Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/356

320 sudden awakening of some self-reliant woman, in whose soul had long slumbered new ideas as to her rights and duties, growing out of personal experiences or the distant echoes of onward steps in other localities. In Connecticut this woman was Isabella Beecher Hooker, who had scarcely dared to think, and much less to give shape in words, to the thoughts that, like unwelcome ghosts, had haunted her hours of solitude from year to year. Elizabeth Barrett Browning describes a hero as one who does what others do but say; who says what others do but think; and thinks what others do but dream. The successive steps by which Mrs. Hooker's dreams at last took shape in thoughts, words and actions, and brought her to the woman suffrage platform, are well told by herself:

My mind had long been disturbed with the tangled problem of social life, but it involved so many momentous questions that I could not see where to begin nor what to do. I could only protest in my heart, and leave the whole matter for God to deal with in his wisdom. Thus matters stood until the year 1861, when Anna Dickinson, then a girl of nineteen, came to Hartford to speak in behalf of the Republican party, particularly on its hostility to the extension of slavery. I shall never forget the dismay—I know not what else to call it—which I felt at the announcement of her first speech in one of our public halls, lest harm should come to the political cause that enlisted my sympathies, and anxiety about the speaker, who would have to encounter so much adverse criticism in our conservative and prejudiced city. It was certainly a most startling occurrence, that here in my very home, where there had been hardly a lisp in favor of the rights of women, this girl should speak on political subjects, and that, too, upon the invitation of the leaders of a great political party. Here was a stride, not a mere step; and a stride almost to final victory for the suppressed rights of women.

My husband and I, full of anxiety and apprehension, but full, too, of determination to stand by one who so bravely shook off her trammels, went to hear this new Joan of Arc, and in a few minutes after she began we found ourselves, with the rest of the large audience, entranced by her eloquence. At the close of the meeting we went with many others to be introduced and give her the right hand of fellowship. She came home with us for the night, and after the family retired she and I communed together, heart to heart, as mother and daughter, and from this sweet, grand soul, born to the freedom denied to all women except those known as Quakers, I learned to trust as never before the teachings of the inner light, and to know whence came to them the recognition of equal rights with their brethren in the public assembly.

It was she who brought me to the knowledge of Mrs. John Stuart Mill, and her remarkable paper on "The Enfranchisement of Women," in The