The centennial celebrations of the 19th Amendment that granted voting rights to all women in the United States began with the full pardon extended by President Trump on 18 August 2020 to Susan Brownell Anthony (1820- 1906) “for a wrongful and unjust conviction stemming from the only vote she ever cast in an election”.

In 1852, at the first woman’s rights convention held in Syracuse she observed “that the right which woman needed above every other, the one indeed which would secure to her all the others, was the right of suffrage”.

Since then she pursued this goal tirelessly through giving speeches, petitioning Congress and state legislatures and publishing a feminist newspaper significantly titled Revolution. Hailing from a Quaker family, Anthony was at first interested in Abolitionism, temperance and rights of the working class.

She got drawn into the women’s rights movement on the issue of pay equity when she learned that male teachers got four times more monthly salary than their female counterparts. Along with Amelia Bloomer (1818-94), she agitated for more comfortable and less restrictive dresses for women.

Bloomer introduced her to Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815- 1902) and the two became lifelong friends collaborating on many reform issues like reform of marriage, property rights for women and a woman’s right to divorce. Stanton was the theoretician while Anthony, the organizer for the women’s rights movement. In 1866, Stanton and Anthony founded the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) with the aim of securing equal rights for all US citizens.

The AERA split following the 14th Amendment (1868) as it enfranchised African American men bringing into the open the contradictions between gender and race. The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) was formed with the intention of pursuing woman’s suffrage and Anthony, according to Blakemore, “became a nationally recognizable (and much mocked) face of the suffrage movement”.

On 1 November 1872, Anthony and her three sisters as part of a group of 50 women entered a voter registration office to register themselves as voters in Rochester, New York.

They quoted the 14th Amendment’s citizenship provision and the article from New York Constitution pertaining to voting that did not stipulate any sex qualification. Initially, the inspector refused but was advised by the Supervisor of elections, Daniel Warner, to register these women voters pointing to the penalty in law for refusal to do so.

After registering to vote, Anthony cast her vote on 5th November and informed Stanton. As she expected, a Democratic poll watcher Sylvester Lewis filed a complaint challenging Anthony’s registration and for casting an illegal vote. Acting on Lewis’ complaint Anthony was served a warrant for arrest on 14th November, under the Enforcement Act, by the US Commissioner William C. Storrs.

She and 14 more women and the inspectors who authorized their ballots were arrested on 18th November. Anthony alone was charged but since she refused bail, she was held in custody. In the interim, Anthony considered moving the Supreme Court and also wrote to her suffragist friends and politicians. Her lawyer, Henry Selden asked a US District Judge in Albany to issue a writ of habeas corpus for Anthony’s release which was denied.

The judge also raised the bail amount from $500 to $1000 which Anthony refused to pay. Her lawyer paid the bail amount and when confronted by Anthony as to why he paid her bail he said he could not see a lady whom he respected put in jail. On 24th January, a grand jury of twenty men indicted Anthony for “knowingly, wrongfully and unlawfully” voting, being a woman.

The trial was set for May. She described her trial as “the greatest judicial outrage history has ever recorded’. Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826- 98), a close associate observed tellingly, “Susan Anthony is not on trial; the United States is on trial”.

Anthony used the next four months to tour 29 post office districts in Monroe County NY, in order to educate fellow citizens about what she described as her citizen’s right guaranteed to her and all other US citizens by the Constitution.

She drew extensively from the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, the New York Constitution, James Madison, Thomas Paine and several radical Republican senators of the day in support of her contention that women had a legal right as citizens to vote.

She argued that natural law and the Civil War Amendments gave women the power to vote. The 15th Amendment according to her gave the right to vote to exslaves and women as both were in a state of servitude.

She quoted Paine who stated that the right to vote was a primary right as it protected other rights; to do away with this right would be to reduce man to a state of slavery. She exhorted women to exercise their citizen’s right to vote; inspectors of election to receive the votes of all US citizens as it was their duty to do so; US commissioners and marshals to arrest the inspectors who rejected the names and votes of US citizens and appealed to judges to support liberty and equal rights to women.

She pleaded to all to fight for the ballot peacefully and persistently until all US citizens were recognised as equals before the law. Hers was the first act of individual civil disobedience within the suffrage movement. In June when the case began, Anthony’s defence counsel Selden pointed out that she was prosecuted purely because she was a woman and stressed on the vote being essential to women for receiving fair treatment from legislatures.

In his concluding remarks Selden pointed out that even if Anthony’s vote was not legal under the 14th Amendment she still could not be prosecuted because she acted in good faith that her vote was legal.

Judge Hunt disagreed with this view and asserted categorically that Anthony’s vote violated the law and that she was guilty as she knowingly cast an illegal vote.

He also denied the motion for a new trial on the ground that Anthony’s constitutional right to a trial by jury had been violated. Anthony responded by stating that this denial was “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 as an offender against law, therefore, the denial of my sacred rights to life, liberty, property”.

Undeterred, she pointed out that laws were made by men, interpreted by men, administered by men and against women; that verdict of guilt was pronounced against a US citizen for the exercise of the citizen’s right to vote simply because the citizen was a woman and not a man. Quoting JS Mill she asked whether “this tyranny (was) any less humiliating and degrading to women under our democratic-republican government today than it was to men under their aristocratic-monarchical government one hundred years ago”.

Anthony was ordered to pay a fine of one hundred dollars and the costs of the prosecution. She challenged the judge to hold her in custody or send her to jail which he did not, thus preventing her from appealing her sentence to a higher court. She protested saying that she would never pay a dollar for the unjust penalty. She decided her sole objective was to educate all women to rebel against man made unjust, unconstitutional forms of law as “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God”.

Anthony did not pay a single penny of the penalty. She petitioned Congress to remit the fine which was ignored. Even the government made no serious effort to collect the fine.

Anthony in the meantime got 3,000 copies of the trial proceedings printed and distributed to political activists and politicians.

‘Aunt Susan’ as she was referred to inspired many by her heroism: “If it is a mere question of who got the best of it”, according to a New York newspaper “Miss Anthony is still ahead. She has voted and the American constitution has survived the shock. Fining one hundred dollars does not rule out the fact that…women voted, and went home, and the world jogged on as before”.

In 1876, along with Gage she disrupted the official Centennial programme of American Independence at the Independence Hall in Philadelphia and presented A Declaration of Rights for Women.

In 1888, she helped to form the National American Women’s Suffrage Association by merging two largest suffrage associations into one. She led the group till 1900.

Fourteen years after her death women in the US secured voting rights.

The 19th Amendment, ratified in the centenary year of her birth, called the Susan B Anthony Amendment is a fitting tribute to her untiring efforts. Not only did she bring out the incompleteness of Enlightenment liberalism as it ignored women but also reminded us that rights are, as pointed out by Miliband, not given but earned.

The writer is Associate Professor of Political Science, Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi.