ridiculed by the press and pulpit both in England and America.  But now many conventions are held each year in both countries to discuss the same ideas; social customs have changed; laws have been modified; municipal suffrage has been granted to women in England and some of her colonies; school suffrage has been granted to women in half of our States, municipal suffrage in Kansas, and full suffrage in four States of the Union.  Thus the principle scouted in 1848 was accepted in England in 1870, and since then, year by year, it has slowly progressed in America until the fourth star shone out on our flag in 1896, and Idaho enfranchised her women!  That first convention, considered a “grave mistake” in 1848, is now referred to as “a grand step in progress.”

My next mistake was when, as president of the New York State Woman’s Temperance Association, I demanded the passage of a statute allowing wives an absolute divorce for the brutality and intemperance of their husbands.  I addressed the Legislature of New York a few years later when a similar bill was pending, and also large audiences in several of our chief cities, and for this I was severely denounced.  To-day fugitives from such unholy ties can secure freedom in many of the Western States, and enlightened public sentiment sustains mothers in refusing to hand down an appetite fraught with so many evil consequences.  This, also called a “mistake” in 1860, was regarded as a “step in progress” a few years later.

Again, I urged my coadjutors by speeches, letters, and resolutions, as a means of widespread agitation, to make the same demands of the Church that we had already made of the State.  They objected, saying, “That is too revolutionary, an attack on the Church would injure the suffrage movement.”  But I steadily made the demand, as opportunity offered, that women be ordained to preach the Gospel and to fill the offices as elders, deacons, and trustees.  A few years later some of these suggestions were accepted.  Some churches did ordain women as pastors over congregations of their own, others elected women deaconesses, and a few churches allowed women, as delegates, to sit in their conferences.  Thus this demand was in a measure honored and another “step in progress” taken.

In 1882 I tried to organize a committee to consider the status of women in the Bible, and the claim that the Hebrew Writings were the result of divine inspiration.  It was thought very presumptuous for women not learned in languages and ecclesiastical history to undertake such work.  But as we merely proposed to comment on what was said of women in plain English, and found these texts composed only one-tenth of the Old and New Testaments, it did not seem to me a difficult or dangerous undertaking.  However, when Part I. of “The Woman’s Bible” was published, again there was a general disapproval by press and pulpit, and even by women themselves, expressed in resolutions in suffrage and temperance conventions.  Like other “mistakes,” this too, in due time, will be regarded as “a step in progress.”