Today’s off-script is about elections — it is Nov. 5, after all — but don’t worry, we’ll steer clear of 21st century politics. Instead, let’s turn the clock back to 1872, 150 years ago to the day, when civil rights icon Susan B. Anthony cast a vote in the presidential election decades before the establishment of women’s suffrage.
On Nov. 5 of that year, Anthony and 15 other women entered a Rochester, N.Y. barber shop being used as a polling place and demanded to vote. A worker informed Anthony that only “male citizens” were allowed to vote. She registered and cast her ballot anyway after convincing the poll workers to allow her to proceed. Two weeks later, she was arrested by the U.S. Marshals. The men who had registered her to vote and accepted her ballot testified in the case.
At her trial, Anthony was direct about her challenge to the existing system. “Women are taxed without representation … governed without their consent, tried, convicted and punished without a jury of their peers,” she said. “And is all this tyranny any less humiliating and degrading to women under our democratic-republican government today than it was to men under their aristocratic, monarchical government 100 years ago?”
The judge in her trial instructed the jury to find Anthony guilty without deliberation. The inspectors who had allowed her to vote were put in jail, and Anthony was fined $100 (which she never paid, but did oppose when asking Congress to excuse her from paying the fine). She campaigned for the workers’ release, a request fulfilled by President Ulysses S. Grant. Anthony died in 1906, 14 years before the 19th Amendment established women’s right to vote.
You can read more about Anthony’s 1872 vote at the NPR website here or at the National Archives.
