owed her with
capabilities equal to the responsibilities He has imposed.

Worse than unwise would it have been to allow an unjust prejudice
against Woman's Rights, to turn the edge of my appeals for a law in
the interest of temperance, when by showing the connection, as of
cause and effect, between men's rights and women's wrongs, between
women's _no_-rights and their helplessness and dependence, I could
disarm that prejudice and win an intelligent support for both
temperance and equal rights. On such a showing I based my appeals to
the noble men and women of Wisconsin. I assured my audiences, that I
had not come to talk to them of "Woman's Rights," that indeed I did
not find that women had any rights in the matter, but to "suffer and
be still; to die and give no sign." But I had come to them to speak of
_man's rights_ and _woman's needs_.

From the Lake Shore cities, from the inland villages, the shire towns,
and the mining communities of the Mississippi, whose churches,
court-houses, and halls, with two or three exceptions, could not hold
the audiences, much less seat them; the responses were hearty, and
when outspoken, curiously alike in language as well as sentiment on
the subject of rights. "I like Mrs. Nichols' idea of talking man's
rights; the result will be woman's rights," said a gentleman rising in
his place in the audience at the close of one of my lectures. On
another occasion, "Let Mrs. Nichols go on talking men's rights and
we'll have women's rights." "Mrs. Nichols has made me ashamed of
myself--ashamed of my sex! I didn't know we had been so mean to the
women," was the outspoken conclusion of a man who had lived honored
and respected, his threescore years and ten. This reaction from the
curiosity and doubt which everywhere met us in the expressive faces of
the people, often reminded me of an incident in my Vermont labors for
a Maine law.

In accepting an invitation to address an audience of ladies in the
aristocratic old town of C----, in an adjoining county, I had
suggested, that as it was votes we needed, I would prefer to address
an audience of both sexes. Arrived at C----, I found that the ladies
of the committee, having acted upon my suggestion, were intensely
anxious as to the result. "An audience," they said, "could not be
collected to listen to woman's rights; the people were sensitive even
to the innovation of a mixed audience for a woman, and they felt that
I ought to be informed of the fact