February 15th is Susan B. Anthony Day

Today is Susan B. Anthony's birthday. The famous abolitionist, temperance supporter and women's voting rights advocate was born on this day in 1820. Her passionate involvement in social issues began with her Quaker family's participation in the abolitionist movement. While attending an anti-slavery conference in 1851, she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Anthony and Stanton established the Women's New York State Temperance Society. They later turned to women's rights issues and founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869.

On November 1, 1872, Anthony and her sisters demanded that Rochester, New York election inspectors register them as voters in advance of the presidential election. After an hour of argument, the inspectors registered the women, reasoning that the burden of the illegal act of voting would be put on the Anthony women. On November 5th, Anthony cast her vote and was arrested the next week. In June of 1873, Anthony was tried and Judge Ward Hunt directed the jury to find Anthony guilty of illegal voting. Judge Hunt declared: "The Fourteenth Amendment gives no right to a woman to vote, and the voting by Miss Anthony was in violation of the law."

After Judge Hunt pronounced her sentence of a one hundred dollar fine, Anthony announced: "May it please your honor, I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty. All the stock in trade I possess is a $10,000 debt, incurred by publishing my paper - The Revolution - ... the sole object of which was to educate all women to do precisely as I have done, rebel against your manmade, unjust, unconstitutional forms of law, that tax, fine, imprison and hang women, while they deny them the right of representation in the government; ..."

(The above information is from Bio.com's Biography of Susan B. Anthony and The Trial of Susan B. Anthony for Illegal Voting from Doug O. Linder's Famous American Trial's project at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) School of Law.)

In honor of her birthday, the McKusick Law Library has displayed the following resources from its collection:

The Trial of Susan B. Anthony/BY Susan B. Anthony, Introduction by Lynn Scherr

Sixty Famous Cases: 29 English Cases-31 American Cases, From 1778 to the Present/BY Marshall Van Winkle (one of the famous cases is Ms. Anthony's trial for illegal voting)

The Teachings of Modern Protestantism on Law, Politics and Human Nature/Edited by John Witte. Original source materials include the following by Susan B. Anthony: A Temperance Speech: The Church and the Liquor Traffic (1852), Two Antislavery Speeches, Anthony's Speech at Her Trial for Voting (1873, and her Speech in the Woman's Bible Controversy (1896).