in which eight States were represented by seventy-one delegates. Among those who took part in the deliberations were Lydia Maria Child, Abby Kelley, Mary S. Parker, Deborah Shaw, and Abigail Hopper Gibbons. Abby Kelley was a young and beautiful woman of Quaker ancestry, an eloquent and logical speaker who gave her early years to the Antislavery movement. When she began to speak in public in behalf of freedom for the slaves she was assailed by the clergy, ridiculed by society women, churches and public halls were closed against her, and personal violence, encouraged by wealthy citizens and high officials, was often visited upon the courageous girl who dared to plead for universal freedom. Mobs assailed her and broke up her meetings; men and women were expelled from churches for listening to her on Sunday. But she never faltered in the good cause and never quailed before the tirades of personal abuse or the assaults of mobs. Her eloquence and courage paved the way for women as public speakers and illustrated their power in that capacity. In 1840 Margaret Fuller wrote an essay, published in the “Dial,” demanding equal rights for women with men, in education, industry and politics. In 1849 Lucretia Mott, the eminent Quaker minister, delivered a powerful discourse in Philadelphia in reply to a lecture by Richard H. Dana ridiculing the idea of political equality for women. In 1847 Susan B. Anthony made her first public speech in Canajoharie, New York, and the same year Antoinette L. Brown and Lucy Stone made their first appearance as public speakers.
The question of the right of women to speak in public, vote, and to serve as delegates to conventions, caused a division in the ranks of the American Antislavery Society in 1840 and disturbed the peace of the World’s Antislavery Convention held in London the same year. Several American societies had sent women as delegates to that Convention, among whom were Lucretia Mott, Abby Southwick and six other young women under thirty years
