“I might have known it was a woman,” he groaned, and fled. And that was the last we ever saw or heard of him. But it made a vast difference in my editorial correspondence. I was not satisfied, however, with setting things to rights and counseling the unhappy. Having convinced my editor-in-chief that I could keep his house in better order than he had been interested in doing, I became ambitious to contribute to its furnishing, to extend its field beyond matters purely Chautauquan. I began by offering contributions to what was called the Editor’s Table—the Editor’s Note Book. I began to write articles, even went off on trips to gather information on subjects which seemed to me to be fitting. The first and most ambitious of these undertakings was an investigation made in the Patent Office in Washington of the amount of inventing the records showed women to have done. I had been disturbed for some time by what seemed to me the calculated belittling of the past achievements of women by many active in the campaign for suffrage. They agreed with their opponents that women had shown little or no creative power. That, they argued, was because man had purposely and jealously excluded her from his field of action. The argument was intended, of course, to arouse women’s indignation, stir them to action. It seemed to me rather to throw doubt on her creative capacity. Power to create breaks all barriers. Women had demonstrated this, I believed, again and again while carrying on what I as an observer of society was coming to regard as the most delicate, complex, and essential of all creative tasks—the making of a home. There was the field of invention. At the moment it was being said in print and on the platform that, in all the history of the Patent Office, women had taken out only some three hundred patents. I had seen so much of woman’s ingenuity on the farm and in the kitchen that I questioned the figures; and so I went to see, feeling very important if scared at my rashness in daring to penetrate a Government department and interview its head. I was able to put my finger at once on over two thousand patents, enough to convince me that, man-made world or not, if a woman had a good idea and the gumption to seek a patent she had the same chance as a man to get one. This was confirmed by correspondence with two or three women who at the time were taking out patents regularly. These dashes into journalism, timid and factual as were the results, gave my position more and more body, began slowly to arouse my rudimentary capacity for self-expression. At the same time my position was enriched by a novel feature of our undertaking, one that any editor of a monthly journal can appreciate. We published but ten issues, suspending in July and August in order to get out on the grounds at Chautauqua an eight-page newspaper—the Chautauqua Assembly _Daily Herald_. This meant moving our Meadville staff bodily to the Lake late in June.