Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/616

Rh dota, in the same county. A few years later, lectures were delivered on the subject of equal rights for women in different parts of the State.

Copies of two of the early appeals have been secured. One by A. J. Grover, published in pamphlet form, was extensively circulated; the other by Mrs. Catharine V. Waite, appeared in the Earlville Transcript. Both of these documents are yellowed with age, but the arguments presented are as logical as the more recent utterances of our most radical champions. There is a tradition of a convention at Galesburg some years later, but we have failed to find any accurate data. During the interim between these dates and that never-to-be-forgotten April day in 1861, but little agitation of this great subject can be traced, and during the six years subsequent to that time we witness all previously defined boundaries of spheres brushed away like cobwebs, when women, north and south, were obliged to fill the places made vacant by our civil war. An adequate record of the work accomplished during those eventful years by Illinois women, notably among them being Mary A. Livermore and Jane C. Hoge, lies before us in a bound volume of the paper published under the auspices of the Northwestern Sanitary Fair, edited by the Hon. Andrew Shuman, This little journal was called the Voice of the Fair, a prophetic name, as really through the medium of these sanitary fairs were the voices of the fair all potent, and through their patriotic services to our soldiery did the women of the United States first discover their talent for managing and administering great enterprises. In his first editorial Lieutenant-Governor Shuman says:

On motion of Mrs. Elizabeth A. Loomis, it was decided to open the fair on February 22, 1865, Washington's birthday, and to continue it till March 4, the presidential inauguration day. A committee, consisting of Mrs. H. H. Hoge, Mrs. D. P. Livermore and Mrs. E. W. Blatchford for the commission, and Mrs. O. E. Hosmer, Mrs. C. P. Dickinson and Mr. L. B. Bryan for the Home, was appointed as executive. This was the little cloud, scarcely larger than a man's hand, which grew till it almost encircled the heavens, spreading into every corner of our broad land, and including every department of industry in its ample details.

The undertaking was herculean, and on the grand occasion of the opening of the fair, although we do not find any account of women sharing in the honors of the day, yet they were vouchsafed honorable mention in the following terms by the governor of the State: "Ido not know how to praise women, but I can say nothing so good as our late president once said on a similar occasion, 'God bless the women of America.' They have been our faithful allies during this fearful war. They have toiled steadily by our side, with the most enduring constancy through the frightful contest." "Amid the first impulses of genuine gratitude men recognized what at present they seem to forget, that by inheritance and patriotic service woman has an equal right with man to a share in the rights and privileges of this government.

In the winter of 1860 Hannah Tracy Cutler, M. D., and Mrs. Frances D. Gage made a canvass of the interior and western parts of the State, pro-