Breakthrough by Nancy L. Cohen

Author:Nancy L. Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619027534
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2016-01-14T00:00:00+00:00

IN 1872, SEVEN years after the Civil War ended and the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, Susan B. Anthony and fourteen other women tried to vote for president. Anthony was arrested and indicted. At Anthony’s trial the next year, as she began to testify on her own behalf, the presiding judge, Supreme Court justice Ward Hunt, interrupted her and would not let her speak in her own defense. He instructed the jury to convict her and, afterward, read a speech he had written before the trial had started. He then made the mistake of asking Anthony if she had anything to say.

“I have many things to say. 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 honor’s verdict, doomed to political subjection,” Anthony said, and as she continued he ordered her to sit down. Then he ordered her to stand, and he fined her $100 and the cost of the prosecution. (She never paid the fine.)

“Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life,” Supreme Court justice Joseph Bradley wrote a year after Anthony’s conviction in Bradwell v. Illinois, ruling that Myra Bradwell had no right to practice law because she was a woman. The “harmony” of the family itself would be threatened by Bradwell or any other woman “adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband,” the court argued. “The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfil the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator. And the rules of civil society must be adapted to the general constitution of things . . .”

The Founding Fathers who wrote the United States Constitution had been silent about women’s right to self-government. After the Civil War, their heirs clarified that the omission had not been an oversight.

In 1868, for the first time in our history, Congress wrote the word male into the Constitution. Section Two of the Fourteenth Amendment said, essentially, if a state deprived any male of the right to vote, it would lose congressional seats proportional to how many male citizens were disfranchised. Or, looked at from another angle, there would be no punishment for denying women access to the ballot box. In 1869, Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment, declaring that “the right to vote shall not be abridged or denied by the United States on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” (It was ratified in 1870.) When Anthony tried to vote in 1872, it remained perfectly legal for states to deprive citizens of the vote on the basis of sex. Every state did.

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