On February 16, 1873, after hearing a powerful sermon, she feels awakened to take up the work over which she has dreamed so much, and talks with her friend, Mary Graves, herself an ordained minister of the Unitarian Church, about "our proposed Woman's Mission here in Boston." A few days later she writes: "Determine that my Sunday services must be held and to see Redpath[77] in this connection."
The result of this determination was the organization of the Woman's Liberal Christian Union, which held Sunday afternoon meetings through the spring. She preached the first sermon, on March 16. "I meant," she says, "to read my London sermon, but found it not suitable. Wrote a new one as well as I could. Had a very good attendance. Was forced to play the hymn tunes myself. Am thankful that the occasion seemed to meet with acceptance."
In 1873, a number of women ministers having come to Boston to attend the May Anniversaries, she conceived the idea of bringing them together in a meeting all their own. She issued a call for a Woman Preachers' Convention, and this convention, the first held in any country, met on May 29, 1873. She was elected president, the Reverends Mary H. Graves and Olympia Brown vice-presidents, Mrs. Bruce secretary. The Journal describes this meeting as "most harmonious and happy."
In 1893, speaking of this time, she said:--
"I find that it is just twenty years, last spring, since I made the first effort to gather in one body the women who intended to devote themselves to the ministry.
"The new liberties of utterance which the discussion of woman suffrage had brought us seemed at this time not only to invite, but to urge upon us a participation in the advocacy of the most vital interests both of the individual and of the community. With some of us, this advocacy naturally took the form of preaching. Pulpits were offered us on all sides, and the charm of novelty lent itself to such merit and power as Nature had vouchsafed us. I am so much of a natural church-woman, I might say an ecclesiast, that I at once began to dream of a church of true womanhood. I felt how much the masculine administration of religious doctrine had overridden us women, and I felt how partial and one-sided a view of these matters had been inculcated by men, and handed down by man-revering mothers. Now, I thought, we have got hold of what is really wanting in the Church universal. We need to have the womanly side of religion represented. Without this representation, we shall not have the fulness of human thought for the things that most deeply concern it. As a first step, I undertook to hold religious services on Sunday afternoons, and to secure for them the assistance of as many woman preachers as I could hear of. I had in this undertaking the assistance of my valued friend, Reverend Mary H. Graves."