At another time she suggested that, as there were only a few hours left for the business of the convention, they should not be frittered away in trifling discussions, saying, “if she were a man she would be ashamed to consume the time in telling how much she loved women and in fulsome flattery of other men.”  She moved also that they set aside the proposed discussion on “The Effects of High Intellectual Culture on the Efficiency and Respectability of Manual Labor,” and take up pressing questions.  When one man was indulging in a lot of the senseless twaddle about his wife which many of them are fond of introducing in their speeches, she called him to order saying that the kind of a wife he had, had nothing to do with the subject.  She introduced again the resolution demanding equal pay for equal work without regard to sex.  A friend wrote of this occasion:  “She arraigned those assembled teachers for their misdemeanors as she would a class of schoolboys, in perfect unconsciousness that she was doing anything unusual.  We women never can be sufficiently thankful to her for taking the hard blows and still harder criticisms, while we reaped the benefits.”

The press reports said:  “Miss Anthony has gained in the estimation of the teachers’ convention, and is now listened to with great attention.”  She gave her lecture on “Co-Education” to a crowded house of Lockport’s prominent citizens, introduced by President George L. Farnham, of Syracuse, always her friend in those troublous days.  By this time more than a score of the eminent educators of the day had become her steadfast friends, and they welcomed her to these conventions, aiding her efforts in every possible manner.  Rev. Samuel J. May, who had delivered an address, upon his return home wrote:  “You are a great girl, and I wish there were thousands more in the world like you.  Some foolish old conventionalisms would be utterly routed, and the legal and social disabilities of women would not long be what they are.”  Miss Anthony herself, writing to Antoinette Blackwell, said:  “I wish I had time to tell you of my Lockport experience; it was rich.  I never felt so cool and self-possessed among the plannings and plottings of the few old fogies, and they never appeared so frantic with rage.  They evidently felt that their reign of terror is about ended.”

October, 1858, brought another crucial occasion.  In Rochester, a young man, Ira Stout, had been condemned to be hung for murder.  A number of persons strongly opposed to capital punishment believed this a suitable time to make a demonstration.  It was not that they doubted the guilt of Stout, but they were opposed to the principle of what they termed judicial murder.  As the Anthonys and many of the leading Quaker families, Frederick Douglass and a number of Abolitionists shared in this opinion, it was not surprising that Miss Anthony undertook to get up the meeting.  In a cold rain she made the round of the orthodox ministers but none