intellectual equality, he "maintain[ed] that women are not inferior to men, but only unlike men, in their intellectual properties" and "would have women treated like men, of common sense." The article more fully explores the concept he raised in "Essay on Duelling" (1817), in which when he urged women to use "the reason that Heaven has apportioned so equally between her, and her brother" to rid the world of duels. Over the 1820s, Neal shifted his focus from educational and intellectual ideas to political and economic issues like coverture and suffrage. In an 1845 letter to activist Margaret Fuller, he said I tell you there is no hope for woman, till she has a hand in making the law — no chance for her till her vote is worth as much as a mans vote. When it is — woman will not be fobbed off with a six-pence a day for the very work a man would get a dollar for... All you and others are doing to elevate woman, is only fitted to make her feel more sensibly the long abuse of her own understanding, when she comes to her senses. You might as well educate slaves — and still keep them in bondage. Neal delivered America's first women's rights lecture as an Independence Day address in Portland, Maine in 1832. He declared that under coverture and without suffrage, women were victims of the same crime of taxation without representation that caused the Revolutionary War. He reached the peak of his influence on feminist issues at the time of his "Rights of Women" speech (1843) before a crowd of 3,000 people in New York City. He attacked the concept of virtual representation in government that suffrage opponents argued women could enjoy through men: "Just reverse the condition of the two sexes: give to Women all the power now enjoyed by Men... What a clamour there would be then, about equal rights, about a privileged class, about being taxed without their own consent, and virtual representation, and all that!" The "Rights of Women" speech was widely covered, albeit dismissed, by the press, and Neal printed it later that year in the pages of Brother Jonathan magazine, of which he was editor. He used that magazine in 1843 to publish his own essays calling for equal pay and better workplace conditions for women, and to host a printed debate of correspondence