of Design for Women, that men held the leading positions and received the highest salaries, but that has since been changed.
That there was no organized action in this State, no woman suffrage association formed, until after the war, was undoubtedly due to the fact that the same women were prominent in both the antislavery and woman's rights movements. And as Pennsylvania bordered on three slave States, the escape of fugitives and their innumerable trials in the courts, just as the whole system was on the eve of dissolution, compelled the Philadelphia friends to incessant vigilance in the care and concealment of the unhappy victims. Thus their hands and thoughts were wholly occupied until the first gun at Sumter proclaimed freedom in the United States.
For collecting many of the facts contained in this chapter we are indebted to Julia and Rachel Foster, daughters of Heron Foster, who founded The Pittsburgh Dispatch. What an inspiring vision it would have been to the earnest women sitting in that Convention in 1854, could they in imagination have stretched forward to the bright winter days of 1881, and seen these two young girls tastefully attired, enthusiastic in the cause of woman's suffrage, tripping through the streets of Philadelphia, paper and pencil in hand, intent on some important errand, now here, now there, climbing up long flights of stairs into the offices of the various journals, to find out from the records what Lucretia Mott, Frances Dana Gage, and Ernestine L. Rose had said over a quarter of a century before, about the rights and wrongs of women. Turning over the dusty journals hour after hour as they copied page by page, it would have been a pleasing study to watch their earnest faces, now sad, now pleased, reflecting with every changing sentiment they read the feelings of their souls, just as their diamonds paled and glowed in the changing light.
Could the satisfaction of these girls in reading Garrison's stern logic, Mrs. Mott's repartee and earnest appeal, and all the arguments by which their opponents had been fairly vanquished; could the new-born dignity they realized in the conscious possession of rights and liberties once unknown, confident that full equality could not be long deferred; could all this have been pre-visioned by the actors in those scenes, they would have felt themselves fully compensated for the persecution and ridicule they had endured. And thus the great work of life goes on; the toils of one generation are the joys of the next. We have reaped what other hands have planted: let us then in turn sow bountifully for those who shall follow us, that our children may enter into a broader inheritance than any legal parchment can bequeath.
