I feel myself drawn on to offer another picture, not of our congress, but of a scene which grew out of it.
The ladies of our association have been invited to visit a school for young girls, of which Miss Conway, one of our members, is the principal. After witnessing some interesting exercises, we assemble in the large hall, where a novel entertainment has been provided for us. A band of twelve young ladies appear upon the platform. They wear the colors of "Old Glory," but after a new fashion, four of them being arrayed from head to foot in red, four in blue, and four in white. While the John Brown tune is heard from the piano, they proceed to act in graceful dumb show the stanzas of my Battle Hymn. How they did it I cannot tell, but it was a most lovely performance.
In the year 1898, for the first time since its first meeting, our association issued no call for a congress of women. The reasons for our failure to do so may be briefly stated. Some of our most efficient members had been removed by death, some by unavoidable circumstances. But more than this, the demands made upon the time and strength of women by the women's clubs, which are now numerous and universal, had come to occupy the attention of many who in other times had leisure to interest themselves in our work. The biennial conventions of the general federation of women's clubs no doubt appear to many to fill the place which we have honorably held, and may in some degree answer the ends which we have always had in view. Yet a number of us still hold together, united in heart and in hand. Although we have sadly missed our departed friends, I have never felt that the interest or value of our meetings suffered any decline. The spirit of those dear ones has seemed, on the contrary, to abide among us, holding us pledged to undertake the greater effort made necessary by their absence. We still count among our members many who keep the inspiration under which we first took the field. We feel, moreover, that our happy experience of many years has brought us lessons too precious to hide or to neglect.
The coming together either of men or of women from regions widely separate from each other naturally gives occasion for comparison. So far as I have known, the comparisons elicited by our meetings have more and more tended to resolve imagined discords into prevailing harmony. The sympathy of feeling aroused by our unity of object has always risen above the distinctions of section and belonging. Honest differences of opinion, honestly and temperately expressed, tend rather to develop good feeling than to disturb it. I am glad to be able to say that sectional prejudice has appeared very little, if at all, in the long course of our congresses, and that self-glorification, whether of State or individual, has never had any place with us, while the great instruction of meeting with earnest and thoughtful workers from every part of our country's vast domain has been greatly appreciated by us and by those who, in various places, have met with us.
We have presented at our meetings reports on a variety of important topics. Our congress of three days usually concluding on Saturday, such of our speakers as are accustomed to the pulpit have often been invited to hold forth in one or more of the churches. In Knoxville, Tenn., for example, I was cordially bidden to lift up my voice in an orthodox Presbyterian church, Mrs. Ednah D. Cheney spoke before the Unitarian society, Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell preached to yet another congregation, and Mrs. Henrietta L. T. Wolcott improved the Sunday by a very interesting talk on waifs, of which class of unfortunates she has had much official and personal knowledge.
An extended account of our many meetings would be out of place in this volume, but some points in connection with them may be of interest. It often happened that we visited cities in which no associations of women, other than the church and temperance societies, existed. After our departure, women's clubs almost invariably came into being.
Our eastern congresses have been held in Portland, Providence, Springfield, and Boston. In the Empire State, we have visited Buffalo, Syracuse, and New York. Denver and Colorado Springs have been our limit in the west. Northward, we have met in Toronto and at St. John. In the south, as already said, our pilgrimages have reached Atlanta and New Orleans.
We have sometimes been requested to supplement our annual congress by an additional day's session at some place easily reached from the city in which the main meeting had been appointed to be held. Of these supplementary congresses I will mention a very pleasant one at St. Paul, Minn., and a very useful one held by some of our number in Salt Lake City.
At the congress held in Boston in the autumn of 1879, I was elected president, my predecessor in the office, Mrs. Daggett, declining further service.
As the years have gone on, Death has done his usual work upon our number. I have already spoken of our second president, Maria Mitchell, who continued, after her term of office, to send us valuable statements regarding the scientific work of women. Mrs. Kate Newell Daggett, our third president, had long been recognized as a leader of social and intellectual progress in her adopted city of Chicago. The record in our calendar is that of an earnest worker, well fitted to commend the woman's cause by her attractive presence and cultivated mind.