een so belied and maligned by the press in
years gone by that many who do not stop to think had come to believe
her a perfect ogre, a cross-grained, incongruous old maid whom nobody
could like, when the truth of the matter is, one has but to look at and
listen to her, either in public or private, to realize that she is a
pure, generous, deep-thinking, womanly woman. Simply because she has
lived her own life, spoken her own thoughts and stood upon her own
platform, the masses have condemned her; but history has already
recorded her as one of the most earnest, hard-working reformers of the
day. If the women of this country only knew how many changes and
ameliorations have been made in the laws regarding themselves through
her unselfish, persistent efforts, at her approach they would all rise
up and call her blessed." But that there still existed editors of the
old-time caliber, this extract from the Richmond, Ky., Herald, October
29, 1879, shows:

Miss Anthony is above the medium height for women, dresses plainly,
is uncomely in person, has rather coarse, rugged features and
masculine manners. Her piece, which doubtless she has been studying
for thirty or forty years, was very well delivered for a woman,
containing no original thought, but full of old hackneyed ideas,
which every female suffrage shrieker has hurled from the stump
against "ignorant men and small boys," for time out of mind all
over this country and every other country where they could command
an audience of curious people willing to throw away an hour or two
on a vain, futile and foolish harangue, proposing to transform men
into women and women into men. Such dissatisfied females should not
hurl anathemas at men, forsooth, because they happened to be born
into the world women instead of men. God alone is responsible for
the difference between the sexes, and he is able to bear it. Men
are not to blame that women are women, for there is not a man in
this whole land who wouldn't rather have a boy baby than a gal baby
any time. There never was a newly-married man when he learned that
his first born was a girl, that didn't try to tear out his hair by
the roots because it wasn't a boy.... If this tirade against men is
to be persisted in, we see no escape for man except to quit his
foolishness and have no more children, unless he can have some sort
of guarantee that they will