“Now He Knows Who Killed Kennedy”

This past Tuesday, during the presidential election when everyone thought Hillary would win, scores of voters covered Susan B. Anthony’s gravestone  with “I Voted” stickers. The woman’s suffrage activist (I mean, suffrage for white women; not true suffrage) obviously believed women should and could vote, but could she have imagined voting for a woman president?

As an amateur historian, I like to think about this in the context of history. Susan B. Anthony died in 1906. Imagine if she could see all that has happened in that time.* The world began to fly. Post-Its and the Xerox machine were invented. Tina Turner happened. Then a woman president became a strong possibility. I like to imagine that, when people were coming up and putting stickers on her headstone, she could all that in the past 100 years of history flash by her.

*When my grandpa died, I remember someone saying, after his funeral, “Well, now he knows who killed Kennedy.”  I obviously don’t know, though I hope, that after we die we get all the answers to life’s mysteries. Like when Lost promised all the riddles would make sense, except for real.