in bitter questionings.  “Are we aliens,” asked Angelina, “because we are women?  Are we bereft of citizenship because we are the mothers, wives, and daughters of a mighty people?  Have women no country—­no interests staked on the public weal—­no partnership in a nation’s guilt or shame?” This discontent with the existing social establishment in its relation to women received sympathetic responses from many friends to whom the sisters communicated the contagion of their unrest and dissatisfaction.  Angelina records that, “At friend Chapman’s, where we spent a social evening, I had a long talk with the brethren on the rights of women, and found a very general sentiment prevailing that it is time our fetters were broken.  L.M.  Child and Maria Chapman strongly supported this view; indeed very many seem to think a new order of things is very desirable in this respect.”

This prevalence of a sentiment favorable to women’s rights, which Angelina observed in Mrs. Chapman’s parlors possessed no general significence.  For true to the character of new ideas, this particular new idea did not bring peace but a sword.  It set Abolition brethren against Abolition brethren, and blew into a flame the differences of leaders among themselves.  But the first irruption of strife which it caused proceeded from without, came from the church or rather from the clergy of the Orthodox Congregational churches of Massachusetts.  This clerical opposition to the idea of women’s rights found expression in the celebrated “Pastoral Letter,” issued by the General Association of Ministers of that denomination to the churches of the same in the summer of 1837.  This ecclesiastical bull had two distinct purposes to accomplish; first, to discourage the agitation of the slavery question by excluding anti-slavery agents from lecturing upon that subject in the churches; and, second, to suppress the agitation of the woman’s question by setting the seal of the disapproval of the clergy to the appearance of women in their new and revolutionary role of public speakers and teachers on the burning subjects of the times.  The reverend authors threw up their hands and eyes in holy horror at the “widespread and permanent injury” which seemed to them to threaten “the female character.”  They scorned the new-fangled notion of woman’s independence, and asked for nothing better than the Pauline definition of her “appropriate duties and influence.”  “The power of women,” quoth they, “is in her dependence....  When she assumes the place and tone of man as a public reformer, our care and protection of her seem unnecessary; we put ourselves in self-defence against her, she yields the power which God has given her for protection, and her character becomes unnatural!”