Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/361

 : You will bear me witness that the state of society is very different from what it was fifty years ago, when I presided at the first Woman's Rights Convention. [ had not been able to meet in council at all with the friends until I met them in the hall as the congregation was gathering, and then fell into the hands of those who urged me to take part with the opposers of a woman serving, as the party had with them a fine-looking man to preside at all of their meetings, James Mott, who had presided at Seneca Falls. Afterward I fell in with the old friends, Amy Post, Rhoda de Garmo and Sarah Fish, who at once commenced labors with me to prove that the hour had come when a woman should preside, and led me into the church. Amy proposed my name as president; I was accepted at once, and from that hour I seemed endowed as from on high to serve.

It was a two days' meeting with three sessions per day. On my taking the chair, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton left the platform and took their seats in the audience, but it did not move me from performing all my duties, and at the close of the meeting Lucretia Mott came forward, folded me tenderly in her arms and thanked me for presiding. That settled the question of men's presiding at a woman's convention. From that day to this, in all the walks of life, I have been faithful in asserting that there should be "no taxation without representation." It has seemed long in coming, but I think the time draws near when woman will be acknowledged as equal with man. Heaven grant the day to dawn soon!

Mrs. Catharine A. F. Stebbins (Mich.), who had attended the Seneca Falls Convention and signed the Declaration of Rights, sent an interesting descriptive letter. Mrs. Lucinda H. Stone (Mich.), the mother of women's clubs and a pioneer on educational lines, wrote:

You wanted I should write you any anecdotes of early interest in woman suffrage. The remembrance of Dr. Stone's waking up to that subject has come to me, and I have thought I would tell you about it.

It was some time in the forties that he was requested to deliver a Fourth of July oration in Kalamazoo. I can not tell the exact year, but it was before I had ever heard of the Rochester Convention, or of you or Mrs. Stanton, and he was looking up all that he could find in the early history of our Declaration of Independence, and the principles of Jefferson and the early revolutionists. I remember his coming in one day (it must have been before 1848), seeming very much absorbed in something that he was thinking about. He threw down the book he had been reading, and said to me: "The time will come when women will vote. Mark my words! We may not live to see it, we probably shall not, but it will come. It is not a woman's right or a man's right; it is a human right, and their voting is but a natural process of evolution."