The woman who advocated co-education in those days was indeed in a “bold and conspicuous position.”  The resolutions were lost by a large majority.  Even if every man present had voted against them, there were enough women to have carried them had they voted in the affirmative.  The Republican said:  “If the lady members had voted so as to be heard we know not what would have been the result; but their voices, to say the least, have not been ordained by the Creator to be equal or identical with man’s, and are drowned by his louder sounds.”  Mrs. Stanton’s opinion can best be learned by an extract from a letter: 

I see by the papers that you have once more stirred that pool of intellectual stagnation, the educational convention.  What an infernal set of fools those schoolmarms must be!  Well, if in order to please men they wish to live on air, let them.  The sooner the present generation of women dies out, the better.  We have idiots enough in the world now without such women propagating any more....  The New York Times was really quite complimentary.  Mr. Stanton brought every item he could find about you.  “Well, my dear,” he would say, “another notice of Susan.  You stir up Susan, and she stirs the world.”  I was glad you went to torment those devils.  I guess they will begin to think their time has come.  I glory in your perseverance.  O, Susan, I will do anything to help you on.  You and I have a prospect of a good long life.  We shall not be in our prime before fifty, and after that we shall be good for twenty years at least.  If we do not make old Davies shake in his boots or turn in his grave, I am mistaken.

The proceedings of the convention were published in full in the New York Tribune, and Miss Anthony received letters of commendation from Judge William Hay, Charles L. Reason, superintendent of the New York city colored schools, and many others.  William Marvin, of Binghamton, wrote:  “The sympathy of the people here, during the teachers’ association, was decidedly with you.  A vote from the audience would have carried any one of your resolutions.”

In the autumn the anti-slavery meetings were resumed, and Miss Anthony was unsparing of herself and everybody else.  Parker Pillsbury complained:  “What a task-mistress our general agent is proving herself.  I expect as soon as women get command, an end will have come to all our peace.  We shall yet have societies for the protection of men’s rights, in the cause of which many of us will have to be martyrs.”  Her brother, Daniel R., was sending frequent letters from Kansas containing graphic descriptions of the terrible condition of affairs in that unhappy territory, and scathing denunciations of the treachery of northern “dough faces,” thus fanning the fires of patriotism that glowed in her breast and filling her with renewed zeal for the cause to which she was giving her time and strength.  During these days she wrote a cherished sister: