o remember our wrongs as well as those of the slave.
We never met without issuing a pronunciamento on some question.
We were at once fast friends, in thought and sympathy we were one, and
in the division of labor we exactly complemented each other. In
writing we did better work together than either could alone. While she
is slow and analytical in composition, I am rapid and synthetic. I am
the better writer, she the better critic. She supplied the facts and
statistics, I the philosophy and rhetoric, and together we have made
arguments that have stood unshaken by the storms of thirty long years:
arguments that no man has answered. Our speeches may be considered the
united product of our two brains.
So entirely one are we, that in all our associations, ever side by
side on the same platform, not one feeling of jealousy or envy has
ever shadowed our lives. We have indulged freely in criticism of each
other when alone, and hotly contended whenever we have differed, but
in our friendship of thirty years there has never been a break of one
hour. To the world we always seem to agree and uniformly reflect each
other. Like husband and wife, each has the feeling that we must have
no differences in public. Thus united, at an early day we began to
survey the State and nation, the future field of our labors. We read
with critical eyes the proceedings of Congress and Legislatures, of
General Assemblies and Synods, of Conferences and Conventions, and
discovered that in all alike the existence of woman was entirely
ignored.
Night after night by an old-fashioned fireplace we plotted and planned
the coming agitation, how, when, and where each entering wedge could
be driven, by which woman might be recognized, and her rights secured.
Speedily the State was aflame with disturbances in temperance and
teachers' conventions, and the press heralded the news far and near
that women delegates had suddenly appeared demanding admission in
men's conventions; that their rights had been hotly contended session
after session, by liberal men on the one side; the clergy and learned
professors on the other; an overwhelming majority rejecting the women
with terrible anathemas and denunciations. Such battles were fought
over and over in the chief cities of many of the Northern States,
until the bigotry of men in all the reforms and professions was
thoroughly tested. Every right achieved: to enter a college; to study
a profession; to labor in some new
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