It was mid such exhilarating scenes that Miss Anthony and I wrote addresses for temperance, anti-slavery, educational and woman’s rights conventions.  Here we forged resolutions, protests, appeals, petitions, agricultural reports and constitutional arguments, for we made it a matter of conscience to accept every invitation to speak on every question, in order to maintain woman’s right to do so.  It is often said by those who know Miss Anthony best, that she has been my good angel, always pushing and guiding me to work.  With the cares of a large family, perhaps I might in time, like too many women, have become wholly absorbed in a narrow selfishness, had not my friend been continually exploring new fields for missionary labors.  Her description of a body of men on any platform, complacently deciding questions in which women had an equal interest without an equal voice, readily roused me to a determination to throw a fire-brand in the midst of their assembly.

Thus, whenever I saw that stately Quaker girl coming across my lawn I knew that some happy convocation of the sons of Adam were to be set by the ears with our appeals or resolutions.  The little portmanteau stuffed with facts was opened and there we had what Rev. John Smith and Hon. Richard Roe had said, false interpretation of Bible texts, statistics of women robbed of their property, shut out of some college, half-paid for their work, reports of some disgraceful trial—­injustice enough to turn any woman’s thoughts from stockings and puddings.  Then we would get out our pens and write articles for papers, a petition to the Legislature, letters to the faithful here and there, stir up the women in Ohio, Pennsylvania or Massachusetts, call on the Lily, the Una, the Liberator, the Standard, to remember our wrongs.  We never met without issuing a pronunciamento on some question.

In thought and sympathy we were one, and in the division of labor we exactly complemented each other.  In writing we did better work together than either could do alone.  While she is slow and analytical in composition, I am rapid and synthetic.  I am the better writer, she the better critic.  She supplied the facts and statistics, I the philosophy and rhetoric, and together we made arguments which have stood unshaken by the storms of nearly fifty long years.[29]

In 1878 Theodore Tilton gave this graphic description:  “These two women, sitting together in their parlors, have for the last thirty years been diligent forgers of all manner of projectiles, from fireworks to thunderbolts, and have hurled them with unexpected explosion into the midst of all manner of educational, reformatory, religious and political assemblies, sometimes to the pleasant surprise and half welcome of the members; more often to the bewilderment and prostration of numerous victims; and in a few signal instances, to the gnashing of angry men’s teeth.  I know of no two more pertinacious incendiaries in the whole country; nor will they themselves deny the charge.  In fact, this noise-making twain are the two sticks of a drum for keeping up what Daniel Webster called ’the rub-a-dub of agitation.’”