earance. No words could have
done justice to the occasion. It was so much more ridiculous than
ridicule, so much more absurd than absurdity. The women on whom that
ridicule was heaped were utterly incapable of self-defense, or
unconscious of its need. The mass of nobility seekers seemed content to
get before the public by any means, and to wear its most stinging
sarcasms as they would a new dress cap.

In those days I reserved all my hard words for men, and in my notice of
the convention mildly suggested that it would have been better had Mrs.
Oliver Johnson been made president, as she had great executive ability
and a good knowledge of parliamentary rules. This suggestion was
received by the president as an insult never to be forgiven, and in the
_Visiter_ defended herself against it. I replied, and in the discussion
which followed she argued that the affairs of each family should be so
arranged that the husband and wife would be breadwinner and housekeeper
by turns, day or oven half day about. He should go to business in the
forenoon, then in the afternoon take care of baby and permit her to go
to the office, shop or warehouse from which came the family supplies.

I took the ground that baby would be apt to object, and that in our
family the rule would not work, since I could not put a log on the
mill-carriage, and the water would be running to waste all my day or
half-day as bread-winner.

About the same time, Mrs. Stanton published a series of articles in Mrs.
Bloomer's paper, the _Lily_, in which she taught that it was right for a
mother to make baby comfortable, lay him in his crib, come out, lock the
door, and leave him to develop his lungs by crying or cooing, as he
might decide, while mamma improved her mind and attended to her public
and social duties.

Against such head winds, it was hard for my poor little craft to make
progress in asserting the right of women to influence great public
questions.

For something over twenty years, after that Akron meeting, I did not see
a woman's rights convention, and in all have seen but five. Up to 1876
there had been no material improvement in them, if those I saw were a
fair specimen. Their holders have always seemed to me like a woman who
should undertake at a state fair to run a sewing machine, under pretense
of advertising it, while she had never spent an hour in learning its
use.

However, those conventions have probably saved the republic. From the
readiness