In the early 1880s, after the failure to achieve women's suffrage in Indiana, Wallace felt that a national constitutional amendment would be the fastest and most efficient way to achieve voting rights for women. In 1883 she sent a letter to suffragist Susan B. Anthony expressing her sentiments, and Anthony read Wallace's inspirational letter to delegates attending the fifteenth annual convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association. This group, which was headed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Anthony, was one of the two major suffrage groups in the United States at that time. The other was the American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe. In 1890 the two groups joined forces to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association.