after their wardrobes, when they shall have restored to us the legal right to our own?"
With a bow I turned from the Speaker's stand, when the profound hush of as fine an audience as earnest woman ever addressed, was broken by the muffled thunder of stamping feet, and the low, deep hum of pent-up feeling loosed suddenly from restraint. A crowd of ladies from the galleries, who had come only at the urgent personal appeal of Judge Thompson, who had spent the day calling from house to house, and who a few months before had utterly failed to persuade them to attend a course of physiological lectures from Mrs. Mariana Johnson, on account of her having once presided over a Woman's Rights Convention, these women met me at the foot of the Speaker's desk, exclaiming with earnest expressions of sympathy: "We did not know before what Woman's Rights were, Mrs. Nichols, but we are for Woman's Rights."
Said Mrs. Thompson to me upon our return to her home: "I broke out in a cold perspiration when your voice failed and you leaned your head on your hand."[1] "I thought you were going to fail," continued Mrs. Thompson. "Yes," said the Judge, "I was very doubtful how it would come out when I saw how sensitive Mrs. Nichols was. But," (turning to me), "you have had a complete triumph! That final expression of your audience was perfect. Mr. Herald with his outside recruits did not come forward with the suit of male attire at the close, as he had advertised he would, {I did not tell Mrs. N. this, my dear," said the Judge.) "He'll catch it now, in the House and out." And he did "catch it."
The effort brought me no reproach, no ridicule from any quarter, but instead, cordial recognition and delicate sympathy from unexpected quarters, and even from those who had heard but the report of persons present. The editorial criticism of the Chairman of the Educational Committee, paid me the high compliment of saying, that "in spite of her efforts Mrs. Nichols could not unsex herself; even her voice was full of womanly pathos." The report of the Committee was adverse to my petition, but not disrespectful. Though the petition failed, the favorable impression created was regarded as a great triumph for woman's rights.
- ↑ The violent throbbing of Mrs. Nichols' heart, caused by her unusual position and her intense anxiety that her plea might be successful, had stopped her speaking at the close of a brief preface to her plea. She, however, soon rallied, though her voice was tremulous throughout, from the conviction that only an eminently successful presentation of her subject, could spike the enemy's batteries and win a verdict of "just and womanly." Mrs. Nichols hoped no further than that. She did not expect conservative Vermont to yield at once for what she asked, as she stood alone with her paper among the press; and there was no other advocate in the State to take the field.
