On The Speeches of Susan B. Anthony

Is it a crime for a citizen of the United States to vote? Susan B. Anthony asked the question after she was arrested for doing exactly that, casting a ballot in the 1872 presidential election, and the speech she built around it is one of the sharpest pieces of constitutional argument in the American reform tradition. Her collected speeches are the record of a woman who refused to accept that the Constitution's guarantees stopped at her sex, and who made the case in the country's own legal language.

Anthony's brilliance was to argue not from sentiment but from the text. The Constitution, she pointed out, speaks of the people and of citizens. The recently ratified Fourteenth Amendment defined citizens as all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and declared that no state could abridge the privileges of citizens. Women were persons. Women were citizens. Therefore, she argued, the right to vote already belonged to them as citizens, and to deny it was to violate the Constitution as it stood, not merely to refuse a reform.

This was a legal claim, pressed in a courtroom and in halls across the country, that the rights of citizenship could not be withheld from half the citizens. Her famous speech, asking whether it is a crime for a citizen to vote, dismantled the contrary position step by step, insisting that a government deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed could not justly govern women while denying them any voice in their government. She was using the founding logic, the same move this library keeps returning to, holding the principle to its own terms until the exception collapses.

She lost in the immediate sense. The judge directed a guilty verdict, fined her, and she refused to pay, daring the state to imprison her, which it declined to do, denying her the appeal that might have carried the question higher. The constitutional argument did not prevail in her lifetime, and the vote came only in 1920, fourteen years after her death, through the amendment that bears her movement's mark.

But the speeches endure because they framed the demand correctly, as a matter of citizenship and constitutional right rather than special pleading, and because they model the persistence of a citizen who would not accept that the country's principles had an asterisk. Anthony belongs in this library beside Stanton's Declaration of Sentiments and Douglass's speeches, the cluster of Americans who took the founding promise and demanded it be kept for everyone.

The major speeches are public domain and freely available. Read the speech on whether a citizen may be punished for voting above all, for the model of turning the Constitution's own words into an instrument against exclusion.