Cracking the AP English Language & Composition Exam, 2020 Edition by The Princeton Review

Author:The Princeton Review [The Princeton Review]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2020-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

A Student Essay

Susan B. Anthony broke the law. For this, she was arrested and about to be tried. Before the trial took place, however, she wanted to prove that she didn’t do anything wrong and to gain support for her innocence. So she gave this speech to convince people—potential jurors at her trial, other women and anyone who chose to listen—that it wasn’t wrong for her to vote in the presidential election.

That would have been a radical assertion at the time. Anthony lived in an era when men and women had different rights, and the difference in their status was widely accepted as normal. While the audience likely included people who knew of Anthony and supported her position, others would have been shocked by the fact that she dared to challenge the accepted social order. She would have needed a strong argument to explain her action and win those people over.

Anthony bases her entire appeal on logos, or logic. “Are women persons?” she asks. If women are people, then they are also citizens and entitled to the “blessings of liberty” that the nation’s Constitution guarantees, including the right to vote. She does not try to claim that she didn’t break a state law. Instead, she argues that the law she broke is “null and void” because it denies her the status and the rights that the federal Constitution guarantees her.

In this appeal to reason and logic, Anthony is basically claiming that anyone who thinks she did something wrong by voting is also saying that she—or any woman—is not a person. In addition, anyone who thinks she committed a crime would also have to argue that a state law (which she did break by voting) outweighs the Constitution of the entire nation. Both positions would be hard to defend. By attributing these positions to her opponents, Anthony portrays people who don’t agree with her—including everyone connected with her arrest and trial and with passing the law in the first place—as illogical, unreasonable idiots. Such people couldn’t possibly be right.

Not only are her opponents fools; Anthony claims they are more dangerous than that. They have created a “hateful aristocracy” and ensured that every family in the country is plagued by “dissension, discord and rebellion.” The government is not a democracy, as the Constitution intended, she claims, but is instead controlled by a privileged few who are depriving her—and all women—of liberty. Her passion and hyperbole come through even more when she describes the government as “the most hateful aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe.”

After this tirade, Anthony comes full circle back to her original point: women are citizens too, and therefore no state law (like the one preventing them from voting) can deny them the rights guaranteed by the country’s Constitution. Through this passionate appeal to logic, Anthony achieves the purpose she clearly stated at the beginning: “to prove to you that in thus voting, I…committed no crime.” It is as if she were a lawyer arguing her

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