Anne M. Todd - Susan B. Anthony: Activist

Women's rights activist Susan B. Anthony stands on the porch of her family's home at 17 Madison Street in Rochester, New York, in the 1870s. U.S. marshals came to the home in November 1872 to arrest her for voting in the presidential election. It was the only presidential election in which Anthony would ever participate.

Source: Corbis.

The following summer, on June 17, 1873, Anthony's trial began at the U.S. Circuit Court in Canandaigua, New York. Yet Judge Ward Hunt had made his decision about the case long before setting foot in the courtroom. Hunt instructed the 12 male jurors to find Susan B. Anthony guilty. He said to them, "The question, gentlemen of the jury is wholly a question or questions of law, and I have decided as a question of law, in the first place, that under the Fourteenth Amendment, which Miss Anthony claims protects her, she was not protected in a right to vote. And I have decided also that her belief and the advice which she took do not protect her in the act which she committed. If I am right in this, the result must be a verdict on your part of guilty, and I therefore direct that you find a verdict of guilty."3 The jury obliged. When Anthony had earlier tried to testify in her own defense, Hunt had barred her from taking the stand.

After the verdict, Anthony was finally allowed to speak, but Judge Hunt frequently interrupted her and cut her off, insisting that "the court cannot allow the prisoner to go on."4 When he later told Anthony that she had been tried according to the established forms of law, she responded, "Yes, your honor, but by forms of law all made by men, interpreted by men, administered by men, in favor of men, and against women; and hence, your honor's ordered verdict of guilty, against a United States citizen for the exercise of 'that citizen's right to vote,' simply because that citizen was a woman and not a man."5

Anthony's words fell to deaf ears. Judge Hunt ordered Susan B. Anthony to pay a $100 fine for her crime. She never paid it.

• 1. "Address of Susan B. Anthony." Available online at http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/.
• 2. James Daley, editor, Great Speeches by American Women. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2008, p. 14.
• 3. Lynn Sherr, Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words. New York: Random House, 1995, p. 115.
• 4. Ibid., p. 116.
• 5. Ibid., p. 116.

Susan Brownell Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, in the rural town of Adams, Massachusetts. Her father, Daniel Anthony, had been raised a Quaker. Quakers are the Religious Society of Friends, which had originated in the mid-1600s in England. Quakers have strict ideals by which they live. They are quiet and somberno loud voices or singing. They dress mostly in graysno colorful or frilly garb. Quakers do not believe that priests or places of worship are necessary to have a relationship with God. Instead, Quakers believe that every person has an "inner light" that is able to direct them to divine truth. Quakers were one of the first organized groups to practice complete equality between men and women. Quakers also do not believe in war (armed conflict) or slavery.

Susan's mother, Lucy Read, had been raised a Baptist. Baptists do gather at a church to listen to sermons and pray. Lucy had liked to sing and dance and wear brightly colored clothes. The Anthonys and the Reads, both farming families, were neighbors. Living next door to each other, Daniel and Lucy became fast childhood friends and remained so as they grew up together. In his teenage years, Daniel left Adams to attend school. When he returned, he and Lucy soon discovered that their friendship had turned into love. Daniel loved Lucy's zeal for life and happy nature. Eager to begin a life together, they got married. The young couple, however, did not take the time to obtain official Quaker approval of the marriage, and a scandal resulted.

Daniel's formal apology to the congregation stated that "I am sorry that in order to marry the woman I love best, I had to violate a rule of the religious society I revered the most."1 The Society accepted his apology, and Daniel was able to regain his status within the community. Lucy felt badly about the Quakers' reaction to the marriage, and she became withdrawn and quiet. And although Lucy took on the ways of the Quakersno longer singing and dancing or wearing bright clothingshe never became a Quaker herself. Daniel and Lucy loved each other deeply and tried to make the best of the situation. In her biography of Susan B. Anthony, Kathleen Barry notes that "Lucy Anthony learned to be pious and humble as a young bride, and soon she would pass these virtues on to her daughters."2