according to his diary, after spending a good deal of money for
himself finds a little left and buys his wife a new gown,
because, he says, "It is fit that the poor wretch should have
something to content her." I have seen many laws passed for the
advantage of women and they were generally passed on that
principle.

I remember going before the Rhode Island Legislature once with
Lucy Stone and she unrolled with her peculiar persuasive power
the wrong laws which existed in that commonwealth in regard to
women. After the hearing was over the chairman of that committee,
a judge who had served on it for years, said to her: "Mrs. Stone,
all that you have stated this morning is true, and I am ashamed
to think that I, who have been chairman for years of this
judiciary committee, should have known in my secret heart that it
was all true and should have done nothing to set these wrongs
right until I was reminded of them by a woman." Again and again I
have seen that experience. Women with bleeding feet, women with
exhausted voices, women with wornout lives, have lavished their
strength to secure ordinary justice in the form of laws which a
single woman inside the State House, armed with the position of
member of the Legislature and representing a sex who had votes,
could have had righted within two years. Every man knows the
weakness of a disfranchised class of men. The whole race of women
is disfranchised, and they suffer in the same way.

Among the other speakers were the Rev. Charles G. Ames, Henry B.
Blackwell, the Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Dr. Thomas, Mrs.
Campbell, Mrs. Mary E. Haggart, Mrs. Frances E. W. Harper, the Rev. S.
S. Hunting, Miss Cora Scott Pond, the Rev. Ada C. Bowles and Mrs.
Adelaide A. Claflin.

The chairman of the executive committee, Mrs. Lucy Stone, in her
annual report, reviewed the year's activities and continued:

But the chief work of the American Woman Suffrage Association
during the past year has been to obtain wide access to the public
through the newspapers. Early in the year correspondence was
opened with most of the papers in the United States. The editors
were asked whether they would publish suffrage literature if it
were sent them every week without charge. More than a thousand
answered that they would use what we sent, in whole