earnest in her efforts, and so she began to
preach in the city of Brooklyn, and with great courage bought a
church in which a man had failed as a minister, leaving a debt of
$14,000. She was like a great many other women--and here is a
warning for all women. God made a woman equal to a man, but He
did not make a woman equal to a woman _and_ a man. We usually try
to do the work of a man and of a woman too; then we break down,
and they say that women ought not to be ministers because they
are not strong enough. They do not get churches that can afford
to send them to Europe on a three months' vacation once a year.
Miss Oliver was not only the minister and the minister's wife,
but she started at least a dozen reforms and undertook to carry
them all out. She was attacked by that influential Methodist
paper, the _Christian Advocate_, edited by the Rev. Dr. James M.
Buckley, who declared that he would destroy her influence in the
church, and so with that great organ behind him he attacked her.
She had that to fight, the world to fight and the devil to fight,
and she broke down in health. She went abroad to recover, but
came home only to die.[91]

The death of those less widely known was touchingly referred to by
women of the different States. Miss Anthony closed the services by
saying: "I am just informed that we must add to this list the revered
name of Abby Hopper Gibbons, of four-score-and-ten, who with her
father, Isaac T. Hopper, formed the Women's Prison Association, and
who has stood for more than the allotted years of man the sentinel on
the watch-tower to guard unfortunate women and help them back into
womanly living."

At the first evening session Miss Anthony, in her president's address,
answered the question, "What has been gained by the forty years'
work?" She called attention to the woman who had preached the day
before, ordained by an orthodox denomination; to the women alternate
delegates to the late National Republican Convention; to the
recommendation of Gov. Roswell P. Flower that women should be
delegates to the approaching New York Constitutional Convention. She
pointed out rapidly many other straws showing the direction of the
wind, saying: "Wendell Phillips said what he wanted to do on the
abolition question was to turn Congress into an anti-slavery debating
society. That is what we have done with every educatio