Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/307

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A Womans Congress.
287

it entirely at her own expense. It took the broadest ground claimed to-day: individual freedom in the State, the Church, and the home; woman's equality and suffrage a natural right. In 1859, she visited Europe for the first time, and spent a year traveling in France, Italy, Austria, and Germany, giving her leisure hours to picture galleries and the study of art. She made many valuable friends on this trip, regained her health, and returned home to work with renewed zeal for the enfranchisement of woman.

Having decided to celebrate the second decade of the National Woman Suffrage movement, in New York, Mrs. Davis took charge of all the preliminary arrangements, including the foreign correspondence. She gave a good report at the opening session of the Convention, of what had been accomplished in the twenty years, and published the proceedings in pamphlet form, at her own expense. One of Mrs. Davis' favorite ideas was a Woman's Congress in Washington, to meet every year, to consider the national questions demanding popular action; especially to present them in their moral and humanitarian bearings and relations, while our representatives discussed them, as men usually do, from the material, financial, and statistical points of view. In this way only, said she, "can the complete idea on any question ever be realized. All legislation must necessarily be fragmentary, so long as one-half the race give no thought whatever on the subject."

In 1871, Mrs. Davis, with her niece and adopted daughter, again visited Europe, and pursued her studies of art, spending much time in Julian's life studio, the only one open to women. She took lessons of Carl Marko in Florence. When in Paris she spent hours every day copying in the Louvre and Luxembourg. The walls of her home Were decorated with many fine copies, and a few of her own creations. Her enthusiasm for both art and reform may seem to some a singular combination; but with her view of life, it was a natural one. Believing, as she did, in the realization of the ultimate equality of the human family, and the possibility of the race sometime attaining comparative perfection, when all would be well-fed, clothed, sheltered, and educated; humanity in its poverty, ignorance, and deformity, were to her but the first rude sketch on the canvas, to be perfected by the skillful hand of the Great Artist. Hence she labored with faith and enthusiasm to realize her ideal alike in both cases.

Tn Naples she made the acquaintance of Mary Somerville, then in her ninetieth year. She found her quite conversant with American affairs, and she expressed great pleasure in reading Mrs. Davis'