Susan B. Anthony: “Disenfranchisement is not only political degradation, but ever and always moral, social and industrial degradation as well.”
A powerful and early quotation
More than any other woman of her generation, Susan B. Anthony saw that all of the legal disabilities faced by American women owed their existence to the simple fact that women lacked the vote. When Anthony, at age 32, attended her first woman’s rights convention in Syracuse in 1852, she declared “that...
More than any other woman of her generation, Susan B. Anthony saw that all of the legal disabilities faced by American women owed their existence to the simple fact that women lacked the vote. When Anthony, at age 32, attended her first woman’s rights convention in Syracuse in 1852, she declared “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.” Anthony spent the next fifty-plus years of her life fighting for the right to vote.
“Disenfranchisement is not only political degradation, but ever and always moral, social and industrial degradation as well.”
In 1872 Anthony and fifteen supporters from Rochester decided to test laws precluding women from voting, and actually showed up at the polling place and cast ballots, becoming the first women ever to vote in a presidential election. They were promptly arrested for their boldness, but Anthony saw the arrest as an opportunity to test women’s legal right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment by taking the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Free on bail of one thousand dollars, she campaigned throughout the country with a carefully prepared legal argument: “Is It a Crime for a U.S. Citizen to Vote?” She lost her case in 1873 in Rochester following some questionable rulings by the judge and was barred from appealing the result to the Supreme Court.
Anthony’s insight was not only that lack of voting rights underlay political disabilities, but moral and social ones, and the unequal treatment of women in the workplace. Autograph Quotation Signed, Lake Linden, Michigan, December 17, 1879. “Disenfranchisement is not only political degradation, but ever and always moral, social and industrial degradation as well. Susan B. Anthony, Rochester, N.Y.”
Anthony worked tirelessly for the cause the rest of her life, heading organizations, giving speeches, petitioning Congress and state legislatures, and publishing books and a feminist newspaper. That cause would ultimately succeed with ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.
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