Seneca Falls

The battle to participate equally in the antislavery crusade made a number of women abolitionists acutely aware of male dominance and oppression. For them, the same principles that justified the liberation of the slaves also applied to the emancipation of women from all restrictions on their rights as citizens. In 1840, Garrison’s American followers withdrew from the first World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London because the sponsors refused to seat the women in their delegation. Among the women thus excluded were Lucretia  Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

In 1848 two prominent moral reformers and advocates of women's rights, Lucretia Mott, a Philadelphia Quaker, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a graduate of Troy Seminary who refused to be merely "a household drudge,” decided to call a convention to discuss "the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.” The hastily organized Seneca Falls convention, the first of its kind, issued on July 19, 1848, a clever paraphrase of Jefferson's Declaration, the Declaration of Sentiments, mainly the work of Mrs. Stanton, who was also the wife of a prominent abolitionist and the mother of seven.

The document proclaimed the self-evident truth that “all men and women are created equal, and the attendant resolutions said that all laws that placed women "in a position inferior to that of men, are contrary to the greet precept of nature, and therefore of no force or authority." Such language was too strong for most of the thousand delegates, and only about a third of them signed it. Ruffled male editors lampooned the women activists as being "love-starved spinsters" and "petticoat rebels." Yet the Seneca Falls gathering represented an important first step in the evolving campaign for women’s rights.

In 1848, about one hundred “living energetic beings,” led by reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, gathered at Seneca Falls, New York, for the first women’s rights convention in the United States. The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments proclaimed that “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.”

In the style of the Declaration of Independence, the Seneca Falls Declaration listed the ways women had been discriminated against. Through the tyranny of male supremacy, men “endeavored in every way that [they] could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lesson her self-respect, an to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.” The Seneca Falls Declaration insisted that women “have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States,” particularly the “inalienable right to the elective franchise.”

Nearly two dozen other women’s rights conventions assembled before 1860, repeatedly calling for suffrage. But they had difficulty receiving a respectful hearing, much less obtaining legislative action. No state came close to permitting women to vote. Politicians and editorialists hooted at the idea. Everyone knew, they sneered, that a woman’s place was in the home, rearing her children and civilizing her man. Nonetheless, the Seneca Falls Declaration served as a path – breaking manifesto of dissent against male supremacy and of support for woman suffrage, which would become the focus of the women’s rights movement during the next seventy years.