Is Susan B. Anthony receiving modern cultus?

ROCHESTER, N.Y. – Women waited in line for hours to leave an offering at a sacred burial place. While some women were local, many had traveled great distances just to be here on this special day. The women came to give thanks, to strengthen hope for the future, and to honor a spiritual ancestress. They were not directed to do so by any religious authority. They just started coming, every year, on the same date. It started with a few, then grew over the years until the numbers climbed into the hundreds.

This could describe the start of any spontaneously created cultus practice throughout recorded history. A person becomes a myth. The myth becomes a focus of veneration. Veneration becomes a sustained religious practice.

In this case, the description isn’t that of an event in ancient Greece, but rather one in present day New York. While many women participating would deny taking part in a religious pilgrimage to worship an ancestral Hero, their actions can be classified as exactly that by anthropologists.

Pilgrimage to a Hero’s Grave

On election day Nov. 8, women flocked to Susan B. Anthony’s grave in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York, completely covering her grave marker in “I Voted” stickers. While small numbers of women have been doing this in previous years, this particular year saw far greater numbers. The cemetery had to stay open several hours past its normal closing to accommodate the long lines of visitors.

Anthony, known as one of the leaders of the Women’s Suffrage movement, famously illegally cast a ballot in the 1872 presidential election in Rochester and faced a subsequent criminal trial.

Sandra Pablo, a Witch living in New Jersey, was one of those who visited the grave on election day. She says it was an eight hour drive with an hour wait in line before she could place her “I Voted” stickers on Anthony’s grave stone. Yet she felt it was worth it, “To see all these women, coming together and thanking Anthony for this moment was something I’ll never forget. It was solemn and joyous and so full of hope.”

Pablo says she felt compelled to make the trip, “It was a need coming from deep inside. I had to touch the place where her bones sleep. To thank her, to let her know her daughters were carrying on her spirit, and to ask her to watch over us.”

Anthropologist Steven Dettwyler, in looking at this new phenomenon at Anthony’s grave, says there are several familiar themes here.  For example, there is contagious magic, where people derive some benefit from proximity to a person seen as having some power, ancestor worship, and creating shrines, including the ones that spring up at roads sides or how people leave mementos and gifts at the Vietnam memorial. “These are very old themes and are pervasive now, I think more than ever.”

Myth vs Reality

Often times, modern mythos, such as this one, will find itself at odds with historical details. Beverley Smith, a two-headed conjure doctor, root woman, and person of color, says that the myth of Anthony may not match the complex reality. Smith notes, “The popular narrative is that Susan B. Anthony was a champion of women. She is admired as a warrior for women’s rights. But it’s important to understand that the only women Anthony was fighting for was white women. Period.”

Anthony started her lifetime activism when she was 17 years old, gathering petitions to end slavery. She continued her anti-slavery work until after the end of the Civil War. She was also a member of the Temperance movement, which eventually ratified an amendment to the Constitution prohibiting the sale of alcohol in the United States. Yet what she’s best known for is her work to gain women the right to vote.

Along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anthony founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 and was a critical leader in the movement for women’s suffrage. However, she died 14 years before the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, was passed in 1920.

So how did an abolitionist suffragette become seen as having racially problematic views?

During the early days of the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements, the two groups often worked together. they shared resources and had common leaders. This changed when the language for the 15th Amendment, which extended voting rights to black males, was being discussed. Tension grew between the female leaders of the women’s movement and male abolitionists. The women suffragettes wanted the right to vote for women and black persons to happen at the same time. The male abolitionists wanted women to postpone their campaign for suffrage until after it had been achieved for black males.

Anthony vigorously opposed the amendment while some women suffragettes agreed to seek voting rights for black males first, then seek voting rights for women at a later date. This split in strategy and philosophy became increasingly bitter, pitting black women against white women within the suffragette movement. Sojourner Truth, a prominent former slave who was also a leader in the abolitionist and suffragette movement, sided with black women, yet didn’t support granting the vote to black men and not black women.

In 1867 she said, “I feel that I have the right to have just as much as a man. There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and colored women not theirs, the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.”

Anthony’s famous quote, “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman,” along with her accepting funding from a benefactor who held the view that black persons were intellectually inferior and general antipathy towards blacks persons by other white suffragettes have called into question if Anthony supported suffrage for all, or only for white women.

Clio Ajana, a Minneapolis Pagan of Color, sees Anthony as a historical figure who worked hard for the right for women to vote, but feels torn about her stance on the 15th Amendment, “It became women vs. black men, and her choice to oppose the Fifteenth Amendment that would permit all to vote, regardless of race. I cannot think of her as a venerated ancestor based on that alone.”

Ajana says although she’s not sure if Anthony said the quote about cutting off her own arm, “… it is something that makes those women of color the “other,” and not included.”

Smith is more direct in her assessment of the myth of Anthony versus the reality, “I find it telling that many European American women don’t know this. They seem to be genuinely surprised to learn how virulently opposed to African Americans of either gender getting the legal vote. She spoke out against black people being allowed to vote and made it clear that her advocacy for women didn’t extend to women of color.”

Both women are taken aback by the Pagan community’s embrace of veneration of Anthony. “[Pagan women] sing about how “we all come from the Goddess” but when it comes down to it, they aren’t really giving much thought to their sisters of color. I’m not sure they even consider us their sisters,” says Smith. She went on to say, “But one thing is certain, either they don’t know about Anthony’s mindset about non-white women voting. Or they just don’t care.”

Why This Myth?

Dettwyler says the power behind who is granted cultus and who isn’t is tied to the collective beliefs about these individuals or events, “Her [contagious magic] is the personal meaning that people take from her life. She is seen as fundamentally changing something so important to us, the extension of something that is now seen as a human right, to choose those who represent us, another form of contagion.”

Anthony and the 19th Amendment are so tied together that the amendment was popularly known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. She was respected for her commitment to the movement, her spartan lifestyle, and that she did not seek personal financial gain. Her organization, the National Women Suffrage Association, survives to this very day as the League of Women Voters. She became the first non-fictitious woman to be depicted on U.S. coinage when her portrait appeared on the 1979 dollar coin.

Pablo says some women brought their daughters to Anthony’s grave, and they could be overheard relating tales of the Women’s Suffrage movement. “They talked about how women were beaten and jailed for attempting to vote,” says Pablo. She says most of the stories were about Anthony’s determination to secure voting rights for women, even in the face of violence.

Suffragettes faced real danger. Their speeches were shut down by armed mobs and police had to escort them from building to protect them.

Yet Anthony is seen as the suffragette most worthy of honor. “Ms. Anthony’s was, and we derive a feeling of history, of value, of validation both in a pilgrimage to her, but, more importantly in my view, doing this with so many other people. People gain a sense of meaning and power when part of a group with similar beliefs and values,” says Dettwyler.

Ajana says those beliefs and values may be shared among white women Pagans, but not among black women Pagans, “Anthony as a focus of modern ancestor worship is a spit in the eye of every person of color who was denied her efforts when she pointedly fought for just women and not everyone – at a time when she could have supported the Fifteenth Amendment.”

Ajana goes on to wonder what Anthony’s veneration says about the Pagans who worship her, “Are they less inclusive? Are they not thinking critically about what such ancestor worship implies? For some, race is truly not an issue and they are okay with not knowing or ignoring historical fact. I am not okay with that.”

Pablo says she doesn’t see Anthony as acting out of racism, but out of a firm belief that all oppressed persons must band together. “She didn’t say white women should get the vote and not blacks. She said women and blacks must get the vote at the same time or both should refuse.”

Smith wonders why more inclusive suffragettes aren’t granted ancestor or hero worship. She lists Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Ida B. Wells as worthy alternatives to Anthony. She also points out that although the 15th Amendment granted blacks the right to vote in theory, in practice that right wasn’t secured until the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

Will Veneration Turn into Sustained Religious Practice?

Was this year’s surge in women lining up to place their sticker on Anthony’s grave due to the real possibility of the election of a female US President?

Pablo believes so. She says the majority feeling that the U.S. was about to elect a woman president for the first time added a celebratory feeling to the trip. “I saw Hillary Clinton’s becoming president as a confirmation of everything Anthony represented and fought so hard for.”

Pablo says Clinton’s loss was spiritually painful, “I was crushed, my soul still hurts. It felt cruel after the spiritual high I experienced at [Anthony’s] grave.”

Will it taper off or cease to happen again in such large numbers? Will it become a sustained religious practice?

Dettwyler says humans are increasingly driven to create these shared events because they provide a sense of connectedness and community when so much of our interconnected community experience has eroded over the past 50 years. But he notes there may be a difference in duration a figure may be venerated, “My brother likes to say that it was the garage door remote that killed the neighborhood. I would add another difference, without evidence, heroes today are often extremely fleeting due to media over exposure, this was probably not true in 400 BCE.”

As for Anthony specifically? She may have some competition. This year the grave of Ida B. Wells was also decorated with “I Voted” stickers.

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