o woman, and therefore she stood outside of
the Republican party, where all her male relatives and friends were
to be found. Republican leaders had told them to wait; that the
movement was inopportune; but all the time had continued to put up
bars and barriers against its future success. No woman should
belong at present to either party; she should simply stand for
suffrage.... She protested against any Republicans saying that Mrs.
Stanton or herself had laid a straw in the way of the negro.
Because they insisted that the rights of women ought to have equal
prominence with the rights of black men, it was assumed that they
opposed the enfranchisement of the negro. She repelled the
assumption. She arraigned the entire Republican party because they
refused to see that all women, black and white, were as much in
political servitude as the black men.

At this meeting Robert Laird Collyer (not the distinguished Robert
Collyer) made a long address against the enfranchisement of women,
mixing up purity, propriety and pedestals in the usual incoherent
fashion. He was so completely annihilated by Anna Dickinson that no
further defense of the measure was necessary. Suffrage societies were
organized in Chicago, Milwaukee and Toledo. In her account of this
convention, Mrs. Livermore wrote of Miss Anthony:

She is entirely unlike Mrs. Stanton, notwithstanding the twain have
been fast friends and diligent co-laborers for a quarter of a
century.... Miss Anthony is a woman whom no one can know thoroughly
without respect. Entirely honest, fearfully in earnest, energetic,
self-sacrificing, kind-hearted, scorning difficulties of whatever
magnitude, and rigidly sensible, she is the warm friend of the
poor, oppressed, homeless and friendless of her own sex. Her labors
in their behalf are tireless and judicious. You think her plain
until she smiles, and then the worn face lights up so pleasantly
and benignly that you forget to criticise and your heart warms
towards her. Knowing her great goodness, and how she has devoted
her life to hard, unpaid work for the negro slave and for woman, we
can never read jibes and jeers at her expense without a twinge of
pain. Let the press laugh at her as it may, she is a mighty power
among both men and women, and those who really love as well as
respect her are a host.

In this winter of 1869