Great Speeches: Susan B. Anthony on Women's Right to Vote

susan

b

anthony

speech on

women

's

right

to

vote

1873 this speech was given by

susan

b

anthony

before the

women

's suffrage court she was arrested for casting an illegal ballot in the 1872 presidential election friends and fellow citizens i stand before you tonight under accusation for the alleged crime of having

vote

d in the last presidential elections without having a legitimate

right

to vote, it will be my job tonight to show you that in the svaty not only did I not commit any crime, but simply exercised the rights of a citizen that I and all citizens of the United States are guaranteed by the national constitution beyond the power of any state to deny the preamble to the federal constitution says that we, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union establish justice to ensure internal tranquility to provide for the common defense to promote the general welfare and to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity ordained and established this constitution for the United States of America it was we the people, not we the male citizens white, and neither are we male citizens, but we, all the people who formed the Union and do form it not to bestow the blessings of liberty, but to secure it not to half of us and half of our posterity, but to all the people, both women and men, and it is an absolute mockery to speak to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they have been denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this republican democrat government the ballot for any state make sex a qualification that should always result in distance from the whole half of the people is to pass an outlaw bill or ex post facto law and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land by it the blessings of liberty are forever withheld from women and their female posterity for them this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed to them this government is not a democracy it is not a republic it is a hateful aristocracy a hateful one oligarchy of sex the most hateful aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe and the oligarchy of wealth if the rich ruled the poor and Oleg, our learning key where the educated rule the ignorant or even in an oligarchy of race where the Saxons rule Africans, it could be borne, but this Oleg, our sex key, who makes father, brothers, husband, sons, oligarchs over mother and sisters, wife and daughters of every household that holds all men as sovereign all women's subjects brings dissension, discord, and rebellion to every home in the nation Webster Worcester and Bouvier define a citizen as a person in the United States with the right to vote and hold office one charge the only issue left to be resolved now is our woman person and i don't think any of our opponents have the audacity to say they are not people then women are citizens and no state has the right to make any law or do comply with old laws that compromise their privileges or immunities, therefore, all discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the various states is null and void today, precisely as the whole world is against blacks.