[Illustration:  Copyright by Underwood and Underwood, N.Y.

SUSAN B. ANTHONY]

Experience soon demonstrated, however, that praise was not the ballot.  Indeed the suffragists already had realized that a tedious contest lay before them.  They had revived in 1866 their regular national convention.  They gave the name of “The Revolution” to their paper, edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.  They formed a national suffrage association and organized annual pilgrimages to Congress to present their claims.  Such activities bore some results.  Many eminent congressmen were converted to their cause and presented it ably to their colleagues of both chambers.  Still the subject was ridiculed by the newspapers and looked upon as freakish by the masses.

=The State Campaigns.=—­Discouraged by the outcome of the national campaign, suffragists turned to the voters of the individual states and sought the ballot at their hands.  Gains by this process were painfully slow.  Wyoming, it is true, while still a territory, granted suffrage to women in 1869 and continued it on becoming a state twenty years later, in spite of strong protests in Congress.  In 1893 Colorado established complete political equality.  In Utah, the third suffrage state, the cause suffered many vicissitudes.  Women were enfranchised by the territorial legislature; they were deprived of the ballot by Congress in 1887; finally in 1896 on the admission of Utah to the union they recovered their former rights.  During the same year, 1896, Idaho conferred equal suffrage upon the women.  This was the last suffrage victory for more than a decade.

=The Suffrage Cause in Congress.=—­In the midst of the meager gains among the states there were occasional flurries of hope for immediate action on the federal amendment.  Between 1878 and 1896 the Senate committee reported the suffrage resolution by a favorable majority on five different occasions.  During the same period, however, there were nine unfavorable reports and only once did the subject reach the point of a general debate.  At no time could anything like the required two-thirds vote be obtained.

=The Changing Status of Women.=—­While the suffrage movement was lagging, the activities of women in other directions were steadily multiplying.  College after college—­Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Smith, Wellesley, to mention a few—­was founded to give them the advantages of higher education.  Other institutions, especially the state universities of the West, opened their doors to women, and women were received into the professions of law and medicine.  By the rapid growth of public high schools in which girls enjoyed the same rights as boys, education was extended still more widely.  The number of women teachers increased by leaps and bounds.