18th November 1872: Susan B. Anthony arrested for voting in a Presidential election

Описание: Anthony was a prominent women’s rights advocate who had founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 with fellow activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship and equal civil and legal rights to African Americans and slaves, had been adopted the previous year and stated ‘No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States’.

On 1 November 1872 Anthony and her sisters visited a temporary voter registration office that had been set up in a barbershop in Rochester, New York. Election official Beverly W. Jones said that he couldn’t register the women since the constitution of the State of New York ‘only gave the right of franchise to male citizens’, but Anthony reminded him of the Fourteenth Amendment. After consulting with a local lawyer, the officials eventually added the women’s names to the register.

By the time the polls opened four days later on 5 November, almost fifty other Rochester women had registered to vote in the presidential election. Although most of them were turned away at the ballot box, Anthony and fourteen other women successfully cast their votes despite it being illegal under federal law.

On 18 November, Anthony was arrested and charged with voting unlawfully. She used her arrest as an opportunity to publicise the issue of women’s suffrage and undertook a speaking tour of 29 towns before her trial began the following June. After hearing the case, Justice Ward Hunt directed the jury to deliver a guilty verdict and sentenced Anthony to pay a $100 fine. She never paid it.