It is being forced upon me that nature orders me to stay quietly at home this winter and it may be that it is to enable me to get a greater literary culture than I possibly could, amidst the hurry and bustle of continual meetings.  Somehow I can not philosophize away a shrinking from going into active work.  I can not get up a particle of enthusiasm or faith in the success, either financial or spiritual, of another series of conventions.  For the past five years I have gone through this routine and something within me keeps praying to be spared from more of it.  There has been such a surfeit of lecturing, the people are tired of it.  Then I never was so poor in purse and I fear to end another campaign with a heavy debt to still further encroach upon my small savings.  I can not bear to make myself dependent upon relatives for the food I eat and the clothes I wear; I never have done it and hope I may never have to.  Perhaps I may feel a renewed faith in myself and my work but the past years have brought me so much isolation and spiritual loneliness, although in the midst of crowds, that I confess to a longing to stay for awhile among my own people.

The commands of the physician were imperative that she should avoid all fatigue and nervous excitement, but her pen was not idle, and the time which she hoped to devote to the reading of many books was occupied in sending out letters, petitions, appeals and the various documents necessary to keep the work going.  In answer to an invitation from the Friends of Human Progress she wrote: 

To be esteemed worthy to speak for woman, for the slave, for humanity, is ever grateful to me, and I regret that I can not be with you at your annual gathering to get for myself a fresh baptism, a new and deeper faith.  I would exhort all women to be discontented with their present condition and to assert their individuality of thought, word and action by the energetic doing of noble deeds.  Idle wishes, vain repinings, loud-sounding declamations never can bring freedom to any human soul.  What woman most needs is a true appreciation of her womanhood, a self-respect which shall scorn to eat the bread of dependence.  Whoever consents to live by “the sweat of the brow” of another human being inevitably humiliates and degrades herself....  No genuine equality, no real freedom, no true manhood or womanhood can exist on any foundation save that of pecuniary independence.  As a right over a man’s subsistence is a power over his moral being, so a right over a woman’s subsistence enslaves her will, degrades her pride and vitiates her whole moral nature.

To her brother Daniel R., in Kansas, who was somewhat skeptical on the woman question, she sent this strong letter: