sity. A million women are
engaged in domestic service providing for their own necessities,
and a million more are supporting their families and drunken
husbands.

Letters were read from Dr. Mary Thomas, President of the Indiana
Association, and from Clara Barton, then traveling in Italy, deploring
the subject condition of women in foreign lands. The day after the
Convention the ladies received their friends in the spacious parlors
at Willard's Hotel. Congressmen, lawyers, clergymen, and many bright
girls from the departments were among the guests. Nothing indicates
the progress of a reform more readily than the cordial social
recognition of its leaders. While pausing now and then to note the
adverse winds we are compelled to encounter in the jealousies,
discords, and divisions of friends, and in the ridicule and
misrepresentation of enemies, a broader vision shows us that the great
tidal waves of thought are all flowing in one direction.

May 11, 1875, the twenty-seventh anniversary of the suffrage movement
was held in the new Masonic Temple, Twenty-third street, New York.
This magnificent Hall for the first time echoed to the demands of
woman for an equal share in the great interests of the world.

The convention was opened with prayer by the Rev. Olympia Brown, who
referred most impressively to the coming Centennial, expressing the
hope that the Fourth of July, 1876, might indeed be a day of jubilee,
in which liberty and justice would be secured to the whole people. The
resolutions[161] were discussed with great spirit by the various
speakers.[162] An interesting letter was read from Isabella Beecher
Hooker, giving some of her experiences and observations in France.

The Hall was crowded in the evening to listen to Mr. Frothingham. His
address was an able exposition of the injustice of the heavy taxes
laid on women. He read several extracts from the reports of William I.
Bowditch, of Boston, in regard to the large number of women in
Massachusetts holding property, and in closing, depicted with great
feeling the constant sacrifices women were compelled to endure because
they had no representation in the Government. After a song by the
Hutchinsons, the large audience slowly dispersed.

At a business meeting next day the officers[163] for the year were
chosen, and arrangements made to canvass Iowa if, as was proposed, an
amendment to the Constitution extending the right of suffrage to the
women of th