Lesson Resources
Related Lesson Pages
- Constitutional Amendment Proposition
- Petition to Congress
- American Woman Suffrage Association Memorial
- Susan B. Anthony Petition
- Frederick Douglass Petition
- Army Nurses Letter to the House Judiciary Committee
- Anti-Suffrage Party of NY Petition
- Photograph, Kaiser Wilson poster
- Ratification of 19th Amendment, Tennessee
- Failure is Impossible Script
- Related Web Sites
Teaching With Documents:
Woman Suffrage and the 19th Amendment
Petition from Susan B. Anthony to U.S. Congress
The tactics of the suffragists went beyond petitions and memorials to Congress. Testing another strategy, Susan B. Anthony registered and voted in the 1872 election in Rochester, NY. As planned, she was arrested for "knowingly, wrongfully and unlawfully vot[ing] for a representative to the Congress of the United States," convicted by the State of New York, and fined $100, which she insisted she would never pay a penny of. On January 12, 1874, Anthony petitioned the Congress of the United States requesting "that the fine imposed upon your petitioner be remitted, as an expression of the sense of this high tribunal that her conviction was unjust."
The Document