riminate between those which could be reached by law and those
purely personal; and that the love of privacy with which the whole sex
was accredited was a mistake, since most of my correspondents literally
agonized to get before the public. Publicity! publicity! was the
persistent demand. To meet the demand, small papers, owned and edited by
women, sprang up all over the land, and like Jonah's gourd, perished in
a night. Ruskin says to be noble is to be known, and at that period
there was a great demand on the part of women for their full allowance
of nobility; but not one in a hundred thought of merit as a means of
reaching it. No use waiting to learn to put two consecutive sentences
together in any connected form, or for an idea or the power of
expressing it. One woman was printing her productions, and why should
not all the rest do likewise? They had so long followed some leader like
a flock of sheep, that now they would rush through the first gap into
newspaperdom.

I declined the presidential honors tendered me, on the ground of
inability to fill the place; and earnestly entreated the movers to
reconsider and give up the convention, saying:

"It will open a door through which fools and fanatics will pour in, and
make the cause ridiculous."

The answer was that it was too late to recede. The convention was held,
and justified my worst fears. When I criticised it, the reply was:

"If you had come and presided, as we wished you to do, the result would
have been different. You started the movement and now refuse to lead it,
but cannot stop it."

The next summer a convention was held in Akron, Ohio, and I attended,
hoping to modify the madness, but failed utterly, by all protests I
could make, to prevent the introduction by the committee on resolutions
of this:

"_Resolved_, that the difference in sex is one of education."

A man stood behind the president to prompt her, but she could not catch
his meaning, and when confusion came, she rose and made a little speech,
in which she stated that she knew nothing of parliamentary rules, and
when consenting to preside had resolved, if there were trouble, to say
to the convention as she did to her boys at home: "Quit behaving
yourselves!"

This brought down the house, but brought no order, and she sat down,
smiling, a perfect picture of self-complaisance.

People thought the press unmerciful in its ridicule of that convention,
but I felt in it all there was much forb