a voice in the laws that govern them.

Woman is being so educated that she will feel herself capable of
assuming grave responsibilities as lawgiver and administrator.
She is crowding into higher avocations and new branches of
industry. She already occupies the highest places in literature
and art. The more liberal lyceums are open to her, and she is
herself the subject of the most popular lectures now before the
public. The young women of our academies and high schools are
asserting their right to the discipline of declamation and
discussion, and the departments of science and mathematics.
Pewholders, of the most orthodox sects, are taking their right to
a voice in the government of the church, and in the face of
priests, crying "let your women keep silence in the churches,"
yes, at the very horns of the altar, calmly, deliberately, and
persistently casting their votes in the choice of church officers
and pastors.[164] Mass-meetings to sympathize with the "strikers"
of Massachusetts are being called in this metropolis by women.
Women are ordained ministers, and licensed physicians. Elizabeth
Blackwell has founded a hospital in this city, where she proposes
a thorough medical education, both theoretical and practical, for
young women. And this Institute in which we are now assembled,
with its school of design, its library and reading-room, where
the arts and sciences are freely taught to women, and this hall,
so cheerfully granted to our Convention, shows the magnanimity of
its founder, Peter Cooper. All these are the results of our
twenty years of agitation. And it matters not to us, though the
men and the women who echo back our thought do fail to recognize
the source of power, and while they rejoice in each onward step
achieved in the face of ridicule and persecution, ostracise those
who have done the work. Who of our literary women has yet
ventured one word of praise or recognition of the heroic
enunciators of the great idea of woman's equality--of Mary
Woolstonecraft, Frances Wright, Ernestine L. Rose, Lucretia Mott,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton? It matters not to those who live for the
race, and not for self alone, who has the praise, so that justice
be done to woman in Church, in State, and at the fireside--an
equal everywhere with man--the