After voting in a national election, Susan B. Anthony was arrested and tried for violation of federal law. She testified, “Your denial of my citizen’s right to vote, is the denial of my right of consent as one of the governed…” Anthony spent decades advocating woman suffrage, which was not won in her lifetime.
Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress
An Account of the Trial of Susan B. Anthony, by Susan B. Anthony, 1874
Women Fight for the Vote
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
After voting in a national election, Susan B. Anthony was arrested and tried for violation of federal law. She testified, “Your denial of my citizen’s right to vote, is the denial of my right of consent as one of the governed…” Anthony spent decades advocating woman suffrage, which was not won in her lifetime.
Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress
