Susan B. Anthony

On 5 November 1872 Susan B. Anthony voted in the presidential election in Rochester, New York, at a time when women could not lawfully do so. She was arrested on 18 November and charged with illegal voting. Her federal trial opened on 17 June 1873. Judge Ward Hunt directed the jury to return a verdict of guilty, and fined her 100 dollars. She declared that she would never pay, and she never did.

She died in 1906, fourteen years before the 19th Amendment gave women the vote, an amendment often called by her name. In 1979 she became the first female citizen shown on US coinage, on the Susan B. Anthony dollar. On 18 August 2020 President Donald Trump announced a pardon. The National Susan B. Anthony Museum and House refused it, arguing that accepting a pardon would wrongly validate the trial. A conviction that history has rejected was offered a pardon, and the museum that preserves her home turned it down.