Tuesday 8 November 2016

Voting for Susan


Apparently, when you vote in the US you get a sticker which says "I Voted".
Some people have been going to the grave of Susan B Anthony to put their stickers on her gravestone.
So who was Susan B Anthony?
I've been looking her up, and she was pretty awesome.
Born into a Quaker family in 1820, she campaigned against slavery, in favour of Temperance, and for equal rights for women and African Americans. She worked with Elizabeth Cady Stanton to campaign for women's right to vote.
In 1872, she was arrested for voting in the presidential election in her home town of Rochester, New York. She refused to pay the fine.
A celebrity in her later life, thanks to her tireless campaigning, she was invited to spend her 80th birthday at the White House with President McKinley. She died at the age of 86, in 1906, and is buried at Rochester, having seen many changes for the better in the position of women during her life.
In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote, was ratified - and was widely known as the Susan B Anthony Amendment. Since then, her face has been on postage stamps and a dollar coin.
But she never saw a woman running for President, which leads me to this extract from the Wikipedia page:

"In 2016, Lovely Warren, the mayor of Rochester, put a red, white and blue sign next to Anthony's grave the day after Hillary Clinton obtained the nomination at the Democratic National Convention; the sign stated, "Dear Susan B., we thought you might like to know that for the first time in history, a woman is running for president representing a major party. 144 years ago, your illegal vote got you arrested. It took another 48 years for women to finally gain the right to vote. Thank you for paving the way."[203] The city of Rochester put pictures of the message on Twitter and requested that residents go to Anthony's grave to sign it.[203]"

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