“I do pray, and that most earnestly and constantly, for some terrific shock to startle the women o f the nation into a self-respect which mill compel them to, see the absolute degradation o f their present position; which will compel them to break their yoke of bondage and give them faith in themselves; which will make them proclaim their allegiance to women first . . . . The fact is, women are in chains, and their servitude is all the more debasing because they do not realize it. O to compel them to see and feel and to give them the courage and the conscience to speak and act for their own freedom, though they face the scorn and contempt of all the world for doing it!” Susan B. Anthony, 1872. Part I Leadership Chapter 1 A Militant Pioneer—Susan B. Anthony Susan B. Anthony was the first militant suffragist. She has been so long proclaimed only as the magnificent pioneer that few realize that she was the first woman to defy the law for the political liberty of her sex. The militant spirit was in her many early protests. Sometimes these protests were supported by one or two followers; more often they were solitary protests. Perhaps it is because of their isolation that they stand out so strong and beautiful in a turbulent time in our history when all those about her were making compromises. It was this spirit which impelled her to keep alive the cause of the enfranchisement of women during the passionate years of the Civil War. She held to the last possible moment that no national exigency was great enough to warrant abandonment of woman’s fight for independence. But one by one her followers deserted her. She was unable to keep even a tiny handful steadfast to this position. She became finally the only figure in the nation appealing for the rights of women when the rights of black men were agitating the public mind. Ardent abolitionist as she was, she could not tolerate without indignant protest the exclusion of women in all discussions of emancipation. The suffrage war policy of Miss Anthony can be compared to that of the militants a half century later when confronted with the problem of this country’s entrance into the world war. The war of the rebellion over and the emancipation of the negro man written into the constitution, women contended they had a right to vote under the new fourteenth amendment. Miss Anthony led in this agitation, urging all women to claim the right to vote under this amendment. In the national election of 1872 she voted in Rochester, New York, her home city, was arrested, tried and convicted of the crime of “voting without having a lawful right to vote.” I cannot resist giving a brief excerpt from the court records of this extraordinary case, so reminiscent is it of the cases of the suffrage pickets tried nearly fifty years later in the courts of the national capital.