It has been objected that we do not confine ourselves to the subject of temperance, but talk too much about woman’s rights, divorce and the church....  We have been obliged to preach woman’s rights because many, instead of listening to what we had to say on temperance, have questioned the right of woman to speak on any subject.  In courts of justice and legislative assemblies, if the right of any person to be there is questioned, all business waits until that point is settled.  Now, it is not settled in the minds of the masses that woman has any right to stand on an even pedestal with man, look him in the face as an equal and rebuke the sins of her day and generation.  Let it be clearly understood then that we are a Woman’s Rights Society; that we believe it is woman’s duty to speak whenever she feels the impression to do so; that it is her right to be present in all the councils of Church and State.

Continuing, she took firm ground in favor of the right of a woman to be divorced from an habitual drunkard, a position which brought upon her a storm of censure from press, pulpit and society.  She was strongly supported, however, by the most prominent women of the day and received many letters of approval, among them one from Lucy Stone, saying:  “On the divorce question, I am on your side, for the reason that drunkenness so depraves a man’s system that he is not fit to be a father.”  Gerrit Smith wrote to the convention: 

I know not why it is not as much the duty of your sex as of mine to establish newspapers, write books and hold public meetings for the promotion of the cause of temperance.  The current idea that modesty should hold women back from such services is nonsense and wickedness.  Female modesty! female delicacy!  I would that I might never again hear such phrases.  There is but one standard of modesty and delicacy for both men and women; and so long as different standards are tolerated, both sexes will be perverse and corrupt....  The Quakers are the best people I have ever known, the most serious and chaste and yet the most brave and resisting; but there are no other people who are so little concerned lest women get out of their sphere.  None make so little difference between man and woman.  Others appear to think that the happiness and safety of the world consist in magnifying the difference.  But when reason and religion shall rule, there will be no difference between man and woman, in respect to the intellect, the heart or the manners.

[Autograph: 

  Very respectfully
  your friend
  Gerrit Smith]

A stirring letter was sent by Neal Dow, expressing his great pleasure that women were taking active and decided measures for the suppression of intemperance, and closing:  “It is absurd, therefore, to argue that the community has no power to control this great evil; that any citizen has the right to inflict it upon society, or that society should hesitate to exercise its right and power of self-protection against it.”