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There's a tradition of leaving "I Voted" stickers on her gravestone on Election Day.
On this Election Day and in the days leading up to it, thousands of people have been visiting suffragist Susan B. Anthony’s grave and leaving “I Voted” stickers to honor her.
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Anthony voted illegally in the election of November 5, 1872, when women were not allowed to vote. She cast her vote in Rochester, N.Y., and several other women joined her. She was arrested two weeks later, tried and convicted, and fined $100.
The 2016 election, in which Hillary Clinton was the first woman to be a major-party nominee for president, saw many women visiting Anthony’s grave at Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester and putting the “I Voted” stickers on her headstone and that of her sister Mary, also a suffragist. This year spurred women and allies to do so again, given that Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee for president and that Election Day falls on November 5.
“It’s a significant day,” local resident Paula Dietz told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. Placing the sticker was the first thing she did after voting Tuesday.
“Voting is as important as breathing,” added Dietz’s partner, Judy Bowers, who has volunteered in several elections and whose mother was a longtime election official.
After voters started leaving stickers in 2016, cemetery workers realized the stickers could damage the headstones, the Democrat and Chronicle notes. So now they have placed clear plastic covers over the stone to protect it.
Women did not win the vote until 1920, 14 years after Anthony died.
Anthony’s legacy is not without complications. When she voted, she invoked the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted Black men the right to vote when it was ratified in 1868. She, along with some other suffragists, objected to Black men getting voting rights before women. Although she was friendly with Black civil rights leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Ida Mae Wells, she excluded Black women from suffrage negotiations. Some suffragists were more inclusive.
Even though the Fourteenth Amendment gave voting rights to all male citizens regardless of race and the Nineteenth Amendment granted the right to all women, Black men and women both encountered many barriers to voting in southern states, such as poll taxes and literacy tests. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed such barriers.
Still, the legacy of Anthony and the suffragists is important to many. Visiting her grave “was so important to me for so many reasons: As a woman, as a survivor of sexual assault and domestic violence, as an advocate for others,” Hannah Kujawski told the Democrat and Chronicle. “This is our lives. The right to our own bodies is up for debate. ... But women are fierce. They challenge people to grow and find a way forward together. It’s something I’m really proud of.”
