In 1840 Abby Kelly was elected to a committee. She was urged, however, to decline the election. "If you regard me as incompetent, then I shall leave." "Oh, no, not exactly that," was the answer. "Well, what is it then?" "But you are a woman...." "That is no reason; therefore I remain." In the same year an anti-slavery congress was held in England. A number of American champions of the cause went to London,--among them three women, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Elizabeth Pease. They were accompanied by their husbands and came as delegates of the "National Anti-slavery Society." Since the Congress was dominated by the English clergy, who persisted in their belief in the "inferiority" of woman, the three American women, being creatures without political rights, were not permitted to perform their duties as delegates, but were directed to leave the convention hall and to occupy places in the spectators' gallery. But the noble William Lloyd Garrison silently registered a protest by sitting with the women in the gallery. This procedure clearly indicated to the American women what their next duty should be, and once when Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton came from the gallery to the hotel Mrs. Stanton said, "The first thing which we must do upon our return is to call a convention to discuss the slavery of woman." This plan, however, was not executed till eight years later. At that time Elizabeth Cady Stanton, on the occasion of a visit from Lucretia Mott, summoned a number of acquaintances to her home in Seneca Falls, New York. In giving an account of the meeting at Washington, in 1888, at the Conference of Pioneers of the International Council of Women (see Report, pp. 323, 324), she states that she and Lucretia Mott had drawn up the grievances of woman under eighteen headings with the American Declaration of Independence as a model, and that it was her wish to submit a suffrage resolution to the meeting, but that Lucretia Mott herself refused to have it presented. Nevertheless, in the meeting Elizabeth Cady Stanton herself, burning with enthusiasm, introduced her resolution concerning woman's right to vote, and, as she reports, the resolution _was adopted unanimously_. A few days later the newspaper reports appeared. "There was," relates Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "not a single paper from Maine to Louisiana which did not contain our Declaration of Independence and present the matter as ludicrous. My good father came from New York on the night train to see whether I had lost my mind. I was overwhelmed with ridicule. A great number of women who signed the Declaration withdrew their signatures. I felt very much humiliated, so much the more, since I knew _that I was right_.... For all that I should probably have allowed myself to be subdued if I had not soon afterward met Susan B. Anthony, whom we call the Napoleon of our woman's suffrage movement."