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

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

In response to her arrest and trial for voting in the 1872 presidential election, Susan B. Anthony launched a speaking tour throughout New York State. The address she delivered and that is included in the records of the trial is titled “Is It a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?” The address falls roughly into three parts. The first is an appeal to the nation's foundational documents, particularly the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The second is an appeal to the language of law as it applies to citizenship and other matters. In the third part, Anthony draws an analogy between women's suffrage and the issue of slavery.

In the opening paragraphs of her address, Anthony expresses the view that as a citizen of the United States, living under a “democratic-republican” form of government, she possesses a “natural right” to participate in the nation's political affairs by voting. (The terms democratic and republican in this context do not refer to modern political parties but to forms of government; democratic means that power is vested in the people through their elected representatives, republican means that the nation is ruled not by a monarch but by an elected head of state.) Anthony thus draws a distinction between rights that are granted by the state and those that any human being possesses by virtue of being a citizen.

The concept of natural rights represents a philosophical tradition from the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment that was articulated by such British philosophers as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. In support of her view, Anthony cites the Declaration of Independence, which enshrines the Enlightenment concept of natural rights with its statement that “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are “inalienable rights”—that is to say, rights that cannot be alienated, or taken away. Rights, then, are not granted by the state, nor can the state deny to citizens their full enjoyment of their rights. People possess rights by virtue of being human. In passing, she notes that the Quaker church into which she was born—she later affiliated herself with the liberal wing of Quakerism but was not a particularly religious person—had always been in the vanguard in acknowledging the rights of women. Indeed, Anthony's own home life, where she was the oldest of seven children, granted her and her mother and sisters a degree of freedom and independent thought that was uncharacteristic of the time. She goes on to say that the Declaration's avowal of the “right of the people to alter or abolish” a government that is “destructive of these ends” clearly implies the right to vote. Voting is the only civilized way to form and alter governments; the only alternative is brute force. Disenfranchising half of the population—women—compels them to obey laws to which they have never consented.

Anthony then cites the U.S. Constitution, noting that it begins with the words “We, the people,” not “we, the white male citizens” or “we, the male citizens.” This was a glancing reference to her bitter disappointment that the Fifteenth Amendment extending suffrage to freed slaves did not also extend suffrage to women, a failure that led to a rift between civil rights activists and women's rights activists in the final decades of the century. She notes that even James Madison, who earlier in his career had expressed fear of the rabble, came around to a belief in universal suffrage, a view that he expressed in the 1787 debates at the Constitutional Convention and that Anthony quotes.

Anthony refers to the first article of the Constitution, which, her opponents asserted, disenfranchised women because it turned over to the states the power to regulate elections. Anthony replies to this view by noting that all the Constitution does is prescribe what are in effect procedural matters to ensure that electors are qualified; these stipulations in no way imply that half the population is to be disenfranchised. She then turns to the distinction between a democratic republic and a monarchy. She argues that disenfranchisement on the basis of sex amounts to a “bill of attainder.” This phrase is a reference to English common law, which said that a legislature or monarch could declare persons or classes of persons guilty of violating a law without giving them the benefit of a trial. A person thus found guilty was “attainted”—that is, “tainted”—and forfeited his or her civil rights, including the right to own and pass property and to vote. She notes that under current U.S. law, a “monarchy,” or at best an “oligarchy” of males rules females, in direct violation of the Constitution, which requires every state to guarantee to its citizens a “republican” form of government, with the concomitant right to vote.

On this basis, Anthony takes up the issue of the language of the law, in the process making an ingenious argument. She notes that laws routinely use the pronouns he and his, suggesting that women are excluded, just as they are excluded from the voting booth. If that is the case, then, women should be exempted from all laws in which he and his are used, including criminal laws and laws applying to taxation. Anthony extends her discussion of the language of the law to the indiscriminant use of words such as “persons, people, inhabitants, electors,” and “citizens” and raises the question of who is included in these terms. She notes that under the Fourteenth Amendment, all “persons” who are born or naturalized in the United States are “citizens.” If “persons” are “citizens,” and if the under the Fourteenth Amendment “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” and further if women are “persons,” then denying women the right to vote is a violation of the federal Constitution.

Anthony cites examples and goes on to elucidate by pointing out that women by law carry the penalties and burdens of government and therefore should also be allowed to enjoy its privileges. She notes that even citizenship laws, including the section of the federal code that deals with the naturalization of citizens, grants women citizenship without the concurrence of their husbands, even in cases where the husband has applied for citizenship but dies before it is granted. If a naturalized woman is entitled to all the rights and privileges of citizenship, should not, Anthony asks, women born in the United States enjoy the same rights and privileges?

Making a transition to the third major argument of her address, Anthony draws an analogy between the status of African Americans and that of women. In the early decades of the nineteenth century the issues of abolition and women's rights were often closely linked. Anthony herself was active in the abolition movement and served as a local agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. It was thought that the condition of women and that of African Americans was similar, particularly because both were denied the franchise. The belief among many reformers was that women and African Americans, as natural allies, could make common cause in asserting their rights, though the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, a victory for African Americans, left the cause of women's rights bereft.

Nevertheless, Anthony continues to make the argument that the law as it applies to black men should also apply to women. She begins with a reference to the Fourteenth Amendment, one of the three so-called Civil War Amendments, or Reconstruction Amendments, passed in the wake of the Civil War. The authors of the amendment were John A. Bingham, an Ohio congressman (who as a judge also presided over the trial of the Abraham Lincoln assassination conspirators and over the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson), and Jacob Howard, a senator also from Ohio. Section 1 of the amendment reads:

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. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; 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.

Although Section 1 of the amendment does not mention race, the effect of the amendment was to make African Americans “citizens,” deny to the states the right to “abridge” the rights of any citizens, and give all citizens due process and equal protection under the law. Anthony makes the argument that the earlier Thirteenth Amendment, which banned slavery, in effect already made African Americans citizens of the nation, giving them the right to vote. The Fourteenth Amendment, Anthony suggests, was unnecessary, except for the purpose of granting African Americans equal protection under the law, among other provisions. She concludes the argument by stating:

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 intended to prohibit the states from denying or abridging their right to vote, then it did the same for all persons, white women included, born or naturalized in the United States; for the amendment does not say that all male persons of African descent, but that all persons are citizens.

Anthony turns to the Fifteenth Amendment, which specifically states that the right to vote cannot be denied or abridged on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” the last of the three items prohibiting states from denying the vote to former slaves. She notes that one of the motives behind the Fifteenth Amendment was to coerce the states of the former Confederacy into extending the franchise to newly freed blacks, thus ensuring that Ulysses S. Grant would win reelection in the 1872 election (the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, at that time being identified as the antislavery party).

Then Anthony makes yet another ingenious argument. Her key point is that women, like African Americans, lived under the condition of servitude. She points out, for example, that a woman, like a slave, had no “control” over her person and could be corrected if she offended her master, though she presumably could not be corrected with a “cat-o'-nine-tails”—that is, a knotted whip. Similarly, just as a slave was not entitled to retain his earnings from labor, so, too, any earnings a woman might have were the property of her husband. A corollary to this was that if the wife was guilty of some offense, it was her husband, not her, who was sued, based on the principle that the wife did not own anything that the person who sues could collect; at the same time, a wife could not sue another, but a husband could file suit on her behalf. Put simply, then, women lived under the condition of servitude, holding a position little different from that of slaves. If the Fifteenth Amendment granted the right to vote despite “previous condition of servitude,” then it granted women the right to vote.