susan b anthony on women's right to vote essay

03 Nov 2001 Susan B. Anthony on a Woman’s Right to Vote – 1873

Woman’s Rights to the Suffrage

by Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906)

This speech was delivered in 1873, after Anthony was arrested, tried and fined $100 for voting in the 1872 presidential election.

Friends and Fellow Citizens: I stand before you tonight under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen’s rights, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any State to deny.

The preamble of the Federal Constitution says:

“We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people–women as well as men. And it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government–the ballot.

For any State to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people is to pass a bill of attainder, or an ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land. By it the blessings of liberty are for ever withheld from women and their female posterity. To them this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed. To them this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex; the most hateful aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe; an oligarchy of wealth, where the right govern the poor. An oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant, or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex, which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household–which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries dissension, discord and rebellion into every home of the nation.

Webster, Worcester and Bouvier all define a citizen to be a person in the United States, entitled to vote and hold office.

The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not. Being persons, then, women are citizens; and no State has a right to make any law, or to enforce any old law, that shall abridge their privileges or immunities. Hence, every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several States is today null and void, precisely as in every one against Negroes.

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Susan B. Anthony

Champion of temperance, abolition, the rights of labor, and equal pay for equal work, Susan Brownell Anthony became one of the most visible leaders of the women’s suffrage movement . Along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton , she traveled around the country delivering speeches in favor of women's suffrage.

Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts. Her father, Daniel, was a farmer and later a cotton mill owner and manager and was raised as a Quaker. Her mother, Lucy, came from a family that fought in the American Revolution and served in the Massachusetts state government. From an early age, Anthony was inspired by the Quaker belief that everyone was equal under God. That idea guided her throughout her life. She had seven brothers and sisters, many of whom became activists for justice and emancipation of slaves.

After many years of teaching, Anthony returned to her family who had moved to New York State. There she met William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass , who were friends of her father. Listening to them moved Susan to want to do more to help end slavery. She became an abolition activist, even though most people thought it was improper for women to give speeches in public. Anthony made many passionate speeches against slavery.

In 1848, a group of women held a convention at Seneca Falls , New York. It was the first Women’s Rights Convention in the United States and began the Suffrage movement. Her mother and sister attended the convention but Anthony did not. In 1851, Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton. T he two women became good friends and worked together for over 50 years fighting for women’s rights. They traveled the country and Anthony gave speeches demanding that women be given the right to vote. At times, she risked being arrested for sharing her ideas in public.

Anthony was good at strategy. Her discipline, energy, and ability to organize made her a strong and successful leader. Anthony and Stanton co-founded the American Equal Rights Association. In 1868 they became editors of the Association’s newspaper, The Revolution , which helped to spread the ideas of equality and rights for women. Anthony began to lecture to raise money for publishing the newspaper and to support the suffrage movement. She became famous throughout the county. Many people admired her, yet others hated her ideas.

When Congress passed the 14 th and 15 th amendments which give voting rights to African American men, Anthony and Stanton were angry and opposed the legislation because it did not include the right to vote for women. Their belief led them to split from other suffragists. They thought the amendments should also have given women the right to vote. They formed the National Woman Suffrage Association , to push for a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote.

In 1872, Anthony was arrested for voting. She was tried and fined $100 for her crime. This made many people angry and brought national attention to the suffrage movement. In 1876, she led a protest at the 1876 Centennial of our nation’s independence. She gave a speech—“Declaration of Rights”—written by Stanton and another suffragist, Matilda Joslyn Gage.

“Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.”

Anthony spent her life working for women’s rights. In 1888, she helped to merge the two largest suffrage associations into one, the National American Women’s Suffrage Association . She led the group until 1900. She traveled around the country giving speeches, gathering thousands of signatures on petitions, and lobbying Congress every year for women. Anthony died in 1906, 14 years before women were given the right to vote with the passage of the 19 th Amendment in 1920.

Anthony, Susan. “Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States by the National Woman Suffrage Association, July 4th, 1876.” The Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony Papers Project. http://ecssba.rutgers.edu/docs/decl.html . Accessed May 2016.
“Biography of Susan B. Anthony.” National Susan B. Anthony Museum & House. http://susanbanthonyhouse.org/her-story/biography.php . Accessed May 2016.
Lange, Allison. “Suffragist Organize: National Woman Suffrage Association.” National Women’s History Musuem. http://www.crusadeforthevote.org/nwsa-organize/ . Accessed May 2016.
Lange, Allison. “Suffragist Unite: National American Woman Suffrage Association.” National Women’s History Museum. http://www.crusadeforthevote.org/nawsa-united/ . Accessed May 2016.
Mayo, Edith. “Rights for Women: The Suffrage Movement and Its Leaders.” National Women’s History Museum. https://www.nwhm.org/online-exhibits/rightsforwomen/index.html . Accessed May 2016.
“Susan B. Anthony.” National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/susan-b-anthony.htm . Accessed May 2016.
PHOTO: Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University .

MLA – Hayward, Nancy. “Susan B. Anthony.” National Women’s History Museum, 2017. Date accessed.

Chicago – Hayward, Nancy. “Susan B. Anthony.” National Women’s History Museum. 2017. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/susan-brownell-anthony.

Crusade for the Vote, National Women's History Museum
Rights for Women, National Women's History Museum
Susan B. Anthony House
1873 Speech of Susan B. Anthony on woman suffrage
Susan B. Anthony House, National Park Service
Susan B. Anthony, National Women's Hall of Fame
Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Project
Public Broadcasting System (PBS) - "Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony"
Trial of Susan B. Anthony
Anthony, Susan B. The Trial of Susan B. Anthony (Humanity Books, 2003).
Anthony, Katherine Susan. Susan B. Anthony: Her Personal History and Her Era (Russell & Russell, 1975).
Barry, Kathleen. Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist (Authorhouse, 2000).
Dubois, Ellen Carol. The Elizabeth Cady Stanton-Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondences, Writings and Speeches (Boston: Northeaster University Press, 1992).
Harper, Ida. Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Beaufort books - 3 volume set).
Isaacs, Sally Senzell. America in the Time of Susan B. Anthony: The Story of Our Nation from Coast to Coast (Heinemann Library, 2000).
Monsell, Helen Albee. Susan B. Anthony: Champion Women's Rights (Aladdin, 1986).
Sherr, Lynn. Failure is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words (Three Rivers Press, 1996).
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Ann De Gordon, and Susan B. Anthony. Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: In the School of Anti-Slavery, 1840-1866 (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997).
Ward, Geoffery C. and Ken Burns. Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (Knopf, 2001).

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Pieces of History

Susan B. Anthony: Women’s Right to Vote

The National Archives is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment with the exhibit Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote , which runs in the Lawrence F. O’Brien Gallery of the National Archives in Washington, DC, through January 3, 2021. Today’s post comes from Michael J. Hancock in the National Archives History Office.

More than any other woman of her time, Susan B. Anthony recognized that many of the legal disabilities women faced were the result of their inability to vote.

Anthony worked tirelessly her whole adult life fighting for the right to vote, and she was instrumental in bringing the issue to the forefront of American consciousness.

She spoke publicly, petitioned Congress and state legislatures, and published a feminist newspaper for a cause that would not come to fruition until the ratification of the 19th Amendment , 14 years after her death in 1906.

Rediscovery #: 04172Job A1 09-137 First Americans

Despite this, she found satisfaction in casting a ballot (albeit illegally) in Rochester, New York, on November 5, 1872. What followed was a trial for illegal voting and a unique opportunity for Anthony to broadcast her arguments for woman suffrage to a wider audience.

Anthony had planned to vote long before 1872. She reasoned that she would take the first opportunity as long as she met the New York state requirement of voters residing in their homes for at least 30 days prior to the election in the district where they cast their vote. Anthony’s logic was based on the recently adopted 14th Amendment that stated that “all persons born and naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States.” Anthony reasoned that that since women were citizens, and the privileges of citizens of the United States included the right to vote, states could not exclude women from the electorate.

The 15th Amendment’s reference to the “right of citizens of the United States to vote” suggested women’s right as citizens to vote. Fundamentally, woman suffragists’ objective was to validate their interpretation through either an act of Congress or a favorable decision in Federal courts.

On November 5, 1872, in the first district of the Eighth Ward of Rochester, New York, Anthony and 14 other women voted in an election that included choosing members of Congress. The women had successfully registered to vote several days earlier but, a poll watcher challenged Anthony’s qualification as a voter.

Taking the steps required by state law when a challenge occurred, the election inspectors asked Anthony under oath if she was a citizen, if she lived in the district, and if she had accepted bribes for her vote. Anthony answered these questions to their satisfaction, and the inspectors promptly placed her ballot in the boxes.

Nine days after the election, U.S. Commissioner William Storrs, an officer of the Federal courts, issued warrants for the arrest of Anthony and an order to the U.S. Marshal to deliver her to county jail along with the 14 other women who voted in Rochester. Based on the complaint of Sylvester Lewis, a poll watcher who challenged Anthony’s vote, the women were charged with voting for members of the U.S. House of Representatives “without having a lawful right to vote,” a violation of section 19 of the Enforcement Act of 1870.

Anthony’s attorneys researched a way to appeal her arrest and detention to the Supreme Court of the United States. They decided that a petition to the district court for a writ of habeas corpus would ensure it would reach the Supreme Court, even though Congress in 1868 had repealed the provision for appeals on writs of habeas corpus from the lower Federal courts to the Supreme Court. Attorney John Van Voorhis argued that Anthony had a right to vote and petitioned the district court for a writ of habeas corpus that would bring Anthony before the court so that the judge could rule if she were properly held in custody.

Judge Nathan Hall of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York granted the petition. The U.S. attorney announced that he was unprepared for argument, and the judge rescheduled the hearing for January in Albany.

At the district court session in Albany, Anthony’s attorney Henry Selden broadened the argument he made previously and insisted Anthony had a right to vote. He acknowledged that the question of women’s right to vote was still unresolved and that the government had no justification for holding her as a criminal defendant. Anthony’s release from custody was eventually denied.

Anthony’s trial began in Canandaigua, New York, on June 17, 1873. Before a jury of 12 men, Richard Crowley stated the government’s case and called an inspector of election as a witness to confirm that Anthony cast a ballot for congressional candidates.

Henry Selden had himself sworn in as a witness and testified that he advised Anthony that the Constitution validated her capacity to vote. In transcripts of Susan B. Anthony’s testimony in her own defense, it is clear that she was thoughtful and deliberate in her account of how she made the progression from interpretation of the Constitution to affirming her perceived rights under its principles.

Judge Hunt declared that “The Fourteenth Amendment gives no right to a woman to vote, and the voting by Miss Anthony was in violation of the law.” He rejected Anthony’s argument that her good faith prohibited a finding that she “knowingly” cast an illegal vote and stated that “Assuming that Miss Anthony believed she had a right to vote which was illegal, and thus is subject to the penalty of law.” He surprised Anthony and her attorney by directing the jury deliver a verdict of guilty.

Conviction of Susan B. Anthony, 06/187305848_2004_001

In her sentencing, Susan B. Anthony was given the opportunity to address the court, and what she said stunned everyone in the courthouse:

Your honor, I have many things to say; for in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural right, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually, but all of my sex, are, by your honor’s verdict, doomed to political subjection under this, so-called, form of government.

Ultimately, Anthony was fined $100 and the cost of prosecution. In steadfast defiance, she declared that she would never pay a penny of her fine, and the government never made a serious effort to collect. In the end, Susan B. Anthony’s protest echoed the old revolutionary adage that “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.”

Rhetorical Analysis: On Women’s Right to Vote, Essay Example

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Susan B. Anthony delivered her “On Women’s Right to Vote” speech after she was arrested and fined $100 for voting in the 1872 presidential election. To appreciate this speech, the history of its occasion should be considered. When ex-slaves were awarded the right to vote through passage of the 15 th amendment, many suffragists fought for the amendment to grant universal suffrage rather than suffrage for only this group. It was no surprise, then, the passion, anger, and persuasive message of women’s rights that Anthony used in her speech to the court when she was arrested in 1873. It is well known that this argument was a major turning point in history because it led to controversy and change for women in following years. To fully understand the reason behind why her speech went so well and persuaded many people to believe in her cause, it will be useful to conduct a rhetorical analysis; the method of speaking that Anthony uses involves logos, ethos, and pathos in “On Women’s Right to Vote” if used in any similar situation, should effectively promote the same change and action for a new speaker as it did for Anthony and her supporters.

The main argument Susan B. Anthony makes in “On Women’s Right to Vote” is the belief that women, like men, should be able to democratically elect their politicians. Women were still considered as somehow less human than men and had not been granted the same rights. Anthony argues that “For any State to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people is to pass a bill of attainder, or an ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land” (15). In this statement, she directly refers to the fact that statements in the Constitution meant to provide rights and protections have historically only referred to the white male; after the ratification of the 15 th amendment, Constitutional rights were extended to colored people as well. Despite this, she argues against the fact that the Constitution doesn’t apply to 50 percent of the population in the United States. She uses the rest of her speech to explain why women’s rights are important and that women should receive the right to vote.

The purpose of this speech is to persuade the audience that women should be afforded the right to vote. When she delivers this speech, Susan B. Anthony is hoping to appeal to the audience in court. Specifically, the men and women who she believed that could be convinced that women should be afforded equal rights. The ultimate goal of her speech is to drive physical change by encouraging people who have not yet been involved in the women’s suffrage movement to take action.

Anthony’s appeal to her audience is particularly convincing due to her use of evidence throughout her speech When Susan B. Anthony says, “It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen’s right, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any State to deny” she appeals to the audience by comparing women’s rights to human rights. To support this argument, she uses the Constitution as a source both information and evidence because everyone that she is speaking to in the courthouse is expected to be fundamentally aware of law it describes. When she says this sentence, Anthony explains that women are not being treated as human beings despite the protections that the Constitution is supposed to afford to all people in this country. When Susan B. Anthony says, “And it is downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government-the ballot.”, she appeals to the audience by using a specific example that supports the statement discussed above. Women cannot possibly enjoy the rights given to the people of this country if they are not allowed to vote using the ballot. By detailing the story that led to her arrest, she provides a concrete example of the inequality that the Constitution is unable to protect against. Therefore, in these parts of the speech, she emphasizes unfair treatment of women and demonstrates how they are being treated as inferior. In doing so, she persuades the audience that voting is the only way to start treating women as equals.

To strengthen her argument, Susan B. Anthony uses logos in her argument. Logos is a component of rhetoric that refers to the ability of a speaker to persuade by the use of reasoning. In this speech, Susan B. Anthony uses a combination of logic and reasoning several times in order to emphasize her point. Specifically she says, “It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed this Union” (15). By doing so, she cites an exact phrase that was used in the Constitution of the United States and applied it to suffrage. By doing so, she uses reasoning to demonstrate that the country’s forefathers wanted equality for all people and this is the foundation on which this country was established. As a result of this reference, the audience was expected to connect more substantially with the purpose of her speech because they will draw the connection that she wants them to; the constitution applies to people as a whole, not just men, so women deserve the same rights that men are given.

Anthony uses a second example of logos when she states “Our democratic-republican government is based on the idea of the natural right of every individual member thereof to a voice and a vote in making and executing laws”. By doing so, she uses logical appeal to refer to the fact that she should have the right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment and that the Constitution was supposed to ensure all citizens rights. She went on to say that, “the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the constitutions of several States and the organic laws of the Territories, all alike propose to protect the people in the exercise of their God-given rights”. Therefore her argument used deductive logical reasoning to show that if these documents were meant for all people, and they granted rights and protections, that women are people and should be given the same rights and protections.

A third example of logos refers to the terminology used in the Constitution; many people argued that the use of the words “he, his, and him” in the Constitution only refer to men, and therefore these rights only apply to men. She uses logical reasoning to retort that if only men are given these rights by the Constitution, then women should be freed from obligations like taxation because these documents clearly don’t refer to them. In addition, women are exempted from criminal laws under these conditions; since there is no she, hers, or her in these laws, only men are able to break the law. These examples above show how Susan B Anthony effectively uses logos to strengthen her argument.

Anthony uses another appeal in her argument in order to persuade her audience which is ethos. It refers to the credibility of the speaker. Susan B. Anthony uses ethos when she cites Senator Charles Sumner. She uses the credibly of a man who holds the same belief as her regarding her rights as a citizen. Many people both knew and respected the Senator in 1873. Since the male audience voted him into office, they should share many opinions with him. As a result, people would be more likely to believe in Anthony’s statement knowing she had some backup from a person who holds power.

Anthony uses ethos a second time when she cites the authority of a Quaker preacher, who holds authority on her subject because the preacher was prominent at the time that the country was being founded. If during the time that the Declaration of Independence was written, the Quakers believed that women should have equal value in society as men, it is interesting that this belief was lost as society continued to grow over time. Nonetheless, Anthony uses the reference to this Quaker preacher to appeal to her audience because his belief reflects the beliefs of this country’s forefathers, who intended all people to be treated equally.

A third example of ethos occurs when Anthony cites a reputable source that is the Fourteenth Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States, and of the State wherein they reside” (16). By this definition of the word citizen, then all the rights afforded by the Constitution should also apply to women; if this is the case, women have the right to vote under the laws that our country’s forefathers established.

Although Susan. B Anthony could have simply accepted the fine she received for trying to vote and not given a speech like this at her trial, she was so passionate about the women’s rights that she delivered this speech. Even though we read this speech rather than heard it being said, we can expect that when she recited this speech, the audience could detect emotion in her tone. In conclusion, Susan B. Anthony’s speech was highly effective because of the rhetorical principles that she took advantage of while conveying her message of women’s suffrage to the courts. The elements of rhetoric that she uses include logos, pathos, and ethos. She speaks in an ideal manner to her target audience and knows them well so she can maximize their response. Anthony makes her argument and purpose clear throughout the speech, using evidence and logic to support her statements. Eventually, this was an ideal speech because many of her listeners respected her opinion and became supporters of the women’s suffrage movement. This moment in history sparked belief in the idea of women’s rights, and many women in the United States today are able to enjoy its outcome.

Works Cited

Anthony, Susan B. “On Women’s Right to Vote”. Language Matters, Ed, Debra De Southlake, TX:Fountainhead Press, 2010.13-19.Print

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HISTORY & CULTURE

Susan B. Anthony fought for women’s suffrage in the face of ridicule

This leading suffragist devoted her life to the movement but never got to vote—legally at least.

Susan B. Anthony was a leading force in the early suffragist movement and spent most of her life advocating for equal rights for women.

They called her “the woman who dared.” A tireless activist who crisscrossed the nation agitating for women’s rights in the 19th century, Susan B. Anthony devoted most of her 86 years to helping women get the vote. Though she was mocked, ridiculed, and often ignored, Anthony became one of the best known voices of the suffragist movement.

Born on February 15, 1820, Anthony was a member of an activist Quaker family. At first, Anthony was more interested in abolitionism than suffrage. She was first drawn to the nascent women’s rights movement by a different issue—pay equity—when she learned male teachers were paid four times her monthly salary.

Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton reading a letter

Susan B. Anthony, left, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were lifelong friends and activists. In a 1902 letter , Anthony wrote Stanton, “It is fifty-one years since we first met, and we have been busy through every one of them, stirring up the world to recognize the rights of women.”

Over time, Anthony became increasingly involved with social issues such as temperance and abolition. She agitated for more comfortable, less restrictive fashions for women along with feminist activist Amelia Bloomer, and in 1851 Bloomer introduced her to suffrage advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They forged a lifelong friendship and collaborated on many reform issues.

Along the way, they encountered constant resistance to the idea of women speaking in public. Anthony, who had been raised to speak her mind, was incensed by being told to “listen and learn” at conventions in which males were encouraged to be vocal. She began to advocate for things like property rights and a woman’s right to divorce.

At first, Anthony continued her abolitionist activism, facing down riots and even being burned in effigy for speaking out against slavery. In 1866, she and Stanton founded the American Equal Rights Association, a group devoted to securing equal rights for all American citizens. (Related: Will the Equal Rights Amendment ever be ratified? )

But after the passage of the 14th Amendment guaranteeing formerly enslaved men the right to vote, a rift formed between those who thought that black men should be enfranchised before white women and those who wanted to prioritize women’s suffrage instead. Anthony interpreted Frederick Douglass ’s support of black male suffrage as an affront to women and split bitterly with him and his supporters, using racist rhetoric and saying “let…woman be first…and the negro last.”

After the split, Anthony devoted herself to women’s rights full time, publishing a feminist newspaper called the Revolution and eventually forming the National Woman Suffrage Association. She traveled the country much of the year , delivering impassioned lectures on women’s suffrage and lobbying state governments to extend the vote to women. She became a nationally recognizable (and much mocked) face of the suffrage movement.

In 1872, Anthony became even more visible when she was arrested and tried for voting in the presidential election. She was indicted by an all-male grand jury, tried by a judge who instructed the jury to find her guilty, and slapped with a $100 fine she refused to pay.

suffragists holding a banner with a Susan B Anthony quote

Six suffragists at the 1920 Republican National Convention in Chicago hold a banner with a quote from Anthony. Although Anthony died 14 years before women gained the right to vote, her message and drive carried on to the next generation of suffragists.

The trial was Anthony’s most controversial and public moment, but it did not stop her agitation on behalf of women’s rights. Throughout her later years, she co-wrote a history of women’s suffrage, helped broker a merger between the split national women’s suffrage groups, and continued to travel the country and even the globe speaking out for the right to vote. She ultimately reconciled with Douglass before his death in 1895.

“If I could only live another century!” she said in 1902. “I do so want to see the fruition of the work for women in the past century.” Four years later, Anthony died.

It would take until 1920 for the first women to legally vote in federal elections in the United States. Now, more than a century after her death, women bring their “I Voted” stickers to Anthony’s grave in Rochester on election days—a small but fitting tribute to the leader whose tireless work helped pave the way for women’s political rights.

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Susan B. Anthony’s Speech Analysis: Rhetorical Devices, Purpose, & More

📢 susan b. anthony speech analysis – introduction, 📝 logos in susan b. anthony’s speech, ✍️ ethos in susan b. anthony’s speech, 📜 historical parallels in susan b. anthony’s speech, ↪️ susan b. anthony speech rhetorical analysis – summary, 💡 work cited.

The speech delivered by Susan B. Anthony following her arrest for casting a vote in the presidential election stands as a remarkable exemplar of American oratory. In “On Women’s Right to Vote,” Anthony set forth a clear objective: to persuade her audience that women’s suffrage was not only constitutionally justified but also a fundamental right, as inherently granted to men. To achieve her goal, Anthony deftly employed a combination of logos, ethos, and historical parallels, weaving together a persuasive argument that resonated deeply with her listeners. With skillful logical reasoning, Susan B. Anthony established her credibility through ethos and cleverly linked the struggles of women to the historical struggle for equality. Anthony delivered a powerful and convincing plea for women’s right to vote. Her succinct yet impactful rhetoric not only left an indelible mark on the suffrage movement but also solidified her position as a key figure in the fight for women’s rights in American history. Read this essay sample of Susan B. Anthony’s speech analysis to learn more about her purpose, contribution, and rhetorical devices used.

Logos is, by far, the most prominent rhetorical strategy used in the speech. Essentially, the core of the author’s argument is a classical syllogism: the Constitution secures liberties for all people, women are people – therefore, women should enjoy the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution – including suffrage – as much as men. She even adopts the form of a syllogism directly when she speaks of this discrimination from a legal perspective.

Any law that contradicts the universal suffrage is unconstitutional, and restrictions on voting are in contradiction to the Constitution – therefore, such law is “a violation of the supreme law of the land” (Anthony 5). Thus, Anthony represents her thesis – that women have the right to vote and restricting it is against the spirit and letter of the Constitution – as an inevitable logical conclusion of an impartial inquiry into the matter.

Anthony’s use of ethos is not typical, but all the more impressive because of that. Closer to the end of her speech, she mentions that the only way do deny citizens’ rights to women is to deny they are persons and doubts that her opponents “will have the hardihood to say they are not” (Anthony 8). As a rule, the speaker tries to establish credibility by pointing to something that makes him or her more competent to speak on a given topic than others, be that knowledge or personal experience. However, Anthony does not opt for that – rather, she appeals to a bare minimum of credibility a sentient creature is entitled to: being considered a person. While not elevating her above the audience, this appeal to credibility is still enough for her rhetorical purpose.

To further her case and root it in the audience’s relatively recent experiences, Anthony also draws a historical parallel with the emancipation and enfranchisement of former slaves. She emphasizes that the Constitution says, “we, the people; not we, the white male citizens” (Anthony 4). This specific reference to whiteness is a clear reference to the 15 th Amendment prohibiting the denial of the right to vote based on color, race, or previous condition of servitude.

By linking the issue of women’s suffrage to voting rights for black citizens, Anthony claims the former is an important progressive endeavor, just like the latter. This parallel is likely an attempt to appeal to the audience’s self-perception as progressive citizens of a free country. The implicit reasoning is clear: those who decided that race is an obstacle for casting a ballot cannot, in all honesty, claim that the gender is.

As one can see, Susan B. Anthony’s 1873 speech combines logos, ethos, and historical parallels to make a case for women’s voting rights. Anthony’s appeals to logic are simple and clear syllogisms based on the Constitution itself. She claims no greater credibility that is due to any sentient being, but that is just enough for her rhetorical purpose. Finally, a historical parallel with the recent enfranchisements of citizens of all races appeals to the audience’s sense of justice and self-perception as progressive people.

Anthony, Susan B. “ On Women’s Right to Vote. ” The History Place .

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People know Susan B. Anthony as one of the leading women's suffrage activist but how did who was she before the fame? How did she get inspired to take action and give women a voice? Anthony’s full name is Susan Brownell Anthony. She was born on February 15th 1820 in Adams Massachusetts [Women's Hall of Fame]. Her family lived on a cotton farm which failed in the early 1830’s which caused them to move to Rochester, New York. In the 1840’s Anthony found work being a teacher in the “Abolition State” of New York. Living in New York inspired Anthony to want to share her opinion with others. Anthony eventually met Elizabeth Stanton and they worked together on many occasions. Unfortunately people would not listen to Anthony’s

Exiting nps.gov

Learning from susan b. anthony.

These activities were researched and written by Alison Russell a NCPE intern with the Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education.  Susan B. Anthony is one of the most recognizable suffragists. She was born in Adams, Massachusetts in 1820. Her family moved to Rochester, New York in 1845 where she lived and worked for most of her life. Her family participated in the anti-slavery and early women’s rights movements. Their work introduced Anthony to activism as a young woman. She met Lucy Ston e and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the 1850s. In 1868, Anthony and Stanton founded the American Equal Rights Association and edited The Revolution, a women’s rights newspaper.

The debate over the Fifteen th Amendment, which granted voting rights to African American men but not women, caused Anthony and Stanton to split from other suffragists and allies , basing their objections on racist assumptions. They formed the National Women Suffrage Association to focus on women’s right to vote. Anthony and her sisters voted in the 1872 and were arrested. In the 1880s, Anthony, Stanton, and Matilda Josyln Gage wrote “The History of Woman Suffrage.” While it detailed white women’s contributions, women of color’s efforts were not included.

Anthony traveled and fought tirelessly for women’s right to vote. She was an accomplished speaker and organizer. Susan B. Anthony died in 1906 in her home in Rochester. The Nineteenth Amendment , named the Susan B. Anthony Amendment in her honor, was ratified in 1920. You can find out more about Anthony by visiting  this article about her  and by exploring the  Places of Susan B. Anthony .

Identify rights and privileges protected for all citizens of the United States and evaluate voting as a privilege.

Connect the actions of a historical figure to the ways we see and remember them.

Create images and memorials using different symbols, composition, or action based on the message you are trying to convey.

Inquiry Question

What is a cause worth dedicating your life to? Is there a cause that is more important than all the others?

Activity 1: What are the Rights in Equal Rights?

Susan B. Anthony was arrested for trying to vote in 1872. In court, she argued the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed rights to all citizens. Therefore, as a natural-born citizen, she was within her rights to vote. The Fourteenth Amendment says that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” It continues, “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens.”

What does the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee? Make a list of what “privileges” you think are guaranteed to citizens of the United States. Where does voting fit? Do you agree with Anthony’s characterization in this 1872 speech:

“Is the right to vote one of the privileges or immunities of citizens? I think the disfranchised ex-rebels, and the ex-state prisoners will agree with me, that it is not only one of them, but the one without which all others are nothing. Seek the first kingdom of the ballot, and all things else shall be given thee, is the political injunction…. To be a person was to be a citizen, and to be a citizen was to be a voter.”1

Since Anthony’s argument, the Supreme Court has listed some but not all privileges protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. These include access to the seats of government and courts, access to seaports, protection abroad, the right of assembly, to access public lands, to pass from state to state, and to vote for national officers, among others. Is it a good idea to have a list of what counts as a privilege? Are there any disadvantages to listing them? Are there any that you would add to the list?

Voting is still not guaranteed to all citizens. The Fifteenth, Nineteenth, Twenty- Third and Twenty- Sixth Amendments have helped expand voting, but as of 2020 only 66% of eligible Americans are registered to vote.2 Other Americans aren’t even eligible because of age, geographic location or former incarcerated status. How do you think Anthony would view this access to the ballot? How do you? Do you think their should be restrictions or limitations on access to voting? Do you think more people should be able to vote? Why?

To learn more about the interpretation of the Privileges and Immunities Clause Check out these essays from the National Constitution Center.

Activity 2: Symbols of Memory

Ratified fourteen years after her death, the Nineteenth Amendment extended the right to vote to women. Lawmakers and activists called it the Susan B. Anthony Amendment in her honor. In recent years, voters have left “I Voted” stickers on Anthony’s grave as a tribute. Anthony was also the first woman to appear on U.S. currency. Her portrait appeared on the dollar coin from 1971 to 1981 and in 1999.

Commemorating a historical figure doesn’t just have to come in the form of a statue, or even an official action. What’s important is to make a connection with that historical figure and why they are important you. Think about a person who fought for progress you benefit from directly or indirectly. What’s one thing you can do to show you appreciate the work of a person in history? Is there an action you can take? Is there an art form (painting, song, poem) that you could dedicate to them? Is there a group or organization that does work that honors the person you are celebrating? Can you volunteer or do something to support your shared mission?

Activity 3: A Picture’s worth a thousand words

Susan B. Anthony co-wrote a history of women’s suffrage, focused on the efforts of white women. She oversaw the images for the book. She wanted the portraits of women to counter the negative stereotypes of suffragists in popular media. Borrowing strategies from anti-slavery reformers, Anthony wrote and gave specific instructions on pose, dress and setting to featured women . It is Anthony herself who has become one of the most recognizable suffragists. Look at her picture in “The History of Woman Suffrage.” What message do you think she is trying to send with her pose, facial expression and dress? Forty-five years after the image and twenty years after the publication of the book, Anthony sat for a new portrait. How is this one different? What parts of the picture stand out to you? What message do you think this is trying to convey to the viewer?

Susan B. Anthony, c. 1855.

From "The History of Woman Suffrage" by Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Volume 1, 1881.

Susan B. Anthony seated at her desk, 1900. Collections of the Library of Congress (https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016651849/).

Think about how different pictures of the same person can say or do different things. Take photos with your friends or family members. Try to convey serious, funny, inspiring, and other emotions. How do you change the person’s pose, the framing of the photograph or even what accessories they use to create the mood? What does the picture tell a viewer about that person? What does it hide?

Part of a series of articles titled Curiosity Kit: Susan B. Anthony .

Next: Places of Susan B. Anthony

women’s history
women’s rights
women’s suffrage
19th amendment
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Last updated: August 9, 2021

I stand before you to-night, under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last Presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen's right, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any State to deny. Our democratic-republican government is based on the idea of the natural right of every individual member thereof to a voice and a vote in making and executing the laws. We assert the province of government to be to secure the people in the enjoyment of their unalienable rights. We throw to the winds the old dogma that governments can give rights. Before governments were organized, no one denies that each individual possessed the right to protect his own life. liberty and property. And when 100 or 1,000,000 people enter into a free government, they do not barter away their natural rights; they simply pledge themselves to protect each other in the enjoyment of them, through prescribed judicial and legislative tribunals. They agree to abandon the methods of brute force in the adjustment of their differences, and adopt those of civilization. Nor can you find a word in any of the grand documents left us by the fathers that assumes for government the power to create or to confer rights. The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the constitutions of the several states and the organic laws of the territories, all alike propose to protect the people in the exercise of their God-given rights. Not one of them pretends to bestow rights. "All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Here is no shadow of government authority over rights, nor exclusion of any from their full and equal enjoyment. Here is pronounced the right of all men, and "consequently," as the Quaker preacher said, "of all women," to a voice in the government. And here, in this very first paragraph of the declaration, is the assertion of the natural right of all to the ballot; for, how can "the consent of the governed" be given, if the right to vote be denied. Again: "That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in such forms as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." Surely, the right of the whole people to vote is here clearly implied. For however destructive in their happiness this government might become, a disfranchised class could neither alter nor abolish it, nor institute a new one, except by the old brute force method of insurrection and rebellion. One-half of the people of this nation to-day are utterly powerless to blot from the statute books an unjust law, or to write there a new and a just one. The women, dissatisfied as they are with this form of government, that enforces taxation without representation,-that compels them to obey laws to which they have never given their consent, -that imprisons and hangs them without a trial by a jury of their peers, that robs them, in marriage, of the custody of their own persons, wages and children,-are this half of the people left wholly at the mercy of the other half, in direct violation of the spirit and letter of the declarations of the framers of this government, every one of which was based on the immutable principle of equal rights to all. By those declarations, kings, priests, popes, aristocrats, were all alike dethroned, and placed on a common level politically, with the lowliest born subject or serf. By them, too, me, as such, were deprived of their divine right to rule, and placed on a political level with women. By the practice of those declarations all class and caste distinction will be abolished; and slave, serf, plebeian, wife, woman, all alike, bound from their subject position to the proud platform of equality. The preamble of the federal constitution says: "We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and established this constitution for the United States of America." It was we, the people, not we, the white male citizens, nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed this Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings or liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people-women as well as men. And it is downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government-the ballot. The early journals of Congress show that when the committee reported to that body the original articles of confederation, the very first article which became the subject of discussion was that respecting equality of suffrage. Article 4th said: "The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse between the people of the different States of this Union, the free inhabitants of each of the States, (paupers, vagabonds and fugitives from justice excepted,) shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of the free citizens of the several States." Thus, at the very beginning, did the fathers see the necessity of the universal application of the great principle of equal rights to all-in order to produce the desired result-a harmonious union and a homogeneous people. Luther Martin, attorney-general of Maryland, in his report to the Legislature of that State of the convention that framed the United States Constitution, said: "Those who advocated the equality of suffrage took the matter up on the original principles of government: that the reason why each individual man in forming a State government should have an equal vote, is because each individual, before he enters into government, is equally free and equally independent." James Madison said, "Under every view of the subject, it seems indispensable that the mass of the citizens should not be without a voice in making the laws which they are to obey, and in choosing the magistrate who are to administer them." Also, "Let it be remembered, finally, that it has ever been the pride and the boast of America that the rights for which she contended were the rights of human nature." And these assertions of the framers of the United States Constitution of the equal and natural rights of all the people to a voice in the government, have been affirmed and reaffirmed by the leading statesmen of the nation, throughout the entire history of our government. Thaddeus Stevens, of Pennsylvania, said in 1866: "I have made up my mind that elective franchise is one of the inalienable rights meant to be secured by the declaration of independence." B. Gratz Brown, of Missouri, in the three day's discussion in the United States Senate in 1866, on Senator Cowan's motion to strike "male" from the District of Columbia suffrage bill, said: "Mr. President, I say here on the floor of the American Senate, I stand for universal suffrage; and as a matter of fundamental principle, do not recognize the right of society to limit on any ground of race or sex. I will go farther and say, that I recognize the right of franchise as being intrinsically a natural right. I do not believe that society is authorized to impose any limitation upon it that do not spring out of the necessities of the social state itself. Sir, I have been shocked, in the course of this debate, to hear Senators declare this right only a conventional and political arrangement, a privilege yielded to you and me and others; not a right in any sense, only a concession! Mr. President, I do not hold my liberties by any such tenure. On the contrary, I believe that whenever you establish that doctrine, whenever you crystallize that idea in the public mind of this country, you ring the death-knell of American liberties." Charles Sumner, in his brave protests against the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, insisted that, so soon as by the thirteenth amendment the slaves became free men, the original powers of the United States Constitution guaranteed to them equal rights-the right to vote and to be voted for. In closing one of his great speeches he said; "I do not hesitate to say that when the slaves of our country became citizens they took their place in the body politic as a component part of the people, entitled to equal rights, and under the protection of these two guardian principles: First-That all just government stand on the consent of the governed; and second, that taxation without representation is tyranny; and these rights it is the duty of Congress to guarantee as essential to the ideal of a Republic." The preamble of the Constitution of the State of New York declares the same purpose. It says: "We, the people of the State of New York, grateful to Almighty God for our freedom, in order to secure its blessings, do establish this Constitution." Here is not the slightest intimation either of receiving freedom from the United States Constitution, or of the State conferring the blessings of liberty upon the people; and the same is true of every one of the thirty-six State Constitutions. Each and all, alike declare rights God-given, and that to secure the people in the enjoyment of their inalienable rights, is their one and only object in ordaining and establishing government. And all of the State Constitutions are equally emphatic in their recognition of the ballot as the means of securing the people in the enjoyment of these rights. Article 1 of the New York State Constitution says: "No member of this State shall be disfranchised or deprived of the rights or privileges secured to any citizen thereof, unless by the law of the land, or the judgment of his peers." And so carefully guarded is the citizen's right to vote, that the Constitution makes special mention of all who may be excluded. It says: "Laws may be passed excluding from the right of suffrage all persons who have been or may be convicted of bribery, larceny or any infamous crime." In naming the various employments that shall not affect the residence of voters-the 3d section of article 2d says "that being kept at any alms house, or other asylum, at public expense, nor being confined at any public prison, shall deprive a person of his residence," and hence his vote. Thus is the right of voting most sacredly hedged about. The only seeming permission in the New York State Constitution for the disfranchisement of women is in section 1st of article 2d, which says: "Every male citizen of the age of twenty-one years, c., shall be entitled to vote." But I submit that in view of the explicit assertions of the equal right of the whole people, both in the preamble and previous article of the constitution, this omission of the adjective "female" in the second, should not be construed into a denial; but, instead, counted as of no effect. Mark the direct prohibition: "No member of this State shall be disfranchised, unless by the law of the land, or the judgment of his peers." "The law of the land," is the United States Constitution: and there is no provision in that document that can be fairly construed into a permission to the States to deprive any class of their citizens of their right to vote. Hence New York can get no power from that source to disfranchise one entire half of her members. Nor has "the judgment of their peers" been pronounced against women exercising their right to vote; no disfranchised person is allowed to be judge or juror- and none but disfranchised persons can be women's peers; nor has the legislature passed laws excluding them on account of idiocy of lunacy; nor yet the courts convicted them of bribery, larceny, or any infamous crime. Clearly, then, there is no constitutional ground for the exclusion of women from the ballot-box in the State of New York, No barriers whatever stand to-day between women and the exercise of their right to vote save those of precedent and prejudice. The clauses of the United States Constitution, cited by our opponents as giving power to the States to disfranchise any classes of citizens they shall please, are contained in sections 2d and 4th of article 1st. The second says: "The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several States; and the electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State Legislature." This cannot be construed into a concession to the States of the power to destroy the right to become an elector, but simply to prescribe what shall be the qualification, such as competency of intellect, maturity of age, length of residence, that shall be deemed necessary to enable them to make an intelligent choice of candidates. If, as our opponents assert, the last clause of this section makes it the duty of the United States to protect citizens in the several States against higher or different qualifications for electors for representatives in Congress, than for members of Assembly, them must the first clause make it equally imperative for the national government to interfere with the States, and forbid them from arbitrarily cutting off the right of one-half of the people to become electors altogether. Section 4th says: "The time, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislative thereof; but Congress may at any time, by law, make or alter such regulations, except as to the places by choosing Senators." Here is conceded the power only to prescribed times, places and manner of holding the elections; and even with these Congress may interfere, with all excepting the mere place of choosing Senators. Thus you see, there is not the slightest permission in either section for the States to discriminate against the right of any class of citizens to vote. Surely, to regulate cannot be to annihilate! nor to qualify to wholly deprive. And to this principle every true Democrat and Republican said amen, when applied to black men by Senator Sumner in his great speeches for EQUAL RIGHTS TO ALL from 1865 to 1869; and when, in 1871, I asked that Senator to declare the power of the United States Constitution to protect women in their right to vote-as he had done for black men-he handed me a copy of all his speeches during that reconstruction period, and said: "Miss Anthony, put sex where I have race or color, and you have here the best and strongest argument I can make for woman. There is not a doubt but women have the constitutional right to vote, and I will never vote for a sixteenth amendment to guarantee it to them. I voted for both the fourteenth and fifteenth under protest; would never have done it but for the pressing emergency of that hour; would have insisted that the power of the original Constitution to protect all citizens in the equal enjoyment of their rights should have been vindicated through the courts. But the newly made freedmen had neither the intelligence, wealth nor time to wait that slow process. Women possess all these in an eminent degree, and I insist that they shall appeal to the courts, and through them establish the power of our American magna charta, to protect every citizen of the Republic. But, friends, when in accordance with Senator Sumner's counsel, I went to the ballot-box, last November, and exercised my citizen's right to vote, the courts did not wait for me to appeal to them-they appealed to me, and indicted me on the charge of having voted illegally. Senator Sumner, putting sex where he did color, said: "Qualifications cannot be in their nature permanent or insurmountable. Sex cannot be a qualification any more than size, race, color, or previous condition of servitude. A permanent or insurmountable qualification is equivalent to a de-privation of the suffrage. In other words, it is the tyranny of taxation without representation, against which our revolutionary mothers, as well as fathers, rebelled." For any State to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people, is to pass a bill of attainder, or an ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land. By it, the blessings of liberty are forever withheld from women and their female posterity. To them, this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed. To them this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex. The most hateful aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe. An oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor; an oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant; or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex, which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household; which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries dissension, discord and rebellion into every home of the nation. And this most odious aristocracy exists, too, in the face of Section 4, of Article 4, which says: "The United States shall guarantee to every State in the Union a republican form of government." What, I ask you, is the distinctive difference between the inhabitants of a monarchical and those of a republican form of government, save that in the monarchical the people are subjects, helpless, powerless, bound to obey laws made by superiors-while in the republican, the people are citizens, individual sovereigns, all clothed with equal power, to make and unmake both their laws and law makers, and the moment you deprive a person of his right to a voice in the government, you degrade him from the status of a citizen of the republic, to that of a subject, and it matters very little to him whether his monarch be an individual tyrant, as is the Czar of Russia, or a 15,000,000 headed monster, as here in the United States; he is a powerless subject, serf or slave; not a free and independent citizen in any sense. But is urged, the use of the masculine pronouns he, his and him, in all the constitutions and laws, is proof that only men were meant to be included in their provisions. If you insist on this version of the letter of the law, we shall insist that you be consistent, and accept the other horn of the dilemma, which would compel you to exempt women from taxation for the support of the government, and from penalties for the violation of laws. A year and a half ago I was at Walla, Walla, Washington Territory. I saw there a theatrical company, called the "Pixley Sisters," playing before crowded houses, every night of the whole week of the territorial fair. The eldest of those three fatherless girls was scarce eighteen. Yet every night a United States officer stretched out his long fingers, and clutched six dollars of the proceeds of the exhibition of those orphan girls, who, but a few years before, were half starvelings in the streets of Olympia, the capital of the far-off northwest territory. So the poor widow, who keeps a boarding house, manufacturers shirts, or sells apples and peanuts on the street corners of our cities, is compelled to pay taxes from her scanty pittance. I would that the women of this republic, at once, resolve, never again to submit of taxation, until their right to vote be recognized. Amen. Miss Sarah E. Wall, of Worcester, Mass., twenty years ago, took this position. For several years, the officers of the law disdained her property, and sold it to meet the necessary amount; still she persisted, and would not yield an iota, though every foot of her lands should be struck off under the hammer. And now, for several years, the assessor has left her name off the tax list, and the collector passed her by without a call. Mrs. J. S. Weeden, of Viroqua, Wis., for the past six years, has refused to pay her taxes, though the annual assessment is $75. Mrs. Ellen Van Valkenburg, of Santa Cruz, Cal., who sued the County Clerk for refusing to register her name, declares she will never pay another dollar of tax until allowed to vote; and all over the country, women property holders are waking up to the injustice of taxation without representation, and ere long will refuse, en masse, to submit to the imposition. There is no she, or her, or hers, in the tax laws. The statute of New York reads: "Every person shall be assessed in the town or ward where he resides when the assessment is made, or the lands owned by him." "Every collector shall call at least once on the person taxed, or at his usual place of residence, and shall demand payment of the taxes charged on him. If any one shall refuse to pay the tax imposed on him, the collector shall levy the same by distress and sale of his property" The same is true of all the criminal laws: "No person shall be compelled to be a witness against himself. " The same with the law of May 31st, 1870, the 19th section of which I am charged with having violated; not only are all the pronouns in it masculine, but everybody knows that that particular section was intended expressly to hinder the rebels from voting. It reads "If any person shall knowingly vote without his having a lawful right," c. Precisely so with all the papers served on me-the U.S. Marshal's warrant, the bail-bond, the petition for habeas corpus, the bill of indictment-not one of them had a feminine pronoun printed in it; but, to make them applicable to me, the Clerk of the Court made a little carat at the left of "he" and placed an "s" over it, thus making she out of he. Then the letters "is" were scratched out, the little carat under and "er" over, to make her out of his, and I insist if government officials may thus manipulate the pronouns to tax, fine, imprison and hang women, women may take the same liberty with them to secure to themselves their right to a voice in the government. So long as any classes of men were denied their right to vote, the government made a show of consistency, by exempting them from taxation. When a property qualification of $250 was required of black men in New York, they were not compelled to pay taxes, so long as they were content to report themselves worth less than that sum; but the moment the black man died, and his property fell to his widow or daughter, the black woman's name would be put on the assessor's list, and she be compelled to pay taxes on the same property exempted to her husband. The same is true of ministers in New York. So long as the minister lives, he is exempted from taxation on $1,500 of property, but the moment the breath goes out of his body, his widow's name will go down on the assessor's list, and she will have to pay taxes on the $1,500. So much for the special legislation in favor of women. In all the penalties and burdens of the government, (except the military,) women are reckoned as citizens, equally with men. Also, in all privileges and immunities, save those of the jury box and ballot box, the two fundamental privileges on which rest all the others. The United States government not only taxes, fines, imprisons and hangs women, but it allows them to pre-empt lands, register ships, and take out passport and naturalization papers. Not only does the law permit single women and widows to the right of naturalization, but Section 2 says: "A married woman may be naturalized without the concurrence of her husband." (I wonder the fathers were not afraid of creating discord in the families of foreigners); and again: "When an alien, having complied with the law, and declared his intention to become a citizen, dies before he is actually naturalized, his widow and children shall be considered citizens, entitled to all rights and privileges as such, on taking the required oath." If a foreign born woman by becoming a naturalized citizen, is entitled to all the rights and privileges of citizenship, is not a native born woman, by her national citizenship, possessed of equal rights and privileges? The question of the masculine pronouns, yes and nouns, too, has been settled by the United States Supreme Court, in the Case of Silver versus Ladd, December, 1868, in a decision as to whether a woman was entitled to lands, under the Oregon donation law of 1850. Elizabeth Cruthers, a widow, settled upon a claim, received patents. She died, and her son was heir. He died. Then Messrs. Ladd Nott took possession, under the general pre-emption law, December, 1861. The administrator, E. P. Silver, applied for a writ of ejectment at the land office in Oregon City. Both the Register and Receiver decided that an unmarried woman could not hold land under that law. The Commissioner of the General Land Office, at Washington, and the Secretary of the Interior, also gave adverse opinions. Here patents were issued to Ladd Nott, and duly recorded. Then a suit was brought to set aside Ladd's patent, and it was carried through all the State Courts and the Supreme Court of Oregon, each, in turn, giving adverse decisions. At last, in the United States Supreme Court, Associate Justice Miller reversed the decisions of all the lower tribunals, and ordered the land back to the heirs of Mrs. Cruthers. The Court said: "In construing a benevolent statute of the government, made for the benefit of its own citizens, inviting and encouraging them to settle on its distant public lands, the words a single man, and unmarried man may, especially if aided by the context and other parts of the statute, be taken in a generic sense. Held, accordingly, that the Fourth Section of the Act of Congress, of September 27th, 1850, granting by way of donation, lands in Oregon Territory, to every white settler or occupant, American half-breed Indians included, embraced within the term single man an unmarried woman." And the attorney, who carried this question to its final success, is now the United States senator elect from Oregon, Hon. J. H. Mitchell, in whom the cause of equal rights to women has an added power on the floor of the United States Senate. Though the words persons, people, inhabitants, electors, citizens, are all used indiscriminately in the national and state constitutions, there was always a conflict of opinion, prior to the war, as to whether they were synonymous terms, as for instance: "No person shall be a representative who shall not have been seven years a citizen, and who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that state in which he is chosen. No person shall be a senator who shall not have been a citizen of the United States, and an inhabitant of that state in which he is chosen." But, whatever there was for a doubt, under the old regime, the adoption of the fourteenth amendment settled that question forever, in its first sentence: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside." And the second settles the equal status of all persons-all citizens: "No states shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." The only question left to be settled, now, is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not. Being persons, then, women are citizens, and no state has a right to make any new law, or to enforce any old law, that shall abridge their privileges or immunities. Hence, every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several states, is to-day null and void, precisely as is every one against negroes. Is the right to vote one of the privileges or immunities of citizens? I think the disfranchised ex-rebels, and the ex-state prisoners will agree with me, that it is not only one of the them, but the one without which all the others are nothing. Seek the first kingdom of the ballot, and all things else shall be given thee, is the political injunction. Webster, Worcester and Bouvier all define citizen to be a person, in the United States, entitled to vote and hold office. Prior to the adoption of the thirteenth amendment, by which slavery was forever abolished, and black men transformed from property to persons, the judicial opinions of the country had always been in harmony with these definitions. To be a person was to be a citizen, and to be a citizen was to be a voter. Associate Justice Washington, in defining the privileges and immunities of the citizen, more than fifty years ago, said: "they included all such privileges as were fundamental in their nature. And among them is the right to exercise the elective franchise, and to hold office." Even the "Dred Scott" decision, pronounced by the abolitionists and republicans infamous, because it virtually declared "black men had no rights white men were bound to respect," gave this true and logical conclusion, that to be one of the people was to be a citizen and a voter. Chief Judge Daniels said: "There is not, it is believed, to be found in the theories of writers on government, or in any actual experiment heretofore tried, an exposition of the term citizen, which has not been considered as conferring the actual possession and enjoyment of the perfect right of acquisition and enjoyment of an entire equality of privileges, civil and political." Associate Justice Taney said: "The words people of the United States, and citizens, are synonymous terms, and mean the same thing. They both describe the political body, who, according to our republican institutions, form the sovereignty, and who hold the power and conduct the government, through their representatives. They are what we familiarly call the sovereign people, and every citizen is one of this people, and a constituent member of this sovereignty." Thus does Judge Taney's decision, which was such a terrible ban to the black man, while he was a slave, now, that he is a person, no longer property, pronounce him a citizen possessed of an entire equality of privileges, civil and political. And not only the black man, but the black woman, and all women as well. And it was not until after the abolition of slavery, by which the negroes became free men, hence citizens, that the United States Attorney, General Bates, rendered a contrary opinion. He said: "The constitution uses the word citizen only to express the political quality, (not equality mark,) of the individual in his relation to the nation; to declare that he is a member of the body politic, and bound to it by the reciprocal obligations of allegiance on the one side, and protection on the other. The phrase, a citizen of the United States, without addition or qualification, means neither more nor less than a member of the nation." Then, to be a citizen of this republic, is no more than to be a subject of an empire. You and I, and all true and patriotic citizens must repudiate this base conclusion. We all know that American citizenship, without addition or qualification, means the possession of equal rights, civil and political. We all know that the crowing glory of every citizen of the United States is, that he can either give or withhold his vote from every law and every legislator under the government. Did "I am Roman citizen," mean nothing more than that I am a "member" of the body politic of the republic of Rome, bound to it by the reciprocal obligations of allegiance on the one side, and protection on the other? Ridiculously absurd question, you say. When you, young man, shall travel abroad, among the monarchies of the old world, and there proudly boast yourself an "American citizen," will you thereby declare yourself neither more nor less than a "member" of the American nation? And this opinion of Attorney General Bates, that a black citizen was not a voter, made merely to suit the political exigency of the republican party, in that transition hour between emancipation and enfranchisement, was no less in-famous, in spirit or purpose, than was the decision of Judge Taney, that a black man was not one of the people, rendered in the interest and the behest of the old democratic party, in its darkest hour of subjection to the slave power. Nevertheless, all of the adverse arguments, adverse congressional reports and judicial opinions, thus far, have been based on this purely partisan, time-serving opinion of General Bates, that the normal condition of the citizen of the United States is that of disfranchisement. That only such classes of citizens as have had special legislative guarantee have a legal right to vote. And if this decision of Attorney General Bates was infamous, as against black men, but yesterday plantation slaves, what shall we pronounce upon Judge Bingham, in the house of Representatives, and Carpenter, in the Senate of the United States, for citing it against the women of the entire nation, vast numbers of whom are the peers of those honorable gentlemen, themselves, in moral!! intellect, culture, wealth, family-paying taxes on large estates, and contributing equally with them and their sex, in every direction, to the growth, prosperity and well-being of the republic? And what shall be said of the judicial opinions of Judges Carter, Jameson, McKay and Sharswood, all based upon this aristocratic, monarchial idea, of the right of one class to govern another? I am proud to mention the names of the two United States Judges who have given opinions honorable to our republican idea, and honorable to themselves-Judge Howe, of Wyoming Territory, and Judge Underwood, of Virginia. The former gave it as his opinion a year ago, when the Legislature seemed likely to revoke the law enfranchising the women of that territory, that, in case they succeeded, the women would still possess the right to vote under the fourteenth amendment. Judge Underwood, of Virginia, in nothing the recent decision of Judge Carter, of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia to women the right to vote, under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendment, says; "If the people of the United States, by amendment of their constitution, could expunge, without any explanatory or assisting legislation, an adjective of five letters from all state and local constitutions, and thereby raise millions of our most ignorant fellow-citizens to all of the rights and privileges of electors, why should not the same people, by the same amendment, expunge an adjective of four letters from the same state and local constitutions, and thereby raise other millions of more educated and better informed citizens to equal rights and privileges, without explanatory or assisting legislation?" If the fourteenth amendment does not secure to all citizens the right to vote, for what purpose was the grand old charter of the fathers lumbered with its unwieldy proportions? The republican party, and Judges Howard and Bingham, who drafted the document, pretended it was to do something for black men; and if that something was not to secure them in their right to vote and hold office, what could it have been? For, by the thirteenth amendment, black men had become people, and hence were entitled to all the privileges and immunities of the government, precisely as were the women of the country, and foreign men not naturalized. According to Associate Justice Washington, they already had the "Protection of the government, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the right to acquire and possess property of every kind, and to pursue and obtain happiness and safety, subject to such restraints as the government may justly prescribe for the general welfare of the whole; the right of a citizen of one state to pass through or to reside in any other state for the purpose of trade, agriculture, professional pursuit, or otherwise; to claim the benefit of the writ of habeas corpus, to institute and maintain actions of any kind in the courts of the state; to take, hold, and dispose of property, either real or personal, and an exemption from higher taxes or impositions than are paid by the other citizens of the state." Thus, you see, those newly freed men were in possession of every possible right, privilege and immunity of the government, except that of suffrage, and hence, needed no constitutional amendment for any other purpose. What right, I ask you, has the Irishman the day after he receives his naturalization papers that he did not possess the day before, save the right to vote and hold office? And the Chinamen, now crowding our Pacific coast, are in precisely the same position. What privilege or immunity has California or Oregon the constitutional right to deny them, save that of the ballot? Clearly, then if the fourteenth amendment was not to secure to black men their right to vote, it did nothing for them, since they possessed everything else before. But, if it was meant to be a prohibition of the states, to deny or abridge their right to vote-which I fully believe-then it did the same for all persons, white women included, born or naturalized in the United States; for the amendment does not say all male persons of African descent, but all persons are citizens. The second section is simply a threat to punish the states, by reducing their representation on the floor of Congress, should they disfranchise any of their male citizens, on account of color, and does not allow of the inference that the states may disfranchise from any, or all other causes, nor in any wise weaken or invalidate the universal guarantee of the first section. What rule of law or logic would allow the conclusion, that the prohibition of a crime to one person, on severe pains and penalties, was a sanction of that crime to any and all other persons save that one? But, however much the doctors of the law may disagree, as to whether people and citizens, in the original constitution, were once and the same, or whether the privileges and immunities in the fourteenth amendment include the right of suffrage, the question of the citizen's right to vote is settled forever by the fifteenth amendment. "The citizen's right to vote shall not be denied by the United States, nor any state thereof; on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." How can the state deny or abridge the right of the citizen, if the citizen does not possess it? There is no escape from the conclusion, that to vote is the citizen's right, and the specifications of race, color, or previous condition of servitude can, in no way, impair the force of the emphatic assertion, that the citizen's right to vote shall not be denied or abridged. The political strategy of the second section of the fourteenth amendment, failing to coerce the rebel states into enfranchising their negroes, and the necessities of the republican party demanding their votes throughout the South, to ensure the re-election of Grant in 1872, that party was compelled to place this positive prohibition of the fifteenth amendment upon the United States and all the states thereof. If we once establish he false principle, that United States citizenship does not carry with it the right to vote in every state in this Union, there is no end to the petty freaks and cunning devices, that will be resorted to, to exclude one and another class of citizens from the right of suffrage. It will not always be men combining to disfranchise all women; native born men combining to abridge the rights of all naturalized citizens, as in Rhode Island. It will not always be the rich and educated who may combine to cut off the poor and ignorant; but we may live to see the poor, hardworking, uncultivated day laborers, foreign and native born, learning the power of the ballot and their vast majority of numbers, combine and amend state constitutions so as to disfranchise the Vanderbilts and A. T Stewarts, the Conklings and Fentons. It is poor rule that won't work more ways than one. Establish this precedent, admit the right to deny suffrage to the states, and there is no power to foresee the confusion, discord and disruption that may await us. There is, and can be, but one safe principle of government-equal rights to all. And any and every discrimination against any class, whether on account of color, race, nativity, sex, property, culture, can but embitter and disaffect that class, and thereby endanger the safety of the whole people. Clearly, then, the national government must not only define the rights of citizens, but it must stretch out its powerful hand and protect them in every state in this Union. But if you will insist that the fifteenth amendment's emphatic interdiction against robbing United States citizens of their right to vote, "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude," is a recognition of the right, either of the United States, or any state, to rob citizens of that right, for any or all other reason, I will prove to you that the class of citizens for which I now plead, and to which I belong, may be, and sure, by all the principles of our government, and many of the laws of the states, included under the term "previous condition of servitude." First.-The married women and their legal status. What is servitude? "The condition of a slave." What is a slave? "A person who is robbed of the proceeds of his labor; a person who is subject to the will of another." By the law of Georgia, South Carolina, and all the states of the South, the negro had no right to the custody and control of his person. He belonged to his master. If he was disobedient, the master had the right to use correction. If the negro didn't like the correction, and attempted to run away, the master had a right to use coercion to bring him back. By the law of every state in this Union to-day, North as well as South, the married woman has no right to the custody and control of her person. The wife belongs to her husband; and if the refuses obedience to his will, he may use moderate correction, and if she doesn't like his moderate correction, and attempts to leave his "bed and board," the husband may use moderate coercion to bring her back. The little word "moderate," you see, is the saving clause for the wife, and would doubtless be overstepped should offended husband administer his correction with the "cat-o'-nine-tails," or accomplish his coercion with blood-hounds. Again, the slave had no right to the earnings of his hands, they belonged to his master; no right to the custody of his children, they belonged to his master; no right to sue or be sued, or testify in the courts. If he committed a crime, it was the master who must sue or be sued. In many of the states there has been special legislation, giving to married women the right to property inherited, or received by bequest, or earned by the pursuit of any avocation outside of the home; also, giving her the right to sue and be sued in matters pertaining to such separate property; but not a single state of this Union has eve secured the wife in the enjoyment of her right to the joint ownership of the joint earnings of the marriage copartnership. And since, in the nature of things, the vast majority of married women never earn a dollar, by work outside of their families, nor inherit a dollar from their fathers, it follows that from the day of their marriage to the day of the death of their husbands, not one of them ever has a dollar, except it shall please her husband to let her have it. In some of the states, also, there have been laws passed giving to the mother a joint right with the father in the guardianship of the children. But twenty years ago, when our woman's rights movement commenced, by the laws of the State of New York, and all the states, the father had the sole custody and control of the children. No matter if he were a brutal, drunken libertine, he had the legal right, without the mother's consent, to apprentice her sons to rum sellers, or her daughters to brothel keepers. He could even will away an unborn child, to some other person than the mother. And in many of the states the law still prevails, and the mothers are still utterly powerless under the common law. I doubt if there is, to-day, a State in this Union where a married woman can sue or be sued for slander of character, and until quite recently there was not one in which she could sue or be sued for injury of person. However damaging to the wife's reputation any slander may be, she is wholly powerless to institute legal proceedings against her accuser, unless her husband shall join with her; and how often have we hard of the husband conspiring with some outside barbarian to blast the good name of his wife? A married woman cannot testify in courts in cases of joint interest with her husband. A good farmer's wife near Earlville, Ill., who had all the rights she wanted, went to a dentist of the village and had a full set of false teeth, both upper and under. The dentist pronounced them an admirable fit, and the wife declared they gave her fits to wear them; that she could neither chew nor talk with them in her mouth. The dentist sued the husband; his counsel brought the wife as witness; the judge ruled her off the stand; saying "a married woman cannot be a witness in matters of joint interest between herself and her husband." Think of it, ye good wives, the false teeth in your mouths are joint interest with your husbands, about which you are legally incompetent to speak!! If in our frequent and shocking railroad accidents a married woman is injured in her person, in nearly all of the States, it is her husband who must sue the company, and it is to her husband that the damages, if there are any, will be awarded. In Ashfield, Mass., supposed to be the most advanced of any State in the Union in all things, humanitarian as well as intellectual, a married woman was severely injured by a defective sidewalk. Her husband sued the corporation and recovered $13,000 damages. And those $13,000 belong to him bona fide; and whenever that unfortunate wife wishes a dollar of it to supply her needs she must ask her husband for it; and if the man be of a narrow, selfish, nighardly nature, she will have to hear him say, every time, "What have you done, my dear, with the twenty-five cents I gave you yesterday?" Isn't such a position, ask you, humiliating enough to be called "servitude?" That husband, as would any other husband, in nearly every State of this Union, sued and obtained damages for the loss of the services of his wife, precisely as the master, under the old slave regime, would have done, had his slave been thus injured, and precisely as he himself would have done had it been his ox, cow or horse instead of his wife. There is an old saying that "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet," and I submit it the deprivation by law of the ownership of one's own person, wages, property, children, the denial of the right as an individual, to sue and be sued, and to testify in the courts, is not a condition of servitude most bitter and absolute, though under the sacred name of marriage? Does any lawyer doubt my statement of the legal status of married women? I will remind him of the fact that the old common law of England prevails in every State in this Union, except where the Legislature has enacted special laws annulling it. And I am ashamed that not one State has yet blotted from its statue books the old common law of marriage, by which Blackstone, summed up in the fewest words possible, is made to say, "husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband." Thus may all married women, wives and widows, by the laws of the several States, be technically included in the fifteenth amendment's specification of "condition of servitude," present or previous. And not only married women, but I will also prove to you that by all the great fundamental principles of our free government, the entire womanhood of the nation is in a "condition of servitude" as surely as were our revolutionary fathers, when they rebelled against old King George. Women are taxed without representation, governed without their consent, tried, convicted and punished without a jury of their peers. And is all this tyranny any less humiliating and degrading to women under our democratic-republican government to-day than it was to men under their aristocratic, monarchical government one hundred years ago? There is not an utterance of old John Adams, John Hancock or Patrick Henry, but finds a living response in the soul of every intelligent, patriotic woman of the nation. Bring to me a common-sense woman property holder, and I will show you one whose soul is fired with all the indignation of 1776 every time the tax-gatherer presents himself at her door. You will not find one such but feels her condition of servitude as galling as did James Otis when he said: "The very act of taxing exercised over those who are not represented appears to me to be depriving them of one of their most essential rights, and if continued, seems to be in effect an entire disfranchisement of every civil right. For, what one civil right is worth a rush after a man's property is subject to be taken from him at pleasure without his consent? If a man is not his own assessor in person, or by deputy, his liberty is gone, or he is wholly at the mercy of others." What was the three-penny tax on tea, or the paltry tax on paper and sugar to which our revolutionary fathers were subjected, when compared with the taxation of the women of this Republic? The orphaned Pixley sisters, six dollars a day, and even the women, who are proclaiming the tyranny of our taxation without representation, from city to city throughout the country, are often compelled to pay a tax for the poor privilege of defending our rights. And again, to show that disfranchisement was precisely the slavery of which the fathers complained, allow me to cite to you old Ben. Franklin, who in those olden times was admitted to be good authority, not merely in domestic economy, but in political as well; he said: "Every man of the commonalty, except infants, insane persons and criminals, is, of common right and the law of God, a freeman and entitled to the free enjoyment of liberty. That liberty or freedom consists in having an actual share in the appointment of those who are to frame the laws, and who are to be the guardians of every man's life, property and peace. For the all of one man is as dear to him as the all of another; and the poor man has an equal right, but more need to have representatives in the Legislature that the rich one. That they who have no voice or vote in the electing of representatives, do not enjoy liberty, but are absolutely enslaved to those who have votes and their representatives; for to be enslaved is to have governors whom other men have set over us, and to be subject to laws made by the representatives of others, without having had representatives of our own to give consent in our behalf." Suppose I read it with the feminine gender: "That women who have no voice nor vote in the electing of representatives, do not enjoy liberty, but are absolutely enslaved to men who have votes and their representatives; for to be enslaved is to have governors whom men have set over us, and to be subject to the laws made by the representatives of men, without having representatives of our own to give consent in our behalf." And yet one more authority; that of Thomas Paine, than whom not one of the Revolutionary patriots more ably vindicated the principles upon which our government is founded: "The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce man to a state of slavery; for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another; and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case. The proposal, therefore, to disfranchise any class of men is as criminal as the proposal to take away property." Is anything further needed to prove woman's condition of servitude sufficiently orthodox to entitle her to the guaranties of the fifteenth amendment? Is there a man who will not agree with me, that to talk of freedom without the ballot, is mockery-is slavery-to the women of this Republic, precisely as New England's orator Wendell Phillips, at the close of the late war, declared it to be to the newly emancipated black men? I admit that prior to the rebellion, by common consent, the right to enslave, as well as to disfranchise both native and foreign born citizens, was conceded to the States. But the one grand principle, settled by the war and the reconstruction legislation, is the supremacy of national power to protect the citizens of the United States in their right to freedom and the elective franchise, against any and every interference on the part of the several States. And again and again, have the American people asserted the triumph of this principle, by their overwhelming majorities for Lincoln and Grant. The one issue of the last two Presidential elections was, whether the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments should be considered the irrevocable will of the people; and the decision was, they shall be-and that it is only the right, but the duty of the National Government to protect all United States citizens in the full enjoyment and free exercise of all their privileges and immunities against any attempt of any State to deny or abridge. And in this conclusion Republican and Democrats alike agree. Senator Frelinghuysen said: "The heresy of State rights has been completely buried in these amendments, that as amended, the Constitution confers not only national but State citizenship upon all persons born or naturalized within our limits." The Call for the national Republican convention said: "Equal suffrage has been engrafted on the national Constitution; the privileges and immunities of American citizenship have become a part of the organic law." The national Republican platform said: "Complete liberty and exact equality in the enjoyment of all civil, political and public rights, should be established and maintained throughout the Union by efficient and appropriate State and federal legislation." If that means anything, it is that Congress should pass a law to require the States to protect women in their equal political rights, and that the States should enact laws making it the duty of inspectors of elections to receive women's votes on precisely the same conditions they do those of men. Judge Stanley Mathews-a substantial Ohio democrat-in his preliminary speech at the Cincinnati convention, said most emphatically: "The constitutional amendments have established the political equality of all citizens before the law." President Grant, in his message to Congress March 30th, 1870, on the adoption of the fifteenth amendment, said: "A measure which makes at once four millions of people voters, is indeed a measure of greater importance than any act of the kind from the foundation of the Government to the present time." How could four millions negroes be made voter if two millions were not included? The California State Republican convention said: "Among the many practical and substantial triumphs of the principles achieved by the Republican party during the past twelve years, it enumerated with pride and pleasure, the prohibiting of any State from abridging the privileges of any citizen of the Republic, the declaring the civil and political equality of every citizen, and the establishing all these principles in the federal constitution by amendments thereto, as the permanent law." Benjamin F. Butler, in a recent letter to me, said: "I do not believe anybody in Congress doubts that the Constitution authorizes the right of women to vote, precisely as if authorizes trial by jury and many other like rights guaranteed to citizens." And again, General Butler said: "It is not laws we want; there are plenty of laws-good enough, too. Administrative ability to enforce law is the great want of the age, in this country especially. Everybody talks of law, law. If everybody would insist on the enforcement of law, the government would stand on a firmer basis, and question would settle themselves." An it is upon this just interpretation of the United States Constitution that our National Woman Suffrage Association which celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the woman's rights movement in New York on the 6th of May next, has based all its arguments and action the past five years. We no longer petition Legislature or Congress to give us the right to vote. We appeal to the women everywhere to exercise their too long neglected "citizen's right to vote." We appeal to the inspectors of election everywhere to receive the votes of all United States citizens as it is their duty to do. We appeal to United States commissioners and marshals to arrest the inspectors who reject the names and votes of United States citizens, as it is their duty to do, and leave those alone who, like our eighth ward inspectors, perform their duties faithfully and well. We ask the juries to fail to return verdicts of "guilty" against honest, law-abiding, tax-paying United States citizens for offering their votes at our elections. Or against intelligent, worthy young men, inspectors of elections, for receiving and counting such citizens votes. We ask the judges to render true and unprejudiced opinions of the law, and wherever there is room for a doubt to give its benefit on the side of liberty and equal rights to women, remembering that "the true rule of interpretation under our national constitution, especially since its amendments, is that anything for human rights is constitutional, everything against human right unconstitutional." And it is on this line that we propose to fight our battle for the ballot-all peaceably, but nevertheless persistently through to complete triumph, when all United States citizens shall be recognized as equals before the law.

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Background Essay: Shall Women Have the Right to Vote (1866-1890)

Directions:

Keep these discussion questions in mind as you read the background essay, making marginal notes as desired. Respond to the reflection and analysis questions at the end of the essay.

Discussion Questions

How had the work of women to end slavery helped them develop skills that would ultimately be useful in the women’s suffrage struggle?
What might be meant by the term, “the conscience of the nation,” and how did the fight against slavery help demonstrate that concept?
What arguments might have been made against women’s suffrage?
Why were Western states the first to grant suffrage to women?

Introduction

After the Civil War, the nation was finally poised to extend the promise of liberty expressed in the Declaration of Independence to newly emancipated African Americans. But the women’s suffrage movement was split: Should women push to be included in the Fifteenth Amendment? Should they wait for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to be adopted before turning to women’s suffrage, or should they seize the moment and demand the vote now? Not content to wait, Susan B. Anthony and other workers in the movement engaged in civil disobedience to wake the conscience of a nation. Meanwhile, railroads opened the West to settlement, and Western territories tried to boost population by offering votes for women.

Life for women in the mid-nineteenth century was as diverse as it is now. What was considered socially appropriate behavior for women varied widely across the country, based on region, social class, and other factors. Branches of the women’s suffrage movement disagreed regarding tactics, and some women (and many men) did not even believe women’s suffrage was appropriate or necessary. Ideals of the Cult of Domesticity, in which women were believed to possess the natural virtues of piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness, were still a powerful influence on culture. An important debate and split in the women’s suffrage movement between a state and national strategy emerged during this period.

The Cult of True Womanhood

The Cult of Domesticity, also known as the Cult of True Womanhood, affirmed the idea that natural differences between the sexes meant women, especially those of the upper and middle classes, were too delicate for work outside the home. According to this view, such women were more naturally suited to parenting, teaching, and making homes, which were their natural “sphere,” happy and peaceful for their families. In other words, it was unnatural and unladylike for women to work outside the home.

Educator and political activist Catharine Beecher wrote in 1871, “Woman’s great mission is to train immature, weak, and ignorant creatures [children] to obey the laws of God . . . first in the family, then in the school, then in the neighborhood, then in the nation, then in the world.” For Beecher and other writers, the role of homemaker was held up as an honored and dignified position for women, worthy of high esteem. Their contribution to public life would include managing the home in a manner that would support their husbands. According to this conception of the roles of men and women, men were considered to be exhausted, soiled, and corrupted by their participation in work and politics, and needed a peaceful, pure home life to enable them to recover their virtue.

Increasingly, women found their political voice through their work in social reform movements. Jane Addams, co-founder with Helen Gates Starr of Hull House and pioneer of social work in America, wrote in 1902, “The sphere of morals is the sphere of action . . . It is well to remind ourselves, from time to time, that ‘Ethics’ is but another word for ‘righteousness . . . ’” She noted that, to solve problems related to the needs of children, public health, and other social concerns that affected the home, women needed the vote.

In keeping with the feminine ideals of piety and purity, many women continued work within the temperance movement to campaign against the excesses of drunkenness. This cause was considered a socially permissible moral effort through which women could participate in public life, because of the damaging effects of alcohol abuse on the family. Annie Wittenmyer, a social reformer and war widow from Ohio who had reported on terrible hospital conditions during the Civil War, founded the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1874 to build support for the idea of abstaining from alcohol use.

According to the tradition of Republican Motherhood, education should prepare girls to become mothers who raised educated citizens for the republic. In a challenge to the Cult of Domesticity, the latter half of the nineteenth century saw an expansion of broader academic opportunities for upper class females of college age in the United States. In the Northeast, liberal arts schools modeled after Wesleyan College (1836) in Macon, Georgia, opened. In 1844, Hillsdale College opened in Michigan, one of the first American colleges whose charter prohibited any discrimination based on race, religion, or sex. Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, founded in 1861, and Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, founded in 1875, also expanded educational opportunities for women. Teaching was among the first professions women entered in large numbers. During and after the Civil War, new opportunities also developed for women to become nurses.

New York City — The sewing-room at A.T. Stewart’s, between Ninth and Tenth Streets, Broadway and Fourth Avenue / Hyde, 1875. Library of Congress.

The Changing Roles of Women

While these career options did not radically challenge the cultural ideal of traditional womanhood, the work landscape of America was changing. As the United States economy grew to provide more options, people began to see themselves as consumers as well as producers. Indeed, mass consumerism drove new manufacturing methods. During the second industrial revolution, the United States started moving from an agricultural economy toward incorporating new modes of production, manufacturing, and consumer behavior.

Young working-class women worked in the same laundries, factories, and textile mills as poor and immigrant men, often spending twelve hours a day, seven days a week, in hot, dangerous conditions. Also, women found work as store clerks in the many new department stores that opened to sell factory-made clothing and other mass-produced items.

The Suffrage Movement Grows

Women continued to work to secure their right to vote. The Civil War ended in April of 1865 and the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified eight months later, banning slavery throughout the United States. A burning question remained: How would the rights of former slaves be protected? As the nation’s attention turned to civil rights and voting with the debates surrounding the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, many women hoped to seize the opportunity to gain the vote alongside African American men.

The Civil War had forced women’s suffrage advocates to pause their efforts toward winning the vote, but in 1866 they came together at the eleventh National Women’s Rights Convention in New York. The group voted to call itself the American Equal Rights Association and work for the rights of all Americans. Appealing to the Cult of Domesticity, they argued that giving women the vote would improve government by bringing women’s virtues of piety and purity into politics, resulting in a more civilized, “maternal commonwealth.”

The Movement Splits

The American Equal Rights Association seemed poised for success with such well-known leaders as Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, and Frederick Douglass. But internal divisions soon became clear. Whose rights should be secured first? Some, especially former abolitionist leaders, wanted to wait until newly emancipated African American men had been given the vote before working to win it for women. Newspaper editor Horace Greeley urged, “This is a critical period for the Republican Party and the life of our Nation . . . I conjure you to remember that this is ‘the negro’s hour,’ and your first duty now is to go through the State and plead his claims.” Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe agreed.

But for Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the time for women also was now. Along with many others, they saw the move to put the cause of women’s suffrage on hold as a betrayal of both the principles of equality and republicanism. Frederick Douglass, who saw suffrage for African American men as a matter of life or death, challenged Anthony on this question, asking whether she believed granting women the vote would truly do anything to change the inequality under law between the sexes. Without missing a beat, Anthony responded:

“ It will change the nature of one thing very much, and that is the dependent condition of woman. It will place her where she can earn her own bread, so that she may go out into the world an equal competitor in the struggle for life.”

In the wake of this bitter debate, not one but two national organizations for women’s suffrage were established in 1869. Stone and Blackwell founded the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). Worried that the Fifteenth Amendment would not pass if it included votes for women, the AWSA put their energy into convincing the individual states to give women the vote in their state constitutions. Anthony and Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). They worked to win votes for women via an amendment to the U.S. Constitution at the same time as it would protect the right of former slaves to vote. Anthony and Stanton started the NWSA’s newspaper, The Revolution, in 1868. Its motto was, “Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.”

The NWSA was a broad coalition that included some progressives who questioned the fitness of African Americans and immigrants to vote because of the prevailing views of Social Darwinism. The racism against black males voting was especially prevalent in the South where white women supported women’s suffrage as a means of preserving white supremacy. In addition, throughout the country strong sentiment reflected the view that any non-white or immigrant individual was racially inferior and too ignorant to vote. In this vein, Anthony and Stanton used racially charged language in advocating for an educational requirement to vote. Unfortunately for many, universal suffrage challenged too many of their assumptions about the prevailing social structure.

Photograph of Lucy Stone between 1840 and 1860. Library of Congress.

The New Departure: Testing the Fourteenth Amendment

But there was another amendment which interested NWSA: the Fourteenth. In keeping with NWSA’s more confrontational approach, Anthony decided to test the meaning of the newly ratified Fourteenth Amendment. The Amendment stated in part, “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States…” Anthony thought it was clear that this language protected the right of women to vote. After all, wasn’t voting a privilege of citizens?

The Fourteenth Amendment went on to state that representation in Congress would be reduced for states which denied the vote to male inhabitants over 21. In other words, states could choose to deny men over 21 the vote, but they would be punished with proportionally less representation (and therefore less power) in Congress. So in the end, the Fourteenth Amendment encouraged states to give all men over 21 the vote, but did not require it. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, banned states from denying the vote based on race, color, or having been enslaved in the past.

Susan B. Anthony on Trial

It was the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of “privileges or immunities” that Anthony decided to test. On November 5, 1872, she and two dozen other women walked into the local polling place in Rochester, New York, and cast a vote in the presidential election. (Anthony voted for Ulysses S. Grant.) She was arrested and charged with voting in a federal election “without having a lawful right to vote.”

Before her trial, 52-year-old Anthony traveled all over her home county giving a speech entitled “Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?” In it, she called on all her fellow citizens, from judges to potential jurors, to support equal rights for women.

At her trial, Anthony’s lawyer pointed out the unequal treatment under the law:

“ If this same act [voting] had been done by her brother, it would have been honorable. But having been done by a woman, it is said to be a crime . . . I believe this is the first instance in which a woman has been arraigned [accused] in a criminal court merely on account of her sex.”

The judge refused to let Anthony testify in her own defense, found her guilty of voting without the right to do so, and ordered her to pay a $100 fine. Anthony responded:

“ In your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled underfoot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights are all alike ignored . . . I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty. And I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women.” She concluded by quoting Thomas Jefferson: “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.”

Anthony’s case did not make it all the way to the Supreme Court. However, the Court did rule three years later in a different case, Minor v. Happersett (1875), that voting was not among the privileges or immunities of citizens and the Fourteenth Amendment did not protect a woman’s right to vote.

A caricature of Susan B. Anthony that appeared in a New York newspaper right before her trial. Thomas Wust, June 5, 1873. Library of Congress.

Suffrage in the West

While Anthony and other suffragists were agitating in the Northeast, railroads had helped open up the Great Plains and the American West to settlement. The Gold Rush of 1849 had enticed many thousands of settlers to the rugged West, and homesteading pioneers continued to push the frontier. These territories (and later states), were among the first to give women the right to vote: Wyoming Territory in 1869, followed by Utah Territory (1870), and Washington Territory (1883).

These territories had many reasons for extending suffrage to women, most related to the need to increase population. They would need to meet minimum population requirements to apply for statehood, and the free publicity they would get for giving women the vote might bring more people. And they did not just need more people—they needed women: There were six males for every female in some places. Some were motivated to give white women the vote to offset the influence of African American votes. And finally, there were, of course, those who genuinely believed that giving women the vote was the right thing to do.

Though several western legislatures had considered proposals to give women the vote since the 1850s, in 1869 Wyoming became the first territory to give women full political rights, including voting and eligibility to hold public office. In 1870, Louisa Garner Swain was the first woman in Wyoming to cast a ballot, and a life-sized statue honors her memory in Laramie.

Under territorial government, Wyoming’s population had grown slowly and most people lived on ranches or in small towns. Territorial leaders believed Wyoming would be more attractive to newcomers once statehood was achieved, as had been the case in other western states. The territory came close to reaching the threshold of 60,000 people for statehood, but many doubted whether that number had actually been reached.

Territorial Governor Francis E. Warren refused to wait for more people to move there. He set in motion the plans for a constitutional convention. Though they had the right to do so, no women ran for seats at the Wyoming constitutional convention. Borrowing passages from other state constitutions, delegates quickly drafted the constitution in September 1889. The new element of this constitution is that it enshrined the protections of women’s political rights by simply stating that equality would exist without reference to gender. Only one delegate, Louis J. Palmer, objected to women’s suffrage. Wyoming voters approved the document in November, and the territory applied for statehood.

In the House of Representatives there was some opposition, mostly from Democrats, because the territory was known to lean Republican. Debate did not openly center on party affiliation, but on a combination of doubts about whether Wyoming had truly achieved the required population and on reluctance to admit a state where women had political rights. In response, Wyoming’s legislature sent a telegram: “We will remain out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without our women!” Wyoming officially joined the union in 1890, becoming the 44th state. Anthony praised Wyoming for its adherence to the nation’s Founding principles: “Wyoming is the first place on God’s green earth which could consistently claim to be the land of the free!”

Representative Women, seven prominent figures of the suffrage and women’s rights movement. Clockwise from the top: Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Livermore, Lydia Marie Child, Susan B. Anthony, Grace Greenwood, and Anna E. Dickinson (center). L. Schamer; L. Prang & Co. publisher, 1870. Library of Congress.

REFLECTION AND ANALYSIS QUESTIONS

What was the Cult of True Womanhood, or Cult of Domesticity?
How did the Industrial Revolution challenge the notion that upper- and middle-class women’s bodies were too delicate for work outside the home?
Describe the events leading to the split in the women’s movement in 1869.
What are some actions in which Susan B. Anthony worked for the cause of women’s suffrage in a very personal way?
The Fourteenth Amendment is ratified
Susan B. Anthony is jailed for voting
Western territories give women the vote
Other (explain)
Principles: equality, republican/representative government, popular sovereignty, federalism, inalienable rights, freedom of speech/press/assembly
Virtues: perseverance, contribution, moderation, resourcefulness, courage, respect, justice

IMAGES

Susan B. Anthony
≫ Susan B Anthony's Fight for Women's Vote Right Free Essay Sample on
Susan B. Anthony, Women's Suffrage Activist
Fun facts: Icon Susan B. Anthony voted illegally
Susan B. Anthony
Susan B. Anthony on suffrage and equal rights, 1901

VIDEO

On this Day: 19th Amendment Gives Women Right to Vote
Chirstina Kirk reads Susan B. Anthony
Susan B. Anthony monologue from THE AGITATORS by Mat Smart

COMMENTS

On Women's Right to Vote Summary
Summary. Last Updated September 6, 2023. "On Women's Right to Vote" is a political speech made by Susan B. Anthony in 1873. Anthony begins by explaining the event that inspired her to make ...
Susan B. Anthony on a Woman's Right to Vote
Woman's Rights to the Suffrage. by Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) 1873. This speech was delivered in 1873, after Anthony was arrested, tried and fined $100 for voting in the 1872 presidential election. Friends and Fellow Citizens: I stand before you tonight under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election ...
Rhetorical Analysis of the Speech by Susan B. Anthony "Women's Right to
Rhetorical Analysis of Women's Right to Vote. All through history, there have been numerous talks that have numerous and enormous effect on society, however one that will never be overlooked is the speech by Susan B. Anthony, "On Women's Right to Vote."
Susan B. Anthony
Champion of temperance, abolition, the rights of labor, and equal pay for equal work, Susan Brownell Anthony became one of the most visible leaders of the women's suffrage movement.Along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she traveled around the country delivering speeches in favor of women's suffrage.. Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts.
Susan B. Anthony: Women's Right to Vote
On November 5, 1872, in the first district of the Eighth Ward of Rochester, New York, Anthony and 14 other women voted in an election that included choosing members of Congress. The women had successfully registered to vote several days earlier but, a poll watcher challenged Anthony's qualification as a voter. Taking the steps required by ...
Rhetorical Analysis: On Women's Right to Vote, Essay Example
The main argument Susan B. Anthony makes in "On Women's Right to Vote" is the belief that women, like men, should be able to democratically elect their politicians. Women were still considered as somehow less human than men and had not been granted the same rights. Anthony argues that "For any State to make sex a qualification that must ...
Susan B. Anthony's "On Women's Right to Vote"
Susan B. Anthony was a prominent leader in the womens rights movement. She, along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, founded the National Womens Suffrage Association, which advocated for giving women the right to vote. In November 1872, Anthony voted in the presidential election. Two weeks later, she was arrested. After her indictment, Anthony gave ...
PDF On Women's Right to Vote Susan B. Anthony (1873)
On Women's Right to Vote Susan B. Anthony (1873) Friends and fellow citizens: I stand before you tonight under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but ...
Susan B. Anthony fought for women's suffrage in the face of ridicule
A tireless activist who crisscrossed the nation agitating for women's rights in the 19th century, Susan B. Anthony devoted most of her 86 years to helping women get the vote.
Susan B. Anthony's Speech Analysis: Summary, Rhetorical Devices
With skillful logical reasoning, Susan B. Anthony established her credibility through ethos and cleverly linked the struggles of women to the historical struggle for equality. Anthony delivered a powerful and convincing plea for women's right to vote. Her succinct yet impactful rhetoric not only left an indelible mark on the suffrage movement ...
Susan B Anthony Women's Right To Vote Essay
Women's Voting Rights A woman voter, Susan B. Anthony, in her speech, Woman's Right to Vote (1873), says that women should be allowed to vote. She supports this claim first by explaining that the preamble of the Federal Constitution states that she did not commit a crime, then she goes on about how women should be able to vote, then about how ...
Analysis of Susan B. Anthony's Speech on Women's Right to Vote
The Use of Hypophora, Pathos and Logos in the Speech Women's Right to Vote by Susan B. Anthony Essay The art of speech has multiple components that make it persuasive and inviting. The use of rhetorical devices is what makes an address interesting and also invokes the curiosity of the audience.
Susan B. Anthony Essay
A women named Susan B. Anthony was one of those women struggling to be the same as mankind. Susan B. Anthony worked helped form women's way to the 19th amendment. Anthony was denied an opportunity to speak at a convention because she was a woman. She then realized that no one would take females seriously unless they had the right to vote.
Learning From Susan B. Anthony
Susan B. Anthony co-wrote a history of women's suffrage, focused on the efforts of white women. She oversaw the images for the book. She wanted the portraits of women to counter the negative stereotypes of suffragists in popular media. Borrowing strategies from anti-slavery reformers, Anthony wrote and gave specific instructions on pose ...
PDF Analyzing the Rhetorical Situation: The Case of Susan B. Anthony and
In 1872, Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906), a prominent human rights activist and advocate of women's right to the ballot from Rochester, New York, found herself uniquely challenged. As a nineteenth-century American woman, she was not permitted to vote. This was the case, even though only two years earlier, all citizens, including recently freed ...
Susan B. Anthony and the Right to Vote
Reading Comprehension Activity. Author: Susan B. Anthony. Susan B. Anthony was a devout women's rights activist in the 19th century and worked extremely hard to secure the right to vote for women. After her arrest in 1873 for illegally voting in New York, she gave a series of speeches stating her case. This passage is from one of her speeches.
On Women's Right to Vote
Go here for more about Susan B. Anthony's speech on women's right to vote. It follows the full text transcript of Susan B. Anthony's speech On Women's Right to Vote, delivered at various locations in the state of New York - 1873. I stand before you to-night, under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last Presidential ...
On Women's Right to Vote Questions and Answers
How does Susan B. Anthony's call for women's voting rights apply to other groups? According to "On Women's Right to Vote," why is denying women the right to vote unconstitutional? Evaluate the ...
The Use of Hypophora, Pathos and Logos in the Speech Women's Right to
In the address "Women's Right to Vote", Susan B. Anthony presents her argument that women should have the right to vote through the use of, hypophora, pathos, and logos. Through the hardships of history, people become more creative about their speeches because something new was always needed to leave the audience mesmerized.
About this Collection
The papers of reformer and suffragist Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) span the period 1846-1934 with the bulk of the material dating from 1846 to 1906. The collection, consisting of approximately 500 items (6,265 images) on seven recently digitized microfilm reels, includes correspondence, diaries, a daybook, scrapbooks, speeches, and miscellaneous items. Donated by her niece, Lucy E. Anthony ...
Background Essay: Shall Women Have the Right to Vote (1866-1890)
On November 5, 1872, she and two dozen other women walked into the local polling place in Rochester, New York, and cast a vote in the presidential election. (Anthony voted for Ulysses S. Grant.) She was arrested and charged with voting in a federal election "without having a lawful right to vote.".
Susan B.Anthony and Women's Right to Vote
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were one of the top and famous leaders of the Women's Suffrage.Susan B.Anthony tried to vote when the 14th and 15th amendment was passed. She later ended up getting arrested.Another Women's Suffrage leader was Margaret Sanger, she traveled around Europe with articles and letter.