AMHERST – With a woman heading a major party ticket for the first time in Tuesday’s presidential election, the graves of famed suffrage activists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton became popular places for people to affix their “I voted today” stickers.
Knowing that she couldn’t get from Amherst to Anthony’s cemetery in Rochester, New York or Stanton’s cemetery in New York City, Meg Gage said she did the next best thing after she cast her vote for Hillary Clinton. She placed her sticker on Emily Dickinson’s headstone at West Cemetery.
Gage, of Amherst, said there are many who theorize that Dickinson regularly donned a white dress because she supported her contemporaries in the women’s rights movement.
“She always wore white because she was in alliance with the suffragettes,” Gage said.
While Gage was sure someone else would have put a sticker on Dickinson’s grave before she did, all that she found at the site were the usual materials left behind in Dickinson’s memory, such as flowers and poems.
In addition to people flocking to the final resting places of Stanton and Anthony, both whom founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, other voters were putting stickers on the graves of civil rights activist Sojourner Truth, in Battle Creek, Michigan, and suffragist Ida B. Wells in Chicago.
Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.
