stopped at Utica for the State Teachers' Convention and was appointed to read a paper at the next annual meeting on "Educating the Sexes Together." This action showed considerable advance in sentiment during the two years since this same body at Rochester debated for half an hour whether a woman should be allowed to speak to a motion. She called the Woman's Rights Convention to order in Saratoga, August 15, 1855, and Martha C. Wright was made president. The brilliant array of speakers addressed cultured audiences gathered from all parts of the country at this fashionable resort. The newspapers were very complimentary; the Whig, however, declared, "The business of the convention was to advocate woman's right to do wrong." It was here that Mary L. Booth, afterwards for many years editor of Harper's Bazar, made her first public appearance, acting as secretary.
She decided to go for a while to the Worcester Hydropathic Institute conducted by her cousin, Dr. Seth Rogers, and she found here complete change and comparative rest, although occupying a great deal of her time in sending out tracts and petitions. Her account-books show the purchase of 600 one-cent stamps, each of which meant the addressing of an envelope with her own hand, and her letters to her father are full of directions for printing circulars, etc. She was, however, enabled to take some recreation, a thing almost unknown in her busy life. On September 18 she attended the Massachusetts Woman's Rights Convention, and wrote home:
I went into Boston with Lucy Stone and stopped at Francis Jackson's, where we found Antoinette Brown and Ellen Blackwell, a pleasant company in that most hospitable home. As this was my first visit to Boston, Mr. Jackson took us to see the sights; and then we dined with his daughter, Eliza J. Eddy, returning in the afternoon. In the evening, we attended a reception at Garrison's, where we met several of the literati, and were most heartily welcomed by Mrs. Garrison, a noble, self-sacrificing woman, loving and loved, surrounded with healthy, happy children in that model home. Mr. Garrison was omnipresent, now talking with and introducing guests, now soothing some child to sleep, and now, with his wife, looking after the refreshments. There we met Caroline H. Dall, Elizabeth Peabody, Mrs. McCready, the Shakespearian reader, Caroline M. Severance, Dr. Harriot K. Hunt, Charles F. Hovey, Wendell Phillips, Sarah Pugh and others. Having worshipped these distinguished people afar off, it was a great satisfaction to meet them face to face.
Saturday morning, with Mr. and Mrs. Garrison and Sarah Pugh, I visited Mount Auburn. What a magnificent resting-place! We could not find Margaret Fuller's monument, which I regretted. I spent Sunday with Charles Lenox Remond at Salem, and we drove to Lynn with his matchless steeds to hear Theodore Parker preach a sermon which filled our souls. We discussed its excellence at James Buffum's where we all dined. Monday Mr. Garrison escorted me to Charlestown; we stood on the very spot where Warren fell and mounted the interminable staircase to the top of Bunker Hill Monument. Then we called on Theodore Parker; found him up three nights of stairs in his library which covers that whole floor of his house; the room is lined with books to the very top—16,000 volumes—and there at a large table in the center of the apartment sat the great man himself. It really seemed audacious in me to be ushered into such a presence and on such a commonplace errand as to ask him to come to Rochester to speak in a course of lectures I am planning, but he received me with such kindness and simplicity that the awe I felt on entering was soon dissipated. I then called on Wendell Phillips in his sanctum for the same purpose. I have invited Ralph Waldo Emerson by letter and all three have promised to come. In the evening with Mr. Jackson's son James, Ellen Blackwell and I went to see Hamlet. In spite of my Quaker training, I find I enjoy all these worldly amusements intensely.
Returning to Worcester, I attended the Anti-Slavery Bazaar. I suppose there were many beautiful things exhibited, but I was so absorbed in the conversation of Mr. Higginson, Samuel May, Jr., Sarah Earle, cousin Seth Rogers and Stephen and Abby Foster, that I really forgot to take a survey of the tables. The next day Charles F. Hovey drove with me out to the home of the Fosters where we had a pleasant call.1
Miss Anthony visited a baby show but she considered it "a sad exhibition, unless it may be the crude and rude beginning of arousing an interest in the laws which govern the production of strong, healthy, beautiful children." She heard Mr. Higginson preach every Sunday, and of one sermon on the "Secret Springs of True Greatness" she writes home:
The minister read from the Book of Esdras in the Apocrypha. It is astonishing that such a beautiful and forcible exemplification of the governing principle of life should have been cast aside as doubtful by those who presumed to sit in judgment upon the revealed will of the Almighty. That they did fail to perceive in this the divine stamp, proves all the more conclusively to me that we, who have the experience of all past generations to enlighten our understanding and deepen our convictions, are infinitely more competent to discern between the good and evil in that wonderful book than were any king-appointed councils of olden times.
During Mr. Higginson's absence his place was filled by Rev. David A. Wasson, who was temporarily a resident of the "water cure." His sermons and his daily companionship were a revelation to Miss Anthony of a higher intellectual and spiritual life than she had known before, and she records in her diary: "It is plain to me now that it is not sitting under preaching that I dislike, but the fact that most of it is not of a stamp that my soul can respond to." While in Worcester she went to her first Republican meeting and heard John P. Hale. Her cousin escorted her to a seat on the platform and Mr. Hale gave her a cordial welcome. She was the only woman present, although several peeped in at the door but had not the courage to enter. She also heard Henry Wilson, Charles Sumner and Anson Burlingame, and writes: "Had the accident of birth given me place among the aristocracy of sex, I doubt not I should be an active, zealous advocate of Republicanism; unless, perchance, I had received that higher, holier light which would have lifted me to the sublime height where now stand Garrison, Phillips and all that small but noble band whose motto is 'No Union with Slaveholders.'"
She was at this time becoming deeply interested in politics but had not dreamed that she herself ever would enter the ranks of political speakers. In October she complains of her restlessness and her anxiety to go home, but she is not strong and knows it would be impossible to keep up the treatment there, so she says: "Because of this, and because of my great desire to be able to do what now seems my life work, I have decided to stay awhile longer." But in this same letter she adds: "If Merritt is sick and needs me I will go to him at once. My waking and sleeping thoughts are with him." This young brother had insisted upon going West to seek his fortune and was taken ill in Iowa. At one time when he asked for some money he had saved, and his father, thinking he was too young to be trusted, did not let him have it, Miss Anthony wrote: "It is too bad to treat him like a child. Let him make a blunder even; it will do much more to develop him than the judgment of father, mother and all the brothers and sisters. He ought to have the privilege, since it is clearly his right, to invest his money exactly as he pleases and I hope he will yet be trusted at least with his own funds."
To a woman who is publishing a paper and complains that her efforts are neither helped nor appreciated, she replies: "Every individual woman who launches into a work hitherto monopolized by men, must stand or fall in her own strength or weakness. Whatever we manufacture we must study to make it for the interest of the community to purchase. If we fail in this, we must improve the work.... Each of us individually has her own duties to perform and each of us alone must work out her life problem."
In October the National Woman's Rights Convention was held in Cincinnati but she was unable to attend. It was the only one she missed from 1852 until the breaking out of the war, when they were abandoned for a number of years, and she felt so distressed that she wrote to Rochester and persuaded her sister Mary to get leave of absence from school and go in her place. We know she has a very pretty bonnet this fall, for she says: "It is trimmed with dark green ribbon, striped with black and white, and for face trimming, lace and cherry and green flowers with the least speck of blue." She grieves because her married sisters never have time to write her, and says:
But so it is; every wife and mother must devote herself wholly to home duties, washing and cleaning, baking and mending—these are the must be's; the culture
