mount hope cemetery

Travel – Seneca Falls, NY

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Today is the third day of Women’s History Month. Typically, there’d be a proclamation from Washington, Congress and/or the White House, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for that. It was clear last week when the Olympics closed for this year that the White House would only be acknowledging the white men on the men’s hockey team. Yes, they did win the gold medal, and should be congratulated, but (or is it and) the women’s hockey team also won the gold as did ten other US athletes or teams. I will say that the last time that the men’s hockey team won the gold was right here in New York forty-six years ago. They were truly a ragtag team of true amateurs. I wasn’t even in high school. The women’s team, on the other hand competed in their first Olympics in 1998, and have won a medal in every Olympics they participated in.

You may think from that introduction that this is going to be a diatribe against misogyny, for Title IX, against discrimination, for DEI (which benefits everyone), but it’s not. It is, however, the world we live in currently with Congress and the White House attempting to take women back to their dark ages. We will not let them. We are not going back.

I begin this Women’s History month with that declaration: we are not going back. We are 50% of the world. We are equal. Even though we’ve earned it, we do not need your respect, but we will not be mocked.

One way to commemorate and celebrate women is to support their spaces and we can do that by using our time and our dollars and visiting some of those spaces.

We have traveled to Canada yearly for the past several years, and each time we’ve driven west towards Niagara Falls and the Rainbow Bridge, we pass a sign on the New York State Thruway that declares the Women’s Rights Historical National Park, and every time I see that sign, I say (out loud), I want to go there one day. And maybe one day, I will.

Links

Begin at the Visitors’ Center and visit the historic houses there that include:

  • Wesleyan  Methodist Church
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton House
  • M’Clintock House
  • Richard Hunt House
  • Amelia Bloomer House

There is also a trail through the area that includes the following sites:

Happy Birthday Susan B!!!

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Happy Birthday!

It’s been 100 years since women were given the right to vote, and as I’ve written previously we’ve come so far, and yet, not so much.

Susan B. Anthony was born today in 1820 in nearby Adams, Massachusetts. I say nearby because I live several hours from her birthplace and her final resting place in Rochester, New York. Last year, in fact, my family and I were able to visit her grave site, something that felt very meaningful to both my daughter and me in part of the run up to one hundred years of women’s suffrage and women receiving the vote.

Susan B. Anthony’s grave site along with other Anthony family members in Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester, New York. (c)2019-2020

Hers was a family of activism and social reform, from abolition and women’s rights and suffrage to opening their homestead up to meetings of many, including Frederick Douglas. She and Douglas were close friends and anti-slavery collaborators (and are buried in the same cemetary), and she is known to have helped some with Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad. Tubman’s homestead is nearby in Auburn, New York.

In 1872, Susan was arrested at the house she shared with her sister in Rochester, for illegally voting. She was convicted and upon refusing to pay the fine, the authorities ceased any further action.

She became the first woman citizen to be featured on a US monetary coin when her image was portrayed on the dollar coin in 1979. I believe I still have one or two somewhere.

If she were alive today, I imagine she’d be astounded that we still haven’t gotten an Equal Rights Amendment in our Constitution. Perhaps, not astounded as much as disappointed. Hopefully, that can soon be rectified as well as ratified before another one hundred years passes. After all, we are more than half the citizenry; we should have at least the equal rights of men.