Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words

Combines biographical essays with selections from Anthony's speeches, letters, and quotes

This collection of excerpts from speeches and letters by women's rights advocate Anthony (1820-1906) reflects her activism on many issues, including female suffrage, the abolition of slavery, temperance, domestic violence and legal rights of married women. Sherr, a correspondent for ABC's 20/20 and coauthor of Susan B. Anthony Slept Here, accompanies Anthony's eloquent words with informed biographical essays. Anthony's spirited 50-year fight to gain the vote for women is detailed here, as well as the anger she expressed when friend and antislavery activist Frederick Douglass excluded women from his fight for voting rights for African Americans. After being jailed for voting illegally, Anthony wrote, "It was we, the people, not we, the white male citizens, but we, the whole people who formed this union." The 19th Amendment, granting voting rights to women, was passed 14 years after Anthony's death. Illustrations.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"Away with your man-visions! Women propose to reject them all, and begin to dream dreams for themselves," writes Anthony in one selection from this sprightly collection of her correspondence, speeches, interviews, and published writings. Sherr, 20/20 correspondent and coauthor of Susan B. Anthony Slept Here (LJ 5/1/94), has arranged the selections by topic-"Oh Slavery, Hateful Thing," "The Original Frequent Flier," "Get Money, Get Wealth," etc.-and chronologically within topics. Specialists may object that this arrangement distorts the historical meaning of some selections; this reader regretted that the leading chapter concerned Anthony's marital status. These are quibbles, however, for this is a fascinating and accessible volume. Sherr includes a brief but choice bibliography and notes that most of the selections are in the microfilm edition of The Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, available to library patrons in some areas. Essential for public, high school, and academic libraries.
Carolynne Myall, Eastern Washington Univ. Libs., Cheney
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Made up of public statements, private letters, and entries from the diaries of Susan B. Anthony that Sherr places in a narrative historical continuity that includes biographical essays, reproductions of period engravings, and contemporary newspaper accounts, this book offers the great nineteenth-century woman's rights advocate in her totality. Here we read Anthony on a diverse range of subjects: her close friend Frederick Douglass and the slavery--that "hateful thing"--from which he escaped; foremothers and women of the future; making money and developing wealth; her own publishing career; President Cleveland, "the enemy"; dressing for success--that is, the issue of dress reform involving corsets, petticoats, and bloomers; and, of course, The Cause--women's suffrage. Anthony traveled widely--notably in a long series of journeys across the Midwest and West to promote the cause of women's suffrage--until age 85 (on account of this near constant movement, ABC News correspondent Sherr dubs her "the original frequent flier"). This biographical documentary commemorates the 175th anniversary of the suffragist's birth and the 75th of the Nineteenth Amendment most appropriately, indeed. Whitney Scott