The following is a RAIDS analysis of Susan B. Anthony’s Constitutional Argument. Together Susan B. Anthony and Cady Stanton led a suffrage movement to bring equal rights to women. Working with one another they created a radical magazine called The Revolution to make their campaign more publicly aware. In an attempt to show that women deserved the right to vote, Susan B. Anthony wrongly casted a vote in the Rochester election. She was arrested, convicted, and fined. While she awaited her trial, Anthony delivered her speech an unbelievable amount of times throughout different counties across New York. Many citizens from these areas came to listen to her. Most were there to see a woman giving a speech in public, a very rare occurrence for this time period, but others agreed with her in her passion towards equal voting rights for women.
Anthony’s invention of the piece was her belief that she should be legally able to cast a vote in an election considering she is a female. She formulated a reasonable argument to support her belief. Anthony anticipated that her audience would be most likely be made up of the court of her trial, but hoped many other citizens would also listen to what she had to say.
The arrangement of the speech Constitutional Argument is broken into different arguments along with an emotional appeal and conclusion. In summary, her first argument was to remind the citizens of the government protecting their own rights over the rights of the citizens. By all means women are citizens in this democracy and should be able to have the same rights as men. She also points out that the rights of citizens are God-given and not government bestowed. Anthony finds examples in the Declaration of Independence to back up her points; such as the opening line of the Declaration, “We the People.” Anthony did not just stop there. Simply not using the word “sex” in the Fourteenth Amendment would take away fifty percent of the people in the...
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