Woman has so long been accustomed to non-intervention with law-making, so long considered it man’s business to regulate the liquor traffic, that it is with much cautiousness she receives the new doctrine which we preach; the doctrine that it is her right and duty to speak out against the traffic and all men and institutions that in any way sanction, sustain or countenance it; and, since she can not vote, to duly instruct her husband, son, father or brother how she would have him vote, and, if he longer continue to mis-represent her, take the right to march to the ballot-box and deposit a vote indicative of her highest ideas of practical temperance.

It will be seen by this that already she had taken her stand on the right of woman to the franchise.

While at Elmira she happened into a teachers’ convention and heard Charles Anthony, of the Albany academy, a distant relative, make an address on “The Divine Ordinance of Corporal Punishment.”  It was a severe and cruel justification of the unlimited use of the rod, but, although more than three-fourths of the teachers present were women, not a word was uttered in protest.  Throughout the proceedings not a woman’s voice was heard, none was appointed on committees or voted on any question, and they were as completely ignored as so many outsiders.  Miss Anthony made up her mind that here also was a work to be done, and that henceforth she would attend the State teachers’ conventions every year and demand for women all the privileges now monopolized by men.

On September 8, 1852, she went to her first Woman’s Rights Convention, which was held at Syracuse.  She had read with avidity the accounts of the Ohio, Massachusetts, Indiana and Pennsylvania conventions, but this was her first opportunity of attending one.  At the preliminary meeting, held the night before, she was made a member of the nominating committee with Paulina Wright Davis, of Providence, R.I., chairman.  Mrs. Davis had come with the determination of putting in as president her dear friend Elizabeth Oakes Smith, a fashionable literary woman of Boston.  Both attended the meeting and the convention in short-sleeved, low-necked white dresses, one with a pink, the other with a blue embroidered wool delaine sack with wide, flowing sleeves, which left both neck and arms exposed.  At the committee meeting next morning, Quaker James Mott nominated Mrs. Smith for president, but Quaker Susan B. Anthony spoke out boldly and said that nobody who dressed as she did could represent the earnest, solid, hard-working women of the country for whom they were making the demand for equal rights.  Mr. Mott said they must not expect all women to dress as plainly as the Friends; but she held her ground, and as all the committee agreed with her, though no one else had had the courage to speak, Mrs. Smith’s name was voted down.  This is but one instance of hundreds where Miss Anthony alone dared say what others only dared think, and thus through all the years made herself the target for criticism, blame and abuse.  Others escaped through their cowardice; she suffered through her bravery.