Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/606

Rh the books supposing that that would put an end to them, when she was informed that the abolition of inequitable laws could not be thus simply achieved. But she devoted the rest of her life in an effort toward the practical solution of women's rights. She has said that her life in this village seminary was made dreary in her disappointment and sorrow in not being a boy, and her chagrin was great when she found herself unable to enter Union College, where her brother was graduated just before his death.

In 1837, in her twenty-fourth year, while on a visit to her distinguished cousin, Gerrit Smith, at Peterboro, in the central part of New York State, she made the acquaintance of Henry Brewster Stanton, a fervid young orator, who had won distinction in the anti-slavery movement, and in 1840 they were married. They immediately set sail for Europe, the voyage, however, being undertaken not merely for pleasure and sightseeing, but that Mr. Stanton might fulfill the mission of delegate to the World's Anti-Slavery Convention, to be held in London, in 1840.

There Mrs. Stanton met Lucretia Mott and learned that there were others who felt the yoke women were bearing as well as herself. It was with Mrs. Mott that she signed the first call for a woman's rights convention and when she was once asked, "What most impressed you in Europe?" she replied, "Lucretia Mott." Their friendship never waned, and they worked together for reform all the long years after that meeting.

Mrs. Stanton and her husband removed to Seneca Falls, N. Y., and it was in that town, on the 19th and 20th of July, 1848, in the Wesleyan Chapel that the first assemblage known to history as a woman's rights convention was held. Mrs. Stanton was the chief agent in calling that convention. She received and cared for the visitors; she wrote the resolutions