It was November 5, 1872. Over 150 years ago, women’s rights activist Susan B Anthony walked into a polling station in the United States and did something women were not legally allowed to do at the time: vote. Her act of defiance would land her in court but also become a landmark moment in the fight for women’s suffrage.
Anthony Museum & House. Born on February 15, 1820, in Adams, Massachusetts, Susan B Anthony was the second of seven siblings.
Her family became actively involved in the anti-slavery movement after moving to Rochester, New York, according to the National Susan B.
As many as 12,000 voters visited Mount Hope Cemetery that day to pay tribute and mark the first time Americans could vote for a woman presidential candidate from a major political party, Hillary Clinton, according to the Associated Press.
Since 2016, voters have been putting their “I Voted” stickers on Susan Anthony and her sister Mary Anthony’s headstone in Rochester, New York.
The ‘illegal’ vote on November 5, 1872
In 1851, Anthony met writer-activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, known for co-founding the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls. The rift produced two rival organisations, which reunited in 1890 as National American Woman Suffrage Association. Anthony became president of the merged body in 1892. Anthony met US president Theodore Roosevelt in 1905, to discuss introducing a women’s suffrage amendment in congress.
They launched the newspaper ‘The Revolution’, which covered suffrage, equal pay, marriage and divorce, and labour rights, according to National Women’s History Museum. The two began a partnership that lasted the rest of their lives. He then described how the supervisor of elections, responded, “At this time, Mr. I think you will have to register their names’—or something to that effect.
She asked whether the 14th Amendment made her a citizen with a right to vote, according to NPR. “She wanted to know if under (the 14th Amendment) she was a citizen and had a right to vote,” an election official said. Warner (the supervisor) said, ‘young man, how are you going to get around that? “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman,” Anthony famously said at the time. She delivered her famous “Failure Is Impossible” speech at her 86th birthday celebration in DC, and died the same year in March.
