Throughout the United States, people were thinking about the Constitution as Americans had not done since the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791. Not only were amendments to the federal Constitution in the air, not only were rebel states being readmitted to the Union with new constitutions, but state constitutions in the North were being revised, and western territories sought statehood. In Susan's opinion the time was ripe to proclaim equal rights for all. This clearly was woman's hour.
"Come back and help," pleaded Elizabeth Stanton, who grew more and more alarmed as she saw all interest in woman suffrage crowded out of the minds of reformers by their zeal for the Negro. "I have argued constantly with Phillips and the whole fraternity, but I fear one and all will favor enfranchising the Negro without us. Woman's cause is in deep water.... There is pressing need of our woman's rights convention...."[173]
Susan's spirits revived at the prospect of holding a woman's rights convention, and plans for the future began to take shape as she read the closing lines of Mrs. Stanton's letter: "I hope in a short time to be comfortably located in a new house where we will have a room ready for you.... I long to put my arms about you once more and hear you scold me for all my sins and shortcomings.... Oh, Susan, you are very dear to me. I should miss you more than any other living being on this earth. You are entwined with much of my happy and eventful past, and all my future plans are based on you as coadjutor. Yes, our work is one, we are one in aim and sympathy and should be together. Come home."
Parker Pillsbury also added his plea, "Why have you deserted the field of action at a time like this, at an hour unparalleled in almost twenty centuries?... It is not for me to decide your field of labor. Kansas needed John Brown and may need you ... but New York is to revise her constitution next year and, if you are absent, who is to make the plea for woman?"
Reading her newspaper a few days later, she found that the politicians had made their first move, introducing in the House of Representatives a resolution writing the word "male" into the qualifications of voters in the second section of the proposed Fourteenth Amendment. She started at once for the East.