Susan B. Anthony is perhaps the most famous advocate for women’s voting rights in American history. She traveled around the country advocating for a constitutional amendment granting women’s suffrage. In 1872, she was thrown in jail for attempting to vote in New York. Anthony died in 1906, just 14 years before the passage of the 19th Amendment vindicated her life’s work.
Susan B. Anthony’s grave is covered in “I Voted” stickers in honor of Hillary Clinton
Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here.
Today, 110 years after Anthony’s death, a woman is the favorite to win the American presidency. And people are paying homage at Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York, where Anthony is buried. Dozens of people have come by, covering her tombstone in “I Voted” stickers. You can watch people come by live in the following feed, courtesy of Rochester’s News 8 WROC, leaving stickers and paying their respects:
Whoever you’re voting for, it’s hard not to be moved by the sight of women of all ages coming by to remember an icon of women’s rights. To recognize that democracy is not automatically equal, that women and black Americans had to fight and suffer and die to exercise the most basic right in a democracy.
And now, the first woman to win a major party nomination is running to succeed the first black president. It’s hard not to be a little in awe of that — to marvel at what Anthony and others like her helped accomplish.
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