by “Long John” Wentworth, who was seated on the stage.  At the close of the address, to her surprise, A. Bronson Alcott, Parker Pillsbury and A.J.  Grover came up to congratulate her.  She had not known they were in the city.  Mr. Alcott said:  “You have stated here this afternoon, in a fearless manner, truths that I have hardly dared to think, much less to utter.”  No other speaker, man or woman, ever had handled this question with such boldness and severity and the lecture produced a great sensation.  Even the radical Mrs. Stanton wrote her she would never again be asked to speak in Chicago, and Mr. Slayton said that she had ruined her future chances there; nevertheless she was invited by the same committee the following winter.

It was given at several places in Wisconsin, Illinois,[83] Iowa, Kansas and Missouri to crowded houses and the newspaper comments were varied.  On the occasion of its delivery in Mercantile Library Hall, St. Louis, in the Star lecture course, the Democrat said:  “The audience was large and composed of the most respectable and intelligent of our citizens, a majority being ladies.  Miss Anthony is one of the most remarkable women of the nineteenth century—­remarkable for the purity of her life, the earnestness with which she promulgates her peculiar views, and the indomitable courage and perseverance with which she bears defeat and misfortune.  No longer in the bloom of youth—­if she ever had any bloom—­hard-featured, guileless, cold as an icicle, fluent and philosophical, she wields today tenfold more influence than all the beautiful and brilliant female lecturers that ever flaunted upon the platform as preachers of social impossibilities.”

The metropolitan press generally acknowledged the necessity for such a lecture and complimented Miss Anthony’s courage in undertaking it, but the country papers were greatly distressed, as a specimen extract will show: 

There is very little satisfaction in observing that Miss Anthony is following in the wake of Anna Dickinson, in publicly lecturing upon subjects that no modest woman ought, in respect for her sex, to acknowledge that she is so familiar with.  Miss D. expatiates upon the “Social Evil,” and Miss A. enlarges upon “Social Purity”—­topics that maidenly delicacy, we repeat, should refuse to discuss.  It would be suggestively coarse for a married woman to deliberately select such questionable themes for a public discourse; but these two ladies are spinsters yet, and spinsters are presumed to be wholly innocent of the necessary information—­are supposed, in truth, to be too pure-minded to contemplate vice in its most repulsive shape, not to say analyze it, and dwell oratorically before the world upon its nauseous details.  The women’s crusade against liquor effected nothing, for the simple reason that women were out of their proper sphere in attempting it; but if so, how much more do they degrade their sex when they go out of the way to ask us to believe