But I found police duty rather irksome, especially when called out dark nights to prevent drunken fathers from disturbing their sleeping children, or to minister to poor mothers in the pangs of maternity.  Alas! alas! who can measure the mountains of sorrow and suffering endured in unwelcome motherhood in the abodes of ignorance, poverty, and vice, where terror-stricken women and children are the victims of strong men frenzied with passion and intoxicating drink?

Up to this time life had glided by with comparative ease, but now the real struggle was upon me.  My duties were too numerous and varied, and none sufficiently exhilarating or intellectual to bring into play my higher faculties.  I suffered with mental hunger, which, like an empty stomach, is very depressing.  I had books, but no stimulating companionship.  To add to my general dissatisfaction at the change from Boston, I found that Seneca Falls was a malarial region, and in due time all the children were attacked with chills and fever which, under homeopathic treatment in those days, lasted three months.  The servants were afflicted in the same way.  Cleanliness, order, the love of the beautiful and artistic, all faded away in the struggle to accomplish what was absolutely necessary from hour to hour.  Now I understood, as I never had before, how women could sit down and rest in the midst of general disorder.  Housekeeping, under such conditions, was impossible, so I packed our clothes, locked up the house, and went to that harbor of safety, home, as I did ever after in stress of weather.

I now fully understood the practical difficulties most women had to contend with in the isolated household, and the impossibility of woman’s best development if in contact, the chief part of her life, with servants and children.  Fourier’s phalansterie community life and co-operative households had a new significance for me.  Emerson says, “A healthy discontent is the first step to progress.”  The general discontent I felt with woman’s portion as wife, mother, housekeeper, physician, and spiritual guide, the chaotic conditions into which everything fell without her constant supervision, and the wearied, anxious look of the majority of women impressed me with a strong feeling that some active measures should be taken to remedy the wrongs of society in general, and of women in particular.  My experience at the World’s Anti-slavery Convention, all I had read of the legal status of women, and the oppression I saw everywhere, together swept across my soul, intensified now by many personal experiences.  It seemed as if all the elements had conspired to impel me to some onward step.  I could not see what to do or where to begin—­my only thought was a public meeting for protest and discussion.