Published as part of the Landmark Law Cases and American Society series of the University Press of Kansas, which is edited by Peter Charles Hoffer and N.E.H. Hull, The Woman Who Dared to Vote: The Trial of Susan B. Anthony provides an extensive, detailed description of the nineteenth century struggle for women’s suffrage. N.E.H. Hull’s narrative begins with Anthony’s initial meeting with Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1851 and concludes with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Most noteworthy though, The Woman Who Dared to Vote includes an examination of the prosecution and trial of Susan B. Anthony for casting her vote in the 1872 election.

The text covers a great deal of material that has been dealt with in a wide variety of existing scholarly and popular studies (for example, Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848-1920; Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920; Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, ed., One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement; Sylvia D. Hoffert, When Hens Crow: The Woman’s Rights Movement in Antebellum America). The promise of the book is suggested by its subtitle: The Trial of Susan B. Anthony, which leads the reader to expect an analysis of the legal theory and strategy—known as the New Departure—that the women’s rights leaders, most prominently Victoria Woodhull and Anthony herself, adopted in their attempt to secure the vote for women. Briefly, according to the New Departure, women had a constitutional right to vote pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment’s privileges or immunities clause. Thus, when women attempted to register to vote and were refused, they would bring suit in federal court and women’s suffrage would be established through litigation, obviating the need for a constitutional amendment. Anthony’s goal was to initiate a test case that would ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court, establishing the right to vote as a right of national citizenship. Unfortunately, that was not to be. After successfully registering to vote and casting her ballot in the 1872 election, Anthony was prosecuted under the Enforcement Act of 1870, a criminal law that Congress passed in order to protect African Americans’ right to vote. The law provided sanctions against the Klan’s determination to deter black voters through intimidation and violence. Anthony’s case ended at trial level when, in June of 1873, the presiding judge, newly appointed Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Ward Hunt, directed the jury to find her guilty, imposed a fine of $100, and when she declared that she would not pay it, dismissed her. By declining to incarcerate Anthony for refusing to pay the fine, the judge effectively precluded the possibility that her case would reach the Supreme Court via a petition for a writ of habeas corpus. Hunt’s manipulation of the result was consistent with the narrow interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that the Court would embrace in several landmark decisions that would shape the jurisprudence of women’s rights as well as those of African Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities for years to come.

At the center of the narrative is an analysis of the arguments that Anthony’s lawyer and the prosecuting attorney presented at her trial. In his attempt to defend Anthony against the charge that she had knowingly voted illegally, Henry R. Seldon argued that women were citizens of the United States and cited a variety of sources to demonstrate that the commonly understood concept of citizenship included the right of suffrage. Accordingly, he claimed that suffrage was a right conferred by the privileges or immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Thus, women had a constitutionally protected right to vote. From the prosecutor’s side, Richard Crowley maintained that if the privileges or immunities clause gave the right of suffrage to all citizens, there could be no limitations on the right to vote—that is, all disqualifications based on age, criminal convictions, or mental deficiency. Such a ban on limitations on voting rights, he declared, could not have been what the Framers of the Amendment intended.

The Woman Who Dared to Vote offers an impressive amount of information about the activities of the leaders of the woman’s rights movement and the issues that divided them. It also provides a description of the cases in which the Supreme Court not only rejected the argument that women had a right to vote derived from the privileges or immunities clause but also that other rights and other groups were protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Indeed, the Court’s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment was so narrow that it provided virtually no protection for the rights of African Americans—the intended beneficiaries of the Amendment—much less the rights of women.

However, Hull’s narrative falls short in that it fails to make clear connections between the failure of the New Departure and the broader context of the post-Civil War political and legal developments. This may be because Hull has included so many details and presented them in such a descriptive way that the major issues tend to get lost. The result is that only with a great deal of patience and a solid background in the history of the Fourteenth Amendment is the reader able to unravel the central theme of the book: the political and legal developments that culminated in the defeat the New Departure and left the suffrage leaders with the options of pursuing voting rights through a state-by-state campaign or a federal constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote. More legal and political analysis might have more effectively located Anthony’s legal case in the broader context of post-Civil War politics as well as constitutional theory. Additionally, Hull’s argument that Anthony pursued the New Departure approach in a calculated attempt to reaffirm her position at the center of the leadership of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association remains unconvincing. In spite of Anthony’s initial enthusiasm for and subsequent rejection of Victoria Woodhull, it seems plausible that her adoption of the New Departure strategy was based on a combination of motives including a desire to find a legal solution to the perennial political problem of the denial of women’s rights.

Despite its shortcomings, The Woman Who Dared to Vote is consistent with the objective of the University Press of Kansas’ Landmark Law Cases and American Society series insofar as it provides an accessible examination of an important judicial decision as well as an informed overview of the struggle for woman suffrage.