ampion of women debated the question with the
dark-skinned fiery Negro, the friendship and warm affection built up
between them over the years occasionally shone through the sharp words
they spoke to each other.

"The old antislavery school says that women must stand back," declared
Susan, "that they must wait until male Negroes are voters. But we say,
if you will not give the whole loaf of justice to an entire people,
give it to the most intelligent first."

Here she was greeted with applause and continued, "If intelligence,
justice, and morality are to be placed in the government, then let the
question of woman be brought up first and that of the Negro last....
Mr. Douglass talks about the wrongs of the Negro, how he is hunted
down ..., but with all the wrongs and outrages that he today suffers,
he would not exchange his sex and take the place of Elizabeth Cady
Stanton."

"I want to know," shouted Frederick Douglass, "if granting you the
right of suffrage will change the nature of our sexes?"

"It will change the pecuniary position of woman," Susan retorted
before the shouts of laughter had died down. "She will not be
compelled to take hold of only such employments as man chooses for
her."

Lucy Stone, who so often in her youth had pleaded with Susan and
Frederick Douglass for both the Negro and women, now entered the
argument. She had matured, but her voice had lost none of its
conviction or its power to sway an audience. Disagreeing with
Douglass's assertion that Negro suffrage was more urgent than woman
suffrage, she pointed out that white women of the North were robbed of
their children by the law just as Negro women had been by slavery.

This was balm to Susan's soul, but with Lucy's next words she lost all
hope that her old friend would cast her lot wholeheartedly with women
at this time. "Woman has an ocean of wrongs too deep for any plummet,"
Lucy continued, "and the Negro too has an ocean of wrongs that cannot
be fathomed. But I thank God for the Fifteenth Amendment, and hope
that it will be adopted in every state. I will be thankful in my soul
if anybody can get out of the terrible pit....

"I believe," she admitted, "that the national safety of the government
would be more promoted by the admission of women as an element of
restoration and harmony than the other. I believe that the influence
of woman will save the country before every other influence. I see the
signs of the times pointing to this c