SERMON

Failure is impossible. There is a denial of reality in this statement. All of us experience both success and failure. There is almost arrogance in saying that failure is impossible. It seems like an unachievable, idealistic goal that can only bring disappointment and frustration.

Let me reframe these words as an attitude we operate from every day. Is failure to provide food for yourself and your family acceptable? Is failure acceptable to us when we are in need of urgent health care? Is failure acceptable when we hold a new born baby and begin parenting that child? Sadly, there will be failure in our children's lives as they grow and mature. Yet as parents, we can not bear the idea of approaching the raising of our children viewing their failure to thrive as possible. We want to do everything in our power to make their failure impossible.

There aren't many steps from our families to our community and our nation and our world. Mothers don't raise their children in cages isolated from their surroundings. If we want to do everything in our power to make our children's failure impossible, we must fight the forces of injustice that threaten our community, nation and world.

Now, taking a day to celebrate motherhood is a very good thing. I'm deeply grateful my mother gave me birth, suckled me when I was helpless, taught me, protected me, guided me, and raised me, with the help of my father, to be a good and decent human being. I owe both of them a debt of gratitude I can never repay.

Yet how this holiday is celebrated leaves much to be desired. While cards, candy and flowers are a fine ways to show our love, the Million Mom March is more my idea of how we should honor our mothers. The best way to honor mothers is by paying attention to the injustices against women and children here and around the globe.

The commercial powers, particularly advertisers, which dominate our lives would rather have us thinking fondly of women as they were treated in the Victorian era. The prosperity of England and America in the 1800's allowed a new class of women to begin evolving who didn't have to work. The aristocratic privileges of education, cultural development and musical training became more widely available. Because men could earn a good living without a wife as a co-worker, her economic power was greatly diminished. Underneath the male veneer of deference to women as saints of domesticity, was a reality of powerlessness, dependence and subjection. Paradoxically, the very abundance that allowed women freedom from the plow and the reaper, served to further enslave them. Into this world, Susan Brownwell Anthony was born February 15, 1820.

Even though she is identified with her single minded dedication to win the right to vote for women, Anthony did not invent the suffrage movement. In fact she was not even at the first Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls in 1848. When praised as a leader in the movement, Anthony quickly began talking about the women who came before her from whom she drew inspiration and support. Although she complained she would rather make history than write it, one of her great legacies was her valuable historical work preserving original documents that laid the foundations for the nineteenth amendment. Stories about women like Abigail Adams who wrote to her husband, John Adams, asking him to "remember the ladies" in the new code of laws. Women like the outspoken Margaret Fuller, Transcendentalist and editor of The Dial.

Social reform was much on the minds of the leaders of our great nation during the middle part of the Nineteenth Century. This was the time of Horace Mann and the beginning of public education. Anthony's first and only paid job was as a school teacher. The 1840's, two important social movements, Temperance and the abolition of slavery were beginning to sweep the nation. Unlike beer and wine drunk for thousands of years, the greater availability of distilled spirits was creating tremendous social problems. Anthony's activism started with work in a temperance society. She learned about slavery in her family home. Fredrick Douglass was a regular visitor with Anthony's parents in Rochester, New York, where she heard about the evils of slavery. With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, the two causes were deeply connected in Anthony's mind. Fugitive slaves had much in common with battered women who were often the victim of slavery to alcoholic husbands.

Anthony's passion for social justice and reform came not just from the times but from her parents and the environment they created for her. She was raised a Quaker, becoming Unitarian in Rochester later in her life. The Quaker belief in the equality of men and women before God and the inner light shared by all predisposed her to believe in her equality with men. She saw women in her meeting standing to speak the word of God. There was no room here for the rejection of women as carriers of the disease of Original Sin, a wretched theology also rejected by early Unitarian and Universalists.

Not only were the seeds of activism sown by her family and the times, Anthony had personal experience of discrimination. As a female school teacher, she was paid about a quarter of what the men were paid. At a New York State Teacher's Association meeting in 1853, the men were seated in the front and the women in the back of the room. The men debated the lack of respect teachers received (an old subject isn't it?) and the women were supposed to watch silently. Anthony later wrote:

My heart was filled with grief and honest indignation, thus to see the minority of the Convention, simply because they were men, presuming that in them, was rooted all wisdom and knowledge...And what was most humiliating of all was to look into the faces of those women and see that by far the larger proportion were perfectly satisfied with the position assigned them[1].

When Anthony could bear it no longer, she rose and said, "Mr. President." The hall went silent as the men were thrown into great consternation not knowing what to do next. Her request to speak was debated for half an hour by the men and finally she was granted permission. As journalist Lynn Sherr retells the story, "In a clear voice with unarguable logic, [at the age of 33,] Susan B. Anthony made her first memorable public speech:

It seems to me gentleman, that none of you quite comprehend the cause of the disrespect of which you complain. Do you not see that so long as society says a woman is incompetent to be a lawyer, minister, or doctor, but has ample ability to be a teacher, that every man of you who chooses this profession tacitly acknowledges that he has no more brains than a woman? And this, too, is the reason that teaching is a less lucrative position, as here men must compete with the cheap labor of woman. Would you exalt your profession, exalt those who labor with you. Would you make it more lucrative, increase the salaries of the women engaged in the noble work of educating our future Presidents, Senators and Congressmen[2].

Well that blew the lid of the convention! Several of the men, congratulated her on her statement and even the local newspaper the next day felt she had "hit the nail on the head." Unfortunately many of the women present were scandalized by her behavior saying such things as "I was actually ashamed of my sex," and "I felt so mortified I really wished that the floor would open and swallow me up[3]." (My how times have changed!)

Strong, courageous and well spoken as Anthony was that day, she was not skilled in philosophy, argument and discourse. By herself, plucky as she was, she could not have made the difference she did by herself. It was her lifelong ally, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the thinker and writer of the team, that provided the rhetoric for her verbal assault. Stanton would write the speeches and Anthony would tirelessly travel the countryside speaking in any venue she could find. Stanton was the head of the partnership and Anthony the hands and feet.

Those feet covered tens of thousands of miles. In the 1850's she began a marathon expedition throughout New York State, two trips over four months covering fifty four of sixty counties to collect signatures on petitions--in the dead of winter. No interstates or automobiles back in those days. Those of you in retirement take note, she continued to campaign for women's rights traveling by any conveyance she could find crisscrossing the nation and touring Europe well into her eighties. In 1894 at the age of 74 she repeated the trip around New York State and made it to all sixty counties in three months.

What drove her to face angry mobs of men and proclaim her message? How could she have intentionally eschewed marriage and family for "The Cause?" I think Anthony might have responded, "How can you not be all on fire?" Writing to a Clara Bewick Colby she said:

I really believe I shall explode if some of you young women don't wake up and raise your voice in protest …I wonder if, when I am under the sod--or cremated and floating in the air--I shall have to stir you and others up. How can you not be all on fire?[4]

Anthony may not have had Stanton's skill with a pen but she had razor sharp clarity about the problem and the solution. The only means to change was the empowerment of women. The only tool that could do the job was the vote. Voting was no simple civic duty to her. Marking your ballot and depositing it in the ballot box was a holy act. "Pray with your ballots!" she said.

Every woman who doesn't vote should be rounded up on election day and forced to listen to the word of Susan B. Anthony about the power won for them by the struggle of so many disfranchised women. I recently heard a political campaign analyst for a current candidate discuss how they decide where to put their time, energy and attention. Campaigns look at the number of registered voters in each precinct and how many of them turn out to vote. How much do you think they care about the neighborhoods with low voter turnout? People need to understand that they are being disloyal to the needs of their neighborhood if they do not show up and vote.

Like the crafty candidate, Anthony had a practical analysis of women's problems and how to solve them. "That underlying disease producing a bewildering myriad of differing symptoms was women's dependence, women's powerlessness, and woman's subjection.[5]" The root of that powerlessness was economic. Women could own no property and control none of their own money. Not that widow's didn't have to pay taxes of course, but if she remarried, she would lose control of her estate. What kept women in this powerless position were laws written by men. The way to change these laws was to put people in power who would be responsive to women's rights. The only way to do that was by giving women the power of the vote.

Obvious isn't it? Not to Grover Cleveland. In 1905 he wrote in the Ladies Home Journal on the so-called "woman's question":

Those of us who ... cling to our faith in the saving grace of simple and unadulterated womanhood, any discontent on the part of woman with her ordained lot, or a restless desire on her part to be and to do something not within the sphere of her appointed ministrations, cannot appear otherwise than as perversions of a gift of God to the human race ... Adam was put in the Garden of Eden to dress it and keep it, and Eve was given to him as a helpmeet."[6]

Sentiments like this kept Anthony's kettle boiling well into the last years of her life. The method she used to channel this energy was agitation.

An inconsistency in the fourteenth amendment was her device. It said male citizens were eligible to vote. Later the amendment also said "All persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens," and "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens." Well, there you have it! Anthony urged women to test the law by going to the polls. She collected her three sisters and a friend and walked into the registration office, in a barber shop no less. They persuaded the bewildered election inspectors to register them to vote in the 1872 Presidential election claiming Federal Constitutional protection.

Anthony showed up early November 5^th and cast her first and only ballot of her life[7]. Three weeks later a U.S. Marshall nervously served her a summons, blushed and said, "The commissioner wishes to arrest you." She made him wait while she put on the proper attire to be arrested, returned and thrust out her wrists to be handcuffed. Instead, he escorted her downtown for an examination. After making bail, Anthony did everything in her power to politicize the charges speaking tirelessly around the county saying, "The United States is on trial, not Susan B. Anthony."

On the day of her trial, the courtroom was packed including several U.S. Senators and former President Millard Fillmore. The judge, trying his first criminal case, penned the decision before the trial began. The twelve male jurors did nothing and said nothing. Anthony was forbidden to defend herself until after the verdict. After the verdict she was fined, sentenced and denied the right to appeal. Ah, for the good old days!

Justice was done though. The election inspectors who registered the women were put in jail for five days, comforted by suffragettes bringing home cooked food.

With tactics like these to bring national recognition, Anthony's popularity grew with each year. Once she had the attention of the American public, she relentlessly brought it back again and again to the need for women to have the right to vote. Unlike so many of her contemporaries, she proclaimed that only bold action in the world could free women from their bondage "eating the bread of dependence." The fervor with which she preached her message was as religious as the prophecy of any Biblical prophet. "My work," she would say again and again, "is my worship." When questioned about the Biblical authority she claimed to speak plainly like a man, she said, "Do right and leave the consequences to God."

Anthony's certainty is more available than some would like to believe if we have the courage to tame our submission to the status quo and raise our awareness through experience and study. Anthony had a gift for making things plain in an 1894 speech:

Women, we might as well be great Newfoundland dogs out baying to the moon as to be petitioning for the passage of bills without the power to vote. So long as women are a disfranchised class the women can do nothing...So long as the constitutors of New York and Ohio say that all may vote when twenty-one years of age, save idiots, lunatics and convicts, women are brought down to the level of those disfranchised. This discrimination is a relic of the dark ages. The most ignorant and degraded man who walks to the polls feels himself superior to the most intelligent woman.[8]

Basically, in Anthony's words, "Men who fail to be just to their mothers cannot be expected to be just to each other[9]" How can we celebrate and praise mothers today without remembering the fight goes on for equal opportunities and equal rights for all women? On Family Planning Advocates Lobby Day, I visited Senator's offices to seek the passage of a women's health and wellness bill. The fight Susan B. Anthony led with such energy and effectiveness is as just and right as it ever was.

I close with Anthony's last public words at a convention shortly before her death, thanking all her colleagues for their years of loyal support, full of love for their undying efforts. Her last words were her prophecy, a legacy for all of us:

There have been others also just as true and devoted to the cause--I wish I could name every one-- but with such women consecrating their lives, failure is impossible![10]

Copyright © 2001 by Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.

[1] Sherr, Lynn, Failure is Impossible, Times Books/Random House 1995, p. 17
[2] Sherr, pp. 19-20
[3] Sherr, p 20
[4] Pellauer, Mary D., Toward a Tradition of Feminst Theology, Carlson Publishing, Brooklyn, 1991, p. 161
[5] Pellauer, p. 162
[6] Sherr, p. 142
[7] Sherr, p 108-9
[8] Sherr, p. 66
[9] Pellauer, p. 153
[10] Sherr, p. 324