Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
women’s suffrage movements →
American women’s suffrage movement
I have reproduced here before the text of some documents relating to the British women’s suffrage movement’s organized tax resistance campaign.
Today I’ll add some concerning tax resistance in the women’s suffrage movement in the United States.
The first comes from Annie Shaw.
It’s an amusing look at the state of that portion of the franchise that was being generously offered to the tax-paying women of Massachusetts by its men, and ends with Shaw’s pledge:
“I will not pay another cent of tax in Massachusetts while I live.”—
You have all heard what school suffrage is in the State of Massachusetts, and it isn’t much of anything, for we have not school suffrage; we haven’t anything but school committee suffrage, and that is a good way from school suffrage.
When the law was passed giving us school committee suffrage I felt as old and as large as my brother did when he was twenty-one; and so I immediately started with some of the ladies of my church to register.
We went out into the field to find a person to register our names, we hunted him up and brought him in from the hay-field, and then we all stood along in a row, like a lot of school-girls, waiting to take our oaths.
The way they do this in Massachusetts, they make us women swear to our property in order to tax us.
That isn’t the way they do with men; they tax them first and then send in their bill and let them do the swearing afterwards.
I had never been taxed before for three reasons: being a Methodist preacher, nobody supposed I had anything to tax, and nobody asked me; and then again, having paid the tax on the property I did own in the place where it was, we in Massachusetts, by a double system, have to pay it over again, and I wouldn’t pay it anyhow; and then again, I don’t believe in taxation without representation, that is tyranny, and I never pay a cent of taxes unless I am obliged to.
Upon going there we women stood up in a little row, and took our little oath in regard to property.
My property yields me $105 a year.
Out of this enormous income I paid $22.50 tax! leaving me a large amount of money to live on the rest of the year, you see.
On the morning of the election I did not know, as we lived in the country, when we were to vote for school suffrage; so we went early.
The way they do there, they stand in a sort of line or procession, you know, as they do in our country places, and vote first for one thing and then another; so we stood there until our time came.
At nine o’clock in the morning we got our places; and presently the men who were there began burning incense on the altar of liberty, and the smoke began rising until by and by, along toward noon, we could scarcely see across the house.
We live in a seafaring place, where they smoke red herring, and every one of us went through the process and know how red herring feel when they are smoked through.
At three o’clock our time to vote for school committee came, and now, we thought to ourselves, is our opportunity.
Just as the time was announced the moderator said, with great dignity:
“I appoint three men to nominate a gentleman for school committee.”
And they walked out and returned with the name of the only man in town whom they could persuade to take the office.
There was no pay to the office, and in order to get a man to take it they had to talk to him of George Washington and the Pilgrim Fathers and the Fourth of July, and wave the flag there in his face for an hour.
So they nominated the only man they could persuade, and the moderator said:
“I appoint Captain Crowell to cast the ballot for the town.”
But I said, “Gentlemen, I thought I was to vote;” but they said, “This is the way we always do it.”
I said, “Yes, I know, but I have paid $22.50 tax; I have been smoked done, and I want to be allowed to vote; may I not be allowed to cast my vote?”
He said, “Ladies, we have no time to spare.”
I said, “Gentlemen, I think I ought to vote, and I want to vote.”
“Very well,” said he, “if you must vote, vote for the town.”
But I said, “I can’t do that, gentlemen, because there are five other ladies here, who all want to vote.”
And as I was talking, an old man, with a pipe in his mouth, snarled out, “That’s just the way; just the way I knew it would be, just the way.”
The moderator quieted them down after a little, and I said, “Gentlemen, I insist upon voting; I came here to vote;” and then I nominated one of the ladies who was with me as my candidate for school committee, and then immediately we began to buttonhole and every one began to vote, and everybody began to dive to get a chance to vote for school committee; and it took us just three hours to vote.
And then the old gentleman who was so angry that the institutions of the fathers had been overturned immediately mounted a chair, and, doubling up his fist, exclaimed, “If this is woman’s suffrage, I am agin it every time.
Here we have spent three hours on the school-house, when we needed it all on the herring brook.”
So that is my voting; that is the opportunity which we say we women are not equal to grasp!
When the question of appropriations for schools came up, there was a certain class of men who wanted to cut them down, and I was asked to speak a word against it, and I said I would do it gladly; but the moderator said: “The lady can not speak upon that subject.”
And I said: “Why not; I am entitled to vote on this subject?”
And he said: “No; you don’t vote on questions pertaining to schools; it is only a question pertaining to school committees” — and that is school suffrage!
And men who never paid a dollar of tax, and men who never paid a dollar for the town, voted to cut down that appropriation, but to increase the fund to support the poor outside of the poor-house, knowing very well that the women who paid the taxes would raise that fund.
I said to the gentlemen: “Can’t you stop this?” and they said: “No, ladies; we can’t stop this.”
I looked up to see who it was, and I saw he was running for representative, and I knew he couldn’t stop it, because there were nine or ten votes involved there.
Finally I said: “Gentlemen, I can stop my part of it, because I will not pay another cent of tax in Massachusetts while I live.”
He said: “You can’t help it; that is what school suffrage does for women in Massachusetts.
They register and swear to their property, and we know what they have and we tax them after.”
Said I: “Gentlemen, you will never tax me again in Massachusetts.”
They laughed at me and said I could not help it; but I could.
I happened to be my own master, so the next day I put my property in such a shape that it has never been taxed in Massachusetts since, and it never will be taxed there if I live there until the angel Gabriel blows the last trumpet.
It costs me more not to pay the tax than it would to pay it, and my friends say: “You are squandering your money.”
I know I am squandering my money, but if I have any money to squander I want to do it.
That is my experience on school suffrage in Massachusetts.
Now, do you wonder that every woman in the State is not anxious to be taxed and get nothing but the privilege to vote on such an unimportant matter as this, knowing full well that if she does vote it will amount to nothing at all?
Lucy Stone wrote:
It is the duty of woman to resist taxation as long as she is not represented.
It may involve the loss of friends as it surely will the loss of property.
But let them all go; friends, house, garden spot, and all.
The principle at issue requires the sacrifice.
Resist, let the case be tried in the courts; be your own lawyers; base your cause on the admitted self-evident truth, that taxation and representation are inseparable.
One such resistance, by the agitation that will grow out of it, will do more to set this question right than all the conventions in the world.
There are $15,000,000 of taxable property owned by women of Boston who have no voice either in the use or imposition of the tax.
An this is the letter she wrote to the tax collector when she put this into practice:
Orange, N.J.,
Mr. Mandeville, Tax Collector, Sir:— Enclosed I return my tax bill, without paying it.
My reason for doing so is, that women suffer taxation, and yet have no representation, which is not only unjust to one-half the adult population, but is contrary to our theory of government.
For years some women have been paying their taxes under protest, but still taxes are imposed, and representation is not granted.
The only course now left us is to refuse to pay the tax.
We know well what the immediate result of this refusal must be.
But we believe that when the attention of men is called to the wide difference between their theory of government and its practice, in this particular, they can not fail to see the mistake they now make, by imposing taxes on women, while they refuse them the right of suffrage, and that the sense of justice which is in all good men, will lead them to correct it.
Then we shall cheerfully pay our taxes — not till then.
Respectfully, Lucy Stone
Elizabeth Cady Stanton tried to get some momentum behind an organized and large-scale campaign of tax resistance:
Should not all women living in States where woman has the right to hold property refuse to pay taxes, so long as she is unrepresented in the government of that State?
Such a movement, if simultaneous, would no doubt produce a great deal of confusion, litigation, and suffering on the part of woman; but shall we fear to suffer for the maintenance of the same glorious principle for which our forefathers fought, bled, and died? shall we deny the faith of the old Revolutionary heroes, and purchase for ourselves a false power and ignoble ease, by declaring in action that taxation without representation is just?
Ah, no! like the English Dissenters and high-souled Quakers of our own land, let us suffer our property to be seized and sold, but let us never pay another tax until our existence as citizens, our civil and political rights be fully recognized.…
The poor, crushed slave, but yesterday tolling on the rice plantation in Georgia, a beast, a chattel, a thing, is to-day, in the Empire State (if he own a bit of land and a shed to cover him), a person, and may enjoy the proud honor of paying into the hand of the complaisant tax-gatherer the sum of seventy-five cents.
Even so with the white woman — the satellite of the dinner-pot, the presiding genius of the wash-tub, the seamstress, the teacher, the gay butterfly of fashion, the feme covert of the law, man takes no note of her through all these changing scenes.
But, lo! to-day, by the fruit of her industry, she becomes the owner of a house and lot, and now her existence is remembered and recognized, and she too may have the privilege of contributing to the support of this mighty Republic, for the white male citizen claims of her one dollar and seventy-five cents a year, because, under the glorious institutions of this free and happy land, she has been able, at the age of fifty years, to possess herself of a property worth the enormous sum of three hundred dollars.
It is natural to suppose she will answer this demand on her joyously and promptly, for she must, in view of all her rights and privileges so long enjoyed, consider it a great favor to be permitted to contribute thus largely to the governmental treasury.
One thing is certain, this course will necessarily involve a good deal of litigation, and we shall need lawyers of our own sex whose intellects, sharpened by their interests, shall be quick to discover the loopholes of retreat.
Laws are capable of many and various constructions; we find among men that as they have new wants, that as they develop into more enlarged views of justice, the laws are susceptible of more generous interpretation, or changed altogether; that is, all laws touching their own interests; for while man has abolished hanging for theft, imprisonment for debt, and secured universal suffrage for himself, a married woman, in most of the States in the Union, remains a nonentity in law — can own nothing; can be whipped and locked up by her lord; can be worked without wages, be robbed of her inheritance, stripped of her children, and left alone and penniless; and all this, they say, according to law.
Now, it is quite time that we have these laws revised by our own sex, for man does not yet feel that what is unjust for himself, is also unjust for woman.
Yes, we must have our own lawyers, as well as our physicians and priests.
Some of our women should go at once into this profession, and see if there is no way by which we may shuffle off our shackles and assume our civil and political rights.
We can not accept man’s interpretation of the law.
The Presbyterian Magazine told its readers that “We fear that these deluded women are the unconscious subjects of that influence which tempted their first maternal ancestor in Paradise.
A glance at some of their sayings in the Syracuse Convention, as reported in the papers, will confirm this apprehension.”
Among these sayings were the following:
Miss Lucy Stone took the platform. She wished to say a word about taxation.
She wished to urge women heroically to resist, bear the reproaches, receive the disgrace, but resist firmly oppression.
What did our fathers say to taxation without representation?
She advised woman, when the tax-gatherer came, to refuse; and when brought to justice, to reply that taxation and representation are inseparable, and keep saying it in reply to every question asked.
Mrs. E. Oakes Smith advocated woman’s right to resist taxation.
She made a motion: “Resolved, That it is the right of every woman holding property, to resist taxation till such time as she is fully represented at the ballot box.”
Miss Susan B. Anthony offered the following resolutions, drawn up by Mrs. Henry B. Stanton:
Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of those States, in which woman has now by law a right to the property she inherits, to refuse to pay taxes.
She is unrepresented in the Government…
Finally, the story of Julia and Abby Smith, and their cows Votey and Taxey:
From time to time women had protested against taxation without representation, some going so far as to refuse absolutely to pay.
The most notable case was that of Julia and Abby Smith of Glastonbury, Connecticut, who, rather than pay their taxes without the privilege of voting, allowed their fine dairy cows and rich meadow-lands to be sold, year after year, at public auction, until even the assessor grew ashamed to visit them.
These women attracted wide attention because of their plucky stand.
At the time they made their fight they were aged women, with neither brothers, husbands, nor sons.
They were highly educated ladies as well as thrifty farmers, earning by their labors a goodly income.
Becoming converted to the principles of equal rights, they carried their conviction to the logical end and resisted taxation.
When at last they were reduced to two cows they named them respectively “Votey” and “Taxey,” and it is recorded that “Taxey” was always aggressive, while “Votey” was ever timid and shy.
Lucy Stone had long since gone on record on the subject, and held that women were in duty bound to resist taxation even though they should lose all they had, and that by combining they could force the Government to consider their rights.
Dr. Harriot K. Hunt protested every year, and many others did the same.
In a number of anti-tax societies were organized, chief among which was that of Rochester, N.Y.
The war taxes made big inroads upon incomes and laid heavy burdens on all property.
Large meetings of protest were called in many places, as the women felt the pressure severely, and at last they resolved to resist.
It was in vain they struggled, however, and, after many fruitless appeals for justice, they gave up the attempt.
Strange, is it not, that men laud to the sky the historic Boston Tea Party, by which the participators lost not a cent, and yet will continue year after year to collect the taxes of unrepresented persons, and prosecute to the fullest extent of the law any one brave enough to resist their tyranny?
Men boast of their chivalry, of the fulness of their protection, yet they inflict upon helpless women wrongs which they themselves would never suffer.
If the women resist, the courts are set in motion; back of the court stand the prison, the Government, and the army.
Truly, men have but little of which to boast in their treatment of women as a class, whether the women be brave or meekly submissive.
I managed to get a copy of Abby Smith and Her Cows (by her sister Julia Smith) through inter-library loan.
It’s mostly a collection of newspaper articles concerning the Smith sisters’ tax resistance campaign in Glastonbury, Connecticut (see the tale of “Votey” and “Taxey” in The Picket Line for ).
From this, I’ll reprint a few pieces today.
The first is an excerpt from Julia Smith’s introduction:
Perhaps the public would like to learn the circumstances which first led two defenceless women, to make such a stand as they have done against taxation without representation.
They were quiet peaceable citizens of the town of Glastonbury, Ct., born and brought up there, having no idea of going contrary to men’s laws, neither have they by any means broken one of them.
Without any fault of their own, have they been driven into their present unpleasant situation.
The first time I ever said anything in self-defense to any of the town officers was in .
An overseer of the highway called here in , and brought a bill of about eighteen dollars and said it was not due till , but wished we would furnish the money beforehand, for he must pay the laborers and could get no money from the men.
I paid it, and there was another highway tax sent in of about the same amount.
I thought there must be a mistake, and did not want to pay it over twice.
I called on the overseer, but he seemed to know nothing how it happened.
He was a republican and wanted to give me some insight into town affairs, and show me how miserably the democrats governed the town, and got the late town report to read to me.
I told him I knew not how to stay, and I had no power to help it.
But he read several items and among the rest was more than $700 for registering men’s names.
“What’s that?” said I. “Why there has been a law passed, which I approve; for some men would vote twice over if their names were not put down.”
“But who pays this?”
“Why the tax payers of course.”
“But if I wanted my name set down would they do it?”
“Oh no!
it is the voter’s names.”
“What! and make the women pay for it?”
He said the democrats charged a third more than the republicans, for the democrats charged three dollars a day, horse hire and a dinner.
“And then make the women pay for it?
If they are going on at this rate, I must go to that suffrage meeting in Hartford and see if we cannot do better, for I have no doubt one woman would write down every name in town for half that money.”
To the suffrage meeting we went, the day but one after.
It was presided over by Dr. Burton, and capital speeches were made.
Snow on the ground, travelling bad, a raw, sour day; we could stay at only one session, and came home believing that the women had truth on their side; but never did it once enter our heads to refuse to pay taxes.
Not long after we had sickness and death in the family, and lost our eldest sister, the life of the house, who had a keen sense of injustice.
In when Collector Cornish called for our taxes, (not collector Andrews the cow auctioneer) I asked him why our assessment was more than , for we laid up no money and did not intend to.
He replied, the assessor had a right to add to our tax as much as he pleased, and he had assessed our house and homestead a hundred dollars more.
To be sure it increased our tax but a little, but what is unjust in least is unjust in much.
I inquired if it was done so to any man’s property.
He looked over his book to see, and not a man had his tax raised; there were only two widows in our neighborhood that were so used.
I told him how wrong it was to treat us in this manner, for we could not even raise money enough from our land to pay its taxes, but men had strength and could raise tobacco and pay theirs readily.
He said he would see the selectmen and call again.
He did call again with peremptory orders to collect it, and that year we paid over $200 to the town.
That man was killed the next winter by being thrown out of his sleigh against a post near his own door.
Had he lived, I do not believe he would ever been forced by any authority to use us so outrageously as collector Andrews has done.
My sister who has the most courage of the two, and seemed to think almost the whole of our native town friendly to us, declared she was not going to be so unjustly used, without telling of it.
I warned her of the consequences, and as we had so short a time to stay here, we had better submit; and asked how she would do it?
She said, when the men met in town meeting.
I at last consented to go with her to the town hall, she having written better than I thought possible.
My scrap book entitled “Abby Smith and her Cows” must give the sequel.
The second excerpt is Abby Smith’s address to the Glastonbury town meeting:
It is not without due deliberation that we have been willing to attend this meeting, but we had no other way of coming before the men of the town.
Others, our neighbours, can complain more effectually than we can, without speaking a word, when they think those who rule over them rule with injustice; but we are not put under the laws of the land as they are — we are wholly in the power of those we have come to address.
You have the power over our property to take it from us whenever you chose, and we can have no voice in the matter whatever, not even to say what shall be done with it, and no power to appeal to; we are perfectly defenseless.
Can you wonder, then, we should wish to speak with you?
People do not generally hold power without exercising it, and those who exercise it do not appear to have the least idea of its injustice.
The Southern slaveholder only possessed the same power that you have to rule over us.
“Happy dog,” he would say of his slave, “I have given him everything; I am the slave, and he the master; does he complain? give him ten lashes.”
The slaveholder really thought they had done so much for their slaves they would not leave them, when the great consideration was, the slave wanted control of his own earnings; and so does every human being of what rightfully belongs to him.
We do not suppose the men of the town think they have done so much for us that they have a right to take our money when they please.
But then there is always excuse enough where there is power.
They say all the property of the town should be taxed for the expenses of the town, according to its valuation, and as taxation without representation is wrong, they give permission to a part of these owners to say what valuation shall be made, and how the money can best be applied for their benefit.
They meet together to consult who among them shall have the offices of the town and what salary they will give them.
All is this done without ever consulting or alluding to the other part of the owners of this property.
But they tax the other owners and take from them just what amount they please.
We had two hundred dollars taken from us in this way , by the same power the robber takes his money, because we are defenceless and cannot resist.
But the robber would have the whole community against him, and he would not be apt to come but once; but from the men of our town we are never safe — they can come in and take our money from us just when they choose.
Now, we cannot see any justice, any right, or any reason in this thing.
We cannot see why we are not just as capable of assisting in managing the affairs of the town as the men are.
We cannot possibly see why we have not just as much intelligence and information or as much capacity for doing business, as they have.
Are we not as far-seeing, and do we not manage our own affairs, as far as we are permitted by the laws, as well as they do?
Is it any more just to take a woman’s property without her consent, than it is to take a man’s property without his consent?
Those whom the town put over us are the very dregs of society, those who are making the town and their families continual expense and trouble, for which we are liable, and the authorities make the town pay the expense of meeting to take off their poll tax, for they can’t pay a dollar; and they have taken some from the insane retreat and kept them in a barn over night to vote the next day.
Now all these things clearly prove how much more these lawless men are valued by the town than such citizens as we are, who never make it the least trouble or expense.
Such men as these are set over us and can vote away our property; indeed, our property is liable for their support.
Now all we ask of the town is to put us on an equality with these men, not to rule over them as they rule over us, but to be put on an equality with them.
Is this an unreasonable request?
Do we not stand on an equality with them, and every man in this assembly, before the law of God?
God is a God of justice; men and women stand alike in his sight; he has but one law for both.
And why should man have but one law for both, to which both shall be accountable alike?
Let each rise if they can by their own ability, and put no obstructions in their way.
Is it right because men are the strongest, that they should go into the women’s houses and take their money from them, knowing they cannot resist?
It is not physical strength that akes a town prosper; it is mind; it is capability to guide the physical strength and put its resources to the best possible advantage.
You are rejecting just half of the very element you need.
You well know that a man and his wife must counsel together to make the affairs of their household prosper; they must be one in the business, and if they are one, I cannot see how one can rule over the other, from which idea comes all the disturbance between them.
Ought not this town to represent one great family all equally interested in its government?
As it is, its government is no concern of ours whatever.
We cannot alter it if we see ever so much injustice.
No woman concerns herself about the government of the town, being placed under the men, instead of being placed under the laws, their whole business is to please the men as the slave’s business is to please his master, because their living comes from the men; the laws are such that they can get it in no other way.
The motto of our government is “Proclaim liberty to all the inhabitants of the land,” and here where liberty is so highly extolled and gloried by every man in it, one-half the inhabitants are not put under her laws, but are ruled over by the other half, who can by their own laws, not hers, take from the other half all they possess.
How is Liberty pleased with such worship?
Would she not be apt to think of her own sex?
This assembly have put such men as Judge Hunt over us, to fine a woman one hundred dollars for doing what is an honor for a man to do, and denied us a trial by jury.
This is the highest court in the land made by your votes.
No man ever had more regard for this town than our father had.
He was born and brought up here, and all his ancestors before him.
He knew ever man in it, and seemed as much interested in their welfare as his own.
He was a man that any town would be proud of.
He did all its law business for nearly forty years.
Did he ever take any of its money without giving full compensation?
It was never said of him.
Is not this the great law of nations, that compensation shall be made when money is taken from women as well as men?
But instead of compensation it is taken from us and every other woman in the place, to strengthen the power of those that rule over us.
It is taken to pay the men for making laws to govern us, by which they themselves would not be governed under any consideration.
Neither would we, if we could help it.
Some of it is given to buy votes which add to their power.
A man’s wife told me they gave her husband four dollars, which kept him drunk a long time to abuse his family.
His wife said if she could vote, her vote would be as good as her husband’s, and the men which came after him to carry him to the polls would treat her as well as they treated him.
Her hard earnings could not be taken for his drams.
And some of the money is taken for the authorities of the town to meet at all the different hotels in it, to make voters and take off the poll tax of all the poor vagabonds, that they may vote; then the authorities want to meet to consult what would be most for the advantage of half of the inhabitants of the town, who do the business and put them into office (the women are not mentioned, of course, for having no power they are of no consequence) and then these officers are furnished with an entertainment at the expense of all the inhabitants of the town.
But the roads make the most complaint to every woman that owns property; they all know as well as we do, that they would not be made as they are before their houses if they could vote.
We have every reason to think the officers of the town add what they please to our taxes.
they added $100 to our homestead without giving us any notice, and the same amount to two widows in the neighborhood, who cannot work their land, and not a man who can work it had his property raised, for he could find it out and a woman could not.
We have paid the town of Glastonbury during more than $1000, and for what? to be ruled over and be put under, what all the citizens know to be the lowest and worthless of any in the place.
We ask only for ourselves and our property.
Why should we be cast out?
Why should we be outlawed?
We should be glad to stay in our homestead where we were born and have always lived, the little time we have to stay, and to be buried with our family and ancestors, but its pleasantness is gone, for we know we do not hold it in security as our neighbors hold theirs; that it is liable to be taken from us whenever the town sees fit.
The town collector called for our taxes on at sunset — the last day and hour he could call.
We told him we would prefer to wait till we had been heard by the town, for if they gave us no hopes of voting, we wanted them to sell our farm for the taxes, for it was but reasonable, if they owned it, to get the taxes from it, we could not; and we wished they would begin at the east end and come into the street, for we wanted to save our homestead while we lived, and thought it would last us.
He said he hoped he should not be the collector then.
He agreed to all the injustice of which we complained.
The Hartford Courant printed this address, and then Abby Smith wrote a follow-up article for them:
To the Editor of the Courant:
Several having read my speech in your paper have requested to know how it was received by the town, and if you would publish the sequel I should feel greatly obliged.
The collector called a second time this evening, as we had told him our paying the tax depended entirely on the encouragement we received about voting, after addressing the meeting.
We told him tonight we received none at all.
We thought no man had spoken about it, for what could they say?
The facts must be admitted, and their not speaking of them allowed they did not intend that we should vote.
Now what would you do?
Mr. A., said we, if some men should get together and agree that you should pay them a certain sum, every little while, without your consent, and without your having the least advantage by it; would you pay it, or would you let them get it as they could?
This is precisely our case; there is no difference between us; it is just as wrong to take it from us as it is to take it from you.
Therefore we had come to the conclusion, if the town owned our farm (about 130 acres), it belonged to the men to get out of it what they said we should pay, for we never could; and it surely did not belong to us to assist them in any way, having no voice in the matter.
As to the expense of selling it off, it made no difference to us by what name they called it, expense or anything else, so long as they could take the whole.
Our money we owned, and we were not willing, any more, to take what we owned to pay for what we did not own.
Our father, when he advised us to keep the farm, said, “You need not cultivate it, but it wont run away from you.”
It did not seem to enter his mind but what we might hold it as securely as the men held theirs; but, being a lawyer he must have known that as soon as he died it would pass into the hands of the men of the town, and not be secured to us by the laws of the land, as the men hold their property.
The collector enquired if we wished to begin at the east end first (the farm is three miles long and twenty-two and a half rods wide).
We said we would be glad to save our homestead, while we lived, but then our homestead did not look so well to us as it did when we thought we owned it.
The movable property would not go very far, for we believed they must leave us, as they did to the poor man, one cow and its keeping, and a part of our furniture.
Mr. A., the collector, said, as many do, he thought women that had property ought to vote.
We said those that had none needed it more.
If they could have the power to vote against the grog shops, their drunken husbands would never dare to abuse them as they did, but they could do it now with impunity, for the town officers would not punish a voter; women have no redress for whatever injury they may receive from a voter!
If the women could have voted, the town would never have been so in debt.
It is very hard for them to earn their money, and they are more careful whom they trust, and would never have employed those men who have brought in such enormous bills against the town.
We inquired of the collector if there were any in the place that are taxed higher than we are.
We knew of one that was, but never paid any money; he took much more from the town than he paid it.
The collector mentioned but one other that was taxed higher, but said he had orders on the town to pay.
Of course they have orders on the town to pay — those that rule — and many work out their taxes on the roads, bridges, etc., and then there is a rotation in office that gives them all a chance at the money, which is taken mostly from the women.
The town is six miles on the river and eight miles east from the river, seven miles from Hartford.
And now, if my sister and I pay the highest taxes, in money, of any of the inhabitants of this large place, how does it look as to the administration of its justice?
The town is doubtless managed like our school districts in which we pay the highest tax, double to any of the men but one.
The voters decided a few years ago to have a new schoolhouse, and a contractor offered to build it for the same price he had just finished one a few miles off.
But the men rejected the offer, for they said they wanted to work out their taxes, which they did, and more too, charging what they pleased to the district, which made the expense to the women nearly as much again as what the contractor offered to do the whole for.
There is not a man but what knows it is perfectly just and right for us to have the same protection, under the laws, that he has; neither does he fear Judge Hunt, but it is hard to give up power.
Some of them mention the Catholics, forgetting that all the command which is given to man is, “Do justly.”
God alone controls the consequences.
The collector said, when he left, that he should call again.
A while back, I started looking for examples of ways tax resisters have organized mutual aid pacts to help diffuse the effects of government retaliation.
In the course of doing the research, though, I started collecting examples instead of a larger variety of collective projects resisters and their sympathizers have used in support of tax resistance.
Here are some of the examples I found:
Tax resister “insurance”
For instance, the Breton Association in
France, which organized to “form a common stock or fund… to indemnify the
subscribers for any expense they may be put to by their refusal to pay any
illegal contributions imposed upon the public.”
Another example was the Association
of Real Estate Taxpayers in
Chicago, which formed a cooperative legal fund to fight an offensive legal
battle against the tax.
American war tax resisters today can use the War Tax Resisters Penalty
Fund to defray penalties and interest seized by the
IRS.
The fund is raised as-needed by asking subscribers to contribute an equal
amount.
The oath of the Regulator tax resistance movement in the North Carolina
colony bound its signers to “bear an equal share in paying and making up
[the] loss” if “any of our company be put to expense or under any
confinement.”
Communes, collectives, and co-housing projects.
Some tax resisters have formed mutual support communities.
Whiteway Colony
was founded to try to live up to Tolstoyan ideals. The members of the
Bijou and
Agape communities live below a taxable
income so as to avoid paying taxes.
Supporting resisters as an employer
Some members of the Restored Israel of
Yahweh ran a construction business and agreed not to withhold federal
taxes from the wages of those employees who were fellow-members and who were
resisting taxes.
Vivien Kellems refused to withhold
taxes from her employees’ wages, saying: “They are all free American
citizens, thoroughly capable of performing all of the duties and
responsibilities of citizenship for themselves. And so, from this day, I am
not collecting nor paying their income taxes for them.”
Charles Kanjama recently urged Kenyans
to begin a tax resistance campaign, and said that to foil pay-as-you-earn
withholding, “participating employers and employees can enter into a
voluntary contract to convert monthly employment into quarterly or
half-yearly employment, thus effectively delaying tax liability for several
months.”
British nonconformists and women’s suffrage activists a century ago also
used this tactic. Auctions became rallies, with speeches and banners and
crowds that could number in the thousands. Supporters would pack the auction
house and refuse to leave their seats. On some occasions, violence broke
out. In some cases, auctioneers refused to handle goods that had been seized
for tax refusal.
Simply boycotting the auctions and refusing to buy seized goods is one way
communities offer support. It was part of the Quaker “Discipline” to refuse
to buy seized goods. When Valentine Byler’s horse was seized for non-payment
of the social security tax, “no Amish came to bid on the horses and, due to
a lack of bidders, they went for a good price, with the harnesses ‘thrown
in’ by the auctioneer.”
Pay cash so as not to leave a paper trail
Jessica Ramer and a
Claire
Files contributor brought this idea up. If you pay in cash
whenever you can, you give the recipient the opportunity to decide whether
or not to declare the income.
Cash tips are easy to under-report. I asked about that recently and was
told that most people pay with credit card/debit card and that the
government now uses a percentage method for tips. They look at the charged
meals, look at the number of total meals served, and then look at the
charged tips to figure out how much cash tips you received.
(100 meals served. 50 paid with card, tipping 15%. the government
calculates 15% from 100 meals even if cash tips are only 10%)
You can help out by tipping more when paying with cash or better yet, when
you pay with card, put 1% tip on it and put the rest out as cash. I even
leave a note for the server saying “this is your money, don’t
tell your boss, or the government. share it with the buss boy if that is
the policy.” This will help lower the average tip figures, but
still give the nice server what they have earned.
Use barter to avoid taxable/seizable transactions
Karl Hess found people willing to barter with him as he was dodging
IRS
seizures:
The other day I welded up a fish-smoking rack for a family in Washington,
D.C. It will earn me a year’s supply
of smoked fish. At about the same time, I helped a friend dig a foundation.
He’ll help me lay the concrete blocks for a workshop. Part of my pay for a
lecture at a New England college was the use of the school’s welding shop,
to make some metal sculptures. Three such sculptures have paid my
attorney’s fees in maintaining the tax resistance which is the reason
barter has become such an integral part of my life.
Manufacture and sell goods as alternatives to taxed products
Before the American Revolution, colonists who opposed Britain’s economic
control boycotted British products and began to produce homespun cloth,
alternatives to tea, and so forth. Gandhi’s independence campaign in India
made the wearing and production of homespun cloth central to the opposition,
and the Salt March was focused on the illegal production of untaxed,
non-foreign-monopoly salt.
An example today is home-brewed beer (which beats the excise tax on
alcoholic beverages).
Buycotts and boycotts that favor resisting businesses
One report from World War Ⅰ-era America noted that this was a technique used
by those who opposed the “Liberty Bonds”:
Efforts to prevent banks from handling the bonds have centered chiefly in
Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Missouri and
Oklahoma. The President of a Wisconsin bank has advised the Treasury that
his depositors, mostly Germans, or of German parentage, have withdrawn
many thousands of dollars from his bank because he aided the First Liberty
Loan.
These depositors, he added, had taken their accounts to two rival banks on
the understanding that those banks would not aid the second Liberty Loan.
The two banks, he reported, were not aiding the loan in any way.
Many banks have felt the pressure of German influence in this propaganda,
reports indicate. So pronounced was the movement that the States of
Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Montana recently decided that they
would withdraw State funds from any bank which did not support the loan.
Social boycotts / shunning / noncooperation with tax collectors
Adolf Hausrath writes of Roman-occupied Judaea,
The people knew how to torment these officials of the Roman customs with
the petty cruelty which ordinary people develop with irreconcilable
persistency, whenever they believe this persistency to be due to their
moral indignation. In consequence of the theocratic scruples about the
duty of paying taxes, the tax-gatherers were declared to be unclean and
half Gentile.… among the Jews the words
“tax-gatherersand sinners,”“tax-gatherers and Gentiles,”“tax-gatherers and harlots,”
“tax-gatherers, murderers and robbers,” and similar insulting
combinations, were not only ready on the tongue and familiar, but were
accepted as theocratically identical in meaning. Thrust out from all
social intercourse, the tax-gatherers became more and more the pariahs of
the Jewish world. With holy horror did the Pharisee sweep past the lost
son of Israel who had sold himself to the Gentile for the vilest purpose,
and avoid the places which his sinful breath contaminated. Their
testimony was not accepted by Jewish tribunals. It was forbidden to sit
at table with them or eat of their bread. But their money-chests
especially were the summary of all uncleanness and the chief object of
pious horror, since their contents consisted of none but unlawful
receipts, and every single coin betokened a breach of some theocratic
regulation. To exchange their money or receive alms from them might
easily put a whole house in the condition of being unclean, and
necessitate many purifications. From these relations of the tax-officials
to the rest of the population, it can be readily understood that only the
refuse of Judaism undertook the office.
A social boycott of tax collectors was practiced in the years before
the American revolution. John Adams wrote:
At Philadelphia, the Heart-and-Hand Fire Company has expelled Mr. Hughes,
the stamp man for that colony. The freemen of Talbot county, in Maryland,
have erected a gibbet before the door of the court-house, twenty feet
high, and have hanged on it the effigies of a stamp informer in chains,
in terrorem till the Stamp Act shall be repealed; and
have resolved, unanimously, to hold in utter contempt and abhorrence
every stamp officer, and every favorer of the Stamp Act, and to
“have no communication with any such person, not even to speak to
him, unless to upbraid him with his baseness.” So triumphant is the
spirit of liberty everywhere.
Harassment of tax collectors was a signature action of the Whiskey
Rebellion. An early published resolution of the rebels read in part:
[W]hereas some men may be found amongst us, so far lost to every sense of
virtue and feeling for the distresses of this country, as to accept
offices for the collection of the duty:
Resolved, therefore, That in future we will consider such persons as
unworthy of our friendship; have no intercourse or dealings with them;
withdraw from them every assistance, and withhold all the comforts of life
which depend upon those duties that as men and fellow citizens we owe to
each other; and upon all occasions treat them with that contempt they
deserve; and that it be, and it is hereby most earnestly recommended to
the people at large to follow the same line of conduct towards them.
Tax collectors were tarred-and-feathered in America, both before and after
the revolution — the violent expulsion of tax collectors was a frequent
technique of the Whiskey rebels. Tax collectors have been the targets of
violent reprisal at many times and in many places. Because of this,
governments have often had to pay high salaries — or, frequently,
percentages of the take — to convince collectors to take on the job, which
only increases the resentment of those being collected from.
During the French Revolution and its aftermath, customs houses were burned
by mobs, tax rolls were destroyed, excise collectors were made to renounce
their jobs and then were run out of town — or in some cases killed.
The first Boer War was triggered when an armed group of Boers seized a
wagon that was being auctioned after it was distrained for resisted taxes.
The Whiskey rebels threatened to destroy the stills of those distillers
who complied in paying the excise tax.
Boycotts / social boycotts of non-resisters
If a tax resisting movement is large enough, it may be able to dissuade
people from paying taxes through boycotts or social boycotts of people
who are tax compliant. In Massachusetts, a group enforced a boycott of
taxed British imports by declaring that
…we further promise and engage, that we will not purchase any goods
of any persons who, preferring their own interest to that of the public,
shall import merchandise from Great Britain, until a general importation
takes place; or of any trader who purchases his goods of such importer:
and that we will hold no intercourse, or connection, or correspondence,
with any person who shall purchase goods of such importer, or retailer;
and we will hold him dishonored, an enemy to the liberties of his country,
and infamous, who shall break this agreement.
Maintain solidarity in the face of divide-and-conquer tactics
In
Germany, the government attempted to break a tax resistance movement by
offering to moderate its enforcement efforts against people who could show
that they had limited means. Karl Marx, who was promoting the resistance at
the time, saw this as a divide-and-conquer tactic:
The intention of the Ministry is only too clear. It wants to divide the
democrats; it wants to make the peasants and workers count themselves as
non-payers owing to lack of means to pay, in order to split them from
those not paying out of regard for legality, and thereby deprive the latter
of the support of the former. But this plan will fail; the people realizes
that it is responsible for solidarity in the refusal to pay taxes, just as
previously it was responsible for solidarity in payment of them.
Keep a record of the “sufferings” of resisters
The Quakers responded to persecution by keeping careful records of
individuals who had suffered thereby. In the archives of Quaker meetings,
you can find lists of people who had resisted militia taxes or tithes for
establishment church ministers, and what property was distrained by which
tax collector.
Sign petitions and public advertisements, engage in public protests
When the American Amish were trying to resist compulsory enrollment in the
social security system, 14,000 of them signed a petition to Congress.
During the Vietnam War, public advertisements were taken out by tax
resisters. In , for instance,
448 writers and editors put a full-page ad in the New
York Post declaring their intention to refuse to pay taxes for the
Vietnam War. The signatories included James Baldwin, Noam Chomsky, Philip K.
Dick, Betty Friedan, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, Paul Krassner, Norman
Mailer, Henry Miller, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Thomas Pynchon, Susan
Sontag, Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, Norman Thomas, Hunter S. Thompson,
Kurt Vonnegut, and Howard Zinn.
Protests, rallies, pickets, and the like have been a part of many
large-scale tax resistance campaigns.
Hold resisters’ property as an informal trustee
Some resisters who are vulnerable to property seizure find sympathetic
friends who are willing to hold the resisters’ property in their
names as a way of foiling seizure. Some war tax resister
alternative funds function
partially as “warehouse banks” that hold deposits of war tax resisters.
When a frustrated tax collector seized Ammon Hennacy’s protest signs
as he was picketing the
IRS
office — claiming that he planned to auction them off to pay Hennacy’s tax
debt — a friend of Hennacy helped him make new signs, each one marked “this
sign is the personal property of Joseph Craigmyle.”
Keep in contact with resisters and express support
After the press reported that Valentine Byler’s horse had been seized by the
IRS
as he was plowing his field, he got letters of support from all across
the country.
Form groups for mutual support & coordinated decision-making
Here there are too many examples to list.
Give financial aid to evicted rent strikers
When the Irish Land League launched its rent strike, it claimed that
“The funds will be poured out unstintedly to all who may endure
eviction in the course of the struggle. Our exiled brothers in America may
be relied on to contribute, if necessary, as many millions in money as they
have thousands, to starve out the landlords and bring the English tenantry
to its knees.”
Comfort and aid imprisoned resisters
The trick to supporting imprisoned tax resisters is to respect their real
needs and desires. When “someone interfered,” as Thoreau put
it, and paid his taxes in order to spring him from his night in jail, they
thought wrongly that they were doing Thoreau a favor, “for they
thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall.”
Juanita Nelson tells of the support she received in jail, where she had
been taken in her bathrobe from her home. Her supporters took the time to
learn how to support her in a way that was appropriate to her resistance:
Two fellow pacifists, one of them also a tax refuser, had been permitted
to come to me, since I would not go to them. I asked them what was
uppermost in my mind, what they’d do about getting properly dressed?
They said that this was something I would have to settle for myself. I
sensed that they thought it the better part of wisdom and modesty for me
to be dressed for my appearance in court. They were more concerned about
the public relations aspect of getting across the witness than I was. They
were also genuinely concerned, I knew, about making their actions truly
nonviolent, cognizant of the other person’s feelings, attitudes and
readiness. I was shaken enough to concede that I would like to have my
clothes at hand, in case I decided I would feel more at ease in them. The
older visitor, a dignified man with white hair, agreed to go for the
clothes in a taxicab.
They left, and on their heels came another visitor. She had been told that
in permitting her to come up, the officials were treating me with more
courtesy than I was according them. It was her assessment that the chief
deputy was hopeful that someone would be able to hammer some sense into me
and was willing to make concessions in that hope. But he had misjudged
the reliance he might place in her — she was not as critical as the
men. She did not know what she would do, but she thought she might wish to
have the strength and the audacity to carry through in the vein in which I
had started.
And she said. “You know, you look like a female Gandhi in that robe.
You look, well, dignified.”
That was my first encouragement. Everyone else had tended to make me feel
like a fool of the first water, had confirmed fears I already had on that
score. My respect and admiration for Gandhi, though not uncritical, was
deep. And if I in any way resembled him in appearance I was prepared to
try to emulate a more becoming state of mind. I reminded myself, too, that
I had on considerably more than the loincloth in which Gandhi was able to
greet kings and statesmen with ease. I need not be unduly perturbed about
wearing a robe into the presence of his honor.
Support the families of imprisoned resisters
When Gandhi was preparing the groundwork for a tax refusal campaign in
India, he noted that the Indian National Congress “should undertake
to feed the wives and families of those who may be imprisoned.”
Study the law, give legal support
When Elizabeth Cady Stanton was contemplating a tax resistance campaign for
women’s suffrage in the United States, she noted, “One thing is
certain, this course will necessarily involve a good deal of litigation,
and we shall need lawyers of our own sex whose intellects, sharpened by
their interests, shall be quick to discover the loopholes of retreat.”
Combine redirected taxes for dramatic charity giveaways
Larry Rosenwald wrote, of this technique, “To sit on the Grants and
Loans Committee of New England War Tax Resistance, and to dispense the
interest on refused taxes to a youth group in Chelsea, a video for cable
television on United States involvement in Central America, and a
people’s garden in Roxbury is to be reminded of the ideal community,
however blurred and fragmented, that war tax resistance is done on behalf
of, in the hope of helping to make it clear and whole.”
Can you think of any I’ve missed?
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
Pays Her Taxes Under Protest
A Prominent Suffragist Serves Written Notice.
MRS. ELLEN C. SARGENT STATES HER POSITION.
SHE PETITIONS RESTITUTION ON CONSTITUTIONAL GROUNDS.
Denies the Obligations of Citizenship Because She Is Refused Its
Privileges by Reason of Her Sex.
Because she is deprived of the right to vote Mrs. Ellen C. Sargent has asked that her taxes be refunded to her.
In the ordinary routine of business before the Board of Supervisors this may seem a light matter, but the plaint has been embodied in a businesslike document and has been presented, duly formed and signed, by her attorney, George C. Sargent.
Mrs. Sargent is the widow of the late A.A. Sargent, former United States Senator from California.
She has been a strong advocate of the rights of woman, and agitation on the privilege of voting has been her specialty.
In her petition to the Board of Supervisors regarding her assessment, which amounts to $440.94, she says:
I claim that the whole of the above assessment is void and I paid the same under written protest to the Tax Collector upon the following grounds: First, that all political power is inherent in the people and that government is instituted for the protection, security and benefit of the people, and that they have the right to alter or reform the same whenever the public good may require it.
Second, that in spite of the provision aforesaid I am deprived of the right of suffrage by reason of my sex.
That the exercise of the right of suffrage is the only manner in which the above inherent political power can be exercised and made effective.
Therefore, I petition that your honorable Board make an order directing the Tax Collector to refund me the above amount paid as taxes as aforesaid.
George C. Sargent, the attorney in the case, is the son of Mrs. Sargent.
Concerning the petition which has been filed he said last night: "We shall follow this with a test suit, and are prepared to carry the case to the Supreme Court of the State.
Ordinarily there can be no repayment of taxes, but the law of California is peculiarly favorable to the interests of justice and provides that any person deeming himself aggrieved may pay taxes under written protest, stating his grounds, and that suit may be brought within six months, and, if the protest be sustained, the taxes shall be repaid.
Another section of the Political Code empowers Boards of Supervisors to return taxes if wrongfully collected, and we have therefore presented this petition, so as to lose no points.
The ground we shall take in this suit is that the State Constitution in limiting suffrage to males conflicts with another section of its own, in which it declares all powers is inherent in the people.
What happened next?
The California Suffrage Association, at its next convention in , unanimously passed a resolution in support of Sargent’s action, and “it was announced that many of the suffragists who were large taxpayers had settled with the municipality before the matter was brought to their attention this year, but that before taxes would be due again, properly worded protests would be ready for distribution.”
The Board of Supervisors denied her petition, and Sargent filed her lawsuit in .
In the case went to trial.
A number of suffrage activists attended the trial (and were chastized by the judge for their boisterous applause).
By the time of the next California Woman Suffrage Association convention, Sargent had lost her case, and she gave a talk on the subject there.
The real purpose of the suit was to test the constitutionality of the taxation of women without representation, and the decision was adverse to Mrs. Sargent.
After reading the decision she commented vigorously upon it and declared the courts construed the Fifteenth Amendment to suit themselves.
“But we will never give up the fight,” she concluded, “and there are hosts preparing to take up the struggle when we shall lay it down.”
Rebecca Mead, in How the Vote Was Won says that “she continued to file tax suits long after the courts had rejected this strategy.
By the end of her life, Sargent declared herself ‘a homemade anarchist and this Gov. has made me so.’
When she died during the suffrage referendum campaign, the flags of San Francisco flew at half-mast for the first time in honor of a woman.”
Women in California were granted the vote, by a majority of male voters, with a constitutional amendment passed as a referendum in the election.
The women of Wisconsin have apparently forgotten the story of the Glastonbury
sisters [Julia & Abby Smith], two ladies with dauntless tongue the little
tyrants and tax-gatherers of their fields withstood up in Connecticut some
thirty years ago. You do not let us vote, therefore we will pay no taxes,
they cried to the tax man; taxation without representation is
unconstitutional and wicked. Get thee hence. The woman suffragists of
Wisconsin announce their intention to play the game in that way. They have
formed a league, they will take a census of the women taxpayers, the list of
names will be published and used as a basis of a “protest to the Legislature
against taxation without representation.” Later, when 10,000 names have been
secured to a pledge, the women will refuse to pay taxes, and the questions
involved will be taken to the courts. This course, it has been reported, has
been approved by prominent women lawyers of Wisconsin interested in the
women’s suffrage movement.
This is about the worst thing that could be said about the women lawyers of
Wisconsin. Instead of encouraging the rebellion of their sisters they should
advise them that they have got the thing all wrong. They should tell them
that the suffrage is not a right, but a privilege, which Legislatures may
withhold or confer in their discretion; that the handy phrase, taxation
without representation, refers to communities, colonies, or subject States,
and has no bearing upon the case of an individual. If the women property
owners of Wisconsin, after their property has been duly assessed and tax
bills have been presented, defiantly and seditiously refuse to pay the same,
the State will in the most matter-of-fact way levy upon their property and
sell it for taxes, just as if the owner were a mere man and voter. The
Glastonbury sisters up in Connecticut were baffled and routed in their
attempt to withhold taxes in order to extort from an unwilling State the
privilege of the vote. That is what will happen in Wisconsin, the women
lawyers to the contrary notwithstanding.
A suffrage referendum failed in Wisconsin in
, but the state was the first in the union to
ratify the 19th Amendment granting women the
“privilege” to vote in .
The Wisconsin “Tax Paying Woman’s Pledge” that the article alludes to may have
been this one:
We, the tax paying women of Wisconsin, hereby agree to do what we can by
protest and argument to emphasize the fact that taxation without
representation is tyranny as much for American women today as it was for
American colonists in . And we also pledge
ourselves that when 5,000 or more women in Wisconsin shall have similarly
enrolled we will simultaneously take action by whatever method may seem best
in accordance with official advice from the Wisconsin Suffrage Association to
the end that public attention may be thoroughly and effectively called to the
injustice and injury done to women by taxing them without giving them any
voice as to how their money should be employed.
Though there was also talk of a 10,000-signer threshold and of tax resistance
as the explicit pre-declared strategy, so perhaps there was a second pledge
I haven’t located yet.
It gives an overview of the rhetoric and practice of tax resistance in the women’s suffrage movement in the United States, and explains why such tax resistance was relatively rare (compared, say, with the movement in Britain) — with a number of notable individual examples, but little in the way of a sustained and general tax resistance movement.
Among the reasons:
The American women’s suffrage movement was in general less militant than the movement in Britain.
American suffragist activists seemed more risk-averse than their British counterparts, with even those who did practice tax resistance being largely reluctant to take things to the stage of imprisonment or property seizure (with some exceptions).
For a time, there was a competing tactic — called the “New Departure strategy” — that urged women to vote under the theory that the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendmentalready guaranteed women the vote.
But since some states made tax-paying a prerequisite for voting, tax resistance would interfere with women who wanted to test the New Departure strategy.
(The Supreme Court deflated the New Departure strategy when it decided in Minor v. Happersett () that though women were indeed citizens, this did not automatically grant them voting rights.)
The potent “no taxation without representation” argument really only implied that taxpayers should have the vote.
During the time of the suffrage debate, only the wealthy paid direct taxes.
But the women’s movement largely wasn’t interested in fighting for the rights of wealthy women to vote, but for all women, on the same terms as men.
This made the taxation-without-representation argument less useful, and tax resistance less of an attractive tactic.
I’m wondering why this was less of an issue in Britain, where taxes also fell largely on the well-off (which is why, in the tax resistance cases reported in The Vote that I’ve been reproducing here, it seems like all the feminists have motorcars, estates, and plenty of silver to be seized and auctioned off).
I remember women being advised in one issue that if they currently were subject to no tax, they should go out immediately and get a dog so that they could refuse to pay the dog license tax!
One answer to this conundrum is that in Britain at the time only a propertied minority of men were able to vote, so women who agitated for the voting rights of wealthy, taxpaying women, would have been arguing for a political equality in a way that their counterparts in the United States would not.
In all, a fascinating article, and welcome proof that I’m not the only one who finds the history of tax resistance interesting.
I’ve shared several times before stories of tax resistance by the women’s suffrage movements in Britain and the United States.
But today’s story, from the Gettysburg Times, is a little different.
It concerns a group of women who, before women were granted suffrage, were untaxed, but who, after suffrage, found themselves subject to poll taxes that applied to all eligible voters.
Screw that, said they.
Cannot Jail Women For Taxes
Problem of Collecting Taxes Will Probably Come Before Next
Legislature.
Collectors Are Worried
In Some Sections Women Refuse to Pay And Collectors Are Powerless to
Enforce Payment.
Tax Collectors in some parts of this county as well as throughout the State have been having their difficulties in collecting taxes from those women in their bailiwicks, who refuse to pay their taxes, following the granting of equal suffrage to the fair sex.
In some sections the collectors have misinterpreted the law entirely and understanding that women need not pay tax, have exempted them entirely, only to find, when they made their returns, that they are held for the full amount of their duplicate and that women are not exempted, just because they have recently become voters.
However, the question has arisen as to what is to be done with the woman who stubbornly declares that she will not pay her taxes.
Whenever a woman has attachable property, it may be levied upon for the amount of her taxes, but the question is, what shall be done with the woman who is not so situated.
If a man refuses to pay his taxes, he can be put in jail, but this cannot be done in the case of a woman.
That is due to the fact that the law reads that men may be jailed, but does not make any provision for women.
Adams county tax collectors report they are having little trouble in collecting from the women.
Some of them protest verbally that they did not ask for suffrage and do not care for it, and they object to the tax, but in the end they pay it.
Other parts of the state send in different reports, and up to this time there has been found no solution for the problem.
What is a tax collector to do when a woman forcibly [sic] declares she will not pay?
He may appeal to her sense of justice, to her respect for the law, but if these fail him what is the next course?
Having none, the tax collectors have turned toward the legal lights of the state for relief.
It is probable the next legislature will be asked to afford some means whereby the law has teeth for the women as well as for the men.
These legislators who have been heard from, however, do not agree on the course of procedure and a long-drawn-out and bitter controversy will probably be forthcoming.
For instance, there are legislators who think it would not be just right to throw a woman into jail for a few dollars in taxes.
There are others who contend that since woman has the ballot, and is therefore the “equal” of men, she must suffer the same penalties as men for infraction of the laws of the commonwealth.
Lobbies of and for the woman cannot consistently go before the legislature and ask exemption for women from this clause of the law, not after all their talk about the ability of women to compete with men, talk that was quite common during the battle for passage of the suffrage amendment, they would not be consistent.
The matter will have to be settled in some way, however, for the men can raise the cry of class legislation and with good reason, if a law is passed jailing them for an offense and exempting women who refuse to obey the same law.
And certainly the taxes of the state must be collected, for the money is needed badly.
The protest meeting , in spite of the numerous counter-attractions offered to the public, must be chronicled as one of our successes.
The resolution
That this meeting protests with indignation against the vindictive sentences passed on voteless women, and especially that on Mrs. Harvey, and demands that the Government accord equal treatment to men and women under the law and under the constitution,
was carried from each platform, and the crowd appeared entirely sympathetic.…
Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard made the first speech…
A sentence of monstrous injustice had been passed on Mrs. Harvey.
She refused to pay the insurance tax.
Let her point out the inequality of the sentences passed on insurance resisters.
Mrs. Harvey was sued for a count of ten weeks, amounting to 5s. 5d. To this was added costs and special costs, till it mounted to £17. For refusing to pay a license for a man-servant she was further fined £22. But a man who defaulted for thirty-one weeks and, moreover, deceived his servants into the belief that all was straight, was fined 15s. We realise, therefore, that this is vindictive.
Mrs. Harvey was fined not for refusing to pay her tax but for being a rebel.
Mrs. Harvey was a woman who devoted her life to the help of others.
During the dockers’ strike she had taken into her own home three of the dockers’ children and cared for them as if they had been her own.
For the sake of justice — for the sake of our country’s reputation — she asked the people to help.
“I ask all men — workers or not — to send a card to Mr. McKenna, demanding Mrs. Harvey’s release.
Work for the time to come, when men and women shall stand together to make the world better, purer, happier and holier than that in which we are condemned to live.”
Mrs. [Anne] Cobden-Sanderson’s point was that Mrs. Harvey was worth of the vote as a human being.
She had worked for the great movement of universal brotherhood.
Even caddies were striking now against the Insurance Act.
But the caddies would have a vote one day, and Mrs. Harvey never.
She objected, naturally, to obey laws made without her consent; and if ever there was a law which touched women equally with men, and left them, in fact, in a worse position than men, that law was the Insurance Act.
Resistance to taxation is no new principle.
Mr. Harry de Passe, speaking next, said: “I only wish more people would protest against this insurance tax, which has been imposed against the people’s will.
The sending of a good woman to prison for refusal to pay makes it clear to us that we are living under a Government of compulsion.
It is this principle of compulsion that we must fight.
As for those who had the vote, let them not use it for the furtherance of bureaucratic legislation.
Let the privilege and monopoly everywhere be abolished, so that the people may come into their own and be delivered from the control of the expert.”
Miss Amy Hicks, M.A., who took the chair on No. 2 platform, said that Mrs. Harvey had been sent to Holloway Prison for two months for refusing to comply with the Insurance Act, and for refusing to pay the license in connection with her gardener, on the ground that taxation and representation ought to go together.
Miss Hicks then read the following message from Mr. [George] Lansbury, who was too unwell to speak at the meeting:—
“Please say that I hope every man and woman who really believes in freedom and justice will not rest until Mrs. Harvey is released.
It is perfectly monstrous that the law should be administered in the iniquitous manner it has been in her case.”
Mr. John Scurr said he had come to protest against the action of the Liberal Government in respect to women… Mrs. Harvey, in company with the rest of women, either taxpayers or working women, had not been consulted as to the National Health Insurance Act.
Although that Act has placed a poll tax of 3d. or 2d. on every woman who works or employs labour at all, they have neither been consulted as to whether they desired that tax, what the amount of that tax should be, or what should be the benefits given under the Act; therefore Mrs. Harvey contended that, as she had not been consulted, she under no circumstances was going to pay that tax.
(Hear hear.)
… They have given Mrs. Harvey two months in the second division — (shame) — because she refused to pay a fine three times more than that inflicted on any man, and they called this justice!
The same motion was also carried by another meeting:
Tax Resistance.
The meetings at Bromley continue to be satisfactory, and at night’s gathering in the Market-square the resolution carried on Trafalgar-square was put to the assembled crowd, and carried with only four dissentients.
A good many people, however, refrained from expressing an opinion either way.
The meeting was under the auspices of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, the speaker being Mrs. Emma Sproson, who is now, we are glad to say, once more able to take up Suffrage work.
Bromley gave her a cordial reception.
Another item in the same edition concerns another meeting about tax resistance:
Tax Resistance.
A most enthusiastic meeting was held in the Market-square, Bromley, Kent, on night in connection with the imprisonment of Mrs. Kate Harvey for non-payment of her insurance tax and license on manservant.
Mrs. Cobden-Sanderson, of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, was followed by two Californian ladies, Mrs. [Eliza] Wilks and Mrs. [Laura] Grover Smith, both of whom enjoy the vote in their own country and voted in the recent election for President Wilson.
Both the American speakers supported tax resistance as one of the best methods of protesting against the present injustices to women.
The crowd throughout was entirely sympathetic and vigorously applauded the speakers.
Popular sympathy is obviously with Mrs. Harvey.
Mrs. Wilks is a Unitarian minister, and has worked for the Suffrage for fifty years.
Two charges of contravention of the Revenue Act were made at the instance of the Officer of Customs and Excise against Dr. Grace Cadell, 145, Leith-walk, Edinburgh, the well-known Suffragette, in the Midlothian County Justice of the Peace Court this afternoon.
The Clerk of Court read a letter from Dr. Cadell, dated from London, stating that as she was not a person in the eyes of the law it was impossible for her to appear personally.
Mr. Henry Seex, Officer of the Customs and Excise, stated that Dr. Cadell kept two carriages, and only held a license for one.
She had been told about it, and refused to take out the license.
A fine of £2, with the option of ten days’ imprisonment, was imposed.
The second complaint was that she had armorial bearings painted on one of her carriages, and had taken out no license for the same.
She had had armorial bearings painted on her carriage for years, but this year she had refused to take out the necessary licenses.
When remonstrated with she had only replied that she was a Suffragette.
A fine of £3 3s. was imposed, which included the license, with the option of ten days’ imprisonment.
An editorial by C. Nina Boyle in the same issue gave a criticism of government and taxation that was more radical than just the basic no-taxation-without-representation argument common to women’s suffrage tax resistance:
“False and Fraudulent Pretenses.”
People who “obtain money by false and fraudulent pretenses” frequently find themselves in the dock answering for their unhandsome doings before a jury of their fellow-men.
The ordinary man is supposed to have a prejudice against being defrauded; the law is supposed to protect him against it; the public is supposed to approve of such prosecutions and to be ready to assist the law in its pursuit of the misdemeanant.
What causes surprise, under these suppositious circumstances, is to note the very large class of persons who obtain money by false and fraudulent pretenses who never reach the dock at all, and the apathy of that other class which never makes any attempt to put them there.
The class known vaguely but comprehensively as “the authorities,” for instance, is never put in the dock to answer for its abuse of public trust and squandering of public money.
Yet it has earned that guerdon as fully and as conscientiously as the absconding clerk, the bogus company promoter, the false trustee, and the confidence-trick man.
Why do not “the authorities” reap the same reward as those other malefactors?
We wonder why not?
Mrs. Harvey is in Holloway because she will no longer consentingly give her money to dishonest trustees to handle for her.
She has been adjudged “guilty” of a crime which is in reality no crime, but a public service.
She has set an example of watchfulness in the nation’s interests that others would do well to follow.
She not only will not pay for what she may not choose; she will not pay for inferior goods, for bad service, foisted on her without her consent, by false and fraudulent pretenses.
What is it we pay for? In the taxes and duties levied on the population right down to the poorest and humblest of all — who pay through their tea and sugar and the very necessaries of life — there is a vested right to a good return and to honest and able management.
These paid servants of ours — the Cabinet, the House of Commons, the Army and Navy, the Civil Service — represent the skilled labour of national employment.
Some of them get the highest skilled wages paid.
It is only the exception when skilled work is given in return for those wages.
The legal advisers of the Government, one way and another, draw some £45,000 a year.
The Attorney-General, besides his £7,000 a year, is entitled to charge a daily fee when put on to a job.
The other is only a waiting fee.
The result has been that one of the Government’s chief measures had to be withdrawn because it was not in order and did not comply with the rules; and a few days before the close of the Session a Government amendment of more than ordinary importance, affecting the shameful taxing of married women’s incomes, had to be dropped for the same reason.
These two measures both were of deep importance to women.
One was to have an amendment granting to women the rights of their citizenship; the other was to give them relief from an entirely illegal form of levying taxes on their incomes.
Both attempts at remedying injustice failed because of the incompetence of the Law Officers of the Crown.
Women are still to be refused the benefits of the Married Women’s Property Act when it comes to taxation, and over two millions of unlawful booty are still to be collected and disposed of by those guilty of false and fraudulent pretenses.
No wonder Mrs. Harvey goes to prison sooner than let them spend money of hers!
The President of the Board of Trade draws £5,000 a year.
He has under him inspectors who hold inquiries and make reports, and occasionally a Commission is appointed to make a special report.
Such a report was made, at great expense, about two years ago.
It was then pigeon-holed — a common fate of reports.
Then the Titanic went down, and another Commission sat.
This one cost upwards of £30,000. The Attorney-General cut in and drew his fees, and the Solicitor-General did likewise.
Then it transpired that there had been the former Commission and that its report had been pigeon-holed.
Had its report been carried out, the mortality from the Titanic disaster would in all probability have been less.
The public paid for both Commissions, both reports; and it paid more — the list of casualties.
The Board of Trade is conducting another inquiry now.
Major Pringle is inquiring into the Aisgill disaster, just as three years ago he inquired into the Hawes Junction disaster.
The recommendation made then was that electricity rather than oil-gas should be used for lighting.
The railway boards smiled courteously; the Board of Trade responded in kind; the same recommendation will now be made again.
Women and children have paid with their lives for the false and fraudulent dealings of the Board of Trade, whose duty it is to maintain and to introduce safeguards up-to-date for those who travel by land and by water.
Small wonder that some women are refusing to pay these “wicked and slothful servants.”
There was a fire at Messrs.
Arding and Hobbs.
Nine girl children were roasted to death on the roof or smashed to pulp on the pavement.
It transpired that young lads monkeyed around among the piled heaps of celluloid with gas-rings and blazing sealing-wax.
L.C.C. inspectors had said nothing; the manager pooh-poohed fire-drill as farcical.
No report of this scandalous neglect ever reached the L.C.C. through its inspectors.
There was another fire at John Barker’s. Five more girls frizzled to death in that outbreak; and it transpired that only a trifle over 500 of the thousands of London firms that keep young employees on the premises had complied with the L.C.C. regulations of , regarding precautions against fire.
Women are only allowed to vote in proportion of one to every seven men in local government; they cannot turn out these inspectors, and can bring but little influence to bear, for the elections are run on party lines.
The power above the L.C.C. is the Cabinet.
No London County Councillors have been put in the dock.
The Cabinet is composed of persons who at divers and sundry times perambulate the country with their cohorts of supporters and parasites, telling the gullible public, with an unparalleled effrontery of bluff, that in their hands the finances, interests, and persons of the community will be safe.
Other sets of politicians also go on circuit giving this a flat denial and upholding their own peculiar political pills and potions and panaceas.
Sometimes the winners call themselves Unionist, sometimes Liberal; they are equally false and fraudulent in their pretenses.
They draw large salaries for themselves, secure office, titles and pensions for their following; make shameless inroads for their own advantage into the public purse entrusted to their keeping, and misadminister the bulk with a recklessness only equalled by its ineptitude and inefficiency.
Commissions sit eternally, for no apparent object but to enable commissioners to draw fees.
The Housing Commission that sat at Birmingham denounced the “back-to-back” design; but houses are still built on the “back-to-back” plan in Birmingham.
The Poor Law Commission presented a Majority and a Minority Report.
Neither have been acted on, and Mr. John Burns is now upholding and extending the crying evils that the Commission sat to remedy.
The Commission on the Jury System sat for months and months; its report gave no relief to sufferers and no promise of justice; but even what it did recommend goes unheeded.
The Divorce Commission’s Report is waste paper; its only result, a private member’s Bill, with no ghost of a chance to obtain time or consideration, let alone a third reading.
The legal advisers help the Cabinet to frame laws, and the legal members of the House discuss and amend them, with the result that no one knows what they mean until other legal gentlemen, or the same ones, have been paid a second time to discuss them before a judge and jury, who must also be paid to say what they eventually do men.
The public pays three times over in this business of law-making; is it any wonder that some women are rising up to say they will pay no more until they have power to ensure more efficiency?
Nay, is it not far more amazing that they have not done so long ere this?
The Government is the Great Fraud of the age.
It and its supporters, with their false and fraudulent pretenses, cannot even govern.
No one will pretend, in this the twentieth century, that “government” is rightly interpreted as mere coercion, repression, or exhibition of force.
Government that is good, government, above all, that claims to be “representative,” must be based on the goodwill of those governed.
The Government does not exist for one set or one class or one portion alone.
No matter who elects it, no matter what its name, party or politics, all the community has an equal claim on it.
Unrest in any direction should enforce on a Government the duty, the necessity, of immediate attention to that unrest, and an endeavour to remove the cause in some fashion that will allay the unrest without causing undue friction elsewhere.
None of our governments do this.
It is the fashion in governing circles to allow unrest to simmer, boil over and create uproar and outrage; upon which police, military, and specially enrolled forces are most improperly burdened with the task of quelling riot and keeping order.
Governments that cannot govern, that delegate their proper functions to subordinate institutions, that prate of the voice of the people and the mandate of the people and the welfare of the people, but heed none of these things until driven to do so by outbreaks of violence; that keep office but neglect their work; that take pay and do not earn it, are an anachronism.
They obtain and keep their power by a system of false and fraudulent pretenses; and just as it is said in our little wars that “regrettable incidents” will continue to occur until one or two generals have been hanged, so lives will be sacrificed, children demoralised, and the people robbed wholesale, until some of the “managing directors” of our national firm make their appearance in the dock charged with obtaining money by false and fraudulent pretenses, or some other charge that will properly describe their crime.
Meanwhile women should not pay their national contributions; Mrs. Harvey will not do so; the goods are not worth the money.
The New York Woman’s Suffrage Society celebrated the centennial of the Boston Tea Party by throwing a tax resistance meeting.
Here are some excerpts from a New York Times article that covered the event on :
[Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake] stated that New-York had had its tea party as well as Boston, although its history was not so well known, and proceeded to inform her auditors that the Sons of Liberty, (an organization which existed in New-York at the time,) or Mohawks, as they were sometimes called, had procured the emptying of two cargoes of tea into the waters of the bay, having waited for the vessels which brought the cargoes, the Nancy and the London, for several months.
Boston had not, therefore, the exclusive honor which belonged to this tea-party transaction.
She wished people could be brought to understand that the demands of women to-day were not less reasonable than those in furtherance of which their ancestors, a century ago, elected to precipitate a revolution.
She did not advocate the proposition that women should refuse articles upon which they were unjustly taxed (because if they did that, they would deprive themselves of all the luxuries of life) by throwing them overboard, but she thought the time had come when the tax collectors themselves might be thrown over.
[Great laughter.]
She said that, of course, only figuratively.
What she desired was that women would not consent to pay taxes until they are represented.
There should be an anti-tax association in this City which would guide them to this issue.
The Rochester women, she said, had been holding anti-tax meetings, and the same order of things had been going forward in San Francisco.
Mrs. Blake narrated several anecdotes of vigorous ladies, who, in the security of their own castles, had defied all the approaches of the tax collector.
One lady, she said, was in the habit of barricading herself in her house whenever the tax collector made his appearance, getting into a top room of the house, and from that coign of vantage, delaying the minion of the Government with potations from her parlors.
[Laughter.]
In this case, Mrs. Blake said it was suspected that the collector had paid the taxes himself, rather than submit to the convincing streams of the lady’s eloquence.
[Laughter.]
Other instances of ladies who didn’t recognize the right of the Government to levy taxes upon them while in their present condition of bondage were given.
The position which they had assumed, she said, was no more than that of their ancestors one hundred years ago, and she proceeded to show that the very resolutions which she submitted were based on the declaration made by their ancestors in Congress in .
…[Miss Susan B. Anthony] then supplemented the list furnished by Mrs. Blake, of interesting ladies who declined any advances by the Government in the matter of levying taxes.…
The resolutions were then adopted by the meeting, and a petition to the Legislature of the State of New-York was also adopted asking them to pass a law exempting women from taxation until they were represented in the Government.
Today is going to be all about tax resistance in the women’s suffrage
movement in the United States.
To start off, we take the wayback machine all the way back to
, when the
Daily Standard of Syracuse, New York, reported on
the National Woman’s Rights Convention (ᔥ). Excerpt:
Miss Anthony read an address to the Convention, written by Elizabeth Cady
Stanton. The scope of it was the duty of property-holding women to refuse
paying taxes, when not represented in Legislative bodies.
Lucy Stone said she wanted the woman who had wealth, nobly, heroically to
refuse to pay taxes. The issue would thus be made, of taxation without
representation. She appealed that this nation should be consistent in its
declaration that governments derived their just powers from the consent of the
governed. Make your practice consistent with your theory. She advised women
when the tax-gatherers came, to refuse, and if brought to justice to reply
that taxation and representation are inseparable, and keep saying so, in reply
to every question they asked. Boston Court House was hung in chains, and
Thomas Sims, in the
prime of his manhood, was cast down from the platform of freedom, to seethe in
the cauldron of slavery, and Boston women were taxed to defray the expenses.
From here, jump forward to , when
this short note hit the pages of The Mirror of
Bloomville, New York (ᔥ):
Lucy Stone refuses to pay her taxes at Orange,
N.Y., on the old
Revolutionary principle of “no taxation without representation,” and the
collector is about to levy on her goods.
In , the
American Union of Ellicottville, New York, noted
(ᔥ):
Sarah E. Wall, of Worchester,
Mass., refuses to pay
taxes. In a letter to a local newspaper she says: “If Massachusetts wants my
money voluntarily given, she can have it by striking one word from two clauses
of her State Constitution. So long as she deems it ‘inexpedient[’] to do that,
I deem it ‘inexpedient’ to pay taxes, and she will get them only by process of
law.”
Mrs. Dr. Lydia Hasbrouck, being
unrepresented, refuses to pay taxes at Wallkill. She was ordered to appear on
the high road with a shovel to work out the amount, and did so bearing a fire
shovel, greatly to the wrath of the authorities, between whom and herself
there consequently exists a terrible disturbance.
The Courier and Union of mocked an anonymous suffragette thusly:
A New York editor has seen a strong minded woman, a “Bloomer,” in the interior
of the State, and he says her port and costume made a strong impression upon
him. She wore a brown tunic, a brown vest, bifacations, a broad, coarse straw
hat, masculine boots (nines, he thinks, for her feet were very large) and
strange to say, carried in her arms a baby. It seemed odd that such a manly
looking being should be a mother, but so it was; and the newspaper man was
informed that, in contempt of the usages of decency, she was accustomed, when
the infant required sustenance in the street, to seat herself on the nearest
door step and administer to its wants from the maternal fountain. From all he
heard of the lady, she is certainly entitled to the merit of consistency. She
is an abolitionist, and a free lover, as such folks are. Her principles and
practices agree. When the road that runs by her residence requires repairing,
she turns out with her brother laborers and shovels dirt and cracks
stone. — She refuses to pay taxes on the ground that she has no vote, and that
taxation without representation is an outrage on civil liberty. — Consequently
the tax collector seizes her property (she has a small estate of her own,
independent of her husband), and sells it to the amount of his claim. On
general training days she has ever been promptly on the ground, armed and
equipped according to law; but, much to her chagrin, has never been able to
find a militia captain ungallant enough to put her through the faceings. Jury
duty she also considers a part of her duty; but the Courts “don’t see it.”…
The Naples [New York] Record gave us this brief
note in their edition
(ᔥ):
Mrs. Virginia L. Minor, of St.
Louis, indignantly refuses to pay taxes unless she is allowed to vote.
Sarah E. Wall, one of the Worcester women whose property is to be sold because
she refuses to pay taxes until she can vote, writes to the
Worcester Gazette: “The idea of the city of
Worcester and the state of Massachusetts leaguing to take from me the little I
possess, by the right arm of the law, to pay the salaries of men who are
fattening on the spoils of the government, in whoso fitness or unfitness I can
have no voice, has always struck me as exceedingly funny, more funny for me
than for the city of Worcester. For others, however, it has a more serious
meaning, those who by years of toil have consecrated a home, around which
cluster the holiest joys of the domestic circle, for them it is martyrdom in
the general sense of the term.”
On two papers (at least)
covered the tax resistance of Mary Anthony. Here, first, is the Syracuse, New
York, Evening Herald’s take:
Miss Mary Anthony of Rochester to Make a Test Case in the Interest of
Cause of Suffrage — Local Political Equalitists Sympathize.
The rebellion of Miss Mary Anthony of Rochester against paying her taxes has
caused a considerable amount of gossip among Syracuse women, and especially
among the suffragists of the city.
Miss Anthony, as is known, served a notice upon County Treasurer Hamilton of Rochester,
stating that she refuses to pay taxes any longer; that for more than forty
years she has paid taxes amounting in the aggregate to thousands of dollars.
She is, she states, a “citizen of the United States as well as of the State
of New York, and of sound mind and not disfranchised for any crime.” Because
she is refused the right of suffrage she is taxed without representation and,
therefore, she gave notice that she would refuse to pay taxes on the ground
that it is unjust, tyrannical, and unconstitutional.
Miss Anthony’s course is upheld by equal suffragists of Rochester and her
course ratified at a meeting of the club held recently in Rochester. Syracuse
suffragists are mainly in favor of Miss Anthony’s position, and express
themselves as follows:
Mrs. C.C. Hall — I think it is a good idea and if more women would make such
an attempt it would be a grand thing. I believe that women should not be
taxed without representation. I believe that women should have a vote and
voice in the making of laws. The
Rev. Anna Shaw has for years
protested against paying her taxes. If more women were alive to the fact and
protested against it the effect would be wholesome.
This course has been tried years ago. Susan B. Anthony was imprisoned some
thirty years ago because she refused to pay her taxes. The case was decided
against her. Of course, as to the outcome of the affair it will be difficult
to say, but it is a step in the right direction.
Miss Harriet May Mills — It is unjust for women to be taxed without
representation. Miss Anthony has all the ethics of democracy on her side. She
is simply doing what our forefathers did. We thought it a noble thing in
them, and so it is with her. We are so proud to boast of their achievements.
They stand for the same principle for which Miss Anthony is working to-day.
It is said that taxation and representation do not go together, because all
men vote regardless of whether they pay taxes or not, on most questions. That
is true, but it is also true that no tax-paying man is denied representation.
I admire Miss Anthony for her courage and her adherence to principle. It is
the principle upon which all government should stand — the consent of the
governed. As to the outcome, I have my opinion of what will happen, but I
don’t wish to express it.
Miss Ada Hall — I don’t approve of it myself. I should never want to take
that course. It doesn’t seem to me that the way to improve laws is to break
them, but I shall, of course, be interested as to the outcome of the matter.
The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle put it this
way (excerpts):
These Things Discussed in Their Relations to Women.
Miss Anthony Talks
Miss Mary May Make Test Case of Her Refusal to Pay Tax Bill — Susan B.
Quotes the Words of the Forefathers.
When a reporter of the Democrat and Chronicle
called at the Anthony home last evening, Miss Mary and Miss Susan B. Anthony
consented to talk about the latest move which Miss Mary has made in the
political world, to have what she considers her rights as an American citizen
recognized.
When it was announced that Mary Anthony had written to the county treasurer
protesting against and refusing to pay her taxes, on the ground that it was
unconstitutional to tax her without representation in the government, it
created a sensation, and several women property owners are awaiting the
outcome with interest, with a view to following Miss Mary’s lead if there is
the slightest possibility of success or of furthering woman suffrage.
“Miss Mary, is it your intention to carry this matter into the courts?” was
asked by the reporter.
“That depends,” was the reply. “The main object of this protest is to arouse
agitation on this phase of woman suffrage, and get the public to declare
itself. But whether we shall carry it through to the end remains to be seen.
Of course, it is expensive, getting into litigation, and it may seem best to
avoid this, but we shall be governed by circumstances.”
“Miss Anthony,” said the reporter, “you have been quoted as stating that
taxation without representation is unconstitutional, and Miss Mary has implied
the same thing in her formal protest to the treasurer. I would like to know if
you have been correctly quoted.”
“I don’t think that I stated that taxation without representation is
unconstitutional, for I should not dare make such a statement without
referring to the constitution, but there has never been any question as to
representation being a correlative right of taxation. Taxation and
representation are inseparable. It is the basic principle upon which our
government is founded. It was the battle cry of our forefathers and a
principle of government which has been handed down to us from the
Revolutionary period.
“Our government is based upon the Declaration of Independence, and the
constitutions of all the states include that principle, if they do not make
the exact statement in words. The constitution of New York state says that
‘No member of this state shall be disfranchised, or deprived of any of the
rights or privileges secured to any citizen thereof, unless by the law of the
land, or the judgment of his peers.’ The pronoun ‘his’ in this article of the
constitution, is interpreted to include only male citizens, but in other
places where it appears in the constitution, when they want to hang us, or
imprison us, or tax us, the pronoun ‘his’ or ‘him’ is interpreted to include
women. Therein lies the great injustice. Man has it all his own way, and he
interprets the constitution and twists and turns it to suit himself every
time, whether it is consistent or not. Why should ‘his’ or ‘him’ in one place
mean only male citizens, and in the other places include both men and women.”
Miss Mary S. Anthony, of Rochester,
N.Y., who not long ago
subscribed the last $2,000 needed to secure the admission of girls to the
University of Rochester, has notified the county treasurer that she will
refuse to pay her taxes, on the ground that she is not permitted to vote, and
that there should be no taxation without representation. Miss Anthony is a
sister of Susan B. Anthony. In Rochester alone 9,991 women pay taxes on
$28,672,974 worth of property.
To Miss Anthony’s plea it is objected, somewhat lamely, that the property of
minors, aliens, and idiots is taxed, although they are not voters. Minors,
aliens, idiots, and insane persons were taxed without representation in
, but that did not seem to our forefathers a
sufficient reason why sane adults should be taxed in the same way, and they
fought the war of the Revolution upon that argument. It is not likely that
Miss Anthony will get a favorable decision in the courts, but every such
incident educates the public and hastens the day of equal rights for women.
The Hudson [New York] Evening Register
editorialized as follows on :
There is a “No Vote, No Tax” league in Chicago composed of women who are
inclined to make trouble if women are not given the ballot.
The women who compose the league give it out that they are going to flatly
refuse to pay taxes until the electoral franchise is accorded them.
The right to vote and the duty to pay taxes have no relation to one another.
Thousands of foreigners who have not yet acquired the right to vote are
assessed taxes upon their property. Women who have not the right to vote are
also assessed taxes on their property and for the same reason, and that
reason is that they have the protection of the law both in their property and
personal rights, and should contribute to the public funds for maintaining
the government that protects them.
Women will never win the franchise on any such pretext as this.
There is no good reason why a woman should not be just as competent to vote
upon any public question as a man if she is intelligent enough to comprehend
it, but that she should claim the right to vote because she pays taxes is
claiming a right that is not accorded to the men, even men who own large
property and conduct large enterprises.
Under our constitution and laws the “No Vote, No Tax” agitation is the
essence of silliness. Woman suffrage cannot rest upon a different basis than
manhood suffrage.
The women have too many sound and logical arguments, to resort to unsound
ones.
In the
Western Mail of Perth, Australia, ran this story:
American suffragists are beginning to adopt tax resisting as a means of
protest against their exclusion from the State franchise. The case of Miss
Lucy Daniels, a Vermont property owner, has attracted a good deal of
attention. Miss Daniels, who has a summer house at Grafton, Vermont, has put
the authorities in a dilemma by refusing to pay taxes while, as she says,
denied representation. Last year some of her bank stock was seized, and sold,
but the bank refused to honour the sale, and continues to send Miss Daniels
the dividends. It appears that the transfer of national bank stock is
controlled by Act of Congress, and is not subject to control by Vermont or
other State laws. The purchaser of the stock. Miss Daniel’s nephew, has done
nothing to enforce his claim, but, as the authorities received more for the
stock from him than the amount of taxes due, they may be content to let the
knotty point as to legal ownership rest. What proceedings, if any, they will
take to recover this year’s taxes is not apparent.
The laws on the Statute Book, Miss Daniels maintains, show that the lawmakers
recognise that the person who pays the bill is the person who must “have the
say.” So far has this conviction been carried that “pocket-book rights” have
been permitted to override, on the statutes, motherhood rights. Yet men are
ignoring these same pocket-book rights in the case of women, making them pay
without letting her say. This makes Miss Daniels “tired,” and the tax-testers
are wondering what will happen next.
Suffragist Leaders Assert They Have Hundreds of Followers
They Are Encouraged
Congressional Union Will Back All Individuals Who Refuse to Pay — Statement Causes Mild Sensation in Washington
Washington, . —
Resistance on the part of women of the country to the federal income tax law
despite the Government’s announced intention to impose fines of $1,000 for
each failure to report incomes will receive the encouragement of the
Suffragists Congressional Union, it is announced in a statement issued by the
organization headquarters here.
Resistance to the law, it is declared, would be thoroughly justified from a
moral standpoint. The statement, coming as it does upon the heels of the
suggestion of the Rev.
Dr. Anna Howard Shaw,
president of the National Women’s Suffrage Association, that the
“unenfranchised” women of the country decline to aid the Government in
collecting taxes upon their incomes, caused a mild sensation today in
congressional, treasury, and suffragist circles.
The statement issued by the Congressional Union declares that it does not
plan to organize a widespread resistance to the income tax law, but says:
“If any society or individual, however, should refuse to pay income tax or to
give information as to amount of income the Congressional Union would have
every sympathy with such action.”
“Helplessness of women”
Imposition of an income tax on women, the statement says, has made them
realize afresh their helplessness under the Government. To tax the women
without granting them representation, the statement asserts, would be an act
of “intolerable injustice.”
“Resistance to the income tax law,” the statement says, “would have excellent
educational value and would be thoroughly justified morally.” It is stated in
conclusion, however, that the union will not undertake to organize a protest
against the law.
The suffragist leaders assert that they have hundreds of followers pledged to
fight the income tax.
Mrs. Ellen Spencer Mussey, honorary dean of the Washington College of Law, in
a statement to-day, takes issue with suffragists who would accept
Dr. Shaw’s advice of “passive
resistance.”
“Women should remember that they receive the protection of the Government,”
said Mrs. Mussey, “and it is only right that they should contribute to the
support of a system of law and order in which they share the benefits.
“In addition to this reason, the income tax was enacted by the aid of
legislators from equal suffrage States and, therefore, suffragists should not
hinder its operation.”
The Washington Times led their article with Mussey’s criticism, and continued as follows (ᔥ):
Treasury officials pointed out that the provisions of the income tax are
plain, and that the penalty clause is sufficiently stringent to prevent women
from attempting to evade payment of the tax. The law provides that any person
liable to make the return or pay the tax “who shall refuse or neglect to make
a return at the times specified in each year shall be liable to a penalty of
not less than $20 nor more than $1,000.”
Guilty of Misdemeanor.
And it is further provided that any person who “makes any false or fraudulent
return or statement with intent to defeat or evade the assessment shall be
made guilty of a misdemeanor and shall be fined not exceeding $2,000 or be
imprisoned not exceeding one year, or both, at the discretion, of the court.”
Miss Alice Paul, of the Congressional Union, when asked as to the attitude of
Washington suffragists on the question of resistance raised by
Dr. Shaw, declared that “women
shouldn’t be taxed unless they have a voice in making the laws.
“If it were possible to resist the measure, undoubtedly we would,” she added.
Members of Congress expressed interest in the letter written by
Dr. Shaw, which was addressed
to the “unfranchised American women.” Congressman Frank D. Mondell, of
Wyoming, one of he first suffrage States, declared that he “is not a believer
in militancy whether It be active or passive as suggested by
Dr. Shaw.”
Includes All Persons.
He declared that Congress had enacted the income tax law and that all persons
whose incomes are above the exempted amount are required to make returns to
the tax collectors and pay the tax.
"Any refusal to make returns, as suggested by
Dr. Shaw, would, of course, be
a refusal to obey the plain letter of the law,” he said.
The Treasury Department has not indicated whether it will take official
notice of
Dr. Shaw’ suggestion by making
reference, to it in instructions to income tax collectors.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle impatiently commented on
the case as follows (ᔥ):
The Rev. Anna Howard Shaw
refuses to pay her taxes without the vote. This is the limit of militancy in
this country. The refusal points an argument and maims or kills no one. If a
friendly sheriff can be induced to sell out
Dr. Anna under spectacular
auspices it will advertise the cause far more, than hit-or-miss
bomb-slinging. But if the sheriff is not friendly, these tax matters drag
over such a long period that they wear out the patience of a press agent.
Dr. Shaw’s Plan to Demand
Representation Meets With Approval in Quaker City.
Philadelphia, . —
Dr. Anna Howard Shaw’s appeal
to the women suffragist property owners of the country to resist taxation
without representation met with sympathy yesterday in this city, but without
promise of definite action.
All the women of the Suffrage party holding property who could be reached
declared their complete sympathy with
Dr. Shaw’s refusal to give the
Tax Collector of Moylan, Delaware County, an appraisement of her property.
None of them would say they would follow her example here.
Dr. Shaw’s appeal carried
particular weight, because she is president of the National Suffrage
Association, and is the trusted leader of the party in the United States.
“It’s all right for those who are brave enough to do it.”
This and similar comments greeted the proposition to refuse Tax Collectors
any help in making assessments, was submitted to the women of Philadelphia
yesterday through Dr. Shaw.
“It has my entire sympathy.” declared Miss Mary Winsor, of Haverford.
“Fine! Splendid!” applauded Mrs. George Morgan, of 4418 Osage avenue, one of
the prominent members of the Suffrage party.
Mrs. Henry C. Davis, of 1822 Pine street, with the blood of her Quaker
ancestry flowing through her veins, was all she needed to promote her to
indorsement of tax resistance.
“It’s the same principle against which my forbears protested,” she said.
“They didn’t have to levy a war tax, because the Quakers didn’t believe in
war. Resistance to taxation without representation has my entire sympathy.”
The New York Call added this note to their coverage
of the tax resistance call:
Denver, . —
Colorado suffragists declared today as a whole that they will refuse to pay
an income tax because the law is “man-made and unfair.”
, Anna Shaw followed
through on her promise to resist, and the Hudson [New
York] Evening Register reported (ᔥ):
Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, president
of the National American Woman Suffrage association, has refused to list for
taxation her property in Pennsylvania. She declares that thus she intends to
prove the impotency of women’s position under existing laws. She will be
assessed by a man she had no voice in choosing, punished by a judge she didn’t
choose, and will lose her estate at the hands of a sheriff she never helped
select but must help to pay. She refuses to pay her income tax also for the
same reason, and when asked to fill out a blank stating the amount of her
income and from what source it was derived, wrote instead on the official
sheet her declaration of principles: that taxation without representation is
tyranny.
The New York Call called upon Joseph E. Cohen to
give the standard order sensible liberal tut-tutting, in “Militancy in America”:
If there is one thing more than another which throws the conservative papers
into hysteria, it is the idea of militancy upon the part of woman
suffragists.
They are accustomed to regard the ordinary channels of politics as something
with very little sting to it (which is not unjustified from their experience
with the Republican, Democratic, and reform parties). The act of the lawless
reaches home; it is personally effective.
Experience teaches that “propaganda of the dead” [sic] — where peaceful methods are at hand — is not direct action, but direct
reaction. It is not the shortest way to the object desired: it is a boomerang.
But where no peaceful methods may be used, what are those who desire
political right to do? The answer is in England.
And if the situation in America were identical with that in England, then the
same methods would come to the front in this country. Not all the preaching
of all the opponents of woman suffrage would stop it.
But the situation is not the same in America. Consequently, it is very
debatable if the suggestion made by
Dr. Anna Shaw, to refuse to
pay the income tax, is a good one.
It is no longer true that taxes are the basis upon which suffrage is to be
had. If only those who pay taxes directly were given the vote, the largest
part of the population would be disfranchised.
And we do not think Dr. Shaw
would care to place herself with those limited suffragists who think only
those should vote who pay taxes.
Still less so would she care to be put in the position of advocating that
only such as pay an income tax should have the right to vote.
If extra legal methods are considered advisable in this country, then they
should be such as may be adopted by all women, irrespective of economic or
other restrictions.
That is to say, the fight on the income tax, from whatever source it comes,
is a fight upon the part of people of means — not the masses.
And the Woman Suffrage Association only too recently, at the national
convention, placed itself upon record as being a working woman’s movement as
much as any one else’s, to now adopt tactics in which the great body of women
can take no part and for which they can have no sympathy.
So far as the income tax itself is concerned, it may indeed be taken to be a
democratic measure, or a progressive measure. To be sure, it is only an
auxiliary of the tariff bill and not independent of it. Its purpose is not to
establish the broad principle of taxing the well to do according to their
ability to pay, which is the right basis for an income tax. The purpose of
the present law is merely to secure to the government such revenue as is lost
by shifting the tariff schedules.
More than that, the woman suffrage movement would be in a rather awkward
plight if it were to be taken for granted that
Dr. Shaw and those who favor
her quarrel with the income tax do so for the same reason they favor woman
suffrage. If woman suffrage were favored for the same reasons that the income
tax is opposed, then something would be wrong with woman suffrage.
Turning the thing around, there is no connection between the suffrage
movement and the income tax. The income tax is a measure to reach the
wealthy, and those who oppose it must do so because they are against popular
government.
That Dr. Shaw and the women
generally should feel resentment toward President Wilson and the Democratic
party for sidestepping the ballot for women, is quite natural and to be
commended. However much one may welcome certain acts of the present
administration, the fact remains that these have been done in the general
plan to offset the real democratic movements of the time, both for
democracy in politics and industry.
The women have every reason for carrying on a vigilant campaign in their own
behalf, and placing no reliance in the old parties. But the fight on the
income measure is not a necessary part of such a campaign.
Better work would be done if the same spirit and energy were thrown toward
securing measures of relief for the working women.
The Casa Grande Valley [Arizona] Dispatch on
reported:
Dr. Anna Howard Shaw sent out
from Pittsfield,
Mass., a statement
regarding her refusal to pay the “exhorbitant” personal tax “unjustly” levied
upon her by the assessor of Delaware county, Pennsylvania. Her statement
reads in part as follows:
“In the tax assessor of
Upper Providence township, Delaware county, Pennsylvania, left at the house
of Dr. Shaw a four page, legal
size, pink sheet requesting that she make out a detailed statement of all her
personal property including bonds, stock, mortgage,
etc., giving in
minute details the name and character of each.
“Dr. Shaw has always believed
in the contention of the Colonies that ‘taxation without representation is
tyranny’ and has consistently protested along this line when paying her
taxes. But when, in addition to imposing an unjust tax, the government
demanded that when she make out the list upon which the taxes were to be
levied, she respectfully declined, stating that the very act of taxing a
citizen of the United States while arbitrarily depriving her of
representation was a violation of the National Constitution which declares
that the ‘privileges and immunities [of] the citizens of the United States,
shall not be abridged or denied by the United States nor by any State.’
“For the State of Pennsylvania to deny to women citizens of the United States
the right to participate in the government is in direct violation of this
fundamental law of the land.
“Furthermore when the state demands that the citizen thus illegally denies
her rights, shall in addition be the state’s accomplice in this
unconstitutional act by making out a list upon which taxes may be levied,
this is heaping injury upon tyranny. In the spirit of
Dr. Shaw declined to be a
party to an act which violated the National Constitution. She returned the
document without making out the list.
“But in declining to make out the list,
Dr. Shaw did not violate any
law for the document stated that if for any reason the person failed to make
out the list, the assessor should prepare it, but added that in doing so he
should as far as possible learn the amount of property in order to make a
reasonably fair statement.
“Dr. Shaw has witnesses who
are willing to testify to the fact that instead of complying with this
reasonable provision of the law, the assessor declared he took no pains to
inform himself, and boasted that he would make the assessment so large that
it would compel Dr. Shaw to
make a statement. He therefore assessed her taxable personal property at
$30,000.00. Had the assessor, as he was legally bound to do, sought to
ascertain the value of Dr.
Shaw’s personal property he could easily have done so, and if upon this
information he had levied taxes she would have paid them as she always does
all other taxes, namely, under protest against the tyranny of taxation
without representation.”
“We don’t vote, and we don’t propose to pay,” is ultimatum of the teachers in Independence, Mo.
Kansas City, . —
Women teachers in the schools of Independence,
Mo., today announced they
would refuse to pay taxes until given the right to vote. The teachers said
they had been notified they were assessed $50 each and must pay taxes on that
amount.
Angered at what she called taxation without representation, Miss Anna Baskin,
teacher in the Columbia school, together with several other teachers, took
the war path to let men know they could not dominate women in any such
manner.
“They don’t let us vote and we are not heads of households and we don’t
propose to pay taxes,” said Miss Baskin. “When they give us suffrage, then we
will be glad to bear our share of the expense of the government.”
Tax resistance groups have used surveys to gauge public support for a possible campaign and to reassure potential resisters that they will not be alone.
Some have also tried the gambit of asking people to commit to resist if and only if a certain critical mass of people also makes such a commitment.
Today I’ll give some examples.
Surveys to gauge support or to “push poll”
The Secretary of the Federation of Dublin Anti Water Charge Campaigns remembers that the government initially challenged anti-tax activists by saying that they were an unrepresentative, radical fringe, and that most people supported the tax:
Our immediate response was to challenge his contention and to propose a survey of the area to find out what people really thought, and a further public meeting to report the findings.
Within 15 minutes we had a dozen volunteers to carry out the survey and these went on to form the nucleus of what became one of the most active campaign groups in the federation.
The follow-up meeting 3 weeks later heard that something like 85% of the local residents opposed the tax.
The fact of carrying out this survey gave everybody the confidence that the silent majority were with us, and for those who carried out the survey, they realised that it wasn’t such a difficult thing to knock on their neighbours’ doors and talk to them and it gave them the confidence to go on to become key campaign activists.
It’s something I would recommend that campaigners try — doing a survey such as this or even collecting a petition in an area, knocking on doors and talking to people about the issue gives those people who we are hoping will become campaign activists a sense of ownership of the local campaign as well as demonstrating quite clearly the strength of feeling on the issue.
People need to feel that it’s their campaign — not one either owned by or controlled by any political organisation or party.
In the anti-Poll Tax movement in Thatcher’s Britain, a Bristol organizer, remembers that in his neighborhood group:
[Our] network was strengthened by a door-to-door survey of over 500 households.
The survey was not intended to be scientifically accurate.
Its purpose was to give the APTU a fairly accurate picture of what was happening on the ground, and, perhaps more significantly, it was a pretext for engaging people in conversation about the Poll Tax, informing them of the non-payment campaign and encouraging them to join their local APTU.
The results were interesting.
Only 20% said that they would definitely pay.
The same number said that they would definitely not, but more significantly, 55% said that they wouldn’t pay if a lot of other people in the area weren’t paying either.
So even at this early stage we knew that non-payment was going to be massive.
Over a third of the people canvassed became paid up members of the union.
By the end of the exercise Easton had over 300 members and street reps for almost every street.
The canvass was not left there.
The key to its success was the second visit.
The group compiled all the statistics on a street by street basis and many of the reps then went back, door-to-door, and told people the results of the survey in their street and the neighbouring streets.
A newsletter was delivered to everyone telling them what the overall results were for Easton.
This meant that people knew how few of their neighbours were going to pay and it gave them confidence not to pay themselves.
They had spoken to the canvassers personally, so they knew that the survey was genuine.
In the American war tax resistance group NWTRCC surveyed resisters, former resisters, and anti-war activists who had never resisted taxes, to find out about their attitudes toward war tax resistance.
They used some of the information, for instance a question for the never-resisted group about their reasons for not resisting, to help them refine their outreach message.
Almost two-thirds of those never-resisters answered “yes” to the question:
Would you consider participating in a one-year commitment to refuse a portion of your federal income taxes and redirect your taxes to a humanitarian cause if thousands joined you publicly?
This encouraging response led the group to launch what it called the “ War Tax Boycott.”
Although the Boycott itself did not generate the hoped-for “thousands,” the group found it to be a useful outreach platform, and has continued to use it in subsequent years.
Women’s suffrage activists in Wisconsin in said they “will take a census of the women taxpayers, [and] the list of names will be published and used as a basis of a ‘protest to the Legislature against taxation without representation.’ ”
Ask people to vow to resist once a critical mass of people take the vow
The women’s suffrage activists from Wisconsin I mention above also said that “when 10,000 names have been secured to a pledge, the women will refuse to pay taxes, and the questions involved will be taken to the courts.”
Another version of the pledge put the number at 5,000:
We, the tax paying women of Wisconsin, hereby agree to do what we can by protest and argument to emphasize the fact that taxation without representation is tyranny as much for American women today as it was for American colonists in .
And we also pledge ourselves that when 5,000 or more women in Wisconsin shall have similarly enrolled we will simultaneously take action by whatever method may seem best in accordance with official advice from the Wisconsin Suffrage Association to the end that public attention may be thoroughly and effectively called to the injustice and injury done to women by taxing them without giving them any voice as to how their money should be employed.
The American anti-war activist group Code Pink launched a campaign called “Don’t Buy Bush’s War” in , saying:
When there are 100,000 of us who have the courage to pledge no more money for war, we will join in an act of mass civil disobedience and refuse to pay the portion of our taxes that represents the % we spend on the U.S. military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Nina Utne explained:
There is safety in numbers.
The idea is to get people to sign a pledge that they will engage in civil disobedience by withholding a percentage of their taxes, but only if a critical mass of 100,000 signers is reached by .
The campaign’s ambitions were a little too high, as it turns out, but they did get over 2,000 pledges, and started many conversations about war tax resistance.
Miners at the “New Rush” in Kimberly, South Africa in signed a pledge of tax resistance, mutual protection, and boycott of non-resisters that included a minimum-signers trigger:
This pledge is to become operative, and shall be enforced, when signed by 400 men.
… This pledge is a serious matter.
If it is passed to-night it will only be a Resolution; but as soon as it is signed by 400 men, which will most likely be on Monday next, it will be the law of the people which must be abided by and ruthlessly enforced.
Tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns have at times made use of barricades, blockades, and occupations to keep tax collectors at bay.
Here are some examples:
There were a number of prominent “sieges” in the tax resistance campaign that accompanied the British women’s suffrage movement.
Dora Montefiore barred the arched doorway to her home against the bailiffs in and held out for six weeks before the bailiffs broke through,
…addressing the frequent crowds through the upper windows of the house.
WSPU meetings were held in front of the house daily, and resolutions were taken “that taxation without representation is tyranny.”
After six weeks, the Crown was legally authorized to break down the door in order to seize property in lieu of taxes, a process to which Montefiore submitted, saying, “It was useless to resist force majeure when it came to technical violence on the part of the authorities.”
The “Siege of Montefiore” was a publicity coup for the movement, and served as a useful rallying point for activists.
On the little terrace of the front garden hung during the whole time of the siege a red banner with the letters painted in white: “Women should vote for the laws they obey and the taxes they pay.”
Kate Harvey barricaded her home in and it took seven months for the authorities to crowbar their way in and seize her dining room furniture to auction for back taxes.
The following year they needed battering rams to break her barricade.
The Women’s Freedom League reported, of her first barricade:
Passers-by read the bold declaration that she refuses to be taxed by a Government that refuses her representation because she is a woman.
Her continued resistance has aroused keen interest in the London and Provincial Press, and afforded excellent “copy” for numerous illustrated papers.
and of the second:
An ingenious plan of protection had been devised and carried out, and the King’s officers wrestled with the fortifications for two hours before an entry was effected by means of a battering-ram!
A newspaper article gives more details:
Finally, after a heavy beam was used as a battering ram, the door went in with a crash.
The door, however, led only to a narrow passage, where a still more obstinate door barred the way.
A crowbar, battering ram, and a small jemmy were here brought into use, but even with those it was nearly half an hour before the door, almost splintered, gave way.
Later, the hall was entered, where the tax collector was met by Mrs. Harvey and Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard.
Here was little furniture visible, and it was not until a locksmith had forced the door of the dining room that the bailiff was able to place his levy upon goods.
The amount of the tax, it is understood, is about £15.
When the tax collector and bailiff came to seize goods from Isabella Harrison,
Mrs. Harrison then gave instructions for the tradesmen’s entrance and windows to be locked and bolted, and herself opened the inner front door, closing it behind her and keeping her hand on the handle.
The Tax Collector, who was standing with the bailiff inside the outer front door, asked if he was addressing Mrs. Darent Harrison, and hoped she would allow him to execute his trying task and produced his paper.
Mrs. Harrison asked and was told the names of the local magistrates who had signed the warrant, and explained that her house could only be entered by force.
… The Tax Collector protested that he could not employ force against a woman — that was quite out of the question.
Mrs. Harrison then suggested that if he did not intend to stand there till he or she collapsed he must either employ force or call in the police to do so.
He scoffed at the idea of sending for the police, but finally sent the bailiff to see if he could find any.
But no police were to be found.
The bailiff was next sent to get his dinner, and when he returned he reported “still no police anywhere to be found.”
It was a complete impasse.
They had been facing one another for three hours, and the Tax Collector seemed equally determined to “do his duty” and not to be guilty of even a technical assault on an elderly woman.
It was only after being taunted with cowardice — with fear of the consequences of meeting moral with physical force — that he finally made an effort to get control of the handle of the door, and so with the assistance of the bailiff to force his way in.
On an earlier occasion, Harrison had barricaded herself inside her home.
Supporters brought her food and supplies by means of a basket she lowered from a window by a rope.
There is at least one report of similar barricades in the American women’s suffrage movement.
Lillie Devereaux Blake addressed a New York Women’s Suffrage Society meeting in , and
…narrated several anecdotes of vigorous ladies, who, in the security of their own castles, had defied all the approaches of the tax collector.
One lady, she said, was in the habit of barricading herself in her house whenever the tax collector made his appearance, getting into a top room of the house, and from that coign of vantage, delaying the minion of the Government with potations from her parlors.
[Laughter.]
In this case, Mrs. Blake said it was suspected that the collector had paid the taxes himself, rather than submit to the convincing streams of the lady’s eloquence.
[Laughter.]
The story of the seizure of the Kehler/Corner home was the subject of the documentary An Act of Conscience.
War tax resisters Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner refused to leave their home when it was seized by the U.S. government in , defying a federal court order.
When Kehler is arrested and imprisoned for contempt of court, a dozen affinity groups maintained a round-the-clock occupation of the home through .
During the Dublin water charge strike:
People were told how to block up their stopcocks to make it difficult for their water to be cut off.
Empty bean tins and a little bit of cement were the necessary ingredients.
In a group of French syndicalists and unemployed workers rallied at the home of “two of their comrades who refused to pay the income tax” and successfully deterred the police and bailiffs from appearing.
During the Fries Rebellion, officials tried to arrest Henry Shankwyler, but were foiled by a crowd of fifty supporters, who “went in advance of the officers, and, reaching the house before them,” intimidated the marshal into withdrawing without his prey.
“Some said if he were taken out of his house they would fight as long as they had a drop of blood in their bodies.
… Seeing that nothing further could be accomplished there, the officers took their leave.
As they left the house the people set up a shout and hurrahed for ‘Liberty.’ ”
Irish “Blue Shirts” held a rally in County Cork to protest government property seizures against tax resisters, and “[w]hile the conference was sitting, County Cork farmers felled trees in the roads, cut telephone wires and made other efforts to prevent further seizure of cattle for unpaid annuities.”
At one point “police fired upon a crowd attempting to prevent the forced sale of cattle seized for non-payment of taxes,” killing one.
Una Ridley, an English council tax resister, told a reporter in :
…how the couple had managed to foil efforts by bailiffs to remove property.
“So long as you make yourself secure, close all the downstairs windows and all the upstairs ones too, the bailiffs cannot make an entry,” she said.
In Samoa in , officials tried to arrest Tamasese, the head of the Mau movement, for tax refusal:
…a party of civil police attempted to arrest Tamasese at Apia, but were prevented by crowds of Mau supporters, who obstructed the police and managed to get him away in a car.
On , at Vaimoso village, another attempt was made by a party of civil police at his home.
On that occasion the police were covered by a party of 30 men from the cruisers.
Resistance was again made, and the police and the naval party, to avoid bloodshed, retired. further attempt to make an arrest was made at the home of Tamasese at Vaimoso on .
The party of six military police was stoned by women and others, and it retired.
Barricades were used successfully in the battle against Thatcher’s Poll Tax.
In one early case:
Over 300 people turned up outside [Jeannette McGuin’s] house.
Banners were hung out of the window saying “God Help the Sheriffs.”
The sheriffs didn’t show up and Jeannette McGuin never heard another word from them.
In some others:
[I]n Edinburgh over 300 people filled a central high street to prevent a poinding… 200 activists guarded flats in the Grass Market area… and 150 people guarded 11 flats in Stockbridge and Comely Bank.
In another:
Demonstrators threatened to form a human blockade outside the home at Irvine of Mr Alex Smith, MEP for Scotland South, who has refused to pay a £50 penalty imposed for not registering for the community charge.
However, before the protesters arrived, two sheriff’s officers, who called at Mr Smith’s home, left without trying to force entry after he refused to let them in.
Jackie Moyers of the Mayfield/Newtongrange Anti-Poll Tax Union reported:
The very first poinding which was supposed to have been taking place was in a small village called Pathead…
The back of eight o’clock everybody started coming up, they actually started running a relay service, a shuttle service with cars going to collect people, and I’d say by about half-past nine to ten o’clock we had 110 people standing in the garden.
It was a beautiful day, it was like everybody was sunbathing, having a day out; we stood about there, everybody singing songs, we had the records on, a couple of them had a wee drink, things like that, waiting on the sheriff officers coming…
The sheriff officers turned up, got on the phone and, lo and behold, a police car turned up… So the police came up and asked us if the sheriff officers could get in and I said, “Well, I’m telling you, under no circumstances whatsoever are we allowing any sheriff officers into anybody’s house to carry out a poinding.”
…So the sheriff officers turned around to the police, and says “I want him arrested, because he’s organising this,” and the police says, “well, we can’t do a thing.”
And everyone in the garden, I says to them, well, “They want me arrested.”
They says, “Well, if you’re getting arrested then all of us are getting arrested.”
And by this time, the local coalman had come up the road in his lorry, stopped his lorry and blocked the street.
The two guys at the back jumped off, and the coalman who was driving the lorry, they jumped over the fence and joined us.
The local council workers, who were doing the windows at the time, downed their tools and got in the garden and supported us.
It’s worse than jungle drums, because the local baker heard it, he came around with his baker’s van and started dishing out cakes to us.
The sheriff officers were getting quite panicky by this time.
The police got in their car and left the sheriff officers.
I told them again.
I said, “You’d better get going.
It’s a waste of your time.
We know you’re not going to get in, so there’s nothing else you can do.”
… They tried to get in for five or ten minutes and by this time the crowd were getting quite hostile, and I says, “I think you’d better go to your car while you’ve still got four wheels and you’re still able to walk.”
At Bishops Lydeard, people “divided up into small groups, and blockaded every road into the village.”
Barricades were constructed and every vehicle which tried to enter was stopped and asked its business.
… In the end, the bailiffs didn’t come near the place.
Poll tax resisters also sometimes occupied or blockaded the offices of sheriffs and bailiffs.
During the Edinburgh Annuity Tax resistance, blockades were used to obstruct the movement of constables when they were seeking to arrest resisters, and barricades were used to prevent property seizure.
Here are excerpts from one government investigation of the Annuity Tax disturbances:
…I saw sledge hammers and other instruments there to open the premises and get at the goods, but after labouring for half an hour or more they could not effect an entrance.
Q: Was that because Mr. Dun used some of the metal in which he was a dealer to barricade his premises?
A: Yes; tons of metal were put up against the back door, and it was impossible for them to get in.
Mr. Dunn had barricaded the door of the room where the poinded effects were, so that an entrance could not be had… I found that the room where the poinded goods were was filled up to above the centre of the room with boxes filled with plates of iron of immense weight.
We were told that the poinded goods were lying beneath those, and that we might get at them as we could.
I sent for labourers, and had the whole of those boxes removed into the front shop until I got access, after great trouble, to the sheets of brass, which were the poinded articles.
These were then declared by the sheriff officers to be of a different description, and inferior to what they had previously poinded; they refused to take them; and the only articles they recognised were some coils of copper wire; those they took to the police office, and those were all that were obtained on that occasion.
During the Bardoli satyagraha, farmers famously barricaded their homes with their cattle inside to protect them from seizure.
When the attachment operations began, minute instructions were issued to meet every situation.
In the beginning only those who had received notices were to greet the attachment parties with closed doors.
Then whole villages were turned into blackholes, and people who could not put up with the terrible strain involved were humourously asked to undertake a pilgrimage.
When it was found that in spite of the greatest precautions, the Pathans managed to carry away carts, break into enclosures and unhinge closed doors, the Sardar [resistance commander] said: “Pull your carts to pieces.
Keep the body in one place, wheels in another, and shafts in a third place; make your hedges extra strong with thorns and bushes; and fortify the doors in such a way that they might not be able to open them except by breaking them open with axes.
Exhaust them thoroughly.”
In order to save their beloved cattle 80,000 men, women, children with these cattle have locked themselves up in small and insanitary houses for over three months.
As I passed through villages, silent, empty and deserted with sentinels posted at different ends, I saw women peeping through the barred windows to see whether it was the arrival of the japti [attachment] officer and on being reassured the doors being opened I was taken inside and I saw the darkness, the stench, the filth; and the men, women and children who had herded for months in the same room with their beloved cattle — miserable, lacerated, grown whitish by disease — and as I heard their determination to remain in that condition for months rather than abandon their cattle to the tender mercies of the japti officer I could not help thinking that the imagination which conceived the dire japti methods, the severity which had enforced them and the policy which had sanctioned them were difficult to be found outside the pages of a history of medieval times.
In Alwar, India, in , blockades were used against tax collectors:
Thousands of armed Hindu Moslem [sic] peasants of splendid physique with fighting spirit are concentrating in an area of 22 square miles to repel the State tax gatherers.
The roads by which the lorries have been bringing troops have been made impassable.
The paths are blocked by huge boulders…
“Early one morning in Karl North (Rochester, N.Y.) was alerted by neighbors that the IRS had seized his car and was about to have it towed for $11.29 in unpaid telephone tax.
Without time to grab his car key, Karl rushed out of the house and lay down under the car.
This disconcerted the IRS enough that when they stopped everything to call the police, he ran back into the house, got the key, rushed back out, and drove the car off.”
Landholders in Tasmania launched a tax strike in , and when the police came with distress warrants, “Householders padlocked their gateways, and mastiffs were chained at the approaches.”
The tax resisters at the “New Rush” in South Africa in assembled a force to prevent the jailing of one of their comrades who had refused to pay a fine.
The Hut Tax War in Sierra Leone began when a king named Bai Bureh assembled an armed group which successfully defended him against an expected attempt to arrest him for refusing to pay the Hut Tax — an attempt that a later government investigator labeled “aggression pure and simple on the part of the authorities.”
Other angry kings and people, inspired by Bai Bureh’s successful action, rallied to his side.
In , drivers parked their cars in the middle of the streets in downtown Paris, blocking all traffic for 45 minutes at mid-day to protest a fuel tax.
Property seizures were also used by the British women’s suffrage movement as opportunities to hold protest rallies or for propaganda.
Here are some examples from the news of the time:
“Miss Muller, far from relenting to save her property, publicly advertised the date of the seizure, and invited the women of England to come and witness the disgraceful spectacle of a woman being robbed by the minions of the law because she dared to ask for a voice in the disposition of her taxation.
The invitation was accepted by hundreds of well-dressed but excited and indignant women, who crowded into Cadogan Square and nearly mobbed the bailiffs while they were removing the lares and penates from the Muller residence.
An indignation meeting was afterward held in Miss Muller’s drawing-rooms and many bitter and vehement denunciations of the tyranny and injustice of the law were indulged in.”
“Miss Raleigh naturally made use of the occasion for propaganda purposes, conversing with the tax collector for some time on the subject of Woman Suffrage, and presenting him with Suffrage literature, which he accepted.”
“A very successful protest was made at Finchley on in connection with the seizure of property belonging to Miss [Sarah] Benett, late hon. treasurer of the W.F.L. By courtesy of the auctioneer, Miss Bennet, was allowed to explain her reason for resisting payment of taxes.
A very successful open-air meeting was held afterwards.”
Because she is deprived of the right to vote Mrs. Ellen C. Sargent has asked that her taxes be refunded to her.
In the ordinary routine of business before the Board of Supervisors this may seem a light matter, but the plaint has been embodied in a businesslike document and has been presented, duly formed and signed, by her attorney, George C. Sargent.
