Is there work down among you for Susan to do?  Any shirt-making, cooking, clerking, preaching or teaching, indeed any honest work, just to keep her out of idleness!  She seems strangely unemployed—­almost expiring for something to do, and I could not resist the inclination to appeal to you, as a person of particular leisure, that an effort be made in her behalf.  At present she has only the Anti-Slavery cause for New York, the “Woman’s Rights Movement” for the world, the Sunday evening lectures for Rochester and other lecturing of her own from Lake Erie to the “Old Man of Franconia mountains;” private cares and home affairs and the various et ceteras of womanity.  These are about all so far as appears, to occupy her seven days of twenty-four hours each, as the weeks rain down to her from Eternal Skies.  Do pity and procure work for her if it be possible!

[Footnote 17:  From 1840 to 1848 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ernestine L. Hose, Lydia Mott and Paulina Wright (afterwards Davis), circulated petitions for a Married Woman’s Property Law and, in presenting them, addressed a legislative committee several times.]

[Footnote 18:  The W.C.T.U. was organized in 1874 and the temperance work passed almost entirely into the hands of women.]

CHAPTER VII.

PETITIONS——­BLOOMERS——­LECTURES.

1854.

Considerable space has been given to detailed accounts of these early conventions to illustrate the prejudice which existed against woman’s speaking in public, and the martyrdom suffered by the pioneers to secure the right of free speech for succeeding generations.  From this time until the merging of all questions into the Civil War, such conventions were held every year, producing a great revolution of sentiment in the direction of an enlarged sphere for woman’s activities and a modification of the legal and religious restraints that so long had held her in bondage.  They have been fully described also in order to indicate some of the causes which operated in the development of the mind and character of Susan B. Anthony, transforming her by degrees from a, quiet, domestic Quaker maiden to a strong, courageous, uncompromising advocate of absolute equality of rights for woman.  Brought into close association with the most advanced men and women of the age, seeing on every hand the injustice perpetrated against her sex and hearing the magnificent appeals for the liberty of every human being, her soul could not fail to respond; and having passed the age when women are apt to consecrate themselves to love and marriage, it was most natural that she should dedicate her services to the struggle for the freedom of woman.  She did not realize then that this would reach through fifty years of exacting and unending toil, but even had she done so, who can doubt that she freely would have given up her life to the work?