The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

AFTER THE WAR* 7

479

again became civilians, members of homes and components
of families. Peace had returned, such as mothers prayed
for, when they kissed their sons "1good-bye " with quivering
lips, and sent them to battle,- peace, such as the brave men
who had thrown themselves into the conflict had fought for,
and believed in,- the nation was saved, and slavery abolished. The people have not forgotten those who died that
the nation might live, and the numerous State and National Soldiers' Homes tenderly care for those who were
disabled in the struggle, and are indigent and homeless.
The war over, I resumed the former tenor of my life, and
again took up the literary and philanthropic work which I
had temporarily relinquished.
The Woman Suffrage movement which had been inaugurated by Lucretia Mott and Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
some dozen years before the war, had been suspended
during the struggle, when the -nation's life trembled in the
balance. With the return of peace it was resuscitated, and
I became identified with it. I had kept the columns of my
husband's paper ablaze with demands for the opening to
women of colleges and professional schools; for the repeal
ot unjust laws that blocked their progress; and for the,
enlargement of their industrial opportunities, that they
might become self-supporting. But I believed that all these
things could be accomplished without giving them the ballot. During the war, and as the result of my own observations, I became aware that a large portion of the nation's
work was badly done, or not done at all, because woman
was not recognized as a factor in the political world. In
the work of public school education, and municipal govern