In this tempest-tossed condition of mind I received an invitation to spend the day with Lucretia Mott, at Richard Hunt’s, in Waterloo.  There I met several members of different families of Friends, earnest, thoughtful women.  I poured out, that day, the torrent of my long-accumulating discontent, with such vehemence and indignation that I stirred myself, as well as the rest of the party, to do and dare anything.  My discontent, according to Emerson, must have been healthy, for it moved us all to prompt action, and we decided, then and there, to call a “Woman’s Rights Convention.”  We wrote the call that evening and published it in the Seneca County Courier the next day, the 14th of July, 1848, giving only five days’ notice, as the convention was to be held on the 19th and 20th.  The call was inserted without signatures,—­in fact it was a mere announcement of a meeting,—­but the chief movers and managers were Lucretia Mott, Mary Ann McClintock, Jane Hunt, Martha C. Wright, and myself.  The convention, which was held two days in the Methodist Church, was in every way a grand success.  The house was crowded at every session, the speaking good, and a religious earnestness dignified all the proceedings.

These were the hasty initiative steps of “the most momentous reform that had yet been launched on the world—­the first organized protest against the injustice which had brooded for ages over the character and destiny of one-half the race.”  No words could express our astonishment on finding, a few days afterward, that what seemed to us so timely, so rational, and so sacred, should be a subject for sarcasm and ridicule to the entire press of the nation.  With our Declaration of Rights and Resolutions for a text, it seemed as if every man who could wield a pen prepared a homily on “woman’s sphere.”  All the journals from Maine to Texas seemed to strive with each other to see which could make our movement appear the most ridiculous.  The anti-slavery papers stood by us manfully and so did Frederick Douglass, both in the convention and in his paper, The North Star, but so pronounced was the popular voice against us, in the parlor, press, and pulpit, that most of the ladies who had attended the convention and signed the declaration, one by one, withdrew their names and influence and joined our persecutors.  Our friends gave us the cold shoulder and felt themselves disgraced by the whole proceeding.

If I had had the slightest premonition of all that was to follow that convention, I fear I should not have had the courage to risk it, and I must confess that it was with fear and trembling that I consented to attend another, one month afterward, in Rochester.  Fortunately, the first one seemed to have drawn all the fire, and of the second but little was said.  But we had set the ball in motion, and now, in quick succession, conventions were held in Ohio, Indiana, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and in the City of New York, and have been kept up nearly every year since.