r were kept at home by family duties. Lucy's baby, Alice Stone
Blackwell, was born in September 1857, then Antoinette Brown's first
child, and Mrs. Stanton's seventh.

[Illustration: Lucy Stone and her daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell]

Impatient to get on with the work, Susan chafed at the delay and when
Lucy wrote her, "I shall not assume the responsibility for another
convention until I have had my ten daughters,"[99] Susan was beside
herself with apprehension. When Lucy told her that it was harder to
take care of a baby day and night than to campaign for woman's rights,
she felt that Lucy regarded as unimportant her "common work" of hiring
halls, engaging speakers, and raising money. This rankled, for
although Susan realized it was work without glory, she did expect Lucy
to understand its significance.

Mrs. Stanton sensed the makings of a rift between Susan and these
young mothers, Lucy and Antoinette, and knowing from her own
experience how torn a woman could be between rearing a family and work
for the cause, she pleaded with Susan to be patient with them. "Let
them rest a while in peace and quietness, and think great thoughts for
the future," she wrote Susan. "It is not well to be in the excitement
of public life all the time. Do not keep stirring them up or mourning
over their repose. You need rest too. Let the world alone a while. We
cannot bring about a moral revolution in a day or a year."[100]

But Susan could not let the world alone. There was too much to be
done. In addition to her woman's rights and antislavery work, she gave
a helping hand to any good cause in Rochester, such as a protest
meeting against capital punishment, a series of Sunday evening
lectures, or establishing a Free Church like that headed by Theodore
Parker in Boston where no one doctrine would be preached and all would
be welcome. There were days when weariness and discouragement hung
heavily upon her. Then impatient that she alone seemed to be carrying
the burden of the whole woman's rights movement, she complained to
Lydia Mott, "There is not one woman left who may be relied on. All
have first to please their husbands after which there is little time
or energy left to spend in any other direction.... How soon the last
standing monuments (yourself and myself, Lydia) will lay down the
individual 'shovel and de hoe' and with proper zeal and spirit grasp
those of some masculine hand, the mercies and the spirits only know. I
declare t