December 2003
January 2004

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

On Voting: Susan B. Anthony, Emma Goldman, and Fannie Lou Hamer

The Only Means of Securing Liberty

Excerpts from Susan B. Anthony's Speech, After Being Convicted of Voting In The 1872 Presidential Election. Downloaded from http://gos.sbc.edu/a/anthony.html

Friends and fellow citizens: I stand before you tonight under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote…

The preamble of the Federal Constitution says: "We, the people of the United States…" It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people - women as well as men. It is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this government - the ballot.

…To 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 an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex; the most hateful aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe….

The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not. Being persons, then, women are citizens; and no state has a right to make any law, or to enforce any old law, that shall abridge their privileges or immunities. Hence, every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several states is today null and void, precisely as is every one against Negroes.

Suffrage Forges Our Chains

Excerpt from "Woman Suffrage" in Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman (1910; Dover 1970). Available at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Curricula/WomensRights/suffrage.html

The poor, stupid, free American citizen! Free to starve, free to tramp the highways of this great country, he enjoys universal suffrage, and, by that right, he has forged chains about his limbs. The reward that he receives is stringent labor laws prohibiting the right of boycott, of picketing, in fact, of everything, except the right to be robbed of the fruits of his labor. Yet all these disastrous results of the twentieth century fetish have taught woman nothing. But, then, woman will purify politics, we are assured.

Needless to say, I am not opposed to woman suffrage on the conventional ground that she is not equal to it. I see neither physical, psychological, nor mental reasons why woman should not have the equal right to vote with man. But that can not possibly blind me to the absurd notion that woman will accomplish that wherein man has failed.

If she would not make things worse, she certainly could not make them better. To assume, therefore, that she would succeed in purifying something which is not susceptible of purification, is to credit her with supernatural powers. Since woman's greatest misfortune has been that she was looked upon as either angel or devil, her true salvation lies in being placed on earth; namely, in being considered human, and therefore subject to all human follies and mistakes.

Are we, then, to believe that two errors will make a right? Are we to assume that the poison already inherent in politics will be decreased, if women were to enter the political arena? The most ardent suffragists would hardly maintain such a folly.

I Question America

Fannie Lou Hamer defied segregation by attempting to register to vote in Indianola, Mississippi in 1962. She was arrested, and after being bailed out was thrown off the land she sharecropped that very night. She became an organizer with SNCC and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Her nationally televised testimony at the 1964 Democratic Convention was so vivid, President Johnson called a snap press conference in order to remove her voice from the airwaves. An excerpt is reprinted below. An audio version of Fannie Lou Hamer's testimony is available at http://democracy.soundprint.org/FLHTestimony.php .

"I was carried out of that cell into another cell where they had two Negro prisoners. The State Highway Patrolmen ordered the first Negro to take the blackjack. The first Negro prisoner ordered me, by orders from the State Highway Patrolman for me, to lay down on a bunk bed on my face, and I laid on my face.

The first Negro began to beat, and I was beat by the first Negro until he was exhausted, and I was holding my hands behind me at that time on my left side because I suffered from polio when I was six years old. After the first Negro had beat until he was exhausted the State Highway Patrolman ordered the second Negro to take the blackjack.

The second Negro began to beat and I began to work my feet, and the State Highway Patrolman ordered the first Negro who had beat me to sit upon my feet to keep me from working my feet. I began to scream and one white man got up and began to beat me my head and told me to hush. One white man - since my dress had worked up high, walked over and pulled my dress down and he pulled my dress back, back up.

I was in jail when [civil rights activist] Medgar Evers was murdered. All of this is on account of us wanting to register, to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America, is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?"

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