Teachers' conventions, however, were only a minor part of her new crusade, plans for which were still simmering in her mind and developing from day to day. Going back to many of the towns where she had held temperance meetings, she found that most of the societies she had organized had disbanded because women lacked the money to engage speakers or to subscribe to temperance papers. If they were married, they had no money of their own and no right to any interest outside their homes, unless their husbands consented.
Discouraged, she wrote in her diary, "As I passed from town to town I was made to feel the great evil of woman's entire dependency upon man for the necessary means to aid on any and every reform movement. Though I had long admitted the wrong, I never until this time so fully took in the grand idea of pecuniary and personal independence. It matters not how overflowing with benevolence toward suffering humanity may be the heart of woman, it avails nothing so long as she possesses not the power to act in accordance with these promptings. Woman must have a purse of her own, and how can this be, so long as the Wife is denied the right to her individual and joint earnings. Reflections like these, caused me to see and really feel that there was no true freedom for Woman without the possession of all her property rights, and that these rights could be obtained through legislation only, and so, the sooner the demand was made of the Legislature, the sooner would we be likely to obtain them."[42]
A PURSE OF HER OWN
The next important step in winning further property rights for women, it seemed to Susan, was to hold a woman's rights convention in the conservative capital city of Albany. This was definitely a challenge and she at once turned to Elizabeth Stanton for counsel. Somehow she must persuade Mrs. Stanton to find time in spite of her many household cares to prepare a speech for the convention and for presentation to the legislature. As eager as Susan to free women from unjust property laws, Mrs. Stanton asked only that Susan get a good lawyer, and one sympathetic to the cause, to look up New York State's very worst laws affecting women.[43] She could think and philosophize while she was baking and sewing, she assured Susan, but she had no time for research. Susan produced the facts for Mrs. Stanton, and while she worked on the speech, Susan went from door to door during the cold blustery days of December and January 1854 to get signatures on her petitions for married women's property rights and woman suffrage. Some of the women signed, but more of them slammed the door in her face, declaring indignantly that they had all the rights they wanted. Yet at this time a father had the legal authority to apprentice or will away a child without the mother's consent and an employer was obliged by law to pay a wife's wages to her husband.
In spite of the fact that the bloomer costume made it easier for her to get about in the snowy streets, she now found it a real burden because it always attracted unfavorable attention. Boys jeered at her and she was continually conscious of the amused, critical glances of the men and women she met. She longed to take it off and wear an inconspicuous trailing skirt, but if she had been right to put it on, it would be weakness to take it off. By this time Elizabeth Stanton had given it up except in her own home, convinced that it harmed the cause and that the physical freedom it gave was not worth the price. "I hope you have let down a dress and a petticoat," she now wrote Susan. "The cup of ridicule is greater than you can bear. It is not wise, Susan, to use up so much energy and feeling in that way. You can put them to better use. I speak from experience."[44]
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her son, Henry
Lucy Stone too was wavering and was thinking of having her next dress made long. The three women corresponded about it, and Lucy as well as Mrs. Stanton urged Susan to give up the bloomer. With these entreaties ringing in her ears, Susan set out for Albany in February 1854 to make final arrangements for the convention. On the streets in Albany, in the printing offices, and at the capitol, men stared boldly at her, some calling out hilariously, "Here comes my bloomer." She endured it bravely until her work was done, but at night alone in her room at Lydia Mott's she poured out her anguish in letters to Lucy. "Here I am known only," she wrote, "as one of the women who ape men—coarse, brutal men! Oh, I can not, can not bear it any longer."[45]