Arrested for Voting While Female — How Susan B. Anthony Put America on Trial

The Trial Sparked by a Single Ballot

On November 5, 1872, election workers at a polling station in Rochester, New York could hardly believe what they were seeing. A middle-aged woman had walked in off the street, ballot in hand, and was standing calmly in line. Her name was Susan B. Anthony. She knew as well as anyone that the U.S. Constitution did not grant women the right to vote. And she had walked in anyway.

Two weeks after casting her ballot, a federal marshal came knocking at her door. The charge was simple: illegal voting. Anthony didn't flinch. If anything, she sensed that this trial was exactly the stage she had been waiting for.

A Woman Who Had Been Fighting for 52 Years

Susan B. Anthony was born in 1820. Raised in a Quaker household, she was involved in the abolitionist movement from an early age, and by the 1850s had joined forces with Elizabeth Cady Stanton to champion women's suffrage. The legal foundation she stood on was the Fourteenth Amendment, passed in the aftermath of the Civil War: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens." If women were citizens, didn't that mean they had the right to vote?

To test that argument firsthand, she deliberately walked into that polling station. Her arrest was an outcome she had fully anticipated.

The Trial Where the Judge Dismissed the Jury

The trial began in June 1873 — and what unfolded in that courtroom was difficult to believe. Judge Ward Hunt instructed the jury not to deliberate and declared the verdict himself: guilty.

Anthony fired back immediately. "I have been convicted by the laws of a male-dominated society, by a jury of men, before a male judge. I am under no obligation to comply with this ruling." When the judge sentenced her to a fine of one hundred dollars, she declared: "I will never pay a dollar of it."

She never did. And the government never moved to collect it. No one could be certain what would happen if the case were forced all the way to the Supreme Court — and no one wanted to find out.

A Defeat That Was Actually a Victory

She lost the trial. But Anthony took that unjust verdict and carried it across the country, delivering speeches at every stop. "If the law is wrong, then change the law." Audiences were electrified every time. After her death in 1906, the movement pressed on — and in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, finally granting American women the right to vote. History has since given that amendment an unofficial name: the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.

🎬 This History on Screen

Iron Jawed Angels (2004) follows Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, the generation of activists who came after Anthony, vividly capturing how they carried the fight forward on the foundation she had built. The film depicts Alice Paul's hunger strike in prison with striking historical accuracy.

Mrs. America (2020) explores the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, a reminder that the movement Anthony set in motion was still unfinished a full century later.

The documentary One Woman, One Vote (1995) is the most comprehensive record of the suffrage movement available, weaving together archival footage and materials that include a dramatization of Anthony's 1873 trial.

Her Words

"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do to their fellows, because it always coincides with their own desires." But the line she is perhaps best remembered for came before her trial: "Failure is impossible." She believed it on the day the verdict went against her. She believed it when the fine notice arrived. And history proved her right — she never truly lost.