atures,--in
fact it was a mere announcement of a meeting,--but the chief movers and
managers were Lucretia Mott, Mary Ann McClintock, Jane Hunt, Martha C.
Wright, and myself. The convention, which was held two days in the
Methodist Church, was in every way a grand success. The house was
crowded at every session, the speaking good, and a religious earnestness
dignified all the proceedings.

These were the hasty initiative steps of "the most momentous reform that
had yet been launched on the world--the first organized protest against
the injustice which had brooded for ages over the character and destiny
of one-half the race." No words could express our astonishment on
finding, a few days afterward, that what seemed to us so timely, so
rational, and so sacred, should be a subject for sarcasm and ridicule to
the entire press of the nation. With our Declaration of Rights and
Resolutions for a text, it seemed as if every man who could wield a pen
prepared a homily on "woman's sphere." All the journals from Maine to
Texas seemed to strive with each other to see which could make our
movement appear the most ridiculous. The anti-slavery papers stood by us
manfully and so did Frederick Douglass, both in the convention and in
his paper, _The North Star_, but so pronounced was the popular voice
against us, in the parlor, press, and pulpit, that most of the ladies
who had attended the convention and signed the declaration, one by one,
withdrew their names and influence and joined our persecutors. Our
friends gave us the cold shoulder and felt themselves disgraced by the
whole proceeding.

If I had had the slightest premonition of all that was to follow that
convention, I fear I should not have had the courage to risk it, and I
must confess that it was with fear and trembling that I consented to
attend another, one month afterward, in Rochester. Fortunately, the
first one seemed to have drawn all the fire, and of the second but
little was said. But we had set the ball in motion, and now, in quick
succession, conventions were held in Ohio, Indiana, Massachusetts,
Pennsylvania, and in the City of New York, and have been kept up nearly
every year since.

The most noteworthy of the early conventions were those held in
Massachusetts, in which such men as Garrison, Phillips, Channing,
Parker, and Emerson took part. It was one of these that first attracted
the attention of Mrs. John Stuart Mill, and drew from her pen that able
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