For Today - Failure is Impossible

Failure is impossible.  - Susan B. Anthony

It is always a little bit odd to have the culture of a neighbouring nation outweigh your own.  Susan B. Anthony is an American human rights and feminist icon.  Enough of an icon that many Canadians will recognize her name and some will know who she is.  She advocated for women's equality and especially the right to vote tirelessly in the United States.  In November of 1872 she registered to vote and voted in the Presidential election. She was arrested for voting illegally and sentenced to pay a fine of $100 and the cost of prosecution.

In 1906, her 86th year, Susan B. Anthony spoke at the National Woman Suffrage Association and the title of her speech was "Failure is Impossible."  At the time, only four American states allowed women to vote.  It would be 1918 before Canadian women had the vote and 1920 for all American women.

I have tried to find the text of Susan B. Anthony's "Failure is Impossible" speech on-line and failed.  Ironic! It seems from reading Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, volume III, that Miss Anthony may have said these remarks to friends, too ill and too elderly to do much speech making.  She is credited with saying this at the Baltimore Convention by the New York papers:

A report in the New York Evening Post said, "The entire house rose and the applause and cheers seemed to continue for ten minutes." It thus continued :

Miss Anthony looked at the splendid audience of men and women, many of them distinguished in their generation, with calm and dignified sadness. "This is a magnificent sight before me," she said slowly, "and these have been wonderful addresses and speeches I have listened to during the past week. Yet I have looked on many such audiences, and in my lifetime I have listened to many such speakers, all testifying to the righteousness, the justice and the worthiness of the cause of woman suffrage. I never saw that great woman, Mary Wollstoncraft, but I have read her eloquent and unanswerable
arguments in behalf of the liberty of womankind. I have met and known most of the progressive women who came after her — Lucretia Mott, the Grimke sisters, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone— a long galaxy of great women. I have heard them speak, saying in only slightly different phrases exactly what I have heard these newer advocates of the cause say at these meetings. Those older women have gone on, and most of those who worked with me in the early years have gone. I am here for a little time only and then my place will be filled as theirs was filled. The fight must not cease; you must see that it does not stop."

The For Today reader sets out "Failure is impossible" and then states whatever one believes is possible, is possible. What is clear from Susan B. Anthony's life and work, one may have to hold belief for a very long time.  And the timing of when the possible is realized is not our own.  But it is possible.

Today it is possible to be abstinent.  To live wholly, without abusing my mind, my soul or my body.

Blessed Be.