Sold – Press Release For the 1875 National Women’s Suffrage Association, Completely in the Hand of Susan B. Anthony

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Anthony and their followers formed the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. In late 1872, the suffrage organization not yet managing to seize the public’s attention, Anthony determined to strike a blow for the cause. More than any other woman of her generation, she saw that all of the legal disabilities faced by American women owed their existence to the simple fact that women lacked the vote. On election day, November 5, Anthony went into the polling place and cast a ballot. This act became a major topic of conversation in the days that followed. On January 24, 1873, a grand jury of 20 men returned an indictment against her, the charge being that she voted in a Congressional election “without having a lawful right to vote…, the said Susan B. Anthony being then and there a person of the female sex.” The trial was set for June. At the trial, Anthony’s lawyer stressed that she was prosecuted purely on account of her gender: “If the same act had been done by her brother…the act would have been…honorable and laudable; but having been done by a woman it is said to be a crime. The crime therefore consists not in the act done, but in the simple fact that the person doing it was a woman and not a man…” She was convicted nonetheless and sentenced to pay a $100 fine. At sentencing she stated that all forms of the law were made by men, interpreted by men, administered by men, in favor of men, and against women, and just as the slaves got their freedom, now women must get their right to a voice in the U.S. government, and take it for themselves. She refused to pay a penny of the fine. On January 12, 1874, Anthony petitioned Congress requesting “that the fine imposed upon your petitioner be remitted, as an expression of the sense of this high tribunal that her conviction was unjust.” Congress did not act, and on March 29, 1874, in Minor v. Happersett, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the right to vote “was not necessarily one of the privileges or immunities of citizenship” and therefore “neither the Constitution nor the Fourteenth Amendment made all citizens voters.” This ended Anthony’s’ attempts to secure voting rights under existing constitutional amendments.

Having reached this point, the question arose as to what direction the NWSA should next take. In December 1874 Anthony went to visit Elizabeth Cady Stanton at her home in Tenafly, N.J., to plot strategy, and to select a date and an agenda for the annual convention. The dates of January 14-15, 1875 were decided upon, and the women set about informing members, friends and the media. As Anthony’s dairy for December 16, 1874 states, “At Tenafly. Wrote letters for Washington National Convention – got off 30 or 40.” She felt that a good attendance was important to keep up the women’s self respect.

The letters to the press contained a press release. Autograph Letter Signed with Press Release, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s home in Tenafly, N.J., December 16, 1874, to a newspaper editor. “Your asking to give my reply to your letter to Syracuse Standard has been unanswered until now. I do not know what I said, but never mean to say anything on paper I shall be unwilling to see again – even in court. Therefore if you think my definition a good one, and that it will satisfy others as well as yourself, you’re at liberty to give it as you desire. Please get your papers to notice the fact of our Washington Convention.”

The press release mentions all of the brightest luminaries of the Women’s Suffrage movement, and reads: “The National Suffrage Association, represented by Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Martha G. Wright, Phoebe Couzens, Jane Graham Jones and others, will hold its seventh annual Convention at Lincoln Hall, Washington, D.C. Thursday and Friday, January 14th and 15th. All friends of citizen suffrage are invited to attend. Communications and contributions should be addressed to Mrs. Ellen C. Sargent, 308 F St. NW, Washington, D.C.”

Then as now, seeking public relations is not the same thing as getting it. Soon Anthony would be complaining that many of the newspapers she contacted had failed to run the notice.