e lecturers, and also put in charge of the
petitions. Sixty women began circulating these, and she herself
canvassed her own city, lectured in a number of towns, and at the same
time made arrangements for a State suffrage convention to be held in
Albany February 14 and 15. At this time Parker Pillsbury wrote to Lydia
Mott:

Is there work down among you for Susan to do? Any shirt-making,
cooking, clerking, preaching or teaching, indeed any honest work,
just to keep her out of idleness! She seems strangely
unemployed--almost expiring for something to do, and I could not
resist the inclination to appeal to you, _as a person of particular
leisure_, that an effort be made in her behalf. At present she has
only the Anti-Slavery cause for New York, the "Woman's Rights
Movement" for the world, the Sunday evening lectures for Rochester
and other lecturing of her own from Lake Erie to the "Old Man of
Franconia mountains;" private cares and home affairs and the
various et ceteras of _womanity_. These are about all so far as
appears, to occupy her seven days of twenty-four hours each, as the
weeks rain down to her from Eternal Skies. Do pity and procure work
for her if it be possible!

[Footnote 17: From 1840 to 1848 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ernestine L.
Hose, Lydia Mott and Paulina Wright (afterwards Davis), circulated
petitions for a Married Woman's Property Law and, in presenting them,
addressed a legislative committee several times.]

[Footnote 18: The W.C.T.U. was organized in 1874 and the temperance
work passed almost entirely into the hands of women.]

CHAPTER VII.

PETITIONS----BLOOMERS----LECTURES.

1854.

Considerable space has been given to detailed accounts of these early
conventions to illustrate the prejudice which existed against woman's
speaking in public, and the martyrdom suffered by the pioneers to
secure the right of free speech for succeeding generations. From this
time until the merging of all questions into the Civil War, such
conventions were held every year, producing a great revolution of
sentiment in the direction of an enlarged sphere for woman's activities
and a modification of the legal and religious restraints that so long
had held her in bondage. They have been fully described also in order
to indicate some of the causes which operated in the development of the
mind and character of Susan B. Anthony, transforming her by degrees