Married For Freedom

A Militant Pioneer-Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony was the first militant suffragist. She has been so long proclaimed only as the magnificent pioneer that few realize that she was the first woman to defy the law for the political liberty of her sex.

The militant spirit was in her many early protests. Sometimes these protests were supported by one or two followers; more often they were solitary protests. Perhaps it is because of their isolation that they stand out so strong and beautiful in a turbulent time in our history when all those about her were making compromises.

It was this spirit which impelled her to keep alive the cause of the enfranchisement of women during the passionate years of the Civil War. She held to the last possible moment that no national exigency was great enough to warrant abandonment of woman's fight for independence. But one by one her followers deserted her. She was unable to keep even a tiny handful steadfast to this position. She became finally the only figure in the nation appealing for the rights of women when the rights of black men were agitating the public mind. Ardent abolitionist as she was, she could not tolerate without indignant protest the exclusion of women in all discussions of emancipation. The suffrage war policy of Miss Anthony can be compared to that of the militants a half century later when confronted with the problem of this country's entrance into the world war.

The war of the rebellion over and the emancipation of the

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negro man written into the constitution, women contended they had a right to vote under the new fourteenth amendment. Miss Anthony led in this agitation, urging all women to claim the right to vote under this amendment. In the national election of 187'2 she voted in Rochester, New York, her home city, was arrested, tried and convicted of the crime of "voting without having a lawful right to vote."

I cannot resist giving a brief excerpt from the court records of this extraordinary case, so reminiscent is it of the cases of the suffrage pickets tried nearly fifty years later in the courts of the national capital.

After the prosecuting attorney had presented the government's case, Judge Hunt read his opinion, said to have been written before the case had been heard, and directed the jury to bring in a verdict of guilty. The jury was dismissed without deliberation and a new trial was refused. On the following day this scene took place in that New York court room.

JUDGE HUNT (Ordering the defendant to stand up)-Has the prisoner anything to say why sentence shall not be pronounced?

Miss ANTHONY-Yes, your Honor, I have many things to say; for in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually, but all my sex are, by your Honor's verdict doomed to political subjection under this so-called republican form of government.

JUDGE HUNT-The Court cannot. listen to a rehearsal of argument which the prisoner's counsel has already consumed three hours in presenting.

Miss ANTHONY-May it please your Honor, I am not arguing the question, but simply stating the reasons why sentence

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cannot in justice be pronounced against me. Your denial of my citizen's right to vote, is the denial of my right of consent as one of the governed, the denial of my right of representation as one taxed, the denial of my right to a trial by jury of my peers as an offender against law; therefore, the denial of my sacred right to life, liberty, property, and

JUDGE HUNT-The Court cannot allow the prisoner to go on.

Miss ANTHONY-But, your Honor will not deny me this one and only poor privilege of protest against this highhanded outrage upon my citizen's rights. May it please the Court to remember that since the day of my arrest last November this is the first time that either myself or any person of my disfranchised class has been allowed a word of defense before judge or jury

JUDGE HUNT-The prisoner must sit down, the Court cannot allow it.

Miss ANTHONY-Of all my persecutors from the corner grocery politician who entered the complaint, to the United States marshal, commissioner, district attorney, district judge, your Honor on the bench, not one is my peer, but each and all are my political sovereigns . . . . Precisely as no disfranchised person is entitled to sit upon the jury and no woman is entitled to the franchise, so none but a regularly admitted lawyer is allowed to practice in the courts, and no woman can gain admission to the bar-hence, jury, judge, counsel, all must be of superior class.

JUDGE HUNT-The Court must insist-the prisoner has been tried according to the established forms of law.

Miss ANTHONY-Yes, your Honor, but by forms of law, all made by men, interpreted by men, administered by men, in favor of men and against women; and hence your Honor's ordered verdict of guilty, against a United States citizen for the exercise of the "citizen's right to vote," simply because that

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