her.... He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to
the elective franchise.... He has made her, if married, in the eye of
the law civilly dead.... He has denied her the facilities for obtaining
a thorough education, all colleges being closed to her." It mattered
not at the time that male suffrage was by no means universal, or that
amelioration of the condition of woman had already begun; the movement
stated its case clearly and strongly in order that it might fully be
brought to the attention of the American people. In 1850 the first
formal National Woman's Rights Convention assembled in Worcester, Mass.
To this meeting came a young Quaker woman who was already listed in the
cause of temperance. In fact, wherever she went Susan B. Anthony entered
into "causes." She possessed great virtues and abilities, and at the
same time was capable of very great devotion. "She not only sympathized
with the Negro; when an opportunity offered she drank tea with him, to
her own 'unspeakable satisfaction.'"[1] Lucy Stone, an Oberlin graduate,
was representative of those who came into the agitation by the
anti-slavery path. Beginning in 1848 to speak as an agent of the
Anti-Slavery Society, almost from the first she began to introduce the
matter of woman's rights in her speeches.

[Footnote 1: Ida M. Tarbell: "The American Woman: Her First Declaration
of Independence," _American Magazine_, February, 1910.]

To the second National Woman's Suffrage Convention, held in Akron, Ohio,
in 1852, and presided over by Mrs. Frances D. Gage, came Sojourner
Truth.

The "Libyan Sibyl" was then in the fullness of her powers. She had been
born of slave parents about 1798 in Ulster County, New York. In her
later years she remembered vividly the cold, damp cellar-room in which