r black, because by every code of
honor or chivalry all men are bound to defend woman. Again, as a
question of morals, custom, and prejudice, they occupied the same
position in the State and the Church. The "white male" in the
Constitutions placed women and black men on the same platform as
citizens. The popular interpretation of Scripture sanctioned the same
injustice in both cases. In the mouths of the false prophets,
"Servants, obey your masters," was used for the same purpose, and with
equal effect, as "Wives, be in subjection to your own husbands."
"Servant of servants shall he be" has been used with the same
prophetic force as the more cruel curse pronounced on woman. The white
man's Bible has been uniformly used to show that the degradation of
the woman and the black man was in harmony with God's will. On what
principle is proscription on account of color more cruel than on
account of sex?

Most of the liberal men and women now withdrew from all temperance
organizations, leaving the movement in the hands of time-serving
priests and politicians, who, being in the majority, effectually
blocked the progress of the reform for the time--destroying, as they
did, the enthusiasm of the women in trying to press it as a moral
principle, and the hope of the men, who intended to carry it as a
political measure. Henceforward women took no active part in
temperance until the Ohio crusade revived them again all over the
nation, and gathered the scattered forces into "The Woman's National
Christian Temperance Union," of which Miss Frances E. Willard is
president. As now, so in 1853, intelligent women saw that the most
direct way to effect any reform was to have a voice in the laws and
lawmakers. Hence they turned their attention to rolling up petitions
for the civil and political rights of women, to hearings before
legislatures and constitutional conventions, giving their most
persistent efforts to the reform technically called "Woman's Rights."

Susan B. Anthony had a similar battle to fight in the educational
conventions. Having been a successful teacher in the State of New York
fifteen years of her life, she had seen the need of many improvements
in the mode of teaching and in the sanitary arrangements of school
buildings; and more than all, the injustice to women in their half-pay
as teachers. Her interest in educational conventions was first roused
by listening to a tedious discussion at Elmira on the "Divine
ordinance"