Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony voted in the presidential election of 1872 — illegally, as everyone including Anthony understood — walked out of the polling place in Rochester, New York, and waited to be arrested. She was charged with voting without a lawful right, tried in a federal court where the judge had written his opinion before testimony concluded and directed the jury to convict, and fined $100 she refused to pay. The episode was a calculated provocation designed to force a legal confrontation over women's constitutional right to vote. It failed in court and succeeded as theater, spreading her name and argument across the country in newspaper accounts of the trial.

Anthony had been organizing for women's rights since meeting Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1851, a partnership that endured for half a century and produced the suffrage movement's strategic and organizational backbone. She canvassed door to door in Kansas. She addressed state legislatures. She submitted a federal suffrage amendment to Congress for the first time in 1878 — the amendment that would eventually become the 19th — and then submitted it again, every year, for the remaining 28 years of her life. Her organizational methods were systematic and relentless: she kept meticulous records of every legislator who had voted against suffrage and worked methodically to replace them.

Anthony died in 1906, 14 years before the 19th Amendment was ratified, and said so directly in her final public remarks: "Failure is impossible," she told an audience of suffragists a month before her death, but she knew she would not live to see the victory. The amendment was ratified in 1920 and is formally known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. Her face appeared on the dollar coin briefly beginning in 1979 — the first woman on circulating American currency — in a coin universally mocked for its inconvenient similarity to a quarter. The amendment outlasted the coin.