er the movement for woman suffrage, which commenced about the
middle of the nineteenth century, had continued for twenty-five years,
the feeling became strongly impressed upon its active promoters, Miss
Susan B. Anthony and Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, that the records
connected with it should be secured to posterity. With Miss Anthony,
indeed, the idea had been ever present, and from the beginning she had
carefully preserved as far as possible the letters, speeches and
newspaper clippings, accounts of conventions and legislative and
congressional reports. By 1876 they were convinced through various
circumstances that the time had come for writing the history. So
little did they foresee the magnitude which this labor would assume
that they made a mutual agreement to accept no engagements for four
months, expecting to finish it within that time, as they contemplated
nothing more than a small volume, probably a pamphlet of a few hundred
pages. Miss Anthony packed in trunks and boxes the accumulations of
the years and shipped them to Mrs. Stanton's home in Tenafly, N. J.,
where the two women went cheerfully to work.

Mrs. Stanton was the matchless writer, Miss Anthony the collector of
material, the searcher of statistics, the business manager, the keen
critic, the detector of omissions, chronological flaws and
discrepancies in statement such as are unavoidable even with the most
careful historian. On many occasions they called to their aid for
historical facts Mrs. Matilda Joslyn Gage, one of the most logical,
scientific and fearless writers of her day. To Mrs. Gage Vol. I of the
History of Woman Suffrage is wholly indebted for the first two
chapters--Preceding Causes and Woman in Newspapers, and for the last
chapter--Woman, Church and State, which she later amplified in a book;
and Vol. II for the first chapter--Woman's Patriotism in the Civil
War.

When the allotted time had expired the work had far exceeded its
original limits and yet seemed hardly begun. Its authors were amazed
at the amount of history which already had been made and still more
deeply impressed with the desirability of preserving the story of the
early struggle, but both were in the regular employ of lecture bureaus
and henceforth could give only vacations to the task. They were
entirely without the assistance of stenographers and typewriters, who
at the present day relieve brain workers of so large a part of the
physical strain. A labor which was to