That Chick Who Voted
American Documents: Susan B. Anthony's 1873 Speech
2026 is America’s 250th birthyear. To celebrate, I’m highlighting 50+ significant American documents from our history. So far I have covered The Mayflower Compact, Patrick Henry’s Speech, The Lee Resolution, The Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Treaty of Paris, the Virginia Plan, The Northwest Ordinance, The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Louisiana Purchase, the Star-Spangled Banner, the Monroe Doctrine, the Indian Removal Act, the Knickerbocker Baseball Club rules. and Lincoln’s ‘House Divided’ Speech.
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Fun Fact #1: I’ve seen the Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York where Susan B. Anthony is buried. I took this picture.
This will come as a shock to my compatriots in the Esoteric Online Religious Extremist (EORE) community, but Susan B. Anthony’s 1873 speech on women’s suffrage was, I regret to tell you, very well-articulated and reasoned according to our founding documents.
Yes, bros. I am shooketh as well. But in the age of incredibly bad arguments for just about anything, finding something from yesteryear that actually has meat on its bones is a reminder of just what we have lost. (Distinguished Scholars may correlate What We Have Lost with the expansion of the franchise, but that in and of itself is a subject for another time.)
These days whenever a politician talks about voting rights, they usually mean lowering the voting age for a power grab, especially because it’s a popular take in states that have low-to-no voter ID requirements and have legalized ballot harvesting. Imagine an entire country of Angeleno political machines, or closed-door combinations like the one that installed Spencer Cox in Utah for a second term. (Another long story.) It’s a bad idea and we in the 21st Century are conditioned by experience to reject it.
Fun Fact #2: Anthony is my 7th cousin, 5x removed. Which makes us Americans-but-strangers, lol. Our most recent common ancestor died in 1600.
SBA’s reasoning and motives were far nobler and in keeping with the Founders’ motives, at least to some degree. (Abigail Adams did, after all, send her husband a ‘Remember The Ladies’ letter, which he dismissed as silly female misbehavior.) From the outset of the country, voting was restricted to a narrow group, and that franchise has been expanded in the subsequent centuries—usually for the right, and all-too-often for wrong.
Anthony’s speech is 20+ pages in my American Documents book. It was, more accurately, an essay which she distributed ahead of her trial. “Trial? Whatever for, Graham?”
Susan B. Anthony cast her vote for president in the 1872 election, which was illegal because she was a woman. How did she register to vote if it was illegal? Pressure tactics, basically—but that isn’t to say her methods were based on bullying and BS. She led a group of 16 women total (her, three sisters, and a dozen others) who had conferred with a lawyer after the passing of the 14th and 15th Amendments. The theory was that if black men could vote, white women should be allowed to as well.
Fun Fact #3: I’m reminded whimsically of the 2008 Democratic Primary where voters had decide if they were racist or sexist, and sexism won, lol. It was a simpler time.
I’M KIDDING JEEZ. We haven’t forgotten racism.
Anyway, Anthony’s goal wasn’t to fly under the radar and get away with a stealth vote; she wanted the publicity. In a sense it was like the Scopes Monkey Trial, where the parties agreed to their case before taking it to court because it was based on a legal theory that hadn’t been tested, and they needed a judicial decision to establish precedent. Anthony wanted to vote, she thought she had a reading of the law that would allow it to work, she tested it publicly, and the movement snowballed from there.
She died in 1906 and the 19th Amendment wasn’t passed until 1920. The groundwork she laid for the suffragette cause ultimately led to its success, which is why she still gets remembered today.
Here’s the link again in case you want to read the whole thing. For someone like me who has started to find a form of perverse and tortuous entertainment in the reading of legal documents, this is a substantial exchange of ideas that are worth examining and understanding.
Deciding in a Republic who gets to vote is probably one of the most impactful things we can do, and it’s pretty much never a settled question. Heinlein wrote an entire book about it and people missed the point because it had space Marines killing bugs. Pay attention to this idea. The future of your country quite literally depends on it.
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