here,” I replied, “in your office, when a child, listening to the complaints women made to you.  They who have sympathy and imagination to make the sorrows of others their own can readily learn all the hard lessons of life from the experience of others.”  “Well, well!” he said, “you have made your points clear and strong; but I think I can find you even more cruel laws than those you have quoted.”  He suggested some improvements in my speech, looked up other laws, and it was one o’clock in the morning before we kissed each other good-night.  How he felt on the question after that I do not know, as he never said anything in favor of or against it.  He gladly gave me any help I needed, from time to time, in looking up the laws, and was very desirous that whatever I gave to the public should be carefully prepared.

Miss Anthony printed twenty thousand copies of this address, laid it on the desk of every member of the legislature, both in the Assembly and Senate, and, in her travels that winter, she circulated it throughout the State.  I am happy to say I never felt so anxious about the fate of a speech since.

The first woman’s convention in Albany was held at this time, and we had a kind of protracted meeting for two weeks after.  There were several hearings before both branches of the legislature, and a succession of meetings in Association Hall, in which Phillips, Channing, Ernestine L. Rose, Antoinette L. Brown, and Susan B. Anthony took part.  Being at the capital of the State, discussion was aroused at every fireside, while the comments of the press were numerous and varied.  Every little country paper had something witty or silly to say about the uprising of the “strong-minded.”  Those editors whose heads were about the size of an apple were the most opposed to the uprising of women, illustrating what Sidney Smith said long ago:  “There always was, and there always will be a class of men so small that, if women were educated, there would be nobody left below them.”  Poor human nature loves to have something to look down upon!

Here is a specimen of the way such editors talked at that time.  The Albany Register, in an article on “Woman’s Rights in the Legislature,” dated March 7, 1854, says: 

“While the feminine propagandists of women’s rights confined themselves to the exhibition of short petticoats and long-legged boots, and to the holding of conventions and speech-making in concert rooms, the people were disposed to be amused by them, as they are by the wit of the clown in the circus, or the performances of Punch and Judy on fair days, or the minstrelsy of gentlemen with blackened faces, on banjos, the tambourine, and bones.  But the joke is becoming stale.  People are getting cloyed with these performances, and are looking for some healthier and more intellectual amusement.  The ludicrous is wearing away, and disgust is taking the place of pleasurable sensations, arising from the novelty of this new phase of