Carlyle's laugh, and other surprises - Thomas Wentworth Higginson

She lived to refute much early criticism or hasty judgment, and this partly from inward growth, partly because the society in which she moved was growing for itself and understood her better. The wife of a reformer is apt to be tested by the obstacles her husband encounters; if she is sympathetic, she shares his difficulties, and if not, is perhaps criticised by the very same people for not sharing his zeal. Mrs. Howe, moreover, came to Boston at a time when all New Yorkers were there regarded with a slight distrust; she bore and reared five children, and doubtless, like all good mothers, had methods of her own; she went into company, and was criticised by cliques which did not applaud. Whatever she did, she might be in many eyes the object of prejudice. Beyond all, there was, I suspect, a slight uncertainty in her own mind that was reflected in her early poems.

From the moment when she came forward in the Woman Suffrage Movement, however, there was a visible change; it gave a new brightness to her face, a new cordiality in her manner, made her calmer, firmer; she found herself among new friends and could disregard old critics. Nothing can be more frank and characteristic than her own narrative of her first almost accidental participation in a woman’s suffrage meeting. She had strayed into the hall, still not half convinced, and was rather reluctantly persuaded to take a seat on the platform, although some of her best friends were there,—Garrison, Phillips, and James Freeman Clarke, her pastor. But there was also Lucy Stone, who had long been the object of imaginary disapproval; and yet Mrs. Howe, like every one else who heard Lucy Stone’s sweet voice for the first time, was charmed and half won by it. I remember the same experience at a New York meeting in the case of Helen Hunt, who went to such a meeting on purpose to write a satirical letter about it for the New York “Tribune,” but said to me, as we came out together, “Do you suppose I could ever write a word against anything which that woman wishes to have done?” Such was the influence of that first meeting on Mrs. Howe. “When they requested me to speak,” she says, “I could only say, I am with you. I have been with them ever since, and have never seen any reason to go back from the pledge then given.” She adds that she had everything to learn with respect to public speaking, the rules of debate, and the management of her voice, she having hitherto spoken in parlors only. In the same way she was gradually led into the wider sphere of women’s congresses, and at last into the presidency of the woman’s department at the great World’s Fair at New Orleans, in the winter of 1883-84, at which she presided with great ability, organizing a series of short talks on the exhibits, to be given by experts. While in charge of this, she held a special meeting in the colored people’s department, where the “Battle Hymn” was sung, and she spoke to them of Garrison, Sumner, and Dr. Howe. Her daughter’s collection of books written by women was presented to the Ladies’ Art Association of New Orleans, and her whole enterprise was a singular triumph. In dealing with public enterprises in all parts of the country she soon made herself welcome everywhere. And yet this was the very woman who had written in the “Salutatory” of her first volume of poems:—

“I was born ’neath a clouded star,