Page:Heroines of freethought (IA cu31924031228699).pdf/175

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HARRIET MARTINEAU
167

Her detailed and circumstantial account of that memorable day—the 21st of October, 1833—when William Lloyd Garrison was mobbed in the streets of liberty-loving Boston for his brave efforts in behalf of Southern slaves, and when the Woman's Anti-Slavery Society, in defiance of the threats of that same mob, quietly met and transacted their business in a hall on Boston's principal street, lends an air of probability to the statement made by Henry C. Wright in his autobiography, that she was present at and participated in the business of that meeting. In her account of it, however, she does not explicitly state, nor lead the reader to infer, that she was thus present.

It would have been more than strange if a mind so comprehensive, so radical, so freedom-loving as hers had been blind to the shortcomings, the needs, and the wrongs of her own sex; but it is with a pleased surprise that we find, in the two chapters on woman in her “Society in America,” views