Susan B. Anthony: “Is It a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?”

About the Author

Susan Brownell Anthony, who devoted more than a half century to women's suffrage and other social issues, was born in Adams, Massachusetts, on February 15, 1820. She received her education at a Quaker boarding school in Philadelphia, where she trained as a teacher, an occupation she pursued for three years beginning in 1846. After the family moved to Rochester, New York, in 1845, she became active in a range of social causes, including abolition of slavery, temperance, the rights of labor, education reform, and particularly women's rights. She signed the Declaration of Sentiments produced by the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention in New York, the first women's rights convention held in the United States. In the early 1850s she met her lifelong friend and fellow suffragist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton—although in later years some tension emerged between the two, with Stanton adopting a more radical approach to women's rights and Anthony a more moderate position.

After the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, Anthony, Stanton, and other suffragist leaders were hopeful that the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which granted voting rights to African Americans, would extend the same rights to women—and were bitterly disappointed that it did not. In response, the two founded the American Equal Rights Association in 1866 and, in 1869, the National Woman Suffrage Association. In 1890 the latter organization merged with a third organization, the American Woman Suffrage Association, to become the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In 1868 Anthony launched a weekly journal called the Revolution under the motto “The true republic—men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.” For the next four decades Anthony devoted her life to writing and speaking in support of women's rights, particularly the right to vote.

After Anthony and several other women cast ballots in Rochester in the 1872 presidential election, she was arrested, tried, found guilty, and fined, though she never paid the fine and was never jailed. In response to her arrest, Anthony launched a statewide speaking tour in 1873, during which she delivered the address “Is It a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?” During the legal proceedings, she recorded her reactions in various letters she wrote in 1872 and 1873. Throughout the final decades of the nineteenth century, Anthony wrote articles and delivered speeches on issues affecting women and the suffragist cause. Her article “The Status of Woman, Past, Present, and Future” appeared in the Arena magazine in May 1897.

Anthony is often regarded as the author of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution recognizing the right of women to vote. She originally wrote the amendment in 1877, using the Fifteenth Amendment (“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude”) as a model. The amendment, which came to be referred to as the Anthony Amendment, was submitted to Congress by a sympathetic senator, Aaron Sargent, and while Congress did not act on it, it was submitted in every session of Congress until 1919. Just one month before her death on March 13, 1906, Anthony concluded her last public speech, delivered at a meeting of the National American Women Suffrage Association, with the words “Failure is impossible”—her final public utterance and a phrase that survived as a rallying cry for women's rights proponents throughout the twentieth century. Her words proved to be prophetic, for Congress approved the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919, and the amendment was ratified in 1920.