I am a person
The question—what is a person?—is baked into the American landscape. Let’s examine the question through two lenses, putting one lens on each eye. In this way, it is possible to see a three-dimensional event emerging on the horizon and how it might impact our world
The lens on the left eye.
Susan B. Anthony voted in the First District of the Eighth Ward in Rochester, New York; she had cast her ballot in the presidential election in 1872. Four days later, U.S. Marshalls came to her house and arrested her for violation of a federal law—the Enforcement Act.
As reported by the Providence Evening Press, the warrant read that Anthony was without the lawful right to vote and “in violation of section 19 of an act of Congress approved May 31, 1870.” It was “An Act to enforce the rights of citizens of the United States to vote in the several States of this Union and for other purposes.”
After the arrest, the Cincinnati Daily Times provided a detailed account of what happened next.
United States Commissioner: “Previous to voting at the 1st District poll in the 8th Ward, did you take the advice of counsel upon voting?
Anthony: Yes, sir.
United States Commissioner: Who was it you talked with?
Anthony: Judge Henry R. Selden
United States Commissioner: What did he advise you with reference to your legal right to vote?
Anthony: He said it was the only way to find out what the law was upon the subject—to bring it to a test.
United States Commissioner: Did he advise you to go and offer your vote?
Anthony: Yes, sir.
…
United States Commissioner: Have you anything further to say upon the subject?
Anthony: I think it was sound.
United States Commissioner: Did he give you an opinion upon the subject?
Anthony: He was like all the rest of you lawyers—he had not studied the question
…
United States Commissioner: Do you have any doubt of your right to vote?
Anthony: Not a particle.
By the end of spring, 1873, Anthony was found guilty; the court sentenced her to pay a fine of one hundred dollars plus the costs of the prosecution. Anthony protested: I have nothing but debt to show for organizing protests against “your manmade, unjust, unconstitutional forms of law, that tax, fine, imprison and hang women, while they deny them the right of representation in the government.”
It is difficult to comprehend her arrest in a nation governed by a constitution which guarantees equality to all. To understand the courts judgment, one must consider the intent of the men who wrote the Constitution. The first section of the Fourteenth Amendment defines “all persons born or naturalized in the United States" as citizens of the United States and prohibits states from abridging the rights of those citizens. However, the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment states that only males could vote. And the Fifteenth Amendment states: "The right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be abridged by the United States on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Anthony’s attorney argued that the Fourteenth Amendment granted women the right to vote “because ‘suffrage was a leading feature of citizenship.’” The prosecutor disagreed. It “implies that the State has a right to abridge the right of suffrage…The 15th Amendment follows….it was granted to restrict the United States from abridging the right of suffrage. The prohibition relates to color, race, or previous servitude, and not at all to sex.”
The key word in these amendments is person.
It was the intent of the writers of the Constitution to leave women out because they were writing in the light of the Old English Common Law which did not recognize women as persons.
In their History of Woman Suffrage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda J. Gage clarified why women were not considered persons. Citing William Beach Lawrence’s Elements of International Law published by Little, Brown, and Company in 1863, the women explained true citizenship required a public life; it demanded political participation; it called for decision making. Voting is quintessentially a decision made in and for the public good. This arena was not, in the view of the founding fathers, the province of women.
The lens on the right eye
On Monday, January 18, 1892, a seventy-six-year-old woman delivered a speech before the Committee on the Judiciary. The woman was Elizabeth Cady Stanton and she had come to assert the sovereignty of personhood, that women are persons. The title of the speech is The Solitude of the Self.
No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone, and for safety in an emergency, they must know something of the laws of navigation. To guide our own craft, we must be captain, pilot, engineer; with chart and compass to stand at the wheel; to watch the winds and waves, and know when to take in the sail, and read the signs in the firmament over all. It matters not whether the solitary voyager is man or woman; nature, having endowed them equally, leaves them to their own skill and judgment in the hour of danger, and, if not equal to the occasion, alike they perish.
Stanton wanted more than the right to vote guaranteed by the Fifteenth. She did not want to be taken care of. Women were sufficiently taken care of by "protective laws" and, if they were married, by their husbands. Stanton knew there was more to freedom and independence than what the vote could give her. She was captain of her soul. She wanted to be recognized as a person.
If she were alive today, Anthony might vote, but she would still see one-thousand women being discriminated against. If she were alive today, Stanton might vote, but she would still see one thousand women being discriminated against. This is because in all other legal respects except the right to vote, women still live under State Laws.
The third dimension
If they were alive today, they would appeal to us to work: to make a world where it would be impossible to imagine, think, look at, or render women no one.