und a college for women equal in all respects to
Harvard and Yale.[109]

Progress and good feeling were in the air, and the speakers were not
heckled as in past years by the rowdies who had made it a practice to
follow abolitionists into woman's rights meetings to bait them. Into
this atmosphere of good will and rejoicing, Susan and Elizabeth
Stanton now injected a more serious note, bringing before the
convention the controversial question of marriage and divorce which
heretofore had been handled with kid gloves at all woman's rights
meetings, but which they sincerely believed demanded solution.

* * * * *

Divorce had been much in the news because several leading families in
America and in England were involved in lawsuits complicated by
stringent divorce laws. Invariably the wife bore the burden of censure
and hardship, for no matter how unprincipled her husband might be, he
was entitled to her children and her earnings under the property laws
of most states.

In New York efforts were now being made to gain support for a liberal
divorce bill, patterned after the Indiana law, and a variety of
proposals were before the legislature, making drunkenness, insanity,
desertion, and cruel and abusive treatment grounds for divorce. Horace
Greeley in his _Tribune_ had been vigorously opposing a more liberal
law for New York, while Robert Dale Owen of Indiana wrote in its
defense. Everywhere people were reading the Greeley-Owen debates in
the _Tribune_. Through his widely circulated paper, Horace Greeley had
in a sense become an oracle for the people who felt he was safe and
good; while Robert Dale Owen, because of his youthful association with
the New Harmony community and Frances Wright, was branded with
radicalism which even his valuable service in the Indiana legislature
and his two terms in Congress could not blot out.

Susan and Mrs. Stanton had no patience with Horace Greeley's smug
old-fashioned opinions on marriage and divorce. In fact these
Greeley-Owen debates in the _Tribune_ were the direct cause of their
decision to bring this subject before the convention, where they hoped
for support from their liberal friends. They counted especially on
Lucy Stone, who seemed to give her approval when she wrote, "I am glad
you will speak on the divorce question, provided you yourself are
clear on the subject. It is a great grave topic that one shudders to
grapple, but its hour is coming.... G