Susan B. Anthony in California Campaign, 1896 [Frontispiece]
Harriet Purvis[faces page 526]
Mentia Taylor[554]
Priscilla Bright McLaren[564]
Elizabeth Pease Nichol[568]
Margaret Bright Lucas[578]
Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton writing the History of Woman Suffrage[600]
Caroline E. Merrick[608]
Zerelda G. Wallace[632]
Rev. Anna Howard Shaw[688]
Harriet Taylor Upton[700]
May Wright Sewall[746]
Mary S. Anthony[760]
Carrie Chapman Catt[780]
Rachel Foster Avery[814]
Sarah B. Cooper[828]
Ellen Clark Sargent[864]
Sarah L. Knox Goodrich[888]
Anthony Residence in Rochester[904]
Attic Work-Rooms[910]
Mary S. and Susan B. Anthony[916]
Anthony Family at Reunion[938]
At the Old Homestead[942]
Quaker Meeting-House, Adams, Mass[946]

CHAPTER XXX.

POLITICAL CANDIDATES—WRITING THE HISTORY.

1880-1881.

During her May lecture trip Miss Anthony was formulating a scheme for a series of conventions, opening and closing with a great mass meeting, which should influence the national political conventions to recognize in their platforms the rights of woman. As usual most of the women opposed this plan and as usual Miss Anthony carried the day. The following letters to Mrs. Spencer, national secretary, will serve as specimens of hundreds which she wrote with her own hand, before every similar occasion:

I want the rousingest rallying cry ever put on paper—first, to call women by the thousand to Chicago; and second, to get every one who can not go there to send a postal card to the mass convention, saying she wants the Republicans to put a Sixteenth Amendment pledge in their platform. Don't you see that if we could have a mass meeting of 2,000 or 3,000 earnest women, June 2, and then receive 10,000 postals from women all over the country, what a tremendous influence we could bring to bear on the Republican convention, June 3? We can get Farwell Hall for $40 a day, and I think would do well to engage it for the 2d and 3d, then we could make it our headquarters—sleep in it even, if we couldn't get any other places.

Besides this, I want to make the best possible use of all our speakers between June 3 and 21, when we shall have a mass meeting in Cincinnati, the day before the Democratic convention. My proposition is that I, as vice-president-at-large, call conventions of two days each at a number of cities. We could divide our speakers and thus fill in the entire two weeks between Chicago and Cincinnati with capital good work. How does the plan strike you? Can we summon the women from the vasty deeps—or distances? Can we get 5,000 or 10,000 to send on their postals? Do the petitions still come in? How many thousands of appeals and documents have you had printed and how many have you sent out?

After the ball was set rolling she wrote: