their right to take part in political life, saying
women need not expect "to have their wrongs fully redressed, until
they themselves have a voice and a hand in the enactment and
administration of the laws."

In 1847, Clarina Howard Nichols, in her husband's paper, addressed to
the voters of the State of Vermont a series of editorials, setting
forth the injustice of the property disabilities of married women.

In 1849, Lucretia Mott published a discourse on woman, delivered in
the Assembly Building, Philadelphia, in answer to a Lyceum lecture
which Richard H. Dana, of Boston, was giving in many of the chief
cities, ridiculing the idea of political equality for woman. Elizabeth
Wilson, of Ohio, published a scriptural view of woman's rights and
duties far in advance of the generally received opinions. At even an
earlier day, Martha Bradstreet, of Utica, plead her own case in the
courts of New York, continuing her contest for many years. The
temperance reform and the deep interest taken in it by women; the
effective appeals they made, setting forth their wrongs as mother,
wife, sister, and daughter of the drunkard, with a power beyond that
of man, early gave them a local place on this platform as a favor,
though denied as a right. Delegates from woman's societies to State
and National conventions invariably found themselves rejected. It was
her early labors in the temperance cause that first roused Susan B.
Anthony to a realizing sense of woman's social, civil, and political
degradation, and thus secured her life-long labors for the
enfranchisement of woman. In 1847 she made her first speech at a
public meeting of the Daughters of Temperance in Canajoharie, N. Y.
The same year Antoinette L. Brown, then a student at Oberlin College,
Ohio, the first institution that made the experiment of co-education,
delivered her first speech on temperance in several places in Ohio,
and on Woman's Rights, in the Baptist church at Henrietta, N. Y. Lucy
Stone, a graduate of Oberlin, made her first speech on Woman's Rights
the same year in her brother's church at Brookfield, Mass.

Nor were the women of Europe inactive during these years. In 1824
Elizabeth Heyrick, a Quaker woman, cut the gordian knot of difficulty
in the anti-slavery struggle in England, by an able essay in favor of
immediate, unconditional emancipation. At Leipsic, in 1844, Helene
Marie Weber--her father a Prussian officer, and her mother an English
woman--wrote a serie