My friend (and Susan B. Anthony House
Board Chair) Bernie Todd Smith invited me to join her table for
Susan B.'s 195th birthday celebration at the Rochester
Convention Center, and since I'm such a devoted fan of the house (I
take any and all guests that I can to see it!), I thought it was time
to step up my support (and the chicken really isn't rubber...). I was
amazed, as were the event planners, at the turnout – it was a
record sellout crowd, at over 1000 people. The audience was
predictably predominantly female, but I was surprised and pleased at
the number of young women in attendance.
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| Susan B. Anthony, portrayed by Barbara Blaisdell |
Although there were many people on the
dais, the remarks were short and sweet, and interjected with a lot of
humor. Kathy Hochul admitted that she recently visited the House for
the first time, and Bernie informed us that they get over
10,000 visitors annually. She also recognized that Miss Anthony's "vision is still an incomplete dream," and that "we need to continue the
march for equality" (it's incomprehensible that we are still striving
for gender equality in this country). Kitty Van Bortel, the
presenting sponsor, confided that she had pinned a “Failure is
Impossible" button to her underwear the first five years of her
working life, as she strove to be taken seriously in the man's world
of automobiles. At the end of the event, she generously announced
that she would be matching all donations made at the lunch!
Lynn Sherr, journalist and author,
captivated and inspired the audience as the keynote speaker. She shared anecdotes
about Sally Ride (her most recent book is Sally Ride: America's
First Woman in Space), whose career wouldn't have been possible
without the tireless efforts of Susan B. Anthony decades earlier.
Sherr compared Susan B. to her birthday-buddy Galileo, remarking that
Galileo's crime was revealing that the earth was not the center of
the universe, and Susan B.'s that men weren't, either!
The event was very well run, except for
the inevitable parking garage headache, made worse by the snow (Sherr
did jokingly complain that it was unfortunate Miss Anthony wasn't
born in May...). The Susan B. Anthony House truly is a Rochester
cultural gem, and it was great to see so many people taking an
interest in learning about and maintaining it. Happy birthday, Susan B. Anthony, and thank you for making it possible for women today to take for granted the right to vote, the right to attend the University of Rochester, and the notion that women and men should be treated equally.
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