Susan B. Anthony doesn’t want your damn pardon

I spent four years living a stone’s throw away from Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York, the site of Susan B. Anthony’s grave. I gained many things during those four years: the ability to correctly pronounce Canandaigua and Chili, an abiding hatred for Genesee Beer, the ability to eat an entire garbage plate from Nick Tahou’s, and a great appreciation for Susan B. Anthony.

In most photographs or portraits, Anthony looks very stern and forbidding, with dresses buttoned up to her chin. This is unfortunate, because she was nothing less than a badass. Consider:

• By age seventeen (in 1837) Anthony was already working for abolition of slavery;
• In 1866, she and gal pal Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the American Equal Rights Association, seeking equal rights for women and for African-Americans;
• She advocated equal pay for women teachers and pushed for co-educational education for all (MOTHER PENCE WOULDN’T LIKE THAT);
• She pressed for married women to have expanded property rights so their dumbfuck husbands wouldn’t take all their money and abuse and/or oppress them;
• She helped enslaved Africans to escape via the Underground Railroad.

Sure, she was part of the Temperance Movement but her motivation was protecting women whose alcoholic husbands left them destitute while beating the crap out of them and their kids — and not cracking down on those of us who like a little toddy before (during and after) dinner.

She coined the jaunty phrase “Failure is impossible!” and although she, sadly, did not live to see the passage of the 19th Amendment, she was absolutely correct: the women’s suffrage movement did not fail. Women are still thinking for themselves, fighting for equal pay and equal rights, and trying to stop those who want to impinge on their right to vote.

Tuesday, on the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment’s ratification, Donald J. Trump issued a federal “pardon” for Anthony, who was arrested and prosecuted for casting her vote in Rochester, New York. An obvious attempt to pander to women voters, I firmly believe no self-respecting woman is stupid enough to buy it.

If Susan B. Anthony were alive today, I suspect she would tell Mr. Trump to go pound sand. You only need a pardon if you’re convicted of a crime, and Anthony did not believe that her vote was a crime. Indeed, at her “the fix is in” trial, where the judge ordered the jury to find Anthony guilty and refused to let her testify in her own defense, Anthony ripped the judge a new one when she was (finally) “allowed” to speak before sentencing:

Judge: Has the prisoner anything to say why sentence should not be pronounced?

Anthony: Yes, your honor, I have many things to say; for in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually, but all of my sex, are, by your honor’s verdict, doomed to political subjugation under this so-called form of goverment.

[Pro tip for sexist judges: if you ask an intelligent and learned woman if she’s got anything to say, be prepared to sit yer ass down and listen.]

Reading the transcript of Anthony’s sentencing is delightful, because Anthony clearly was not intimidated by the judge and she was clearly not stopping until she said her piece. At least half a dozen times the judge tried to cut her off and Susan B. Anthony was not having it. Only when she decided she was through did she sit down. The judge then sentenced her to pay a $100 fine (which the prestigious internet tells us is the equivalent of $2123.78 today).

“Fine,” sez Susan B. “You know where you can stick your fine!” although because she was an elegant lady speaker, she actually said “May it please your honor” – HAH – “I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty.” Do you think that this woman – who, when a mealy-mouthed deputy came to arrest her, said “is this how you would arrest a man?!” and demanded she be put in handcuffs? – do you really think this woman would have an iota of patience for the man in Washington and his shitty little pardon trying to buy the votes she spent her life working to get?

But there’s a broader issue at play here, one that the man in the White House will never understand, because it involves justice and integrity and giving a damn about the greater good. Civil disobedience does not involve doing something against the law and then whining like a little bitch when you get caught. The great MLK Jr. described civil disobedience not only as breaking a law “that conscience tells [a person] is unjust” but also “willingly accept[ing] the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice.”

Susan B. Anthony didn’t sit around tweeting “Waaaah, I got arrested, it’s so unfair!” She didn’t complain about witch hunts or nasty men or come up with some dumb nickname for the trial judge.  She didn’t hint around on social media about how “many people” think she deserves a pardon. Instead, she accepted her conviction as the penalty to be paid in exchange for getting people fired up over the injustice of depriving women the right to vote. And then she kept working like the proverbial dog to change the law she knew was unjust.

Susan B. Anthony doesn’t need your damn pardon, Mr. Trump, but someday you just may need one real bad.