The Trial of Susan B. Anthony: An Illegal Vote, a Courtroom Conviction and a Step Toward Women’s Suffrage

A public argument with her friend, Frederick Douglass, led Susan B. Anthony to alter her strategy of seeking a broad range of rights for women and blacks and focus exclusively on winning the right to vote for women. As a result, she defied state and federal law by voting in the presidential election of 1872. She was arrested and tried in a case presided over by a U.S. Supreme Court justice, who ordered - for the only time in American history - the jury to deliver a directed verdict in a criminal case. She was sentenced to pay a fine, but she defiantly told the judge she would never pay it. And she never did. The case attracted worldwide attention and made Anthony into the iconic leader of the women’s rights movement.