Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/266

 I have been asked to speak a word of Mrs. Ralph Waldo Emerson. It has been said by some people that we have wrongfully quoted Mr. Emerson as being on our side. His biographers appear to have put in his early statements and forgotten to include his later declarations, which were all in favor of the enfranchisement of women.

I was once sent to Concord by the Massachusetts society to hold a meeting. The churches were closed against suffrage speakers and there was not money enough to pay for a hall. Mrs. Ralph Waldo Emerson heard the meeting was to be given up, and she sent a message to the lady having the work in charge, saying: "Shall it be said that here in Concord, where the Revolutionary war began, there is no place to speak for the freedom of women? Get the best hall in town and I will pay for it." So on that occasion and on another Mrs. Emerson paid for the hall and sent a kind word to the meeting, declaring herself in favor of the suffrage for women, and stating that her husband's views and her own were identical on this question. She had the New England trait of being a good wife, a good mother and a good housekeeper, and Mr. Emerson's home was a restful and blessed place. We sometimes forget the wives of great men in thinking of the greatness of their husbands, but Mrs. Emerson was as great in her way as Mr. Emerson in his, and no more faithful friend to woman and to woman's advancement ever has lived among us.

A word as to the Rev. Anna Oliver, the first woman to enter the theological department of Boston University. She was much beloved by her class. She was a devoted Christian, eminently orthodox, and a very good worker in all lines of religious effort. After Miss Oliver graduated she was ambitious to become ordained, as all women ought to be who desire to preach the gospel; and so after I had graduated from the theological school, the year following, we both applied to the conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church for admission. Miss Oliver's name beginning with O and mine with S, her case was presented first. She was denied ordination by Bishop Andrews. Our claims were carried to the general conference in Cincinnati, and the Methodist Episcopal Church denied ordination to the women whom it had graduated in its schools and upon whom it had conferred the degree of bachelor of divinity. It not only did this, but it made a step backwards; it took from us the licenses to preach which had been granted to Miss Oliver for four years and to myself for eight years.

But Miss Oliver was earnest in her efforts, and so she began to preach in the city of Brooklyn, and with great courage bought a church in which a man had failed as a minister, leaving a debt of $14,000. She was like a great many other women—and here is a warning for all women. God made a woman equal to a man, but He did not make a woman equal to a woman and a man. We usually try to do the work of a man and of a woman too; then we break down, and they say that women ought not to be ministers