me as much as the principal.  You sent to another town for a man, who has made an absolute failure, and yet you do not hesitate to pay him the full salary for the time he was here.  If you will be as just to me, I will resume the work and do my best—­on any other conditions I must decline.”  They agreed to the proposition, I finished the term and for the first time on record a woman received a principal’s salary!

A little later Miss Mary continues the story: 

You know the principal of Number Ten has been ill nearly two months.  I asked him if Miss Hayden, who took his place, was to receive his salary.  He replied:  “Do you think after the money has been audited to me, I ought to turn around and give it all to her?” Said I:  “If the board are willing to pay you $72 a month while you are sick and pay her the same, all right; but if only one is to receive that salary, I say, and most emphatically, she is the one.”  He wanted to know if I was not aware that mine was the only case where such a thing had been done in Rochester.  I told him I was heartily glad I had been the means of having justice done for once, and was really in hopes other women teachers would follow my example and suffer themselves no longer to be duped.

Miss Hayden however was obliged to accept $25 a month for doing exactly the work for which the man received $72 during all his illness.  To keep her from making trouble, the board gave her a small present with the understanding that it was not to be considered as salary.  A short time afterwards Miss Mary wrote again:  “A woman teacher on a salary of $20 a month has just been ill for a week and another was employed to take her place; when she recovered, she was obliged to have the supply teacher’s salary deducted from her own.  So I posted down to the superintendent’s office and had another decidedly plain talk.  He owned that it was unjust but said there was no help for it.”

In the winter of 1860, Henry Ward Beecher delivered his great woman’s rights speech at Cooper Institute, New York.  At that time his name was a power in the whole world and his masterly exposition of the rights of women is still used as one of the best suffrage leaflets.  Miss Anthony tells in her diary of meeting Tilton and of his amusing account of the struggle they had to get this speech published in the Independent.  Her little visits to New York and Boston always inspired her with fresh courage, for here she would meet Theodore Parker, Frothingham, Cheever, Chapin, Beecher, Greeley, Phillips, Garrison, the great spirits of that age, and all in perfect sympathy with what she represented.