Such radical "reformers" as Susan B. Anthony, with her adoption of semi-masculine costume, just sufficiently masculine to render it unfeminine and nothing more, or Lucretia Mott, with her impracticable theories of "women's rights," presented in such form as to be repellent to all the better attributes of true womanhood, could win but ridicule, good-natured or acrimonious, as their portion; yet, in a sense, they were the leaders of the great movement which in altered guise was to come as a preponderant question of its day. Not in 1866, however, had that movement taken or even promised to assume any definite shape or one likely to win sufficient adherents to make it worthy of notice. As yet American womanhood was content with its sphere. It still ruled the home, and found in that rule all of "right" that it desired. It was content to send to the polls, as to the battle, its male representatives and to guide them by its influence into the paths which seemed best. It did not "lift up its voice and contend in the streets"; it was quietly strong.
The close of the Civil War, then, found the outer conditions of the American woman, speaking of them in general and not as affected by the material results of that war, just as they had been at the beginning of the strife. Society had indeed been rent into fragments; but the components of that society which had flourished four years before were unchanged in their status. Socially speaking, there had come no change to the women of America during the period of the Civil War; yet by that war and its results there had been created conditions that were to bear fruit in after days.
During the era which is generally known in the political history of our country as the "Reconstruction Period," there came about many and significant changes in the status and thought of the women of our land, particularly in the Southern portion thereof. It was a period of honest error on the part of those who guided the destinies of the nation, and the errors made by them, largely founded on the old base of misunderstanding of actual conditions, reacted upon the womanhood of the South and prolonged the sectional animosity which still held its place of prejudice and bitterness in our midst. Justice of judgment, as far as applied to national issues and affairs, was unknown; hence, amelioration of existent conditions, always the work of wise and tolerant public opinion, was impossible. During that period the South, and with it its women, passed through greater stress and suffering than even the days of the Civil War had brought upon it.