laughed even louder than you do. After the meeting Miss Anthony said to me, "Anna, what did I say to make the people laugh so?" I answered, "You called me your right bower." She said, "Well, you are my right-hand man. That is what right, bower means, isn't it?' And this orthodox minister had to explain to her Quaker friend what a right bower is.
The chief event of last summer was the quinquennial meeting of the International Council of Women in London. The Woman's National Council of the United States is made up of about twenty societies with an aggregate membership of over a million women. It was only allowed two delegates besides its president, and it is not a suffrage association, yet it honored two women who have been known for some years as suffragists, Miss Anthony and myself, by making us its delegates to London. They said they did this because they wanted women who did not represent anything too radical!
That Congress was the greatest assemblage of women from all parts of the world that ever had taken place, and therefore the biggest suffrage convention ever held. Suffrage seemed to take possession of the whole meeting, as it does at every great gathering of women. From this point of view it was a decided and emphatic success. The largest meeting of all was the one held by the Suffrage Association and every suffrage heart would have swollen so large it could hardly have been kept within the bounds of the body if it had heard the applause with which Miss Anthony was greeted. She could not speak for ten minutes. ....
In England I entered upon a role I had never filled before, or had any ambition for—I "entered society," and for ten days I was in it from before breakfast till after midnight; and I prayed the prayer of the Pharisee—I thanked the Lord that I was not as other women are who have to go into society all the time. I had thought that traveling up and down the country with gripsack in hand was hard enough; but it is child's play to hand-shaking and hob-nobbing with duchesses and countesses. However, the experience was good for us, and it was especially good for those American women who had thought that they knew more than other women till they met them and found that they didn't.
I came home, spent three days there, and then took my grip in hand and started out again lecturing—mostly for the Redpath bureau, and for people who did not want to hear about suffrage; so I spoke on "The Fate of Republics," "The American Home," "The New Man," etc. Under these titles I gave them stronger doses of suffrage than I ever do to you here, and they received it with great enthusiasm, because it was not called suffrage. I spoke the other day in Cincinnati to about 3,000 people and they were delighted, and did not suspect that I was talking suffrage. They don't know what woman suffrage is. They think it only means to berate the men. In this way I have perhaps done the best suffrage work I possibly could.Later in the session Miss Anthony made her report as delegate
