Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/602

Rh bors, and not intentionally unkind or unjust, but full of that belief in the right of men to rule, which was general in those days, and ruling his own family with a strong hand. Although he helped his son through college, when his daughter Lucy wished to go he said to his wife, "Is the child crazy?" and she had to earn the money herself. For years she taught district schools, teaching and studying alternately at the low wages then paid to women teachers. It took her till she was twenty-five years of age to earn the money to take her to Oberlin, then the one college in the country that admitted women. In Oberlin she earned her way by teaching during vacations, and in the preparatory department of the college, and by doing housework in the ladies' boarding hall, at three cents an hour. Most of the time she cooked her food in her own room, boarding herself at a cost of less than fifty cents a week. At her graduation we have the first hint of the stand she was to take for woman's rights. Graduating with honors, she was appointed to write a commencement essay, but finding that she would not be allowed to read it herself, but that one of the professors would have to read it for her (the young women in those days not being allowed to read their own work in public) she declined to write it. After her return to New England she discovered her ability as a speaker, and her first woman's rights lecture was given from the pulpit of her brother's church, in Gardner, Mass., in 1847. Soon after she was engaged to lecture for the Anti-Slavery Association. It was still a great novelty for a woman to speak in public, and curiosity attracted great audiences. She always put a great deal of woman's rights into her anti-slavery lectures, and finally when Powers' "Greek Slave" was on exhibition in Boston the sight of the statue moved her so strongly that in her next lecture there was so much woman's rights and so little anti-slavery that Rev. Samuel May, who arranged her lectures, said to her, "Lucy, that was beautiful, but on the anti-