daily with glaring examples of the injustices women
suffered under the property laws, she was more than ever convinced
that her work was worth-while. "We stopped at a little tavern where
the landlady was not yet twenty and had a baby, fifteen months old,"
she reported. "Her supper dishes were not washed and her baby was
crying.... She rocked the little thing to sleep, washed the dishes and
got our supper; beautiful white bread, butter, cheese, pickles, apple
and mince pie, and excellent peach preserves. She gave us her warm
room to sleep in.... She prepared a six o'clock breakfast for us,
fried pork, mashed potatoes, mince pie, and for me at my special
request, a plate of sweet baked apples and a pitcher of rich milk....
When we came to pay our bill, the dolt of a husband took the money and
put it in his pocket. He had not lifted a finger to lighten that
woman's burdens.... Yet the law gives him the right to every dollar
she earns, and when she needs two cents to buy a darning needle she
has to ask him and explain what she wants it for."[65]

When after a few weeks Mrs. Gage was called home by illness in her
family, Susan appealed hopefully to Lucretia Mott's sister, Martha C.
Wright, in Auburn, New York, "You can speak so much better, so much
more wisely, so much more everything than I can." Then she added, "I
should like a particular effort made to call out the Teachers, the
Sewing Women, the Working Women generally--Can't you write something
for your papers that will make them feel that it is for them that we
work more than [for] the wives and daughters of the rich?"[66] Mrs.
Wright, however, could help only in Auburn, and Susan was obliged to
continue her scheduled meetings alone. She interrupted them only to
present her petitions to the legislature.

The response of the legislature to her two years of hard work was a
sarcastic, wholly irrelevant report issued by the judiciary committee
some weeks later to a Senate roaring with laughter. In the Albany
_Register_ Susan read with mounting indignation portions of this
infuriating report: "The ladies always have the best places and the
choicest tidbit at the table. They have the best seats in cars,
carriages, and sleighs; the warmest place in winter, the coolest in
summer. They have their choice on which side of the bed they will lie,
front or back. A lady's dress costs three times as much as that of a
gentleman; and at the present time, with the prevailing fashion, on