Susan B. Anthony, 1905
Asked, a few years before, if she believed that all women in the United States would ever be given the vote, she had replied with assurance, "It will come, but I shall not see it.... It is inevitable. We can no more deny forever the right of self-government to one-half our people than we could keep the Negro forever in bondage. It will not be wrought by the same disrupting forces that freed the slave, but come it will, and I believe within a generation."[464]
She had so longed to see women voting throughout the United States, to see them elected to legislatures and Congress, but for her there had only been the promise of fulfillment in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho, and far away in New Zealand and Australia.
"Failure is impossible" was the rallying cry she left with her "girls" to spur them on in the long discouraging struggle ahead, fourteen more years of campaigning until on August 26, 1920, women were enfranchised throughout the United States by the Nineteenth Amendment.
Even then their work was not finished, for she had looked farther ahead to the time when men and women everywhere, regardless of race, religion, or sex, would enjoy equal rights. Her challenging words, "Failure is impossible," still echo and re-echo through the years, as the crusade for human rights goes forward and men and women together strive to build and preserve a free world.