In 1860, at the last National Woman's Rights Convention held before the outbreak of the Civil War, Antoinette engaged in the heated debate about divorce with her colleagues and contemporaries, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She was opposed to an easy divorce arguing, "the married partner can not annul his obligations to the other… All divorce is naturally and morally impossible." Antoinette, a staunch abolitionist and suffragist, contrary to the hopes of her friends and fellow suffragists, supported the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which did not include the right of free women to vote. In 1869, during the controversy over the amendment, she and Lucy Stone separated from other preeminent women's rights activists to form the American Woman Suffrage Association as a counterweight to Anthony's National Woman Suffrage Association.