Susan B. Anthony's - Women's Right to Vote - 1873

Susan B. Anthony's "Women's Right to Vote" speech was delivered on July 1873 in the courtroom of the Ontario County Courthouse in Canandaigua, New York, during her trial for voting in the 1872 presidential election. In her speech, Anthony argues that the denial of the right to vote to women was a violation of their natural rights and a betrayal of the founding principles of the United States.

She begins by stating that she has been indicted by the government for the crime of voting, and that she is proud of the act for which she is being prosecuted. She asserts that the Constitution grants equal rights to all citizens, and that the only reason women are not allowed to vote is because they are women.

Anthony goes on to argue that women are just as capable of voting as men, and that their participation in the political process is essential to achieving social justice and progress. She condemns the notion that women should be confined to the private sphere of the home, and emphasizes the importance of their public role as citizens.

In conclusion, Anthony calls on women to assert their right to vote and to demand full citizenship and equal rights under the law. She ends with the famous statement, "Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God," and calls on her fellow citizens to support the cause of women's suffrage and justice for all. - with chatGPT

 

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- Full Text -

“Friends and Fellow-citizens: I stand before you to-night, under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last Presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen's rights, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any State to deny.

The preamble of the Federal Constitution says:

'We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.'

It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people – women as well as men. And it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government – the ballot.

For any State to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people, is to pass a bill of attainder, or an ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land. By it the blessings of liberty are forever withheld from women and their female posterity.

To them this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed. To them this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex; the most hateful aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe; an oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor. An oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant, or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex, which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters, of every household – which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries dissension, discord, and rebellion into every home of the nation.

Webster, Worcester, and Bouvier all define a citizen to be a person in the United States, entitled to vote and hold office.

The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not. Being persons, then, women are citizens; and no State has a right to make any law, or to enforce any old law, that shall abridge their privileges or immunities. Hence, every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several States is today null and void, precisely as in every one against Negroes.

Susan B. Anthony, speech in San Fransisco, July 1871.

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