convention at Saratoga Springs, then the fashionable summer resort of
the East.

She had braved this center of fashion and frivolity the year before
with her message of woman's rights, and to her great surprise, crowds
seeking entertainment had come to her meetings, their admission fees
and their purchase of tracts making the venture a financial success.
Here was fertile ground. Susan was counting on Lucy Stone and
Antoinette Brown to help her, for Elizabeth Stanton, then expecting
her sixth baby, was out of the picture. Now, to her dismay, Lucy and
Antoinette married the Blackwell brothers, Henry and Samuel.

Fearing that they too like Elizabeth Stanton would be tied down with
babies and household cares, Susan saw a bleak lonely road ahead for
the woman's rights movement. She did so want her best speakers and
most valuable workers to remain single until the spade work for
woman's rights was done. Almost in a panic at the prospect of being
left to carry on the Saratoga convention alone, Susan wrote Lucy
irritable letters instead of praising her for drawing up a marriage
contract and keeping her own name. Later, however, she realized what
it had meant for Lucy to keep her own name, and then she wrote her, "I
am more and more rejoiced that you have declared by actual doing that
a woman has a name and may retain it all through her life."[59]

So persistently did she now pursue Lucy and Antoinette that they both
kept their promise to speak at the Saratoga convention, Lucy traveling
all the way from Cincinnati where she was visiting in the Blackwell
home. Lucy was loudly cheered by a large audience, eager to see this
young woman whose marriage had attracted so much notice in the press.
In fact Lucy Stone, who had kept her own name and who with her husband
had signed a marriage protest against the legal disabilities of a
married woman, was as much of a novelty in this fashionable circle as
one of Barnum's high-priced curiosities.

Pleased at Lucy's reception, Susan surveyed the audience
hopefully--handsome men in nankeen trousers, red waistcoats, white
neckcloths, and gray swallowtail coats, sitting beside beautiful young
women wearing gowns of bombazine and watered silk with wide hoop
skirts and elaborately trimmed bonnets which set off their curls. To
her delight, they also applauded Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the first
woman minister they had ever seen, and Ernestine Rose with her
appealing foreign accent. They clap