After the fever of 1878, when our constitutional convention was going to convene, broke the agony and grief of my own heart, for one of my children died, and took part in the suffrage movement in Louisiana, with the wife of Chief-Justice Merrick, Mrs. Sarah A. Dorsey, and Mrs. Harriet Keatinge, of New York, the niece of Mr. Lozier. These three ladies aided me faithfully and ably. When they found we would be received, I went before the convention. I went to Lieutenant-Governor Wiltz, and asked him if he would present or consider a petition which I wished to bring before the convention. He read the petition. One clause of our State law is that no woman can sign a will. We will have that question decided before the meeting of the next Legislature. Some ladies donated property to an asylum. They wrote the will and signed it themselves, and it was null and void, because the signers were women. They not knowing the law, believed that they were human beings, and signed it. That clause, perhaps, will be wiped out. Many gentlemen signed the petition on that account. I took the paper around myself. Governor Wiltz, then lieutenant-governor, told me he would present the petition. He was elected president of the convention. I presented my first petition, signed by the best names in the city of New Orleans and in the State. I had the names of seven of the most prominent physicians there, leading with the name of Dr. Logan, and many men, seeing the name of Dr. Samuel Logan, also signed it. I went to all the different physicians and ministers. Three prominent ministers signed it for moral purposes alone. When Mrs. Horsey was on her dying bed the last time she ever signed her name was to a letter to go before that convention. No one believed she would die. Mrs. Merrick and myself went before the convention. I was invited before the committee on the judiciary. I made an impression favorable enough there to be invited before the convention with these ladies. I addressed the convention. We made the petition then that we make here; that we, the mothers of the land, are barred on every side in the cause of reform. I have strived hard in the work of reform for women. I pledged my father on his dying bed that I would never cease that work until woman stood with man equal before the law, so far as my efforts could accomplish it. Finding myself baffled in that work, I could only take the course which we have adopted, and urge the proposition of the sixteenth amendment.