no question so important as the
emancipation of women from the dogmas of the past, political, religious,
and social. It struck me as very remarkable that abolitionists, who felt
so keenly the wrongs of the slave, should be so oblivious to the equal
wrongs of their own mothers, wives, and sisters, when, according to the
common law, both classes occupied a similar legal status.

Our chief object in visiting England at this time was to attend the
World's Anti-slavery Convention, to meet June 12, 1840, in Freemasons'
Hall, London. Delegates from all the anti-slavery societies of civilized
nations were invited, yet, when they arrived, those representing
associations of women were rejected. Though women were members of the
National Anti-slavery Society, accustomed to speak and vote in all its
conventions, and to take an equally active part with men in the whole
anti-slavery struggle, and were there as delegates from associations of
men and women, as well as those distinctively of their own sex, yet all
alike were rejected because they were women. Women, according to English
prejudices at that time, were excluded by Scriptural texts from sharing
equal dignity and authority with men in all reform associations; hence
it was to English minds pre-eminently unfitting that women should be
admitted as equal members to a World's Convention. The question was
hotly debated through an entire day. My husband made a very eloquent
speech in favor of admitting the women delegates.

When we consider that Lady Byron, Anna Jameson, Mary Howitt, Mrs. Hugo
Reid, Elizabeth Fry, Amelia Opie, Ann Green Phillips, Lucretia Mott, and
many remarkable women, speakers and leaders in the Society of Friends,
were all compelled to listen in silence to the masculine platitudes on
woman's sphere, one may form some idea of the indignation of
unprejudiced friends, and especially that of such women as Lydia Maria
Child, Maria Chapman, Deborah Weston, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, and
Abby Kelly, who were impatiently waiting and watching on this side, in
painful suspense, to hear how their delegates were received. Judging
from my own feelings, the women on both sides of the Atlantic must have
been humiliated and chagrined, except as these feelings were outweighed
by contempt for the shallow reasoning of their opponents and their
comical pose and gestures in some of the intensely earnest flights of
their imagination.

The clerical portion of the convention was most