Susan B. Anthony’s On Women’s Right to Vote (1873) — Text, Context, and Lessons

Context

In November 1872, Susan B. Anthony walked into a voter registration office in Rochester, New York, and cast a ballot in the presidential election. She was arrested, indicted, and tried in 1873 for the crime of voting while female.

Before the trial, she toured the towns of her county giving the same speech over and over — a tactic meant to make it impossible to seat an unbiased jury, and a way to argue her case directly to the public when the court refused to let her testify. The speech is short, plain, and built like a legal brief delivered to ordinary citizens rather than to lawyers.

Its single claim is that she committed no crime at all, because the Constitution already gave her the right she exercised.

About the Speaker

Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) was a Quaker-raised reformer who worked in temperance and abolition before becoming the most relentless organizer of the American women’s suffrage movement. She would not live to see the Nineteenth Amendment ratified in 1920 — fourteen years after her death — but it was named for her.

She was not a soaring orator in the mold of the preachers and politicians of her day; her power came from argument, repetition, and an unshakable refusal to concede a single premise.

Key Passages

Full delivery ran roughly ~6 minutes (~700 words) in its core form, though Anthony often expanded it on the stump.

[Opening — she frames the entire fight not as a request but as the defense of a right already held.]

Friends and fellow citizens: I stand before you tonight under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen's rights.

[She grounds the claim in the Preamble — the "we" that opens the Constitution.]

It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.

[The turn — she names the system for what she says it is.]

To them this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex.

[The close of the logic — rights, once granted, cannot be carved away by the states.]

Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not. Being persons, then, women are citizens; and no state has a right to make any law... That shall abridge their privileges or immunities.

Why It Endures

The speech survives because of its discipline. Anthony does not plead, weep, or appeal to chivalry — the expected register for a woman addressing the public in 1873. She argues.

The structure is a syllogism anyone can follow: the Constitution secures rights to *persons* and *citizens*; women are persons and citizens; therefore women already hold the right to vote, and any law saying otherwise is the violation. By refusing to ask for a *new* right and instead defending an *existing* one, she shifts the burden onto her accusers.

The repetition of "we, the people" stripped of its unspoken qualifiers ("not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens") is the rhetorical heart — she reads the nation’s founding document back to it and exposes the silent edit men had made. The phrase "oligarchy of sex" is the unforgettable line: cold, exact, and impossible to soften.

It reframes disenfranchisement from custom into tyranny.

What You Can Borrow

• Argue from a premise your opponent already accepts. Anthony didn’t debate whether women *deserved* rights; she debated what the Constitution *already said*. Start from common ground your audience can’t reject, then walk them to a conclusion they didn’t expect.
• Quote the room’s own scripture. She used the Preamble — the most familiar words in American civic life — against the people who claimed to honor it. Find the text, value, or rule your audience reveres and show how their position contradicts it.
• Coin one cold, precise phrase. "Oligarchy of sex" did more work than any paragraph. Build a single label so accurate it travels on its own.
• Strip the qualifiers out loud. Reading "we, the people" and then naming everything it does *not* say is a technique of subtraction. Recite what something claims, then expose what it quietly excludes.
• Refuse the role you’re handed. Expected to plead, she litigated. When an audience expects emotion, the unexpected calm of pure logic can land harder.
• Keep it short and repeatable. She built the speech to be given dozens of times, town to town. A tight, portable argument outlasts a sprawling one.

Bottom Line

Anthony’s 1873 address is a master class in turning a defense into an indictment — proof that the most disarming move in any argument is to claim the high ground your opponent thought was theirs. Use it when you need to win a point on principle, not pity.