se of our citizens who,
while not in full sympathy with your views, have a desire to hear
you in deliberative council and to cordially tender you the same
courtesies offered other conventions which have chosen St. Louis
as their place of annual gathering.

And I am the more happy to do this because of the opportunity it
affords me to disabuse your minds of certain impressions which
have gone abroad concerning our slowness of action in the line of
advanced ideas. Certainly in some phases of that reformation to
which you and your co-laborers have pledged your lives, your
fortunes--the cause of woman--St. Louis is the leader.

When, eighteen or twenty years since, Harriet Hosmer desired to
study anatomy, to perfect herself in her art, not a college in
New England would open its doors to her; she traveled West, and
through the generous patronage of Wayman Crow of this city, she
became a pupil of the dean of the St. Louis Medical college.

When other cities had refused equality of wages and position, St.
Louis placed Miss Brackett at the head of our normal school,
giving her--a heretofore exclusively male prerogative--the
highest wages, added to the highest educational rank.

And here in St. Louis began the advance march which has finally
broken down the walls of the highest judicial fortress, the
Supreme Court of the United States. Washington University, in
response to my request, unhesitatingly opened its doors, and for
the first time in the history of America, woman was accorded the
right to a legal course of training with man, and, at its close,
after successful examination, I was freely accorded the degree of
Bachelor of Laws! A city or a State that could perpetrate the
anomaly of a female bachelor, is certainly not far behind the
radicalism of the age.

Again, as I turn to its record on suffrage, I find as early as
1866 the Hon. B. Gratz Brown of Missouri made a glowing speech
for woman's enfranchisement, in the United States Senate, on Mr.
Cowan's motion to strike out "male" from the District of Columbia
suffrage bill, which resulted in an organization in 1867, through
the efforts of Mrs. Virginia L. Minor, its first president. And
again, I remember when that hydra-headed evil arose in our midst,
degrading all women and violating a