to silence the women. It called attention to dangers now seeming "to threaten the female character with wide-spread and permanent injury." It claimed that the New Testament clearly defined "the appropriate duties and influence of women. The power of woman is in her dependence. When she assumes the place and tone of a man as a public reformer, our care and protection of her seem unnecessary: we put ourselves in self-defence against her. She yields the power which God has given her for protection, and her character becomes unnatural." The letter especially condemned those "who encourage females to bear an obtrusive and ostentatious part in measures of reform, and countenance any of that sex who so far forget themselves as to itinerate in the character of public lecturers and teachers." This was the letter which Whittier called the "Brookfield Bull," and of which he wrote:—
"So this is all—the utmost reach
Of priestly power the mind to fetter!
When laymen think, when women preach,—
A war of words—a 'Pastoral Letter'!"
Lucy went to the meeting. The body of the church was black with ministers, and the gallery was tilled with women and laymen. While the famous letter was being read, the Rev. Dr. Blagden marched up and down the aisle, turning his head from side to side and looking at the women in the gallery, as much as to say, "Now we have silenced you." Lucy listened in great indignation, and at each aggravating sentence she nudged her cousin, who said afterward that her side was black and blue. At the close of the meeting she told her cousin that, if she ever had anything to say in public, she would say it, and all the more because of that pastoral letter.
At the low wages received by women teachers it took Lucy until she was twenty-five to earn the money to carry her to Oberlin, then the only college in the country that admitted women and colored men. Among most New Englanders Oberlin was unpopular, partly because of its radicalism on the negro question and the woman question, but chiefly because the authorities of the college believed in the doctrine of "entire sanctification." It was regarded as a highly heretical place, and the feeling against it was strong. Deacon White, of West Brookfield, took the Oberlin Evangelist, but his wife would not touch the paper, and used to hand it to him with the tongs. Here or nowhere, however, Lucy had to get her collegiate education.
She set out on the long journey to Ohio with only seventy dollars in her purse toward the expenses of the four years' course, but with her heart full of courage and her head of good common sense. Crossing Lake Erie from Buffalo to Cleveland, she could not afford a state-room, but slept on deck on a pile of grain sacks, among horses and freight, with a few other women who, like herself, could only pay for a "deck passage." At Oberlin she earned her way by teaching in the preparatory department of the college, and by doing housework in the Ladies' Boarding Hall at three cents an hour. Most of the students were poor, and the college furnished them board at a dollar a week. But she could not afford even this small sum, and during most of her course she cooked her food in her own room, boarding herself at a cost of less than fifty cents a week. Her father's disapproval of a collegiate education for girls finally gave way before his admiration of her sturdy perseverance, in which he perhaps felt something akin to his own character; and he wrote offering to lend her the money to carry her through the rest of her course, and urging her not to hurt her health by overwork. She would accept only a small sum, however, preferring to earn her own way as far as possible. She taught country schools during the vacations, and had some hard experiences, amusing to look back upon, in the rough and primitive neighborhoods of the new West. Throughout her college course she wore cheap calico dresses with white collars, laundering them herself, and being always so clean and trim that she used to be held up to the other young women by the members of the Ladies' Board as an example of how exquisite neatness could go hand in hand with the closest economy. She had only one or two new dresses while at Oberlin, and she did not go home once during the four years; but she thoroughly enjoyed college life, and found time also for good works.
