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Transcription
Susan B. Anthony delivered a speech defending women's right to vote in 1873. She argued that voting was a citizen's right guaranteed by the constitution and that denying women this right was a violation of the law. Anthony stated that the government was an aristocracy of sex, where men governed women, and that it was unjust to deny women the use of the ballot. She also argued that women were citizens and any discrimination against them in state laws was null and void. Susan B. Anthony's speech on women's right to vote, 1873. This speech was delivered by Susan B. Anthony before court in defense of women's suffrage. She was arrested for casting an illegal vote in the presidential election of 1872. Friends and fellow citizens, I stand before you tonight 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 citizens' 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, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our prosperity, 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 prosperity, 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 disenfranchisement 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 hardyhood to say that 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 is everyone against Negroes.
