equally with man in the image of the Creator and divinely appointed to co-sovereignty over the earth. To name them here is to recognize their presence with us in spirit and to invoke their benediction upon this generation which, entering into the results of their labors, must carry them forward to full fruition.
Lucretia Mott always will be revered as one of those who conceived the idea of a convention to make an organized demand for justice to women. She became a Quaker preacher in 1818 at the age of twenty-five, and the last suffrage convention she attended was in her eighty-sixth year. Her motto, "Truth for authority and not authority for truth," is still the tocsin of reform. Sarah Pugh, the lovely Quaker, was ever her close friend and helper.
Frances Wright, a noble Scotchwoman, a friend of General Lafayette, early imbibed a love for freedom and a knowledge of the principles on which it is based. In this the land of her adoption she was the first woman to lecture on political subjects, in 1826.
Ernestine L. Rose, the beautiful Polish patriot, sent the first petition to the New York Legislature to give a married woman the right to hold real estate in her own name. This was in 1836, and she continued the work of securing signatures until 1848, when the bill was passed. She was a matchless orator and lectured on woman suffrage for nearly fifty years.
Lucy Stone's voice pleaded the wide continent over for justice for her sex. Her life-long devotion to the woman suffrage cause was idealized by the companionship and assistance of her husband, Henry B. Blackwell, the one man in this nation who under any and all circumstances has made woman's cause his chief consideration. Her first lecture on woman's rights was given in 1847, the year of her graduation at Oberlin College, and her life work was epitomized in her dying words, "Make the world better."
Martha C. Wright, Jane Hunt and Mary Ann McClintock were three of those noble women who issued the call for the Seneca Falls Convention, and were ever ready for service.
Paulina Wright Davis, who called the first National Convention in 1850 and presided over its twentieth celebration in 1870, was one of the moving spirits of the work for more than twenty-five years. Assisted by Caroline H. Dall, she edited the Una, founded in 1853, the first distinctively woman suffrage paper.
Frances Dana Gage, better known by her pen-name, "Aunt Fanny," was farmer, editor, lecturer and worker in the Sanitary Commission. Of her eight children six were stalwart sons, and she used to boast that she was the mother of thirty-six feet of boys. She was a pillar of strength to the movement in early days.
Clarina Howard Nichols is associated with the seed-sowing in Vermont, in Wisconsin and especially in Kansas, where her labors with the first constitutional convention, in 1859, engrafted in organic law many rights for women which were obtained elsewhere, if at all, only by slow and difficult legislative changes. Susan E. Wattles led the Kansas campaign of 1859 with Mrs. Nichols.
Emily Robinson of Salem, Ohio, was one of the chief movers in