Susan B. Anthony Speech
Effective Speech Susan B. Anthony Speech 1873 Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820 and she was one of the many women in the nineteenth century to fight for women’s rights. She would travel all over the nation and create petitions for the right for women to vote and also slavery. She was an abolitionist, an educational reformer, a labor activist, and of course a women’s right campaigner. As brave as she was, she voted illegally in the presidential election of 1872 in Rochester, New York and arrested.
They had fined her 100 dollars but did not imprison her, which she refused to pay. The next year, Susan presented a speech explaining and demanding that women had the right vote just as much as men did. She states, “It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. (1873)”. She pointed out that the constitution itself stated that people as a whole would help and contribute to justice and establishment in the United States.
Most importantly, Susan Anthony’s speech in 1873 was effective in every way. Although, it took as long as 14 years after her speech for women to have the lawful right to vote and exactly one hundred years after her birth, she campaigned and petitioned all over the nation and was part of several organizations against slavery, women’s suffrage and the labor movement. She fought and petitioned for the thirteenth amendment which was to outlaw slavery. She was threatened by many people and humiliated but nothing stopped Susan from continuing to fight for everyone’s rights.
I define effective as being helpful and successful, in Susan’s case, it wasn’t successful right away, but her intelligence throughout all the years after her arrest, made her stronger and that’s what made her goal become a success, she never gave up. The speech took place in 1872 in Rochester, New York after she voted for the presidential election. It was after the judge had fined her with $100 to pay for unlawfully voting for a candidate. The court room was filled with politics, former presidents, women and men that supported her words.
She stood alone at the Canandaigua Courthouse and gave her speech before her sentencing. She stood handcuffed but nothing stopped Susan B. Anthony from expressing her feelings towards the authorities that were trying to keep her from voting. Susan opened her speech by addressing it to each and every single person in the room. She did not mention only men or only women but stated, “Friends and fellow citizens”. Her main ideas that she was mainly focused on getting across were the constitution itself explained how we the people were to help establish a better and equal America.
She did not understand why the constitution contradicted itself because later, women were still not allowed to vote. She also explained, if the government wouldn’t allow women to vote, they were degrading us. “For any state to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people, is to pass a bill of attainder, or, an ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land. By it the blessings of liberty are forever withheld from women and their female posterity” (Susan B.
Anthony 1873). In this quote she strongly expresses her feelings and beliefs, if the government were to ever pass that law, liberty and equality were to be taken from women forever. Women all over the nation supported her and felt the same exact way. She used effective language and everyone understood where she was coming from. Susan was very motivating and persuading, not only in her speech but many of the other speeches she had presented in the past in court rooms, events in town during the woman’s suffrage movement.
She created petitions all over the nation to get people to support her so she would have many reasons and supporters when the time would come. The speech wasn’t so conversational but more of a last words speech before she was sentenced. She had many goals she wanted to achieve but her main concern was to be able to have the same rights as men had. Men at the time had the right to vote, and were eligible to run as a candidate in a presidential election. They treated women as animals that were not capable of managing anything and had no say in who would be the best choice for America.
Many people were emotionally affected by Susan’s speech because she wasn’t only fighting for herself but for other women and also slaves. She did not only think about herself but others too. People realized that she casted this vote for women and slaves so that the government would know that Susan was no longer taking any disrespect from her fellow citizens. I’m not sure if she was well prepared because when she had given her speech she was in court. She probably felt a lot of pressure because this speech determined if they would really listen to her or sentence her to a long time in jail or bombard her with fines from he government. The text from the speech is well said and well thought out, every word came out one hundred percent strong and she spoke with powerful words. If you pay attention on how she stands up for women and the slaves at the time, she was very serious and completely heartbroken because of the decisions and laws that the government had created at the time. “To them this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex; the most hateful aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe; an oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor.
An oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant, or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex, which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters, of every household – which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries dissension, discord, and rebellion into every home of the nation”(Susan B . Anthony 1873 Speech) Susan believed that the government ad only focused on the negativity.
Instead of them trying to educate the “ignorant”, why wouldn’t they try to educate “just people” in general? Not everyone had the same opportunities as other so why not give them the opportunity to learn and share that knowledge. She also didn’t understand why the head of household was always addressed as the father, or if the father died the son would take his place for example in a royal chain, if the king dies, the son automatically became king. The rich were always the superior because they had the money. I support Susan B.
Anthony completely because even though, it took many years for the law to become effective, she did everything possible to help out women and slaves. She risked her life in some situations, was arrested for illegally voting knowing she couldn’t vote but did anyways for the sake of women. She has motivated me to want to be superior in a large company one day. The CEO of many companies are always men and very few women. Society has painted a picture out for us that make us think automatically that the CEO of a popular firm or chain is man instead of a woman.
Also, America back in 2008 had the chance to vote a woman for president, Hilary Clinton, but we did not because we felt as if she wasn’t capable of running a country all on her own and America wasn’t ready for a woman president. Others believed that if she were to have won the election, Bill Clinton would’ve helped her run this country which is a very negative comment to say. There is nothing I would have changed about her speech but what I would have changed was the timing of the law becoming effective. Susan was an extraordinary woman who had courage, determination, and motivated many other women after that to continue her footsteps.
