admits the publication of but a few, yet all breathed the same hopeful spirit and confidence in future success. Abigail Bush, who presided over the first Rochester convention, said:
No one knows what I passed through upon that occasion. I was born and baptized in the old Scotch Presbyterian church. At that time its sacred teachings were, "if a woman would know anything let her ask her husband at home." *** I well remember the incidents of that meeting and the thoughts awakened by it. *** Say to your convention my full heart is with them in all their deliberations and counsels, and I trust great good to women will come of their efforts.
Ernestine L. Rose, a native of Poland, and, next to Frances Wright, the earliest advocate of woman's enfranchisement in America, wrote from England:
How I should like to be with you at the anniversary—it reminds me of the delightful convention we had at Rochester, long, long ago—and speak of the wonderful change that has taken place in regard to woman. Compare her present position in society with the one she occupied forty years ago, when I undertook to emancipate her from not only barbarous laws, but from what was even worse, a barbarous public opinion. No one can appreciate the wonderful change in the social and moral condition of woman, except by looking back and comparing the past with the present. *** Say to the friends, Go on, go on, halt not and rest not. Remember that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" and of right. Much has been achieved; but the main, the vital thing, has yet to come. The suffrage is the magic key to the statute—the insignia of citizenship in a republic.
Caroline Ashurst Biggs, editor of the Englishwoman's Review, London, wrote:
I have read with great interest in the National Citizen and the Woman's Journal the announcement of the forthcoming convention in Rochester. *** I cannot refrain from sending you a cordial English congratulation upon the great advance in the social and legal position of women in America, which has been the result of your labor. The next few years will see still greater progress. As soon as the suffrage is granted to women, a concession which will not be many years in coming either in England or America, every one of our questions will advance with double force, and meanwhile our efforts in that direction are simultaneously helping forward other social, legal, educational and
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L. Minor, Missouri; Elizabeth H. Duvall, Kentucky; Mrs. G.W. Church, Tennessee; Mrs. Augusta Williams, Elsie Stuart, Kansas; Ada W. Lucas, Nebraska; Emeline B. Wells, Annie Godbe, Utah; Mary F. Shields, Alida C. Avery, M. D., Colorado; Harriet Loughary, Mrs. L. F. Proebstel, Mrs. Coburn, Abigail Scott Duniway, Oregon; Clarina I. H. Nichols, Elizabeth B. Schenck, Sarah J. Wallis, Abigail Bush, Laura de Force Gordon, California; Mrs. A.H.H. Stuart, Washington Territory; Helen M. Martin, Arkansas; Helen R. Holmes, District of Columbia; Caroline V. Putnam, Virginia; Elizabeth Avery Meriwether, Tennessee; Elizabeth L. Saxon, Louisiana; Martha Goodwin Tunstall, Texas; Priscilla Holmes Drake, Buell D. M'Clung, Alabama; Ellen Sully Fray, Ontario; Theodore Stanton, France; Ernestine L. Rose, Caroline Ashurst Biggs, Lydia E. Becker, England.
