lackwell, who asked if only those women
ministers who had been regularly ordained were to be heard, Miss Anthony
wrote:

I have felt all along that we ought to give a chance for the
expression of the highest and deepest religious thought of those
not ordained of men. Your wish to give the result of your research
opens the way for us to make the last day--Easter Sunday--voice the
new, the purer, the better worship of the living God. We'll have a
real symposium of woman's gospel. It is not fair to give only the
church-ordained women an opportunity to present their religious
thoughts, and now it shall be fixed so that the laity may have the
same. I don't want a controversy or a lot of negations, but shall
tell each one to give her strongest affirmation. This forever
saying a thing is false and failing to present the truth, is to me
a foolish waste of time, when almost everybody feels the old forms,
creeds and rituals to be only the mint, anise and cumin.

So, my dear, I am very, very glad that you and Lucy are both to be
on our platform, and we are to stand together again after these
twenty years. But none of the past! Let us rejoice in the good of
the present, and hope for more and more in the future.

In response to her letter asking him to take part on Pioneer Day,
Frederick Douglass wrote:

I certainly shall, if I live and am well. The cause of woman
suffrage has under it a truth as eternal as the universe of
thought, and must triumph if this planet endures. I have been
calling up to my mind's eye that first convention in the small
Wesleyan Methodist church at Seneca Falls, where Mrs. Stanton, Mrs.
Mott and those other brave souls began a systematic and determined
agitation for a larger measure of liberty for woman, and how great
that little meeting now appears! It seems only yesterday since it
took place, and yet forty years have passed away and what a
revolution on this subject have we seen in the sentiment of the
American people and, in fact, of the civilized world! Who could
have thought that humble, modest, maiden convention, holding its
little white apron up to its face and wiping away the tear of
sympathy with woman in her hardships and the sigh of her soul for a
larger measure of freedom, would have become the mother of an
International Council