l who were eighteen years old being
entitled to deposit their ballots. They mingled in the crowds about the
polls, and became as violently agitated by partisan excitements as the
men. Those who would have been quiet home bodies, had no such foolish
liberty been allowed them, became zealous politicians; while others, to
whom excitement of some kind was a necessity of life, turned to this,
and became so wild with political furor as to unsex themselves,--if
throwing aside all modesty be doing so. They carried placards in their
hands among the crowd to influence voters, distributed handbills and
tickets, entered into familiar conversation with total strangers, many
of them persons of infamous character, and pleaded and wrangled with
them to secure their votes. They obeyed literally the injunction of
modern political managers to "vote early,"--so many mere girls swearing
that they were of legal age, when they were in reality much younger,
that the singular statistical dislocation became apparent, that there
were no women in the country under eighteen years old. With so loose a
morality on this point, it cannot be doubted that the other injunction,
to "vote often," was as generally obeyed. I have no positive information
as to how the married women who thus devoted themselves to
electioneering managed their domestic concerns,--who prepared the
dinner, who rocked the cradle, who tended the baby,--or whether these
cards were thrust upon the husbands. History is silent on this subject;
but the more practical minds of the men of this generation can readily
conceive how inconvenient it would be for them to be transformed into
cooks and dry-nurses.

I have had no ambition to parade in Bloomer costume, or to be otherwise
eccentric, even where it happened to be more comfortable. Neither have I
figured as the chairman or secretary of a woman's convention, nor had my
name ringing through the newspapers as an impatient struggler after more
rights than I now possess. I do not think that I should be happier by
being permitted to vote, and am sure there is no office I can think of
that I would have for the asking. But I was never one of the
strong-minded of my sex. I know that there are such, and that even in
this noisy world they have made themselves heard. How attentively they
have been listened to I will not stop to inquire. I have always believed
that the truest self-respect lies, not in the exaction of questionable
prerogatives, but in