Instead of holding its usual May anniversary in New York city, the National Association decided to meet in Rochester to celebrate the close of the third decade of organized agitation in the United States, and issued the following call:
The National Association will hold a convention in Rochester, N. Y., July 19, 1878. This will be the thirtieth anniversary of the first woman's rights convention, held July 19, 1848, in the Wesleyan church at Seneca Falls, N. Y., and adjourned to meet, August 2, in Rochester. Some who took part in that convention have passed away, but many others, including both Mrs. Mott and Mrs. Stanton, are still living. This convention will take the place of the usual May anniversary, and will be largely devoted to reminiscences. Friends are cordially invited to be present.
Clemence S. Lozier, M. D., President.
Susan B. Anthony, Chairman Executive Committee.
The meeting was held in the Unitarian church on Fitzhugh street, occupied by the same society that had opened its doors in 1848; and Amy Post, one of the leading spirits of the first convention, still living in Rochester and in her seventy-seventh year, assisted in the arrangements. Rochester, known as "The Flower City," contributed of its beauty to the adornment of the church. It was crowded at the first session. Representatives from a large number of States were present,[38] and there was a pleasant interchange of greetings between those whose homes were far apart, but who were friends and co-workers in this great reform. The reunion was more like the meeting of near and dear relatives than of strangers whose only bond was work in a common cause. Such are the compensations which help to sustain reformers while they battle ignorance and prejudice in order to secure justice. In the absence of the president, Dr. Clemence S. Lozier, Mrs. Stanton took the chair and said:
We are here to celebrate the third decade of woman's struggle in this country for liberty. Thirty years have passed since many of us now present met in this place to discuss the true position of woman as a citizen of a republic. The reports of our first conventions show that those who inaugurated this movement understood the significance of the term "citizens." At the very start we claimed full equality with man. Our meetings were hastily called and somewhat crudely conducted; but we intuitively recognized the fact that we were defrauded of our natural rights, conceded in the national constitution. And thus the greatest movement of the century was inaugurated. I say greatest, because through the elevation of woman all humanity is lifted to a higher plane. To contrast our position thirty years ago, under the old common law of England, with that we occupy under the advanced legislation of to-day, is enough to assure us that we have passed the boundary line—from slavery to freedom. We already see the mile-stones of a new civilization on every highway.
Look at the department of education, the doors of many colleges and universities thrown wide open to women; girls contending for, yea, and winning prizes over their brothers. In the working world they are rapidly filling places and climbing heights unknown to them before, realizing, in fact, the dreams, the hopes, the prophesies of the inspired women of by-gone centuries. In many departments of learning woman stands the peer of man, and when by higher education and profitable labor she becomes self-reliant and independent, then she must and will be free. The moment an individual or a class is strong enough to stand alone, bondage is impossible. Jefferson Davis, in a recent speech, says: "A Cæsar could not subject a people fit to be free, nor could a Brutus save them if they were fit for subjugation."
Looking back over the past thirty years, how long ago seems that July morning when we gathered round the altar in the old Wesleyan church in Seneca Falls! It taxes and wearies the memory to think of all the conventions we have held, the legislatures we have besieged, the petitions and tracts we have circulated, the speeches, the calls, the resolutions we have penned, the never-ending debates we have kept up in public and private, and yet to each and all our theme is as fresh and absorbing as it was the day we started. Calm, benignant, subdued as we look on this platform, if any man should dare to rise in our presence and controvert a single position we have taken, there is not a woman here that would not in an instant, with flushed face and flashing eye, bristle all over with sharp, pointed arguments that would soon annihilate the most skilled logician, the most profound philosopher.
To those of you on this platform who for these thirty years have been the steadfast representatives of woman's cause, my friends and co-laborers, let me say our work has not been in vain. True, we have not yet secured the suffrage, but we have aroused public thought to the many disabilities of our sex, and our countrywomen to higher self-respect and worthier ambition, and in this struggle for justice we have deepened and broadened our own lives and extended the horizon of our vision. Ridiculed, persecuted, ostracised, we have learned to place a just estimate on popular opinion, and to feel a just confidence in ourselves. As the representatives of principles which it was necessary to explain and defend, we have been compelled to study constitutions and laws, and in thus seeking to redress the wrongs and vindicate the rights of the many, we have secured a higher development for ourselves. Nor is this all. The full fruition of these years of seed-sowing shall yet be realized, though it may not be by those who have led in the reform, for many of our number have already fallen asleep. Another decade and not one of us may be here, but we have smoothed the rough paths for those who come after us. The lives of multitudes will be gladdened by the sacrifices we have made, and the truths we have uttered can never die.
Standing near the gateway of the unknown land and looking back through the vista of the past, memory recalls many duties in life's varied relations we would had been better done. The past to all of us is filled with regrets. We can recall, perchance, social ambitions disappointed, fond hopes wrecked, ideals in wealth, power, position, unattained—much that would be considered success in life unrealized. But I think we should all agree that the time, the thought, the energy we have devoted to the freedom of our countrywomen, that the past, in so far as our lives have represented this great movement, brings us only unalloyed satisfaction. The rights already obtained, the full promise of the rising generation of women more than repay us for the hopes so long deferred, the rights yet denied, the humiliation of spirit we still suffer.
And for those of you who have been mere spectators of the long, hard battle we have fought, and are still fighting, I have a word. Whatever your attitude has been, whether as cold, indifferent observers—whether you have hurled at us the shafts of ridicule or of denunciation, we ask you now to lay aside your old educational prejudices and give this question your earnest consideration, substituting reason for ridicule, sympathy for sneers. I urge the young women especially to prepare themselves to take up the work so soon to fall from our hands. You have had opportunities for education such as we had not. You hold to-day the vantage-ground we have won by argument. Show now your gratitude to us by making the uttermost of yourselves, and by your earnest, exalted lives secure to those who come after you a higher outlook, a broader culture, a larger freedom than have yet been vouchsafed to woman in our own happy land.
Congratulatory letters[39] and telegrams were received from all portions of the United States and from the old world. Space admits the publication of but a few, yet all breathed the same hopeful spirit and confidence in future success. Abigail Bush, who presided over the first Rochester convention, said:
No one knows what I passed through upon that occasion. I was born and baptized in the old Scotch Presbyterian church. At that time its sacred teachings were, "if a woman would know anything let her ask her husband at home." * * * I well remember the incidents of that meeting and the thoughts awakened by it. * * * Say to your convention my full heart is with them in all their deliberations and counsels, and I trust great good to women will come of their efforts.
Ernestine L. Rose, a native of Poland, and, next to Frances Wright, the earliest advocate of woman's enfranchisement in America, wrote from England:
How I should like to be with you at the anniversary—it reminds me of the delightful convention we had at Rochester, long, long ago—and speak of the wonderful change that has taken place in regard to woman. Compare her present position in society with the one she occupied forty years ago, when I undertook to emancipate her from not only barbarous laws, but from what was even worse, a barbarous public opinion. No one can appreciate the wonderful change in the social and moral condition of woman, except by looking back and comparing the past with the present. * * * Say to the friends, Go on, go on, halt not and rest not. Remember that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" and of right. Much has been achieved; but the main, the vital thing, has yet to come. The suffrage is the magic key to the statute—the insignia of citizenship in a republic.
Caroline Ashurst Biggs, editor of the Englishwoman's Review, London, wrote: