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[243] accepted, and in the series of meetings which they held in the principal cities on their return journey from Kansas to New York, the ladies named shared the speaking with him, and listened without protest to his constant ridicule and vulgar abuse of the negro.

The annoyance and mortification felt by many suffragists at this entangling alliance and its consequent degradation of the movement, led to the formation at Cleveland, in November, 1869, of the American Woman Suffrage Association, of which Henry Ward Beecher was made President, and to the subsequent establishment at Boston1 of the Woman's Journal. To both of these movements Mr. Garrison gave his active cooperation, and was especially helpful in launching the Journal, of which, for a time, he was an associate editor with Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Lucy Stone, and T. W. Higginson. He was one of the Vice-Presidents also of the American and of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Associations, and President of the former for two years. In the wintry months of February and March, 1870, he made two journeys to Vermont, and addressed suffrage conventions at Rutland and Burlington in company with Mrs. Howe and Mrs. Livermore, the question of a constitutional amendment being then before the State Board of Censors. From the exposure thus incurred he narrowly escaped a severe illness, and the gradual impairment of his health may be said to date from that time. When well enough, he never failed to attend the semi-annual suffrage conventions in Boston, in January and May; and at the annual hearings at the State House before the Committees on suffrage and other bills affecting the rights of person and property of women, he was ever a faithful champion. He spoke also at many suffrage meetings in other cities and States, and wrote repeatedly on the subject for the Independent, and to conventions in distant places which he could not attend.2

1 Jan., 1870.

2 See Independent, Dec. 31, 1868, Dec. 23, 1869, March 17, May 19, 1870, March 2, July 1, Dec. 7, 1871, April 3, 1873; Woman's Journal, passim, 1870-79; “ History of Woman Suffrage,” Vol. 3, pp. 122, 343, 368. In other ways, too, he had opportunity to bear his testimony in behalf of equal rights for the sexes. Called upon, at a dinner of the American Institute of Homoeopathy (Boston, June 10, 1869), to respond to a toast on ‘Reform and Reformers,’ he urged that women should stand on an equality with men in the medical profession, and the Institute voted by an overwhelming majority, the next day, to admit them as members, winning the honor of being the first medical body that had ever done so.

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