US President Donald Trump Tuesday signed a pardon for women’s rights leader and American suffragist Susan B. Anthony.
The pardon applies to Anthony’s 148-year-old conviction for voting in the 1872 presidential election. Illegal at the time, Anthony received a $100 fine for casting the ballot, which she refused to pay.
A leader in the women’s rights movement, Anthony organized the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, advocating for an expansion of the right to vote for women. Fourteen years after her passing in 1906, women’s suffrage was ratified in the Nineteenth Amendment.
Tuesday marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment. Trump used the occasion to sign a proclamation celebrating the historic achievement. At the proclamation signing ceremony, Trump announced that he would also be issuing a pardon for Anthony later in the day.
“And you know that she got a pardon for a lot of other women, and she didn’t put her name on the list. So she was never pardoned,” Trump said at the event and affirmed, “we are going to be signing a full and complete pardon.”