initiative steps, Elizabeth B.
Chace in a letter to a friend, says:

In October 1868, while in Boston attending the convention that
formed the New England society, Paulina Wright Davis[171]
conceived the idea that the time had come to organize the friends
of suffrage in Rhode Island. After consultation with a few of the
most prominent friends of the cause, a call was issued for a
convention, to be held in Roger Williams Hall, Providence,
December 11th, signed by many leading names. No sooner did the
call appear than, as usual, some clergyman publicly declared
himself in opposition. The Rev. Mark Trafton, a Methodist
minister, gave a lecture in his vestry on "The Coming Woman," who
was to be a good housekeeper, dress simply, and not to vote. This
was published in the _Providence Journal_, and called out a
gracefull vindication of woman's modern demands from the pen of
Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, the poet, and Miss Norah Perry, a
popular writer of both prose and verse. The convention was all
that its most ardent friends could have desired, and resulted in
forming an association.[172] The audience numbered over a
thousand, at the different sessions, and among the speakers were
some of the ablest men in the State. Though the friends were
comparatively few in the early days, yet there was no lack of
enthusiasm and self-sacrifice. Weekly meetings were held, tracts
and petitions circulated; conventions[173] and legislative
hearings were as regular as the changing seasons, now in
Providence, and now in Newport, following the migratory
government.

Mrs. Davis was president of the association for several successive
years in which her labors were indefatigable. Finally failing
health compelled her to resign her position as president of the
association.[174] Since then her able coadjutor Elizabeth B. Chace,
has been president of the Rhode Island Suffrage Association, and
with equal faithfulness and persistence, carried on the work. She
steadily keeps up the annual conventions and makes her appeals to
the legislature. Among the names[175] of those who have appeared
from year to year before the Rhode Island legislature we find many
able men and women from other States as well as many of their own
distinguished citizens.

In this State an effort was made early to get women on the board of
managers for school