er said of the resolution that "the same transgressions
should be visited with equal severity on man and woman." "Of all the
notable pronunciamentos at Seneca Falls no resolutions shows a finer
spiritual audacity than this. A delicious flavor of transcendentalism
from beginning to end marks the phraseology. Like the Brook Farm
experiment the Seneca Falls Convention was the outcome of a great wave
of idealism sweeping over the world. It was seen in England and in
Europe. Germany was stirring things up and Italy was seething with
revolution. This new world was eager to put its idealism into
immediate practical living.... Women were looking after their woman's
share of it. They felt that it must be founded on spiritual ideas and
this was a spiritual Declaration of Independence. We honor these
pioneers because women who had been trained to follow and not to lead,
and taught that wives and mothers should buy their security at the
cost of a discarded fragment of their sex, dared to summon men to an
equal bar and to declare that in purity, as in justice, there is no
sex."

Mrs. Stewart treated with delicious wit and sarcasm the resolution of
protest against "the objection of indelicacy and impropriety which is
so often brought against women who address a public audience by those
who encourage their appearance in the theatre and the circus." Miss
Clay discussed with dignity and seriousness the resolution that
"equality of human rights necessarily follows identity in capabilities
and responsibilities." Mrs. Villard spoke of the great privilege of
being the daughter of a reformer and said: "The cause of woman is so
intimately connected with that of man that I think the men will be the
gainers by its triumph even more than women." Mrs. Douglas, a
brilliant young speaker from New Orleans, new to the suffrage
platform, took up the resolution, "Woman has too long rested
satisfied in the circumscribed limits which corrupt customs and a
perverted application of the Scriptures have marked out for her, and
it is time she should move in the enlarged sphere which her great
Creator has assigned to her," and said in part:

Only one thing can make me see the justness of woman being
classed with the idiot, the insane and the criminal and that is,
if she is willing, if she is satisfied to be so classed, if she
is contented to remain in the circumscribed limits which corrupt
customs and perverted application of the Scr