan B. Anthony in his website of “famous trials.”
“More than any other woman of her generation, Susan B. Anthony saw that all of the legal disabilities faced by American women owed their existence to the simple fact that women lacked the vote.”
In a crafty maneuver, Hunt ended the trial in 1873 by announcing: “Madam, the Court will not order you committed until the fine is paid.” This decision not to imprison Anthony effectively precluded any appeal to a higher court, according to most legal scholars.
Prof. Linder said: “In the eyes of some, the trial elevated Anthony to the status of the martyr.”
Anthony’s attorney Henry Rogers Selden remarked: “No juror spoke a word during the trial, from the time they were impaneled to the time they were discharged.”
A newspaper quoted one juror as saying: “Could I have spoken, I should have answered ‘not guilty,’ and the men in the jury box would have sustained me.”
Anthony stated: “There never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers.” Furthermore, she commented: “It was we the people, not we the white, male citizens…but we the whole people, who formed this Union.”
In 1876, the Centennial of America’s independence, Anthony celebrated her 86th birthday (Feb. 15) by attending National American Woman Suffrage Association’s annual convention in Baltimore, Md.
She was recognized and rose to respond: “I am here for a little time only, and then my place will be filled. The fight must not cease; you must see that it does not stop.”
“There have been others also just as true and devoted to the cause – I wish I could name everyone – but with such women consecrating their lives, failure is impossible!”
That was Anthony’s last public appearance. She died less than a month later at her home in Rochester, N.Y.
At last, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1920, 14 years after Anthony’s death, granting the right to vote to all U.S. women aged 21 and older.
Melissa Block of NPR News reported that Dr. Martha S. Jones, history professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, believes the ratification of the 19th Amendment “marked for African-American women a start, not a finish.”
“It fueled a new chapter in the struggle for voting rights in the United States,” Dr. Jones said, “a movement that black women led all the way to 1965 and passage of the Voting Rights Act.”
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