o slavery object of
my paper seemed to be lost sight of, both by friends and foes of human
progress, in the surprise at the innovation of a woman entering the
political arena, to argue publicly on great questions of national
policy, and while men were defending their pantaloons, they created and
spread the idea, that masculine supremacy lay in the form of their
garments, and that a woman dressed like a man would be as potent as he.

Strange as it may now seem, they succeeded in giving such efficacy to
the idea, that no less a person than Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was led
astray by it, so that she set her cool, wise head to work and invented a
costume, which she believed would emancipate woman from thraldom. Her
invention was adopted by her friend Mrs. Bloomer, editor and proprietor
of the _Lily_, a small paper then in infancy in Syracuse, N.Y., and from
her, the dress took its name--"the bloomer." Both women believed in
their dress, and staunchly advocated it as the sovereignest remedy for
all the ills that woman's flesh is heir to.

I made a suit and wore it at home parts of two days, long enough to feel
assured that it must be a failure; and so opposed it earnestly, but
nothing I could say or do could make it apparent that pantaloons were
not the real objective point, at which all discontented woman aimed. I
had once been tried on a charge of purloining pantaloons, and been
acquitted for lack of evidence; but now, here was the proof! The women
themselves, leaders of the malcontents, promulgated and pressed their
claim to bifurcated garments, and the whole tide of popular discussion
was turned into that ridiculous channel.

The _Visiter_ had a large list of subscribers in Salem, Ohio, and in the
summer of '49 a letter from a lady came to me saying, that the _Visiter_
had stirred up so much interest in women's rights that a meeting had
been held and a committee appointed to get up a woman's rights
convention, and she, as chairman of that committee, invited me to
preside. I felt on reading this as if I had had a douche bath; then, as
a lawyer might have felt who had carried a case for a corporation
through the lower court, and when expecting it up before the supreme
bench, had learned that all his clients were coming in to address the
court on the merits of the case.

By the pecks of letters I had been receiving, I had learned that there
were thousands of women with grievances, and no power to state them or
to disc