Plaintiff
United States
Defendant
Susan B. Anthony
Plaintiff's Claim
That Anthony had voted illegally.
Chief Prosecutor
Richard Crowley, U.S. District Attorney
Chief Defense Lawyers
Henry R. Selden, John Van Voorhis
Judge
Supreme Court Justice Ward Hunt
Place
Canandaigua, New York
Date of Decision
18 June 1873
Decision
Anthony was convicted of voting illegally.
Significance
Was one of the first in a series of decisions--including two rendered by thefull Supreme Court--which found that Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment tothe U.S. Constitution did not expand or protect women's rights, an interpretation which remained unchanged for almost 100 years.
United States v. Anthony and several related cases in the 1870s grew out of women's attempts to gain full rights of citizenship through the judicial system. Had this strategy worked, women would have been spared what followed: a 60-year-long, state-by-state legislative campaign for suffrage and 100 years in which the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause was not applied to sex discrimination cases.
In July of 1868, exactly 20 years after the Seneca Falls Convention and American women's first public demand for suffrage, the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted. Section 2, intended to encourage states to grant suffrage to African American men, angered women's rights leaders because it introduced the word "male" into the Constitution and, some thought, called into question the citizenship of females. Francis Minor, an attorney and husband of the Woman Suffrage Association of Missouri's president, Virginia Minor, thought women were looking at the wrong clause. Section 1, he pointed out in 1869, declared
Minor wrote that this clause confirmed the citizenship of women and concluded" . . . provisions of the several State Constitutions that exclude women from the franchise on account of sex, are violative alike of the spirit and letter of the Federal Constitution."
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton published Minor's analysis in their newspaper, the Revolution, and urged women to go to the polls. In 1871 and 1872, in at least ten states, women did so. Most were turned away, but a few actually managed to vote.
The Almighty Vote
One of those who voted in 1872 was Susan B. Anthony. Before registering in Rochester, New York, she had consulted Judge Henry R. Selden, who agreed that Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment should entitle women to suffrage; she carried his written opinion with her and threatened to sue the registrars if they failed to take her oath. They complied. Anthony and 14 female companions were registered and, on 5 November, they voted. On 28 November, Susan B. Anthony, the other 14 women, and the inspectors who had registered them, were arrested.
All parties were offered release upon payment of $500 bail; Anthony alone refused to pay. Henry Selden, acting as her attorney, applied for a writ of habeas corpus, and Anthony was temporarily released. A U.S. district judgedenied the writ and reset her bail at $1000 on 21 January 1873. Anthony refused to pay, but Selden--who would later explain that he "could not see a ladyI respected put in jail"--paid the bail. Anthony was released and immediately lost her right to appeal to the Supreme Court on the basis of the writ of habeas corpus.
Preparation for Trial
Since women were not allowed to testify in their own defense in the mid-nineteenth century, Anthony tried to present her side of the story to prospectivejurors before the trial, scheduled for 13 May, began. She gave the same speech in all 29 postal districts of her county:
Because Anthony had "prejudiced any possible jury," her trial was moved out of her own Monroe County to Canandaigua, a town in Ontario County, New York, and rescheduled for 17 June. By 16 June, Anthony had spoken in every Ontario village.
The Trial
The trial opened before Judge Ward Hunt on 17 June 1873.
U.S. District Attorney Richard Crowley presented the government's case: "MissSusan B. Anthony . . . upon the 5th day of November, 1872, . . . voted . . .At that time she was a woman."
Beverly W. Jones, one of the inspectors under indictment for registering Anthony, testified that he had indeed registered her and that he had received ballots from her on 5 November.
Crowley introduced the poll list bearing the name of Susan B. Anthony as proof that the woman had voted, and the government rested its case.
Henry Selden then tried to call Anthony to the stand. Crowley objected: "Sheis not competent as a witness in her own behalf."
The Judge "so held" that Anthony could not testify.
Selden then took the stand and testified that he concurred with Anthony's reading of the Fourteenth Amendment and that he had advised her to cast her ballot. Selden argued: "The only alleged ground of illegality of the defendant'svote is that she is a woman. If the same act has been done by her brother under the same circumstances, the act would have been not only innocent, but honorable and laudable; but having been done by a woman it is said to be a crime. The crime, therefore, consists not in the act done, but in the simple factthat the person doing it was a woman and not a man."
At the conclusion of argument, Judge Hunt read a statement--prepared before he had heard testimony--to the "Gentlemen of the Jury":
Judge Hunt directed the jury to deliver a verdict of "guilty."
Selden objected, saying, " . . . it is for the jury [to decide]."
Hunt addressed the jury again: " . . . I have decided as a question of law .. . that under the Fourteenth Amendment, which Miss Anthony claims protects her, she was not protected in a right to vote . . . I therefore direct you tofind a verdict of guilty."
Hunt then asked the clerk to take the jury's verdict. Selden asked the jurorsbe polled individually, and Judge Hunt discharged the jury without asking for its verdict.
The next day, Selden presented a motion and arguments for a new trial, whichHunt denied. Hunt then asked Anthony to stand. "The sentence of the Court isthat you pay a fine of $100.00 and the costs of prosecution."
Anthony replied: "May it please your honor, I will never pay a dollar of yourunjust penalty . . . `Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.'"
Hunt released her, saying, "Madam, the Court will not order to stand committed until the fine is paid."
Anthony never paid the fine.
The Supreme Court Looks at Women and the Fourteenth Amendment
In 1873, the Supreme Court heard the case of Myra Bradwell, who claimed thather Fourteenth Amendment rights were abridged by Illinois' law prohibiting women from the practice of law. The Court found that her rights had not been violated since " . . . the right of females to pursue any lawful employment fora livelihood (the practice of law included)" was not "one of the privilegesand immunities of women as citizens." Justice Samuel F. Miller, writing for the majority, explained: "The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of theCreator. And the rules of civil society must be adapted to the general constitution of things . . . "
In its decision on Minor v. Happersett, the Supreme Court's unanimousopinion was that the right of suffrage was not one of the privileges and immunities of citizenship and women, although citizens of the United States, could be denied the vote by their respective states.
The first successful Fourteenth Amendment challenge to a sex-biased law was brought by Sally Reed in 1971. Reed's son died intestate and the Idaho court automatically appointed Reed's estranged husband Cecil as administrator of theestate, because of his sex, and denied Reed's own petition, because of hers.More than one hundred years after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment,Chief Justice Warren E. Burger delivered the following opinion of the Court:" . . . We have concluded that the arbitrary preference established in favorof males by the Idaho Code cannot stand in the face of the Fourteenth Amendment's command that no State deny the equal protection of the laws to any person within its jurisdiction."
Related Cases
Suffrage
Though considered fundamental to political equality and representative government, suffrage, the right to vote, has been difficult to achieve by many in the United States. Originally, only free white men with property held the right.
The first women's rights convention, convened in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, made suffrage their primary goal. In 1869 two national advocacy organizations formed. The National Woman Suffrage Association, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, proposed a woman's suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Lucy Stone, worked to influence individual states. By the end of the nineteenth century only four states had granted full suffrage to women. In 1890 the two groups merged into the National American Women's Suffrage Association led by Carry Chapman Catt. By 1919 with 27 states granting full or limited suffrage and womenhaving manned the home front during World War I, Congress felt increased pressure to act. Suffragists participated in marches, picketing, vigils, and hunger strikes. Finally, in 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment granted women suffrage.
Not until 1965, a century after the Civil War and in the midst of the civil rights movement did Congress pass the landmark Voters' Rights Act guaranteeingblacks the right to vote as well.
Sources
Guinier, Lani. The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy. New York: Free Press, 1994.
United States
Defendant
Susan B. Anthony
Plaintiff's Claim
That Anthony had voted illegally.
Chief Prosecutor
Richard Crowley, U.S. District Attorney
Chief Defense Lawyers
Henry R. Selden, John Van Voorhis
Judge
Supreme Court Justice Ward Hunt
Place
Canandaigua, New York
Date of Decision
18 June 1873
Decision
Anthony was convicted of voting illegally.
Significance
Was one of the first in a series of decisions--including two rendered by thefull Supreme Court--which found that Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment tothe U.S. Constitution did not expand or protect women's rights, an interpretation which remained unchanged for almost 100 years.
United States v. Anthony and several related cases in the 1870s grew out of women's attempts to gain full rights of citizenship through the judicial system. Had this strategy worked, women would have been spared what followed: a 60-year-long, state-by-state legislative campaign for suffrage and 100 years in which the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause was not applied to sex discrimination cases.
In July of 1868, exactly 20 years after the Seneca Falls Convention and American women's first public demand for suffrage, the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted. Section 2, intended to encourage states to grant suffrage to African American men, angered women's rights leaders because it introduced the word "male" into the Constitution and, some thought, called into question the citizenship of females. Francis Minor, an attorney and husband of the Woman Suffrage Association of Missouri's president, Virginia Minor, thought women were looking at the wrong clause. Section 1, he pointed out in 1869, declared
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to thejurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridgethe privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States . . .
Minor wrote that this clause confirmed the citizenship of women and concluded" . . . provisions of the several State Constitutions that exclude women from the franchise on account of sex, are violative alike of the spirit and letter of the Federal Constitution."
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton published Minor's analysis in their newspaper, the Revolution, and urged women to go to the polls. In 1871 and 1872, in at least ten states, women did so. Most were turned away, but a few actually managed to vote.
The Almighty Vote
One of those who voted in 1872 was Susan B. Anthony. Before registering in Rochester, New York, she had consulted Judge Henry R. Selden, who agreed that Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment should entitle women to suffrage; she carried his written opinion with her and threatened to sue the registrars if they failed to take her oath. They complied. Anthony and 14 female companions were registered and, on 5 November, they voted. On 28 November, Susan B. Anthony, the other 14 women, and the inspectors who had registered them, were arrested.
All parties were offered release upon payment of $500 bail; Anthony alone refused to pay. Henry Selden, acting as her attorney, applied for a writ of habeas corpus, and Anthony was temporarily released. A U.S. district judgedenied the writ and reset her bail at $1000 on 21 January 1873. Anthony refused to pay, but Selden--who would later explain that he "could not see a ladyI respected put in jail"--paid the bail. Anthony was released and immediately lost her right to appeal to the Supreme Court on the basis of the writ of habeas corpus.
Preparation for Trial
Since women were not allowed to testify in their own defense in the mid-nineteenth century, Anthony tried to present her side of the story to prospectivejurors before the trial, scheduled for 13 May, began. She gave the same speech in all 29 postal districts of her county:
"Friends and Fellow-Citizens, I stand before you under indictment for the alleged crime of havingvoted at the last presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote . . . We no longer petition legislature or Congress to give of the right tovote, but appeal to women everywhere to exercise their too long neglected `citizen's right' . . . we throw to the wind the old dogma that governments cangive rights. The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the constitutions of the several states . . . propose to protect the peoplein the exercise of their God-given rights. Not one of them pretends to bestow rights . . . One half of the people of this Nation to-day are utterly powerless to blot from the statute books an unjust law, or to write a new and justone. The women, dissatisfied as they are with this form of government, thatenforces taxation without representation--that compels them to obey laws to which they have never given their consent--that imprisons and hangs them without a trial by a jury of their peers--that robs them, in marriage of the custody of their own persons, wages, and children--are this half of the people left wholly at the mercy of the other half . . . "
Because Anthony had "prejudiced any possible jury," her trial was moved out of her own Monroe County to Canandaigua, a town in Ontario County, New York, and rescheduled for 17 June. By 16 June, Anthony had spoken in every Ontario village.
The Trial
The trial opened before Judge Ward Hunt on 17 June 1873.
U.S. District Attorney Richard Crowley presented the government's case: "MissSusan B. Anthony . . . upon the 5th day of November, 1872, . . . voted . . .At that time she was a woman."
Beverly W. Jones, one of the inspectors under indictment for registering Anthony, testified that he had indeed registered her and that he had received ballots from her on 5 November.
Crowley introduced the poll list bearing the name of Susan B. Anthony as proof that the woman had voted, and the government rested its case.
Henry Selden then tried to call Anthony to the stand. Crowley objected: "Sheis not competent as a witness in her own behalf."
The Judge "so held" that Anthony could not testify.
Selden then took the stand and testified that he concurred with Anthony's reading of the Fourteenth Amendment and that he had advised her to cast her ballot. Selden argued: "The only alleged ground of illegality of the defendant'svote is that she is a woman. If the same act has been done by her brother under the same circumstances, the act would have been not only innocent, but honorable and laudable; but having been done by a woman it is said to be a crime. The crime, therefore, consists not in the act done, but in the simple factthat the person doing it was a woman and not a man."
At the conclusion of argument, Judge Hunt read a statement--prepared before he had heard testimony--to the "Gentlemen of the Jury":
. . . Theright of voting, or the privilege of voting, is a right or privilege arisingunder the Constitution of the State, and not of the United States . . . If the State of New York should provide that no person should vote until he had reached the age of thirty-one years, or after he had reached the age of fifty,or that no person having gray hair, or who had not the use of all his limbs,should be entitled to vote, I do not see how it could be held to be a violation of any right derived or held under the Constitution of the United States.
Judge Hunt directed the jury to deliver a verdict of "guilty."
Selden objected, saying, " . . . it is for the jury [to decide]."
Hunt addressed the jury again: " . . . I have decided as a question of law .. . that under the Fourteenth Amendment, which Miss Anthony claims protects her, she was not protected in a right to vote . . . I therefore direct you tofind a verdict of guilty."
Hunt then asked the clerk to take the jury's verdict. Selden asked the jurorsbe polled individually, and Judge Hunt discharged the jury without asking for its verdict.
The next day, Selden presented a motion and arguments for a new trial, whichHunt denied. Hunt then asked Anthony to stand. "The sentence of the Court isthat you pay a fine of $100.00 and the costs of prosecution."
Anthony replied: "May it please your honor, I will never pay a dollar of yourunjust penalty . . . `Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.'"
Hunt released her, saying, "Madam, the Court will not order to stand committed until the fine is paid."
Anthony never paid the fine.
The Supreme Court Looks at Women and the Fourteenth Amendment
In 1873, the Supreme Court heard the case of Myra Bradwell, who claimed thather Fourteenth Amendment rights were abridged by Illinois' law prohibiting women from the practice of law. The Court found that her rights had not been violated since " . . . the right of females to pursue any lawful employment fora livelihood (the practice of law included)" was not "one of the privilegesand immunities of women as citizens." Justice Samuel F. Miller, writing for the majority, explained: "The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of theCreator. And the rules of civil society must be adapted to the general constitution of things . . . "
In its decision on Minor v. Happersett, the Supreme Court's unanimousopinion was that the right of suffrage was not one of the privileges and immunities of citizenship and women, although citizens of the United States, could be denied the vote by their respective states.
The first successful Fourteenth Amendment challenge to a sex-biased law was brought by Sally Reed in 1971. Reed's son died intestate and the Idaho court automatically appointed Reed's estranged husband Cecil as administrator of theestate, because of his sex, and denied Reed's own petition, because of hers.More than one hundred years after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment,Chief Justice Warren E. Burger delivered the following opinion of the Court:" . . . We have concluded that the arbitrary preference established in favorof males by the Idaho Code cannot stand in the face of the Fourteenth Amendment's command that no State deny the equal protection of the laws to any person within its jurisdiction."
Related Cases
- Bradwell v. Illinois, 83 U.S. 130 (1873).
- Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1875).
- Reed v. Reed, 404 U.S. 71 (1971).
Suffrage
Though considered fundamental to political equality and representative government, suffrage, the right to vote, has been difficult to achieve by many in the United States. Originally, only free white men with property held the right.
The first women's rights convention, convened in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, made suffrage their primary goal. In 1869 two national advocacy organizations formed. The National Woman Suffrage Association, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, proposed a woman's suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Lucy Stone, worked to influence individual states. By the end of the nineteenth century only four states had granted full suffrage to women. In 1890 the two groups merged into the National American Women's Suffrage Association led by Carry Chapman Catt. By 1919 with 27 states granting full or limited suffrage and womenhaving manned the home front during World War I, Congress felt increased pressure to act. Suffragists participated in marches, picketing, vigils, and hunger strikes. Finally, in 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment granted women suffrage.
Not until 1965, a century after the Civil War and in the midst of the civil rights movement did Congress pass the landmark Voters' Rights Act guaranteeingblacks the right to vote as well.
Sources
Guinier, Lani. The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy. New York: Free Press, 1994.
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