She writes May 26: "Arrived home at 8 p. m. and found all well—the all consisting of sister Mary, the only one left." She was invited to meet with a large and conservative society of women who did not believe in equal suffrage. All made nice little addresses and when Miss Anthony was called on she said: "Ladies, you have been doing here today what I and a few other women were denounced as 'unsexed' for doing thirty years ago—speaking in public;" and then proceeded to point the moral. She attended the commencement exercises of a young ladies' seminary, whose principal would not acknowledge a handsome gift from her pupils by a few remarks because she "considered it would look too strong-minded." Miss Anthony comments on the graduates' essays: "They had as much originality as Baedecker's Guide-book."
In July she went as the guest of her friend Adeline Thomson, of Philadelphia, for two weeks at Cape May and here had her first experience in sea-bathing, although she always had lived within a short distance of the ocean. She says: "This is my first seaside dissipation. It seems very odd to be one of the giddy summer resort people!" She took Miss Thomson with her up into the Berkshire hills of northwestern Massachusetts to Adams, her birthplace, and visited the home of her grandfather. In the early days of her peregrinations she used to come often to this picturesque spot, but it now had been twenty years since her last visit. Time does not bring many changes to the New England nooks or the people who live in them, and she greatly enjoyed the nine days spent with uncles, aunts and cousins, exploring the well-remembered spots. They went from here to Magnolia for a two weeks' visit at the seaside cottage of Mr. and Mrs. James Purinton, of Lynn, Mass. At this time, in answer to a request for advice, Miss Anthony wrote to Olympia Brown and Mrs. Almedia Gray, of Wisconsin:
I have your letters relative to bringing suits under the school suffrage law, and hasten to say to you that Mrs. Minor's and my own experience in both suing and being sued on the Fourteenth Amendment claim leads me to beseech you not to make a test case unless you know you will get the broadest decision upon it. If you get the narrow one restricting the present law simply to school-district voting, there it will rest and no judge or inspector will transcend the limit of the decision. My judgment would be to say and do nothing about the law, but through the year keep up the educational work, showing that such and such cities allowed women to vote for mayor, common council, etc., and by the next election many others will let women vote; and so in a few years all will follow suit. Let what you have alone and try for more; for all your legislature has power to give. It will be vastly more likely to grant municipal suffrage than your supreme court will be to give a decision that the school law already allows women to vote for mayor, council, governor, etc.
They thought best, however, to bring the suits; the exact results which were predicted followed, and the school suffrage even was restricted until it was practically worthless.
During this summer Miss Anthony undertook to arrange her many years' accumulation of letters, clippings, etc., and knowing her reluctance ever to destroy a single scrap, Mrs. Stanton wrote from Paris: "I am glad to hear that you have at last settled down to look over those awful papers. It is well I am not with you. I fear we should fight every blessed minute over the destruction of Tom, Dick and Harry's epistles. Unless Mary, on the sly, sticks them in the stove when your back is turned, you will never diminish the pile during your mortal life. (Make the most of my hint, dear Mary.)" It is safe to say it was just as large at the end of the examination as at the beginning.
In September, 1887, Miss Anthony again made a circuit of conventions in every congressional district in Wisconsin and then turned her attention to Kansas. The officers of the State association had arranged a series of conventions for the purpose of demanding a constitutional amendment conferring full suffrage on women. Miss Anthony, with Mrs. Johns, Mrs. Letitia V. Watkins, State organizer, Rev. Anna Shaw and Rachel Foster, gave the month of October to this canvass. Senator Ingalls, in a speech at Abilene, had attempted to defend his vote in the Senate against the Sixteenth Amendment, and Miss Anthony took this as a text for the campaign. She had ample material for the excoriating which she gave him in every district in Kansas, as the Senator had declared: 1st, that suffrage was neither a natural nor a constitutional right, but a privilege conferred by the State; 2d, that no citizens should be allowed to participate in the formation of legislatures or the enactment of laws, who could not enforce their action at the point of a bayonet; 3d, that no immigrants should be allowed to enter the United States from any country on earth for the next twenty-five years; 4th, that negro suffrage had been an absolute and unqualified failure; 5th, that while there were thousands of women vastly more competent than men to vote upon questions of morality, they never should be allowed to do so—simply because they were women.
It hardly need be said that Miss Anthony found little difficulty in reducing to tatters these so-called arguments, and that her audiences were in hearty sympathy. To borrow her own expression, she "tried to use him up so there was not an inch of ground under his feet." When the convention was held at Atchison Mrs. Ingalls invited sixteen of the ladies to a handsome luncheon, where the senator placed Miss Anthony at his right hand and made her the guest of honor. She proposed that he debate the question of woman suffrage with her but he refused on the ground that he could not attack a woman, so she served up this objection in her speech that evening. To a reporter he is said to have given the reason that he "would not stoop to the intellectual level of a woman."
The month of November was given to holding a two days' convention in each of the thirteen congressional districts of Indiana. These meetings were arranged by the State secretary, Mrs. Ida H. Harper, and the strong force of speakers, Miss Anthony, Mrs. Wallace, Mrs. Sewall and Mrs. Gougar, aroused great enthusiasm and made many converts.[35] This ended three months of constant travelling and speaking almost every day and evening. On the first of December Miss Anthony writes: "I have laid me down to sleep in a new bed nearly every night of this entire time."
But the 10th found her in Washington fresh and vigorous for the work of the coming winter. She was anxious to know whether the reports of the Senate debate had been franked and sent out as promised and, to her inquiry, Senator Blair answered with his usual little joke: "I have had the speeches, etc., attended to and trust that the mails will do you justice if the males do not. But remember that men naturally fight for their lives, and on the same principle, you shall for yours!"