"Those of you who have the _talent_ to do honor to poor, oh how poor womanhood have all given yourselves over to _baby_-making and left poor brainless _me_ to battle alone. It is a shame. Such a lady as _I might_ be _spared_ to _rock cradles_, but it is a crime for _you_ and _Lucy_ and _Nette_."[93]
On a separate page she outlined for Mrs. Stanton the points she wanted to make. Her title was affirmative, "Why the Sexes Should be Educated Together." "Because," she reasoned, "by such education they get true ideas of each other.... Because the endowment of both public and private funds is ever for those of the male sex, while all the Seminaries and Boarding Schools for Females are left to maintain themselves as best they may by means of their tuition fees--consequently cannot afford a faculty of first-class professors.... Not a school in the country gives to the girl equal privileges with the boy.... No school _requires_ and but very few allow the _girls_ to declaim and discuss side by side with the boys. Thus they are robbed of half of education. The grand thing that is needed is to give the sexes _like motives_ for acquirement. Very rarely a person studies closely, without hope of making that knowledge useful, as a means of support...."[94]
Mrs. Stanton wrote her at once, "Come here and I will do what I can to help you with your address, if you will hold the baby and make the puddings."[95] Gratefully Susan hurried to Seneca Falls and together they "loaded her gun," not only for the teachers' convention but for all the summer meetings.
Addressing the large teachers' meeting in Troy, Susan declared that mental sex-differences did not exist. She called attention to the ever-increasing variety of occupations which women were carrying on with efficiency. There were women typesetters, editors, publishers, authors, clerks, engravers, watchmakers, bookkeepers, sculptors, painters, farmers, and machinists. Two hundred and fifty women were serving as postmasters. Girls, she insisted, must be educated to earn a living and more vocations must be opened to them as an incentive to study. "A woman," she added, "needs no particular kind of education to be a wife and mother anymore than a man does to be a husband and father. A man cannot make a living out of these relations. He must fill them with something more and so must women."[96]
Her advanced ideas did not cause as much consternation as she had expected and she was asked to repeat her speech at the Massachusetts teachers' convention; but the thoughts of many in that audience were echoed by the president when he said to her after the meeting, "Madam, that was a splendid production and well delivered. I could not have asked for a single thing different either in matter or manner; but I would rather have followed my wife or daughter to Greenwood cemetery than to have had her stand here before this promiscuous audience and deliver that address."[97]
It was one thing to talk about coeducation but quite another to offer a resolution putting the New York State Teachers' Association on record as asking all schools, colleges, and universities to open their doors to women. This Susan did at their next convention, and while there were enough women present to carry the resolution, most of them voted against it, listening instead to the emotional arguments of a group of conservative men who prophesied that coeducation would coarsen women and undermine marriage. Nor did she forget the Negro at these conventions, but brought much criticism upon herself by offering resolutions protesting the exclusion of Negroes from public schools, academies, colleges, and universities.
Such controversial activities were of course eagerly reported in the press, and Henry Stanton, reading his newspaper, pointed them out to his wife, remarking drily, "Well, my dear, another notice of Susan. You stir up Susan and she stirs up the world."[98]
* * * * *
The best method of arousing women and spreading new ideas, Susan decided, was holding woman's rights conventions, for the discussions at these conventions covered a wide field and were not limited merely to women's legal disabilities. The feminists of that day extolled freedom of speech, and their platform, like that of antislavery conventions, was open to anyone who wished to express an opinion. Always the limited educational opportunities offered to women were pointed out, and Oberlin College and Antioch, both coeducational, were held up as patterns for the future. Resolutions were passed, demanding that Harvard and Yale admit women. Women's low wages and the very few occupations open to them were considered, and whether it was fitting for women to be doctors and ministers. At one convention Lucy Stone made the suggestion that a prize be offered for a novel on women, like _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, to arouse the whole nation to the unjust situation of women whose slavery, she felt, was comparable to that of the Negro. At another, William Lloyd Garrison maintained that women had the right to sit in the Congress and in state legislatures and that there should be an equal number of men and women in all national councils. Inevitably Scriptural edicts regarding woman's sphere were thrashed out with Antoinette Brown, in her clerical capacity, setting at rest the minds of questioning women and quashing the protests of clergymen who thought they were speaking for God. Usually Ernestine Rose was on hand, ready to speak when needed, injecting into the discussions her liberal clear-cut feminist views. Nor was the international aspect of the woman's rights movement forgotten. The interest in Great Britain in the franchise for women of such men as Lord Brougham and John Stuart Mill was reported as were the efforts there among women to gain admission to the medical profession. Distributed widely as a tract was the "admirable" article in the _Westminster Review_, "The Enfranchisement of Women," by Harriet Taylor, now Mrs. John Stuart Mill.
In New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, where state conventions were held annually, women carried back to their homes and their friends new and stimulating ideas. National conventions, which actually represented merely the northeastern states and Ohio and occasionally attracted men and women from Indiana, Missouri, and Kansas, were scheduled by Susan to meet every year in New York, simultaneously with antislavery conventions. Thus she was assured of a brilliant array of speakers, for the Garrisonian abolitionists were sincere advocates of woman's rights.
Both Elizabeth Stanton and Lucy Stone were a great help to Susan in preparing for these national gatherings for which she raised the money. Elizabeth wrote the calls and resolutions, while Lucy could not only be counted upon for an eloquent speech, but through her wide contacts brought new speakers and new converts to the meetings. However, national woman's rights conventions would probably have lapsed completely during the troubled years prior to the Civil War, had it not been for Susan's persistence. She was obliged to omit the 1857 convention because all of her best speakers were either having babies or were kept at home by family duties. Lucy's baby, Alice Stone Blackwell, was born in September 1857, then Antoinette Brown's first child, and Mrs. Stanton's seventh.
[Illustration: Lucy Stone and her daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell]
Impatient to get on with the work, Susan chafed at the delay and when Lucy wrote her, "I shall not assume the responsibility for another convention until I have had my ten daughters,"[99] Susan was beside herself with apprehension. When Lucy told her that it was harder to take care of a baby day and night than to campaign for woman's rights, she felt that Lucy regarded as unimportant her "common work" of hiring halls, engaging speakers, and raising money. This rankled, for although Susan realized it was work without glory, she did expect Lucy to understand its significance.
Mrs. Stanton sensed the makings of a rift between Susan and these young mothers, Lucy and Antoinette, and knowing from her own experience how torn a woman could be between rearing a family and work for the cause, she pleaded with Susan to be patient with them. "Let them rest a while in peace and quietness, and think great thoughts for the future," she wrote Susan. "It is not well to be in the excitement of public life all the time. Do not keep stirring them up or mourning over their repose. You need rest too. Let the world alone a while. We cannot bring about a moral revolution in a day or a year."[100]
But Susan could not let the world alone. There was too much to be done. In addition to her woman's rights and antislavery work, she gave a helping hand to any good cause in Rochester, such as a protest meeting against capital punishment, a series of Sunday evening lectures, or establishing a Free Church like that headed by Theodore Parker in Boston where no one doctrine would be preached and all would be welcome. There were days when weariness and discouragement hung heavily upon her. Then impatient that she alone seemed to be carrying the burden of the whole woman's rights movement, she complained to Lydia Mott, "There is not one woman left who may be relied on. All have first to please their husbands after which there is little time or energy left to spend in any other direction.... How soon the last standing monuments (yourself and myself, Lydia) will lay down the individual 'shovel and de hoe' and with proper zeal and spirit grasp those of some masculine hand, the mercies and the spirits only know. I declare to you that I distrust the powers of any woman, even of myself to withstand the mighty matrimonial maelstrom!"[101]