When Americans go to the polls on Tuesday, they will be following in the footsteps of the famous suffragette Susan B. Anthony, who on November 5, 1872, voted illegally to make her voice heard as a full citizen of the United States.

Anthony was born into a Quaker family in Adams, Massachusetts in 1820, a full century before American women were officially given the right to vote.

As a young woman, she dedicated herself to social justice – campaigning as a teenager against the practice of slavery, and later as an adult, joining forces with Elizabeth Cady Stanton to advance the cause of women’s rights.

For 45 years, Anthony traveled the country giving thousands of speeches in support of women’s suffrage, facing ridicule and cruelty from those who took offense to her plea for civil rights.

When the 15th Amendment was passed to eliminate voting discrimination based on race but not gender, Anthony—now controversially—was offended by the sentiment that black men would be allowed to vote before white women.

“I will cut off my right arm before I work or ask for the ballot for the negro and not for the woman,” Anthony once said.

Despite relentless campaigns for women’s suffrage, Congress continued to ignore their demands.

So, in the 1872 election race between incumbent Ulysses S. Grant and Horace Greeley, a defiant Anthony and 14 other women went to the local polling station in Rochester, NY, and demanded ballots on the grounds that they were paying citizens with as much. agency like any human.

“She wanted to know if under the (14th Amendment) she was a citizen and had the right to vote,” an election official Anthony said. “At this point Mr. Warner (Supervisor of Elections) said, ‘Young man, how are you going to get around? I think you’ll have to register their names—or something like that.

Two weeks later, Anthony was arrested at her home, where she said the marshal to handcuff her “as one would arrest a man.”

Although she died in 1906 before her dream of women’s suffrage was realized, she is remembered as a champion of women’s rights.

In 2016, when Hillary Clinton ran for president as the first female nominee of the Democratic Party, women gathered by the thousands at Anthony’s burial site in Rochester and covered his headstone in “I Voted” stickers.

Now, as Vice President Harris hopes to make history as the first woman elected to the White House, women are already patching up Anthony’s tombstone with voting stickers to honor your memory.

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