Chicago for
the appointment of women to the board of management. "Lady Managers"
were appointed, 115 strong, who proved to be very much alive under the
leadership of Mrs. Bertha Honore Palmer. Susan found Mrs. Palmer
almost as determined as she to secure equality of rights for women at
the World's Fair, and nothing that she herself might have planned
could have been more effective than the series of world congresses in
which both men and women took part, or than the World's Congress of
Representative Women.

[Illustration: Elizabeth Smith Miller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and
Susan B. Anthony]

Two of Susan's "girls," as she liked to call them, Rachel Foster
Avery[381] and May Wright Sewall, were appointed by Mrs. Palmer to
take charge of the World's Congress of Representative Women, and they
arranged a meeting of the International Council of Women as a part of
this Congress.

Convening soon after the opening of the World's Fair, the Congress of
Representative Women drew record crowds at its eighty-one sessions.
Twenty-seven countries and 126 organizations were represented. Here
Susan, to her joy, heard Negroes, American Indians, and Mormons tell
of their progress and their problems, and saw them treated with as
much respect as American millionaires, English nobility, or the most
virtuous, conservative housewife. Watching these women assemble,
talking with them, and listening to their well-delivered speeches, she
felt richly rewarded for the lonely work she had undertaken forty
years before, when scarcely a woman could be coaxed to a meeting or be
persuaded to express her opinions in public. Although only one session
of the congress was devoted to the civil and political rights of
women, it was gratifying to her that women's need of the ballot was
spontaneously brought up in meeting after meeting, showing that
women, whatever their cause or whatever their organization, were
recognizing that only by means of the vote could their reforms be
achieved.

Speaking on the subject to which she had dedicated her life, Susan
gave credit to the pioneering suffragists for the change which had
taken place in public opinion regarding the position of women. She
urged women's organizations to give suffrage their wholehearted
support and pointed out the great power of some of the newer
organizations, such as the W.C.T.U. with its membership of half a
million and the young General Federation of Women's Clubs of 40,000
members. Confe