It was ’mid such exhilarating scenes that Miss Anthony and I wrote addresses for temperance, anti-slavery, educational, and woman’s rights conventions.  Here we forged resolutions, protests, appeals, petitions, agricultural reports, and constitutional arguments; for we made it a matter of conscience to accept every invitation to speak on every question, in order to maintain woman’s right to do so.  To this end we took turns on the domestic watchtowers, directing amusements, settling disputes, protecting the weak against the strong, and trying to secure equal rights to all in the home as well as the nation.  I can recall many a stern encounter between my friend and the young experimenter.  It is pleasant to remember that he never seriously injured any of his victims, and only once came near fatally shooting himself with a pistol.  The ball went through his hand; happily a brass button prevented it from penetrating his heart.

It is often said, by those who know Miss Anthony best, that she has been my good angel, always pushing and goading me to work, and that but for her pertinacity I should never have accomplished the little I have.  On the other hand it has been said that I forged the thunderbolts and she fired them.  Perhaps all this is, in a measure, true.  With the cares of a large family I might, in time, like too many women, have become wholly absorbed in a narrow family selfishness, had not my friend been continually exploring new fields for missionary labors.  Her description of a body of men on any platform, complacently deciding questions in which woman had an equal interest, without an equal voice, readily roused me to a determination to throw a firebrand into the midst of their assembly.

Thus, whenever I saw that stately Quaker girl coming across my lawn, I knew that some happy convocation of the sons of Adam was to be set by the ears, by one of our appeals or resolutions.  The little portmanteau, stuffed with facts, was opened, and there we had what the Rev. John Smith and Hon. Richard Roe had said:  false interpretations of Bible texts, the statistics of women robbed of their property, shut out of some college, half paid for their work, the reports of some disgraceful trial; injustice enough to turn any woman’s thoughts from stockings and puddings.  Then we would get out our pens and write articles for papers, or a petition to the legislature; indite letters to the faithful, here and there; stir up the women in Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Massachusetts; call on The Lily, The Una, The Liberator, The Standard to remember our wrongs as well as those of the slave.  We never met without issuing a pronunciamento on some question.  In thought and sympathy we were one, and in the division of labor we exactly complemented each other.  In writing we did better work than either could alone.  While she is slow and analytical in composition, I am rapid and synthetic.  I am the better writer, she the better critic.  She supplied the facts and statistics, I the philosophy and rhetoric, and, together, we have made arguments that have stood unshaken through the storms of long years; arguments that no one has answered.  Our speeches may be considered the united product of our two brains.