She died before women secured the right to vote, but she found a way to vote anyway, 50 years before the 19th Amendment passed. She was eventually arrested and convicted for giving her voice.
Nearly 150 years later, Anthony receives the kind of recognition from the federal government that she would have mocked in her lifetime.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced that he would forgive the defensive suffragist on the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which guarantees women the right to vote. Anthony is perhaps the most famous leader of the women’s rights movement.
Anthony proudly voted in the 1872 election in Rochester, New York, although it was still illegal for women to vote at that time.
Poll workers question their references. They required them to register. An election official asked her if she was a U.S. citizen, if she lived in the neighborhood in which she voted and if she had accepted a bribe for her vote. Her answers satisfied the official, so she was allowed to vote, according to the National Archives.
About a week later, Anthony and 14 other women who voted with her in New York were arrested and charged with wrongful voting.
Anthony refused to accept different treatment because of her gender. According to historian Ann D. Gordon, a deputy federal marshal asked Anthony to “accompany him downtown” before her arrest.
“Is that the way you arrest men?” she asked. When he told her that was not the case, she demanded that she be ‘properly arrested’.
Before her trial, Antony traveled across 29 cities stating, “Is it a crime for an American citizen to vote?”
“It was we the people, not us the white, male citizens, and not yet we male citizens, but we the whole people, who formed this Union,” she said in her speech.
She called it a “right mockery” to talk about the freedoms enjoyed by American women at the time, while being “denied the only means to secure them” by the government – in other words, women did not feel liberated when they could not vote.
She may not have wanted an apology
In any case, Anthony carried her acts of rebellion as badges of honor that brought her purpose of suffrage to women. Some current officials believe they did not want forgiveness.
New York City Attorney Kathleen Hochul asked Trump to apologize “in the name of the legacy of Susan B. Anthony.”
“She was proud of her arrest for drawing attention to the issue of women’s rights, and never paid her a fine,”
Hochul tweeted Tuesday. “Let her rest in peace, @realDonaldTrump.”
Anthony refused to submit to the men who condemned her. At the end of her two-day trial, which she called ‘the largest court hearing history has ever recorded’, Anthony was ordered to pay a $ 100 fine – which she told the judge who told her condemned that she “would never pay a dollar,” according to the Library of Congress archives.
She concluded her trial with a maximum that she urged all women to hear: “Resistance against tyranny is obedience to God.”
Obstacles to voting still remain
The 19th amendment was finally passed in 1920, 14 years after Anthony’s death at 86.
However, voting was not accessible to all women, even after the amendment was passed. The movement for women’s rights as coveted by Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton excluded Black women when White leaders distanced themselves from Black activists. Civil judges such as Ida B. Wells and Mary E. Terrell Church received widespread recognition for their work for charity after her death.
Black women and women of color marched for suffrage, but were often not embraced by the White leaders of the movement. As a result, Black women face additional challenges in voting, even after the 19th Amendment passed.
Barriers to voting for Black Americans were maintained in the century following Anthony’s trial. Tax breaks, grandparent complaints and literature tests were imposed after the 14th Amendment granted civil rights to African Americans.
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