On November 5, 1872, Susan B. Anthony walked into a barbershop in Rochester, New York, that served as a polling place and cast a ballot in the presidential election, deliberately violating laws that prohibited women from voting. Anthony and fourteen other women had successfully registered to vote two weeks earlier by convincing reluctant election officials that the recently ratified 14th Amendment's guarantee of citizenship rights applied to women. Her act of civil disobedience, which she considered exercising a constitutional right rather than breaking the law, resulted in her arrest two weeks later and a trial that became a national sensation, advancing the cause of women's suffrage even as it ended in her conviction.
This bold challenge to male-only suffrage demonstrated Anthony's lifelong strategy of forcing the nation to confront the contradiction between its democratic ideals and the exclusion of half its population from political participation.
Citizen or Subject?
Susan B. Anthony's 1872 vote emerged from suffragists' legal strategy following the Civil War, when the 14th Amendment's guarantee that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States" were citizens with equal protection suggested that citizenship necessarily included voting rights. Anthony and her allies argued that since women were undeniably persons and citizens, laws barring them from voting violated the Constitution. This interpretation challenged the prevailing view that citizenship and suffrage were separate, with voting being a privilege that states could grant or withhold from various groups including women, Native Americans, and in practice through various restrictions, African Americans.
Anthony's decision to register and vote represented a calculated test case designed to force the courts to rule on whether citizenship inherently included voting rights. She and fellow suffragist leaders coordinated similar actions in multiple states, hoping that at least one case would reach the Supreme Court and establish a favorable precedent. Anthony's prominence as a suffrage leader and her clear intention to challenge the law made her an ideal test case, though this also ensured that authorities would prosecute her rather than ignoring the violation.
Trial and Conviction
Two weeks after voting, a U.S. Marshal arrested Anthony at her home, treating her with respect but insisting she must face charges of illegal voting. The subsequent trial in June 1873 became a showcase for Anthony's suffrage arguments, though the proceedings themselves demonstrated the very injustice she was protesting—as a woman, she could not testify on her own behalf or serve on the jury judging her case. Judge Ward Hunt, apparently determined to avoid a jury verdict, directed the all-male jury to find Anthony guilty without allowing them to deliberate, then fined her $100 plus court costs.
Anthony's response to Judge Hunt's question about why sentence should not be pronounced became one of history's great courtroom speeches, in which she declared, "Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God" and argued that the trial had violated her constitutional rights at every stage. Her refusal to pay the fine represented continued defiance, though Hunt declined to imprison her for non-payment, thereby preventing her from appealing to higher courts. This technicality frustrated Anthony's goal of bringing the citizenship argument before the Supreme Court, but her trial's publicity advanced the suffrage cause by dramatizing women's legal disabilities.
Advancing the Movement Through Defeat
Although Anthony's legal challenge failed to establish voting as a constitutional right of citizenship—the Supreme Court would definitively reject this argument in Minor v. Happersett in 1875—her act of voting and subsequent trial generated enormous publicity for the suffrage movement and demonstrated women's determination to achieve political equality. Anthony spent the remaining decades of her life organizing, speaking, and lobbying for women's suffrage, building the movement's infrastructure and training younger activists who would eventually achieve victory with the 19th Amendment's ratification in 1920.
The irony of Anthony's 1872 vote is that she died in 1906, fourteen years before the 19th Amendment finally secured women's right to vote nationwide. However, her illegal ballot cast on November 5, 1872, represented the kind of principled civil disobedience that ultimately made women's suffrage inevitable by forcing Americans to confront the fundamental injustice of excluding women from democracy. Anthony's determination to vote despite knowing she would face arrest and prosecution embodied the courage and persistence that characterized the women's suffrage movement, demonstrating that challenging unjust laws through deliberate violation could advance social change even when legal challenges failed.