Garrison now came out in favour of "the rights of women," and thus lost much of the support which he was receiving from the country clergy generally in New England. The final breach was in May, 1840, at the meeting of the National Association of Abolitionists in New York City. There came Garrison with more than five hundred followers from New England. They gained by a close vote a place on the business committee for that noble woman, Abby Kelley. Ministers and church members seceded and started a new anti-slavery society, which carried away most of the members and even the officers of the old one. The quarrel was embittered by the vote of censure, passed at this meeting upon those abolitionists who had dared to nominate a candidate of their own for the presidency without leave from Mr. Garrison; but the chief trouble came from the prejudice which, that same summer, caused most of the members of the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London, to refuse places to Harriet Martineau and other ladies as delegates. This exclusion was favoured by all the eight clergymen who spoke, and by no other speakers so earnestly. Among the rejected delegates were Mrs. Lucretia Mott and Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton; and they resolved, that night, to hold a convention for the benefit of their sex in America. The volume of essays which Emerson published in 1844 praised "the new chivalry in behalf of woman's rights"; and the other Transcendentalists in America came, one after another, to the same position. Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Mott called their convention in that year of revolutions, 1848, on July 19th. The place was the Methodist church at Seneca Falls, in central New York. The reformers found the door locked against them; and a little boy had to climb in at the window. The Declaration of Independence, adopted on July 4, 1776, furnished a model for a protest against the exclusion of girls from high schools and colleges, the closing of almost every remunerative employment against the sex, and the laws forbidding a married woman to own any property, whether earned or inherited by her, even her own clothing. This declaration was adopted unanimously; but a demand for the suffrage had only a small majority. Not a single minister is known to have been present; but there were two at a second convention, that August, in Rochester, where the Unitarian church was full of men and women. There were more than twenty-five thousand ministers in the United States; but only three are mentioned among the members of the national convention, held at Worcester, Massachusetts, in October, 1850, by delegates from eleven States. As Phillips was returning from this meeting, Theodore Parker said to him, "Wendell, why do you make a fool of yourself?" The great preacher came out a few years later in behalf of the rights of women; but it was long before a single religious newspaper caught up with _The Investigator_.