Seneca Falls Convention

• Author: Ellen Carol Dubois
• Pages: 2365-2366

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On July 19 and 20, 1848, in Seneca Falls, New York, the first public meeting on behalf of women's rights was convened,

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thus inaugurating a movement that three-quarters of a century later resulted in the constitutional enfranchisement of women. The chief organizer was ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, then a mother of four living in this upstate industrial village. She was aided by Lucretia Mott, dean of American women abolitionists. The two had met in 1840 in London, and from then on Mott served as Stanton's mentor, sharing her radical Quaker convictions about the equality of the sexes with her apt pupil.

Around the world, 1848 was a year of international political upheaval and revolutionary inspiration. In Seneca Falls, Stanton, Mott, and three other women prepared a Declaration of Sentiments, Grievances and Resolutions. The preamble was modeled on the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, so as to endow women's discontent with political legitimacy. It claimed, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal." A list of grievances indicted the long "history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman," chief of which was the denial to women of "the inalienable right to the elective franchise." The Declaration also concentrated on the disabilities that law and custom imposed on wives by regarding them as the PROPERTY of their husbands. Women's exclusion from higher education, trades and professions, from church authority and moral responsibility, and from all that would build "faith in [their] own powers" was also protested.

The Declaration concluded with thirteen resolutions for future action, of which only the ninth, declaring that it is "the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right of the franchise," was controversial. Stanton's defense of the franchise demand was supported by Frederick Douglass, the only disfranchised man attending, and after debate the convention passed it. Two weeks later a second session of the convention was held in Rochester, which session focused on the grievances of working women. Newspaper coverage was widespread and...