10 x 14"
Watercolor, ink, chalk |
Susan B. Anthony1820-1906
Susan B. Anthony and her three sisters registered to vote in November of 1872 after “a full hour of debate” between the election supervisors, inspectors, and herself, in which she threatened to sue every one of them for denying her and her sisters their rights as citizens. Then she cast her ballot, for which she was arrested. At her trial, the Judge barred Anthony from taking the stand. In a three-hour defense her attorney said that if the same act had been committed by her brother it would have been honorable and laudable, but having been comitted by a woman it was said to be a crime. The crime therefore consisted not in the act done, but that the person doing it was a woman. The judge pronounced Anthony guilty without waiting for the jury’s opinion, and her attorney argued for a new trial on the ground that her constitutional right to a trial by jury had been violated. The judge denied the motion and asked, as was customary, whether the prisoner had anything to say. * * * * * * * * * * * * * ANTHONY: Yes, your honor, I have many things to say . . . Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject . . . JUDGE: The Court cannot listen to a rehearsal of arguments the prisoner's counsel has already consumed three hours in presenting. ANTHONY: Your denial of my citizen's right to vote is the denial of my right of consent as one of the governed, the denial of my right of representation as one of the taxed, the denial of my right to a trial by a jury of my peers . . . JUDGE: The Court cannot allow the prisoner to go on. ANTHONY: May it please the Court to remember that since the day of my arrest last November, this is the first time that either myself or any person of my disfranchised class has been allowed a word of defense . . . JUDGE: The prisoner must sit down. . . . ANTHONY: Had your honor submitted my case to the jury, as was clearly your duty, even then I should have had just cause of protest, for not one of those men was my peer; every man of them was my political superior . . . JUDGE: The Court orders the prisoner to sit down. . . . ANTHONY: But failing to get this justice — failing, even, to get a trial by a jury not of my peers — I ask not leniency at your hands — but rather the full rigors of the law . . . * * * * * * * * * * * * * Anthony sat down as ordered and then was ordered to stand up again while the judge sentenced her to pay a fine of one hundred dollars plus the costs of the prosecution. Anthony vowed she would not pay, and she never did. From then on she campaigned unceasingly, traveling, lecturing, petitioning Congress and the state legislatures, and publishing a feminist newspaper. The Nineteenth Amendment giving women the vote was ratified in 1920, fourteen years after her death. |