Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
A tribute was paid to the tried and true friends of woman suffrage who
had died during the year, many of them veterans in the cause: Sarah
Anthony Burtis, aged 90, secretary of the first Woman's Rights
Convention in 1848 when adjourned to Rochester, N.Y.; Charles K.
Whipple, aged 91, for many years secretary of the Massachusetts and
New England Woman Suffrage Associations; Zerelda G. Wallace of
Indiana, the "mother" of "Ben Hur"; Paulina Gerry, the Rev. Cyrus
Bartol, Carrie Anders, Dr. Salome Merritt, Matilda Goddard and Mary
Shannon of Massachusetts; Mary J. Clay of Kentucky; Eliza J. Patrick
of Missouri; Fanny C. Wooley and Nettie Laub Romans of Iowa; Eliza
Scudder Fenton, the widow of New York's war governor; Charlotte A.
Cleveland and Henry Villard of New York; John Hooker of Connecticut;
Giles F. Stebbins and George Willard of Michigan; Ruth C. Dennison, D.
C., Theron Nye of Nebraska; Elizabeth Coit of Ohio; Major Niles
Meriwether of Tennessee; M. B. Castle of Illinois; John Bidwell of
California; Wendell Phillips Garrison of New Jersey.
On the evening when Miss Anthony presided she introduced to the
audience with tender words Mrs. Charlotte Pierce of Philadelphia, as
one of the few left who attended the first Woman's Rights Convention
at Seneca Falls, N. Y., in 1848; Mrs. Eliza Wright Osborne of Auburn,
N. Y., niece of Lucretia Mott and daughter of Martha Wright, two of
the four women who called that convention; Miss Emily Howland, a
devoted pioneer of Sherwood, N. Y.; the Rev. Olympia Brown of Racine,
second woman to be ordained as minister; Mrs. Ellen Sulley Fray, a
pioneer of Toledo, O., and Mrs. Caroline E. Merrick, wife of a Chief
Justice of Louisiana, who organized the first suffrage club in New
Orleans.
Mrs. Rachel Foster Avery, who had been the corresponding secretary of
the association for twenty-one years, had insisted that she should be
allowed to resign from the office. A pleasant incident not on the
program took place one morning during the convention when Miss Anthony
came to the front of the platform and said: "I have in my hand a
thousand dollars for Rachel Foster Avery. It has been contributed
without her knowledge by about four hundred different persons; most of
you are on the list. I asked for this testimonial because I felt that
you would all rejoice to show your appreciation of her long and
faithful services and her great liberality to the cause. I should
never have been able to carry on the work of the society as its
president for so many years but for her able cooperation. She thinks
she cannot talk but we know that she can work. She has done the
drudgery of this association for more than twenty years and I hope the
woman who will be chosen in her place, whoever she may be, will be as
consecrated and free from all self-seeking."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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