Susan B. Anthony Fined for Voting
Susan B. Anthony's fine for voting in 1872 marked a significant moment in the fight for women's suffrage in the United States. As a prominent feminist leader, Anthony and her peers registered and cast their votes in a Rochester, New York, election to challenge the legal barriers preventing women from participating in the electoral process. This act of civil disobedience led to her arrest and subsequent trial, where she was fined, a penalty she famously refused to pay. Born into a Quaker family that valued gender equality, Anthony had a remarkable intellectual and activist journey, initially advocating for temperance before shifting her focus to women's rights. Alongside her close ally Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she played a crucial role in organizing the National Woman Suffrage Association and published the influential newspaper *The Revolution*. Despite facing numerous challenges, Anthony's relentless advocacy contributed to the eventual passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, which granted women the right to vote. Her legacy is honored today, and her conviction was posthumously pardoned in 2020, a decision that sparked various interpretations of her views on justice and equality.
Susan B. Anthony Fined for Voting
Susan B. Anthony Fined for Voting
In order to test the Constitutional rights of women with respect to citizenship and the voting, feminist leader Susan B. Anthony led a group of women who registered and voted in a Rochester, New York, election in 1872. Their action set off a celebrated legal case. Anthony was arrested, tried, and on June 19, 1873, sentenced to pay a fine. Adamant in her refusal to do so, she was allowed to go free by a judge who wished to avoid further publicity and controversy.
Susan Brownell Anthony was born in Adams, Massachusetts, on February 15, 1820. As Quakers, her parents belonged to a group that had always recognized the equal rights of women, an attitude that their daughter inherited. A person of remarkable intellect and strong personality, she was educated at her father's school and subsequently served as a teacher herself for fifteen years.
Her first reform activities were in the field of temperance. When she was prevented from addressing a temperance meeting because of her sex, she joined with others in 1852 to form the Woman's State Temperance Society of New York. She also lectured widely, urging the abolition of slavery. However, she came to realize that women could work effectively for social reform only if they obtained the same rights and privileges as men, and she eventually turned her principal efforts toward that end.
Prior to the Civil War, the causes of abolition and women's rights were usually linked. In 1848, however, a separate women's rights convention was held at Seneca Falls, New York, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other early feminist leaders. It was followed by other women's meetings, including one at Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850 headed by Lucy Stone. After the Civil War, when women found themselves excluded from the equal rights granted to the former slaves, a separate women's rights movement began in earnest.
Anthony, who has been described as the dynamic force that galvanized the new women's movement into effective action, first met the pioneering Stanton at a temperance meeting in 1851. Thus began a friendship that lasted fifty years. With Stanton, Anthony worked to reform New York's state laws concerning women's rights over their children and control of their own earnings and property. Together the two women brought out the militant women's rights newspaper The Revolution from 1868 to 1870, with Anthony as publisher and Stanton as an editor.
In 1869 they organized the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). Stanton was elected president of the new organization and Anthony became head of its executive committee. The stated purpose of the organization, which held an annual national convention for the next fifty years, was to secure women's voting rights by means of a constitutional amendment. The Anthony Woman Suffrage Amendment was introduced before a congressional hearing in 1868, the first of a half-century of unsuccessful annual presentations. Across the nation and in Europe, Anthony lectured eloquently on behalf of suffrage and contributed to leading magazines. With Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage, she compiled the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage, which ultimately embraced the years from 1881 to 1922.
While the NWSA began its effort on the national level, the American Woman Suffrage Association, founded in 1869 under the leadership of Stone and others, was specifically geared for work in the states. In 1890 the two organizations merged as the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Anthony served from 1892 to 1900 as president of the new group, which pressed its campaign on both the state and national levels. In 1888 she organized the International Council of Women and in 1904 the International Woman Suffrage Alliance.
Anthony died in Rochester, New York, on March 13, 1906. Her advocacy had influenced the granting of women's voting rights by several states. Further, her work paved the way for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which in 1920 finally gave American women the right to vote. In 1950 she was elected to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in New York City. Her life and work continued to be honored into the twenty-first century, and in August 2020, President Donald Trump issued a pardon for the conviction she received in 1873. For some, the pardon was considered controversial, as there were arguments made that because she had not considered the trial or sentence just, Anthony would not have appreciated a pardon.
Bibliography
Andrew, Scottie. "Nearly 150 Years Ago, Susan B. Anthony Was Arrested for Voting When Women Weren't Allowed To. Today, She'll Get a Pardon." CNN, 18 Aug. 2020, www.cnn.com/2020/08/18/us/trump-susan-b-anthony-pardon-trnd/index.html. Accessed 4 Sept. 2020.
Glass, Andrew. "Susan B. Anthony Found Guilty of Voting, June 19, 1873." Politico, 19 June 2018, www.politico.com/story/2018/06/19/susan-b-anthony-found-guilty-of-voting-june-19-1873-649110. Accessed 4 Sept. 2020.
"Suffragist." The National Susan B. Anthony Museum and House, susanb.org/suffragist/. Accessed 4 Sept. 2020.