ht?
If she did not this, it is no matter what she did." It is thus we
already begin to judge the American women of the past. The time
will come, when of all Mrs. Adams' letters, the passage best
remembered will be that, where she points out to her great
husband, that while emancipating the world, he still believes in
giving men the absolute control over women. So the time will come
when Harriet Beecher Stowe will be less honored, even as the
authoress of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," than as the woman who in _The
New York Independent_, that repository of religious thought,
dared to place it among her religious thoughts, that Antoinette
Brown had a right to stand in the pulpit. I wish Mrs. Stowe were
yet more consistent; I wish she were not satisfied with merely
wishing that others would attend Woman's Rights Conventions, and
support Woman's Rights Lectures, but would join and take part in
these things herself, as I believe she will when her brave spirit
has gone a little further. Her heroic brother, Henry Ward
Beecher, is with us already in the public advocacy of the right
of suffrage for women.

The third obstacle that sets woman against this movement is
_prejudice_. It is the honest feeling of multitudes of women that
their "natural sphere," their domestic duties, will be interfered
with by any other career. Let me tell you that so judging, you
have only learned half the story we have to tell. We encourage
these domestic duties most fully and amply. There is not a woman
here who is not proud to claim them. Of all the women who have
stood or spoken on this platform since this Convention began,
there is only one who is not a married woman; there are very few
who are not mothers; and among them all there is not one who does
not give, by the nobleness of her domestic life, a proof of the
consistency of that with the rest of the claims she makes for her
sex. Some there are who doubt this; some there are who do not see
how the elective franchise is any way connected with home duties
and cares. I tell you there is the closest connection. If any one
thing caps the sum of the argument for the rights of woman, it is
the fact of those domestic duties which some idly array against
it. What has a man at stake in society? What has he to risk by
his ballot? A