We may note that the denominations that have been foremost in building colleges for woman, and in promoting her general advancement in professions and trades, as well as in social and philanthropic matters, are the ones whose pulpits she has not entered. They are also those by which she is most cordially welcomed to speak on all Christian and philanthropic themes. Where her influence is most broadly felt, she has not been taken out of the ordinary life that she was meant to share and to sway. It was from the great denominations that she first crossed the threshold of home to carry home love and principle to foreign countries. In missions she has served in every conceivable form of public benevolence, side by side with man. Real reforms work from within. If the time comes when the other branches of the Christian Church feel as do a few at present, that the exercise of the ministerial office is consistent and appropriate for woman, one that compels no sacrifice of the life and work that are, and must be, peculiarly her own, the ballot will not be needed to place her or to keep her in their pulpits. Whatever may be thought of the profession of the ministry for woman, it must certainly be acknowledged that it is the one farthest removed from political thought and action. If any class of women should be glad to be exempted from the vote, it is the woman preachers.
In her book, "Common Sense," Dr. Jacobi says: "The profession of medicine was thrown open to women when, in 1849, the year following the Revolution, and the passage of the Married Woman's Property Rights Bill, New York State for the first time, at Geneva, conferred a medical diploma on a woman, Elizabeth Blackwell. She was, or rather she became, the sister-in- law of Lucy Stone; and the work of these two women, the one in medicine, the other for equal suffrage, constituted the two necessary halves of one idea."
In 1848, when the first Suffrage convention was held, twelve women were studying medicine in different parts of the country. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell was studying that year in Geneva, and when members of the convention wrote to congratulate her, she said, in the course of her reply: "Much has been said of the oppression that woman suffers; man is reproached with being unjust, tyrannical, jealous. I do not so read human life." Dr. Blackwell estimates that within ten years of that time three hundred women had been graduated in medicine. In an address delivered in 1889 before the London Medical School for women in London, Dr. Blackwell said: "I believe that the department of medicine in which the great and beneficent influence of women may be specially exerted is that of the family physician. Not as specialists, but as the trusted guides and wise counsellors in all that concerns the physical welfare of the family, they will find their most congenial field of labor." All this was the exact opposite of the spirit that prevailed in the Association with which Lucy Stone was identified. She declaimed against man's injustice; and when it was proposed, after the civil war had taught the power of organization, to have a constitution and by-laws for the Suffrage movement, Lucy Stone said that she had felt the "thumb-screws and the soul-screws," and did not wish to be placed under them again. "Our duty is merely agitation." After a stormy quarrel, she left to form a new association in New England. Elizabeth Blackwell's name is conspicuous for its absence from Suffrage annals. In the letter referred to she wrote: "The exclusion and constraint woman suffers is not the result of purposed injury or premeditated insult. It has arisen naturally, without violence, because woman has desired nothing more, has not felt the soul too large for the body. But when woman, with matured strength, with steady purpose, presents her lofty claim, all barriers will give way, and man will welcome, with a thrill of joy, the new birth of his sister spirit."