Here, in the first paragraph of the Declaration [of Independence], is the assertion of the natural right of all to the ballot; for how can “the consent of the governed” be given, if the right to vote be denied?

Susan B. Anthony made this argument in the wake of her 1872 attempt to vote in Rochester, New York—an act that led to her arrest and highly publicized federal trial in 1873. In speeches and writings from this period, Anthony grounded woman suffrage in the nation’s founding principles, especially the Declaration of Independence’s claim that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” By reading that phrase as requiring an actual political mechanism for consent, she contended that denying women the ballot contradicted American revolutionary ideals and exposed the inconsistency between professed natural rights and women’s legal exclusion from political participation.

Anthony argues that the Declaration of Independence’s foundational principle—government deriving “their just powers from the consent of the governed”—logically entails a universal right to vote. If political legitimacy rests on consent, she reasons, then excluding any class (notably women) from the ballot makes that consent fictive and the government’s authority morally inconsistent with its stated origins. The quote exemplifies the 19th-century suffrage movement’s strategy of grounding women’s enfranchisement not in special pleading but in the nation’s own revolutionary creed, reframing voting as a natural right and a prerequisite for genuine self-government.