Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/699

Rh ladies and gentlemen. The morning session was occupied with the usual preliminary business matters, choosing officers, presenting resolutions, and planning new aggressive steps for the coming year. Susan B. Anthony was President on this occasion, and fulfilled her duties to the general satisfaction. During the evening session the hall was crowded, all the available space for either sitting or standing was occupied, the platform and steps were densely packed, and this at twenty-five cents admission.

Mr. Phillips, Mrs. Mott, Mrs. Rose, Mr. Garrison, Mr. Higginson, Miss Brown, and Lucy Stone all spoke with their usual effect. Mrs. Eliza Woodson Farnham, the author of "Woman and her Era," spoke at length on the "Superiority of Woman."

She presented a series of resolutions, recognizing the right of man in the primary era in his physical and cerebral structure, to be the conqueror, the mechanic, the inventor, the clearer of forests, the pioneer of civilization, but she looked to the dawning of a higher era, when woman should assume her true position in harmony with her superior organism, her delicacy of structure, her beauty of person, her great powers of endurance, and thus prove herself not only man's equal in influence and power) but his superior in many of the noblest virtues. In woman's creative power during maternity, she recognized her as second only to God himself. Woman should recognize man as a John the Baptist, going before to prepare the world for her coming, he recognizing her greater divinity as equal in the Godhead, as heavenly mother as well as father.

Mrs. Farnham enforced her theory of woman's superiority in a -long speech, which was received with apparent satisfaction by the audience, though several on the platform dissented from the claim of superiority, thinking it would be a sufficient triumph over the tyrannies of the past, if popular thought could be educated to the idea of the equality of the sexes.

Mrs. Sarah Hallock read an extract from the Statutes of New York, giving the items set aside by law for use of the wife and minor children, in case the husband died without a will.

1st. All spinning-wheels, weaving-looms, or stoves put up for use.