Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/652

624 for that purpose, preferred to listen to woman's pathetic statements of her wrongs, than to the most gifted orators that men could boast. It was not until after repeated requests for order from the president, and assurances from several of the ladies that they would not speak until Mr. May had finished his remarks, that quiet was restored.

It was at this Convention that Mary L. Booth made her first appearance on our platform, as one of the secretaries. One feature of these meetings was the freedom and warm sympathy between the audience and the platform. At the close of almost every speech, some one on the floor asked questions, or stated some objections which were quickly answered and refuted by the speakers in the most pleasant conversational manner.

Mrs. Rose presented the wrongs of woman in her most happy manner, demanding the ballot as the underlying power to protect all other rights. Thomas Wentworth Higginson made an address especially adapted to the fashionable audience. Many of the thoughtless ones whom idle curiosity had led to the hall, must have felt like the woman of Samaria (John iv. 29) at the well, when she reported that she had seen a man who told her all the things that ever she had done, so nearly did Mr. Higginson picture to them their thoughts and feelings, the ennui of their daily lives. Lucy Stone, whom the papers now call Mrs. Blackwell, arriving in the midst of the convention, was greeted with long and repeated cheers, and spoke with her wonted simplicity and earnestness. The resolutions covering all the different phases of the movement were duly discussed through two entire days.

Antoinette Brown was called on as usual to meet the Bible argument. A clergyman accused her of misapplying texts. He said Genesis iv. 7 did not allude to Cain and Abel, and that the language in Genesis iii. 16, as applied to Eve, did not mean the same thing. Miss Brown maintained her position that the texts were the same in letter and spirit; and that authority to all men over all women could be no more logically inferred from the one, than authority to all elder brothers over the younger could be from the other; and that there was no divine authority granted in either case. Miss Anthony announced that woman's rights tracts and papers were for sale at the door, and urged all who had become interested in the subject to procure them not only for their own benefit, but to circulate among their neighbors. If they would be intelligent as to