Suffragists lobbied Congress for the right to vote throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but their activism took other forms as well. In 1872, Susan B. Anthony cast a ballot for a federal election in New York. She was arrested and put on trial. In court, she argued that her action was legal under the Fourteenth Amendment, which gave citizens the right to vote. Her highly publicized trial raised public awareness about woman suffrage. Women finally achieved national voting rights with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject

Susan B. Anthony, 1872