“we shall beg at the feet of each and every individual voter” — Susan B. Anthony Dollar Coin

Today, the Susan B. Anthony Dollar Coin remembers the women’s suffrage speeches given to a committee of Congress 133 years ago.

From the Report of the Sixteenth Annual Washington Convention, March 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th, 1884, With Reports of the Forty-eighth Congress by the National Women’s Suffrage Association:

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Arguments Before the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives by a Committee of the Sixteenth Annual Washington Convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association in Favor of a Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, that shall protect the right of women to vote in the several States of the Union.

Judiciary Committee, Washington, D. C, March 8, 1884.

The Chairman — The committee are now ready to hear the ladies.

Susan B. Anthony — Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Judiciary Committee:

We appear before you this morning on behalf of the National Woman Suffrage Association, that has just closed a four days’ convention in this city, with speakers and representatives from twenty-six States, 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.

This is the sixteenth year that we have annually appeared before Congress in person, and the eighteenth by petitions, asking for national protection for women in the exercise of their right to vote.

In the winter of 1865 and ’66 we sent your honorable body a ten-thousand prayer, asking you not to put “male” in the second section of the proposed fourteenth amendment, and again we appealed to you by thousands of petitions that you would add “sex” after “race or color” in the fifteenth amendment, but all to no avail.

Then, by a thirty-thousand petition in 1871, we demanded the enactment of a declaratory law that women had the right to vote under the first section of the fourteenth amendment, viz., “All persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States and of the State in which they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law that shall abridge or deny the privileges or immunities of citizens.”

This, too, was denied us not only by Congress, but by the Supreme Court, in 1875, on the ground that the framers of the amendment had only “colored men” in their thought, therefore none others could come within the purview of its guarantees.

From 1876 to the present we have from year to year poured into Congress tens and hundreds of thousands of petitions asking you to take the initiative step for another amendment that shall specifically prohibit the disfranchisement of women.

But, you say, why do you not go to your several States to secure this right?

I answer, because we have neither the women nor the money to make the canvasses of the thirty-eight States, school district by school district, to educate each individual man out of the old prejudice that woman was created to be his subject.

Four State Legislatures have submitted the question of striking “male” from their constitution — Kansas in 1867, Michigan, 1874; Colorado, 1877; and Nebraska, 1882 — and we made the best canvass of each that was or is possible for a disfranchised class outside of all political party help.

In Kansas, the question of negro Suffrage, which was submitted at the same election, had brought to bear upon it the whole Republican party enginery of both the State and Nation, while that of Woman Suffrage had the actual opposition of all the parties in their State conventions — the Democrats, the Germans, and even the Temperance men passed resolutions against Woman Suffrage, and the Republicans, though they resolved to be neutral, sent out speakers nearly every one of whom opposed the measure.

And yet, notwithstanding all the Republican powers of State and Nation were for negro Suffrage, and all the power of all the political parties against Woman Suffrage, on election day the negro got only 1,000 more votes than woman!

Negro Suffrage was over and over overwhelmingly voted down in various States — New York, Connecticut, Ohio, etc.; and you know, gentlemen, that if the negro had never had the right to vote until the majority of the rank and file of white men, particularly foreign-born men, had voted “Yes,” he would have gone without the right until the crack of doom.

And it was because of the prejudice of the unthinking majority that Congress submitted the question of the negro’s enfranchisement to the Legislatures of the several States, to be adjudicated upon by the educated, broadened representatives of the people.

And we now appeal to you to lift the decision of this question from the vote of the populace of the States to that of the Legislatures, that you may thereby be as considerate, as just, to the women of this Nation as you were to the ex-slaves.

Every new privilege granted to women has been by the Legislatures.

The liberal laws for married women, the right of the wife to own and control her inherited property and separate earnings, the right of women to vote at school elections in a dozen States, the right of women to vote on all questions in three territories, have all been gained through the Legislatures.

Had any one or all of these beneficent propositions been submitted to the vote of the rank and file of husbands, or of men, do you, gentlemen, believe a majority would have placed their sanction upon them?

I do not. And I beg you, Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, that you will at once recommend to the House the submission of the proposition now before you, and thereby place the decision of this great constitutional and humanitarian question of the right of one-half the people of this republic to a voice in the government in the hands of the representative men of the Legislatures of the several States.

You need not fear that our enfranchisement will come too suddenly or too soon by this method.

After this proposition shall have passed Congress by the requisite two-thirds vote of both Houses, it may take five years, ten or twenty years, even, to secure the two-thirds vote of three-fourths of the thirty-eight State Legislatures necessary for its ratification.

It takes all too many of us women, and too much of our hard earnings, from our homes and from the works of charity and education of our respective localities, to come up to Washington, session after session, until Congress shall have submitted the proposition, and then to go from Legislature to Legislature, urging its adoption; but when you insist that we shall beg at the feet of each and every individual voter of each and every one of the thirty-eight States, native and foreign, black and white, educated and ignorant, you doom us to incalculable hardships and sacrifices, and to most exasperating insults and humiliations.

I pray you, therefore, save us from the fate of waiting and working for our freedom until we shall have educated the ignorant masses of men to consent to give their wives and sisters equality of rights with themselves.

Were the voters only the educated men of the several States, our task would be comparatively easy.

You surely will not compel us to wait the enlightenment of the freedmen of this Nation and the newly-made voters from the monarchical governments of the Old World!

Liberty for one’s self is a natural instinct possessed alike by all men, native and foreign, black and white; but to be willing to accord liberty to another is the result of education, of self-discipline, of the practice of the golden rule — “Do unto others as you would that others should do unto you.”

Therefore we ask that the question of equality of rights to women shall be arbitrated upon by the picked men of the Nation in Congress, and the picked men of the several States in their respective Legislatures.

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Many women argued for the right to vote that day with Ms. Anthony introducing each woman to the committee.

The Susan B. Anthony Dollar Coin shows with an image of her in a seated portrait, circa 1880.

Susan B. Anthony Dollar Coin