Susan B. Anthony relative reflects on historic election

On Election Day hundreds of women lined up to place “I Voted” stickers on Susan B. Anthony’s tombstone in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York. By the end of the day, only her name was visible and the stickers seemed to bloom into a red, white and blue bouquet.

Winifred Fiedler found herself deeply moved by the story, and not just because the 94-year-old Kettering woman is a lifelong feminist. “I felt a tremendous sense of family pride,” she said. Susan B. Anthony was first cousin to her grandfather, Daniel Anthony. Fiedler’s mother, Charlotte, grew up in a household where Anthony was a frequent visitor and world figures such as Frederick Douglass graced the dinner table.

“I grew up hearing stories from my mother about how Susan would come for dinner after traveling on a train, or how she went on horseback to give a speech,” Fiedler said. “She was six feet tall and dressed with lace and ruffles at her throat.”

Fiedler’s mother knew that Anthony was an important person — “the Grand Lady,” as some family members called her. But she didn’t have a big head about her accomplishments. She deflected praise when people applauded for her. “It’s not me they’re applauding, it’s the cause,” she once told her sister Mary.

Anthony was arrested in 1872 for attempting to vote. She was tried and convicted, but refused to pay the $100 fine. “The policeman came to the house to arrest her because she tried to vote,” Fiedler said.

Anthony could relate, in other words, to the scorn heaped upon the first woman candidate for the White House, to the chants of “Lock her up!” and worse. “She faced vicious attacks as bad as what Hillary was facing,” Fiedler said.

The two history-makers also shared “an amazing amount of energy,” Fiedler said. But Anthony traveled in a lot less comfort than Clinton, she noted: “She had a wooden trunk for her things. She took trains or a horse-drawn coach over dirt roads. There was no air conditioning and it wasn’t heated either in the winter. The family would talk about how dirty she would get just from travel.”

But that never stopped her. Anthony appeared before Congress every year from 1869 until her death in 1906, lobbying for an amending allowing women to vote. She didn’t live to see women achieve suffrage in 1920, but the 19th amendment was commonly referred to as the “Susan B. Anthony amendment.”

Fiedler was thrilled by Clinton’s nomination. “I never thought I would live to see the day that we might have a woman as president of the United States,” she said. “But once upon a time it would have seemed ridiculous for a man to land on the moon. And when I went to Radcliffe in 1939, I wasn’t able to use the Harvard library and I wasn’t welcome in any of the academic buildings unless I had a male escort.”

Fiedler talks often with her four daughters about women’s roles and the discrimination faced by women during Susan B. Anthony’s lifetime.

“I’m aware that my mother is something of a phenomenon,” said her daughter, Carol Fiedler of Kettering. “People really respond to her.”

But it’s not for her mother or even her famous relative that Carol served as a volunteer staff member for the Kettering Clinton campaign headquarters. “It’s less about Susan and more about my nieces, and all the young women I know and what this could mean for them. That generation of Millennials assumes that of course a woman could be president. But I don’t think so until it actually happens. In order to break the glass ceiling, you must actually break it.”

When I visited Fiedler Monday night, on the eve of the historic election, Winifred Fiedler confessed to being nervous: “I feel like I’m in a state of suspended animation.”

The election didn’t turn out as she hoped, but Fiedler was moved by Clinton’s concession speech, particularly her words “to all the little girls watching…never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance to pursue your dreams.”

“Susan might have done something like that,” Fiedler said. “I can picture her saying, ‘Let’s keep going; the objective is worth it. We have a cause and we cannot let it go.’”

Contact this columnist at maryjomccarty@gmail.com.

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