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| Sunday,13 November 2005 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Famous Trials that shook
the world : Trial of Susan B. Anthony
Susan Brownell Anthony was born in a farm in Massachusetts USA on February 15, 1820. Her father, Daniel, was a liberal quaker and an abolitionist and at various times a shopkeeper, the owner and manager of cotton mills, a farmer, and an insurance agent. Her mother, Lucy Read was a Baptist whose father had fought in the American Revolution and served in the Massachusetts legislature. Lucy had six children who survived infancy. Anthony was the second child. Moving to Battenville In 1826, when Anthony was six-years-old, the family moved to Battenville, New York. There Anthony, along with her brothers, sisters and some neighbourhood children, received the bulk of her formal education in a home-school established by her father. Before she was sixteen, Anthony started to teach, taking small jobs near her home. However, she began to feel that her own education had not been enough. Her father, who encouraged education in his daughters, enrolled her in a boarding school in Philadelphia, in 1837. She could not stay there for long. She was forced to end her studies because her family, like many others, was financially ruined during the American Depression of 1837. Their losses were so great that they were forced to sell everything in an auction-even their personal belongings. Leaving home In 1839, the family moved to Centre Falls, New York. That same year, Anthony left home to teach and to help pay off her father's debts. She taught, first at a seminary in New York, and then at the Canajoharie Academy in 1846. There, she rose to become headmistress of the Female Department. Anthony's father moved the family once again in 1845, this time to a small farm in Rochester, New York. By 1849, Anthony had grown dissatisfied with teaching, and took up her father's offer to come to Rochester and run the farm, while he built up his insurance business. There, her lifelong career in reform began. During the 1850s, Anthony became increasingly interested in women's rights. In 1852, she attended her first women's rights convention, in New York. During the same year, she canvassed incorporating women's rights into three other reform movements: Temperance, Labour and Education. That year, she also helped a group of Rochester seamstresses draft a code outlining fair wages for working women in the city. And, at a New York State Teachers' Association meeting, also in Rochester, she demanded that women be allowed to participate in discussions formerly opened only to men. In 1854, Anthony began to organise petition drives for women's rights, including women's suffrage. In each county of New York State she, along with others, went from door to door obtaining signatures to present to the legislature. Although she never lapsed in her commitment to women's rights, as the Civil War approached, Anthony, always an anti-slavery advocate, poured more and more of her energy into working for abolitionists. Principal New York agent From 1856 until the end of the Civil War, she was the principal New York agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. As such, she was constantly speaking to the public, frequently to violent and hostile crowds. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Anthony began to concentrate exclusively on women's rights. By now, Anthony had become a brilliant organiser and political strategist, and she showed a tireless devotion to the cause. She championed women's suffrage, equal pay for equal work, women's education, the rights of working women and the opening of new occupations for women, as well as the liberalisation of divorce laws. In 1872, Anthony decided to test the constitutionality of the ban on women's suffrage. She registered to vote in Rochester, New York. She then voted in the presidential election. She was arrested for this act and in 1873 was tried in the U.S. District Court, New York. At the trial, the judge penned his decision before hearing the case and discharged the jury because he maintained that there were no questions of fact for them to consider. He found Anthony guilty of voting illegally, fined her $100, and then made the mistake of asking her if she had anything to say. "Yes, your honour", said Anthony, "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 of my sex, are, by your honour's verdict, doomed to political subjection under this so-called, form of Government". Anthony's petition to congress seeking remission of the fine was denied. Anthony vigorously continued to campaign for women's rights after this. Between 1881 and 1886, she published three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage, a collection of writings about the movement's struggle. In 1888, Anthony officially extended her scope from a national to a worldwide concern for women's rights when she founded the International Council of Women. She acted as the head of the U.S. delegation to its meetings in 1899 (London) and 1904 (Berlin). Rights of women In 1902, Anthony wrote to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, her life-long colleague: "It is fifty-one years since we first met and we have been busy through every one of them, stirring up the world to reorganise the rights of women... we little dreamed when we began this contest... that half a century later we would be compelled to leave the finish of the battle to another generation of women. But our hearts are filled with joy to know that they enter upon this task equipped with a college education, with business experience, with the freely admitted right to speak in public-all of which were denied to women fifty years ago.On March 13, 1906, Susan B. Anthony died in Rochester, New York. On November 1920, fourteen and a half years later, The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution guaranteed women their right to vote. Susan's dream had finally come true. More than seventy years after her death, on July 2, 1979, the U.S. Mint honoured her work by issuing the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin. |
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