n
converts and finally become the fashion. Susan admired their courage,
but still could not be persuaded to put on the bloomer.

Fired with their zeal, she began planning what she herself might do
to rouse women. The idea of a separate woman's rights movement did not
as yet enter her mind. Her thoughts turned rather to the two national
reform movements already well under way, temperance and antislavery.
While a career as an antislavery worker appealed strongly to her, she
felt unqualified when she measured herself with the courageous Grimke
sisters from South Carolina, or with Abby Kelley Foster, Lucy Stone,
and the eloquent men in the movement. She had made a place for herself
locally in temperance societies, and she decided that her work was
there--to make women an active, important part of this reform.

That winter, as a delegate of the Rochester Daughters of Temperance,
she went with high hopes to the state convention of the Sons of
Temperance in Albany, where she visited Lydia Mott and her sister
Abigail, who lived in a small house on Maiden Lane. Both Lydia and
Abigail, because of their independence, interested Susan greatly. They
supported themselves by "taking in" boarders from among the leading
politicians in Albany. They also kept a men's furnishings store on
Broadway and made hand-ruffled shirt bosoms and fine linen accessories
for Thurlow Weed, Horatio Seymour, and other influential citizens.
Their political contacts were many and important, and yet they were
also among the very few in that conservative city who stood for
temperance, abolition of slavery, and woman's rights. Their home was a
rallying point for reformers and a refuge for fugitive slaves. It was
to be a second home to Susan in the years to come.

When Susan and the other women delegates entered the convention of the
Sons of Temperance, they looked forward proudly, if a bit timidly, to
taking part in the meetings, but when Susan spoke to a motion, the
chairman, astonished that a woman would be so immodest as to speak in
a public meeting, scathingly announced, "The sisters were not invited
here to speak, but to listen and to learn."[33]

This was the first time that Susan had been publicly rebuked because
she was a woman, and she did not take it lightly. Leaving the hall
with several other indignant women delegates, amid the critical
whisperings of those who remained "to listen and to learn," she
hurried over to Lydia's shop to ask her advic