As soon as the Centennial headquarters were closed Miss Anthony proceeded to carry out her cherished plan of writing the history of the woman’s rights movement.  She had sent the most peremptory orders to Mrs. Stanton not to make a lecture engagement before December 1, so that in August, September, October and November they might prepare this history.  She then shipped to Mrs. Stanton’s home several large trunks and boxes full of letters, reports and various documents which she had carefully preserved during the past quarter of a century, and the first day of August they set to work.  The entries in the diary for the next two months give some idea of her state of mind:  “I am immersed to my ears and feel almost discouraged....  The work before me is simply appalling....  The prospect of ever getting out a satisfactory history grows less each day....  Would that the good spirits in my own brain would come to the rescue!...  O, these old letters!  It makes me sad and tired to read them over, to see the terrible strain I was under every minute then, have been ever since, am now and shall be, I think, the rest of my life."[90]

On August 24 occurred the death of Paulina Wright Davis and, at the husband’s request, Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton spoke at the funeral.  The former felt that again she had lost a friend who never could be replaced.  Mrs. Davis was a woman of beauty, culture, wealth and social position and a life-long advocate of woman suffrage.  In October the dear cousin Anson Lapham passed away, and in the diary that night was written:  “No man except my father ever gave me such love and confidence, and his acts were equal to his faith.”

[Autograph: 

  With truest and tenderest friendship for my co-workers, I am as ever,
  Pauline Wright Davis.]

Work was pressing upon her from every side.  In the spring of this year she had been engaged by the editors of Johnson’s Universal Cyclopedia to write the chapter on suffrage and prepare the biographies of a number of eminent women.  Amidst all the other cares of the summer and fall, she had been endeavoring to collect the materials for these sketches, having the usual experience.  Some failed to answer; others wrote asking a score of questions; many sent four times as many words as were requested, with the statement that not one single line could be cut out; while a number forwarded a mass of unintelligible matter and requested her to make a good sketch out of it.  The history also was occupying her waking and sleeping thoughts, and the depleted condition of her pocket-book foreshadowed the necessity of another lecture tour.  Meanwhile, the mother at home was growing very feeble, and on Thanksgiving Day Miss Anthony wrote to her:  “I feel as if I were robbing myself of the last moments which I may ever have to be with you, but I can not see the way clear to stay at home this coming winter.  It is ever thus with me, so hard to know which is the strongest duty, the one that ought to be done first, and so I grope on in the dark.  That I am always away from home may look to the world as if I care less for it than other people, whereas my longing for it almost makes me weak; but you, dear mother, understand my love.”