TODAY IN HISTORY
Susan B. Anthony makes a statement
On March 8th, 1884, Susan B. Anthony appeared before the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives. Anthony began her statement thus:
“We appear before you this morning…to ask that you will, at your earliest convenience, report to the House in favor of the submission of a Sixteenth Amendment to the Legislatures of the several States, that shall prohibit the disfranchisement of citizens of the United States on account of sex.”
Anthony’s statement argued for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting women the right to vote, 16 years after legislators had first introduced a federal woman’s suffrage amendment.
Susan B. Anthony co-founded the National Woman Suffrage Association along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton. During the four days before Anthony addressed the House Committee, she participated in the National Woman Suffrage Association’s 16th annual convention in Washington, D.C. On the last day of the convention, Anthony went before the Senate Select Committee on Woman Suffrage and remarked:
“This is the sixteenth year that we have come before Congress in person, and the nineteenth by petitions. Ever since the war, from the winter of 1865-’66, we have regularly sent up petitions asking for the national protection of the citizen’s right to vote when the citizen happens to be a woman. We are here again for the same purpose.”
It took many more years of arguing before the suffrage amendment passed. Not until June 4, 1919, did Congress approve what was nicknamed the “Anthony Amendment” in honor of the leader who had died in 1906. On August 18, 1920, the states ratified it as the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.
Source: Library of Congress