od touch your lips if you speak
on it."[110]

Neither Susan nor Mrs. Stanton shuddered to grapple with any subject
which they believed needed attention. In fact, the discussion of
marriage and divorce in woman's rights conventions had been on their
minds for some time. Three years before Susan had written Lucy, "I
have thought with you until of late that the Social Question must be
kept separate from Woman's Rights, but we have always claimed that our
movement was _Human Rights_, not Woman's specially.... It seems to me
we have played on the surface of things quite long enough. Getting the
right to hold property, to vote, to wear what dress we please, etc.,
are all to the good, but _Social Freedom_, after all, lies at the
bottom of all, and unless woman gets that she must continue the slave
of man in all other things."[111]

* * * * *

Consternation spread through the genial ranks of the convention as
Mrs. Stanton now offered resolutions calling for more liberal divorce
laws. Quick to sense the temper of an audience, Susan felt its
resistance to being jolted out of the pleasant contemplation of past
successes to the unpleasant recognition that there were still
difficult ugly problems ahead. She was conscious at once of a stir of
astonishment and disapproval when Mrs. Stanton in her clear compelling
voice read, "Resolved, That an unfortunate or ill-assorted marriage is
ever a calamity, but not ever, perhaps never a crime--and when society
or government, by its laws or customs, compels its continuance, always
to the grief of one of the parties, and the actual loss and damage of
both, it usurps an authority never delegated to man, nor exercised by
God, Himself...."[112]

Listening to Mrs. Stanton's speech in defense of her ten bold
resolutions on marriage and divorce, Susan felt that her brave
colleague was speaking for women everywhere, for wives of the present
and the future. As the hearty applause rang out, she concluded that
even the disapproving admired her courage; but before the applause
ceased, she saw Antoinette Blackwell on her feet, waiting to be heard.
She knew that Antoinette, like Horace Greeley, preferred to think of
all marriages as made in heaven, and true to form Antoinette contended
that the marriage relation "must be lifelong" and "as permanent and
indissoluble as the relation of parent and child."[113] At once
Ernestine Rose came to the rescue in support of Mrs. Stan