My water broke in the afternoon on Election Day. My due date was only a week away but I was still somehow surprised by this dramatic development. Two weeks prior, my husband and I settled on the baby's name. He was going to be Eddie.

I just didn't expect him to be Election Day Eddie.

Yet what could be more perfect and more fitting than the fulfillment of my progeny's liberal destiny? I spent the morning of Election Day in 2016 with thousands of others at Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York, visiting the gravesite of Susan B. Anthony—the matriarch of the Nineteenth Amendment—on the day when I felt certain that America would elect its first woman president.

A sense of unadulterated hope, celebration, and excitement clung to the air. I ran into my daughter's dentist at the cemetery. With evidence that our prowoman ideologies aligned, I felt validated in how much I already liked her. We hugged, beaming from ear to ear at what would surely be a remarkable day. The baby twirled in utero.

I came relatively late to the Hillary Clinton bandwagon. I voted for Bernie Sanders in the New York primary, lured by his seductive messages on income equality and racial justice. But there was also a chauvinism to some of his rabid supporters that I found unsettling, and I lost patience with his campaign when he prolonged his concession in June 2016 to Clinton as the Democratic heir apparent. Once Clinton clinched the nomination that summer, I stepped up a ritual I had begun that spring—immediately following the primary. I paid regular visits to the gravesite of Susan B. Anthony, drawn to photo documenting the tokens left behind. It felt important, encountering living history, to chronicle the types of mementos that thankful visitors wanted to share with the woman who wrote the Nineteenth Amendment but never lived to witness its impact. “You are an awesome, inspirational individual,” read one letter left at the grave that I saw during a visit in August 2016. The letter was signed by “Berry,” in preteen handwriting. “Thank you for getting females to the point where we can vote. Your family must be so proud. I hope that somewhere along the lines of history we are family.”