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Happy Birthday, Susan B.February 15, 2006 Today is Susan B. Anthony's birthday. She was born in 1820; the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, giving women the right to vote, was enacted in the year she would have turned 100. She died at 86, on March 13, 1906, so the 100th anniversary of her death is coming right up. I wish I lived in a country where Susan B.'s birthday was a national holiday and Valentine's Day was the answer to a Trivia question. How long, O goddesses, how long? Hung around my neck is a pendant I've had since forever -- well, probably since the late 1970s: on a pewter oval, Liberty brandishes a scroll that reads "ERA" against the backdrop of a U.S. flag. Around the top half of the edge is engraved "FAILURE IS IMPOSSIBLE," which Anthony is often quoted as saying. I like the bold assertiveness of it, but most of the time I don't believe it. The Constitution still does not include the Equal Rights Amendment -- what part of "equal rights" do you guys find so threatening? -- and I've lost count of the people I've known over the years who devote considerable energy to making failure inevitable. Possibly there's a loophole here: if you work hard at failing and then you fail, you've succeeded at failing; ergo you haven't really failed and maybe failure is impossible. As usual, context is crucial. What Susan B. Anthony said was "With women such as these consecrating their lives, failure is impossible" (italics mine). In a way it's the public version of Eleanor Roosevelt's "You must do the thing you think you cannot do." Between Eleanor and Susan I can get through today without shooting myself in the foot.
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