When Americans take to the polls on Tuesday, they will be following in the footsteps of famed suffragette Susan B. Anthony, who on Nov. 5, 1872, cast an illegal ballot to make her voice heard as a full citizen of the United States.
Anthony was born into a Quaker family in Adams, Mass., in 1820, a full century before American women were officially granted the right to vote.
As a young woman, she dedicated herself to social justice — campaigning as a teenager against the practice of slavery, and later as an adult, joined forces with Elizabeth Cady Stanton to further the cause of women’s rights.
For 45 years, Anthony traveled across the country, delivering thousands of speeches in support of women’s suffrage, facing ridicule and cruelty from those who took offense to her demand for civil rights.
When the 15th Amendment was passed to eliminate voting discrimination on the basis of race but not gender, Anthony — now controversially — took offense to the sentiment that Black men would be allowed to vote before white women.
“I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman,” Anthony once famously said.
Despite relentless campaigning for women’s rights to vote, Congress continued to ignore their demands.
So in the 1872 election race between the incumbent candidate Ulysses S. Grant versus Horace Greeley, a defiant Anthony and 14 other women went to their local polling station in Rochester, N.Y., and demanded ballots on the basis that they were taxpaying citizens with as much agency as any man.
“She wanted to know if under [the 14th Amendment] she was a citizen and had a right to vote,” an election official reported Anthony as saying. “At this time, Mr. Warner [the Supervisor of Elections] said, ‘young man, how are you going to get around that? I think you will have to register their names’—or something to that effect.”
Two weeks later, Anthony was arrested at her home, where she reportedly told the marshal to handcuff her “as they would arrest a man.”
Though she died in 1906 before her dream of full women’s suffrage had been realized, she is remembered as a champion of women’s rights.
In 2016, when Hillary Clinton ran for president as the first female nominee of the Democratic Party, women flocked by the thousands to Anthony’s burial site in Rochester and covered her headstone in their "I Voted" stickers.
Now, as Vice President Harris hopes to make history as the first woman elected to the White House, already women are patching Anthony’s headstone with voting stickers to honor her memory.
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