Susan B. Anthony voted illegally and was arrested

Four days before the 1872 presidential election, Susan B. Anthony persuaded election officials in Rochester, New York, to register her, citing the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship. Then, on November 5, 1872, she and roughly a dozen other women cast ballots in the Grant–Greeley race—an act everyone present knew the state considered illegal.

The gamble was deliberate. Anthony wanted an arrest, a trial, and a courtroom in which to argue that women were already enfranchised citizens. She got the arrest about two weeks later, was indicted under a federal enforcement law, and stood trial in June 1873.

The judge directed the jury to convict and fined her $100—which she vowed never to pay, and never did.

Because the court refused to jail her, she lost the appeal route she had hoped for. Still, the spectacle made her case a rallying cry, and the argument she pressed echoed until the Nineteenth Amendment secured women’s suffrage in 1920.