The Visiter had a large list of subscribers in Salem, Ohio, and in the summer of ’49 a letter from a lady came to me saying, that the Visiter had stirred up so much interest in women’s rights that a meeting had been held and a committee appointed to get up a woman’s rights convention, and she, as chairman of that committee, invited me to preside.  I felt on reading this as if I had had a douche bath; then, as a lawyer might have felt who had carried a case for a corporation through the lower court, and when expecting it up before the supreme bench, had learned that all his clients were coming in to address the court on the merits of the case.

By the pecks of letters I had been receiving, I had learned that there were thousands of women with grievances, and no power to state them or to discriminate between those which could be reached by law and those purely personal; and that the love of privacy with which the whole sex was accredited was a mistake, since most of my correspondents literally agonized to get before the public.  Publicity! publicity! was the persistent demand.  To meet the demand, small papers, owned and edited by women, sprang up all over the land, and like Jonah’s gourd, perished in a night.  Ruskin says to be noble is to be known, and at that period there was a great demand on the part of women for their full allowance of nobility; but not one in a hundred thought of merit as a means of reaching it.  No use waiting to learn to put two consecutive sentences together in any connected form, or for an idea or the power of expressing it.  One woman was printing her productions, and why should not all the rest do likewise?  They had so long followed some leader like a flock of sheep, that now they would rush through the first gap into newspaperdom.

I declined the presidential honors tendered me, on the ground of inability to fill the place; and earnestly entreated the movers to reconsider and give up the convention, saying: 

“It will open a door through which fools and fanatics will pour in, and make the cause ridiculous.”

The answer was that it was too late to recede.  The convention was held, and justified my worst fears.  When I criticised it, the reply was: 

“If you had come and presided, as we wished you to do, the result would have been different.  You started the movement and now refuse to lead it, but cannot stop it.”

The next summer a convention was held in Akron, Ohio, and I attended, hoping to modify the madness, but failed utterly, by all protests I could make, to prevent the introduction by the committee on resolutions of this: 

“Resolved, that the difference in sex is one of education.”

A man stood behind the president to prompt her, but she could not catch his meaning, and when confusion came, she rose and made a little speech, in which she stated that she knew nothing of parliamentary rules, and when consenting to preside had resolved, if there were trouble, to say to the convention as she did to her boys at home:  “Quit behaving yourselves!”