THE WOMEN REJECTED AT SYRACUSE.
At the Rochester convention Gerrit Smith, Mrs. Bloomer, and Miss Anthony were appointed delegates to the state convention then soon to meet in Syracuse. The call was to all temperance organizations to send delegates to it, and clearly included the Woman’s Temperance Society. Mrs. Bloomer and Miss Anthony accepted the appointment and attended; but their simple appearance caused a tremendous hubbub, and after a whole day spent by the men in discussing the question of their admission they were excluded. Mrs. Bloomer describes the scene as follows:
“The women had friends in the convention who were as determined on their side that women should be recognized, and so they had it, each side determined to have it’s way—a dozen men talking at the same time all over the house, each claiming the floor, each insisting on being heard—till all became confusion, a perfect babel of noises. No order could be kept and the president left his chair in disgust. Time and words fail to give you the details of this disgraceful meeting. The ringleaders were prominent clergymen of Albany, Lockport, and Buffalo. Their names and faces are indelibly engraven on my memory. During this whole day’s quarrel of the men, no woman said a word, except once Miss Anthony addressed the chair intending to prefer a request for a donation of temperance tracts for distribution by our society. She got no farther than ‘Mr. President,’ when she was rudely called to order by one of the belligerent clergymen and told to sit down. She sat down and no other woman opened her mouth, though they really were entitled to all the rights of any delegate, under the call; and the treatment they received was not only an insult to the women present, but to the organization that sent them.”
In referring to this incident, on page 488 Vol. I. of History of Woman Suffrage, it is said: “Rev. Luther Lea offered his church just before adjournment, and Mr. May announced that Miss Anthony and Mrs. Bloomer would speak there in the evening. They had a crowded house, while the conservatives scarcely had fifty. The general feeling was hostile to the action of the convention. The same battle on the temperance platform was fought over and over again in various parts of the state, and the most deadly opposition uniformly came from the clergy, though a few noble men in that profession ever remained true to principle through all the conflicts of those days in the anti-slavery, temperance, and woman’s rights movements.”