Susan B. Anthony
Voted illegally in 1872, was fined 100 dollars, and never paid a cent
Susan Brownell Anthony was born in Adams, Massachusetts, in 1820 to a Quaker family that took the equality of women more or less for granted. She taught school for fifteen years, earning a fraction of what male teachers were paid, and moved into reform work through the temperance movement. When she rose to speak at a temperance meeting in 1852 she was told that women were there to listen, not to speak. She left and formed a women's society instead.
She met Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1851 and the two became lifelong partners in the cause: Stanton, tied to home by seven children, wrote the speeches, and Anthony, who never married, delivered them. She travelled constantly, by train, sleigh and wagon, speaking in courthouses and barns, and was hanged in effigy and pelted with eggs. In 1869 they founded the National Woman Suffrage Association.
In November 1872 she persuaded election inspectors in Rochester, New York, to let her register and vote. She was arrested, and at her trial the judge directed the jury to find her guilty without deliberating. He fined her one hundred dollars. She told him she would never pay it, and she never did; the government did not pursue it, which denied her the appeal she wanted.
At her last public appearance in 1906, aged 86, she told a suffrage convention that "failure is impossible". The Nineteenth Amendment, which gave American women the vote in 1920, was known for years as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.