Katie Polfleit locations an “I Voted” sticker on the grave of ladies’s rights advocate Susan B. Anthony in Rochester, N.Y., on Nov. 2, 2020. The cemetery has put a plastic cowl on the gravestone so voters can place stickers on it with out damaging the grave.
Ted Shaffrey/AP
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Ted Shaffrey/AP
When People take to the polls on Tuesday, they are going to be following within the footsteps of famed suffragette Susan B. Anthony, who on Nov. 5, 1872, forged an unlawful poll to make her voice heard as a full citizen of america.
Anthony was born right into a Quaker household in Adams, Mass., in 1820, a full century earlier than American ladies had been formally granted the appropriate to vote.
As a younger lady, she devoted herself to social justice — campaigning as a young person towards the observe of slavery, and later as an grownup, joined forces with Elizabeth Cady Stanton to additional the reason for ladies’s rights.
For 45 years, Anthony traveled throughout the nation, delivering hundreds of speeches in assist of ladies’s suffrage, going through ridicule and cruelty from those that took offense to her demand for civil rights.
When the fifteenth Modification was handed to remove voting discrimination on the premise of race however not gender, Anthony — now controversially — took offense to the sentiment that Black males could be allowed to vote earlier than white ladies.
“I’ll lower off this proper arm of mine earlier than I’ll ever work or demand the poll for the Negro and never the girl,” Anthony as soon as famously mentioned.
Regardless of relentless campaigning for girls’s rights to vote, Congress continued to disregard their calls for.
So within the 1872 election race between the incumbent candidate Ulysses S. Grant versus Horace Greeley, a defiant Anthony and 14 different ladies went to their native polling station in Rochester, N.Y., and demanded ballots on the premise that they had been taxpaying residents with as a lot company as any man.
“She needed to know if underneath [the 14th Amendment] she was a citizen and had a proper to vote,” an election official reported Anthony as saying. “At the moment, Mr. Warner [the Supervisor of Elections] mentioned, ‘younger man, how are you going to get round that? I believe you’ll have to register their names’—or one thing to that impact.”
Two weeks later, Anthony was arrested at her house, the place she reportedly told the marshal to handcuff her “as they’d arrest a person.”
Although she died in 1906 earlier than her dream of full ladies’s suffrage had been realized, she is remembered as a champion of ladies’s rights.
In 2016, when Hillary Clinton ran for president as the primary feminine nominee of the Democratic Get together, ladies flocked by the thousands to Anthony’s burial website in Rochester and lined her gravestone of their “I Voted” stickers.
Now, as Vice President Harris hopes to make historical past as the primary lady elected to the White Home, already ladies are patching Anthony’s gravestone with voting stickers to honor her reminiscence.
