world. Lady Aberdeen was in the chair, and Mrs. Creighton, wife
of the late Bishop of London, was reading a paper. In the midst of deep
attention, a door at the rear of the platform was gently opened, and
Miss Susan B. Anthony stepped onto the stage. She had just arrived from
America. Her strong figure was bent with the weight of years; her face
was squared by the conflict and partial ostracism she had met; but her
glance had lost none of its stern kindliness, and her bearing none of
its indomitable courage. As she appeared, this most representative
audience of women in the world sprang to its feet and burst into wild
cheering. In vain did Lady Aberdeen rap for order and beg the audience
to let Mrs. Creighton proceed. Not until Miss Anthony came to the front
and urged the women to sit down was quiet restored. These women knew the
price of a life which their champion had paid for their opportunities.

A few months after this the school children of the prosperous city of
Rochester, N.Y., where Miss Anthony had been a leading citizen for many
years, were asked to write school compositions in which they named the
person they would most wish to be like. Over three thousand girls, in
the elementary grades, wrote these papers, but not one chose Miss
Anthony. This first generation of women reformers could not establish
the type of womanhood for the modern world; they had not the leisure,
nor the freedom, nor could they see all that lay in the future. But all
the more, because their lives were hard, should they be held in grateful
remembrance.

To the second generation of leaders belong women like Alice Freeman
Palmer, Mary Sheldon Barnes and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. They came on
the scene when the first campaign had been won; they could command their
own bodies and property; college doors were swinging open where they
could secure the training that should fit them for the struggle to win
educational, industrial, social and political opportunity for all their
sisters. They were still looked upon as blue-stockings and queer; they
had often to serve as the butt of ridicule; but they had education,
income, a certain degree of leisure, and a social recognition which, if
grudging in some quarters, was all the more generous in others.

With the rapid development of higher education, these women found
themselves associated with large groups of independent women who could
create a society of their own in advanced centers of populatio