Susan B. Anthony did not fight to go jail
- Cutie Pie T.T.V.
- Apr 23
- 3 min read
There’s a Powerpuff Girls episode that gets history wrong, and it stood out to me.
In the episode, a girl is robbing a bank and demands Susan B. Anthony coins because she doesn’t like men. the real issue is how they explain Susan B. Anthony.
The show claims that in 1872 she voted illegally, got found guilty, and the government wanted to go easy on her because she was a woman and not send her to jail. Then it says she didn’t want special treatment and demanded to be jailed like a man.
That is not true.
Susan B. Anthony did vote in 1872 and was arrested for it.
She was put on trial and found guilty.
The judge forced a guilty verdict without letting the jury decide, which was controversial. (Wikipedia)
She was fined $100. (National Archives Foundation)
She refused to pay the fine because she believed the law was unjust. (Wikipedia)
She was never jailed for not paying the fine as the government chose not to pursue it further. (Wikipedia)
What the show gets wrong is the motive.
There is no solid evidence that she demanded to be jailed for equality. What actually happened is much simpler: she challenged the system, refused the fine, and spoke out against the ruling.
United States v. Susan B. Anthony was the criminal trial of Susan B. Anthony in a U.S. federal court in 1873. The defendant was a leader of the women's suffrage movement who was arrested for voting in Rochester, New York in the 1872 elections in violation of state laws that allowed only men to vote. Anthony argued that she had the right to vote because of the recently adopted Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, part of which reads, "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States."
The judge, Ward Hunt, was a recently appointed U.S. Supreme Court Justice who had responsibility for the federal circuit court in which the trial was held. He did not allow the jurors to discuss this case but instead directed them to find Anthony guilty. On the final day of the trial, Hunt asked Anthony if she had anything to say. Anthony, who had not previously been permitted to speak,
responded with what one historian of the women's movement has called "the most famous speech in the history of the agitation for woman suffrage".[1] Repeatedly ignoring the judge's order to stop talking and sit down, she protested what she called "this high-handed outrage upon my citizen's rights".[2] She also protested the injustice of denying women the right to vote.
When Justice Hunt sentenced Anthony to pay a fine of $100, she defiantly said that she would never do so. Hunt then announced that Anthony would not be jailed for failure to pay the fine, a move that prevented her from taking her case to the Supreme Court.
Fourteen other Rochester women who lived in Anthony's ward also voted in that election and were arrested, but the government never took them to trial. The election inspectors who allowed the women to vote were arrested, tried and found guilty. They were pardoned by President Ulysses S. Grant after being jailed for refusing to pay the fines imposed by the court.
The trial, which was closely followed by the national press, helped make women's suffrage a national issue. It was a major step in the transition of the women's rights movement from one that encompassed a number of issues into one that focused primarily on women's suffrage.
Judge Hunt's directed verdict created a controversy within the legal community that lasted for years. In 1895, the Supreme Court ruled that a federal judge could not direct a jury to return a guilty verdict in a criminal trial.
Also, when she was arrested, she didn’t “ask for punishment.” She just asked to be arrested in the normal fashion instead of being told to show up somewhere alone with a random male stranger, which is reasonable and not the same thing as wanting jail time.
So the episode basically takes real history and twists it to make a cleaner moral message. It turns a legal protest into a “she wanted equal punishment” story, which is actually the worst idea they had.
The show mixes truth with fiction. The voting and trial are real, but the idea that she wanted to be jailed is made up.
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