This Day in Women's History (The Seneca Falls Convention)

July 19, 1848—In a decade of rising American sentiment for reform and world clamor for revolution, The Woman's Rights Convention met in the upstate New York community of Seneca Falls. The convention's Declaration of Sentiments, adopted a day later, was patterned on the Declaration of Independence, but took that document a step further: not only claiming that "all men and women are created equal," but that this inherent equality entitled women to the right to vote.

"The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries on the part of man towards women, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her,” the declaration passed by the convention noted. “To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world."

George III might have been the target of the colonists, but in Seneca Falls it was the entire male sex that was charged with subverting rights. The long list of grievances—matching in number (18) those against the clueless British monarch—included:

* denying her the right to the franchise;
* making her, if married, "civilly dead" in the eyes of the law; depriving her of property;
* framing divorce laws to benefit men;
* monopolizing employment;
* closing her off to "avenues of wealth and distinction" such as theology, medicine or law;
* perpetuating a double standard in morality that doomed many women but were never enforced against men.

Calling for the franchise was so radical that even one of the convention’s organizers, Lucretia Coffin Mott, reproved the prime mover of the resolution, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for making the delegates “look ridiculous.” But Stanton was not to be dissuaded, arguing that the right to vote was central to all the other freedoms. Her insight proved correct, as demonstrated years later by civil-rights workers in the South in the 1960s who braved threats to their lives to win the right to vote for their race.

Mott was not the only person to give way before Stanton’s polemical power. In his memoir, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, the great African-American orator recalled the impact of her arguments on his own way of thinking concerning women’s rights:

"I could not meet her arguments except with the shallow plea of 'custom,' 'natural division of duties,' 'indelicacy of woman's taking part in politics," the common talk of 'woman's sphere,' and the like, all of which that able woman, who was then no less logical than now, brushed away by those arguments which she has so often and effectively used since, and which no man has yet successfully refuted."

Just how far Douglass was moved by her arguments was seen on the second and last day of the convention, when Stanton’s resolution in favor of the franchise appeared ready to go down to defeat. Douglass’ speech calling for its approval moved many in the audience to vote in the affirmative.

Not only logic carried the day for Stanton, however. The year 1848 was one of those heady years—1968 and 1989 were others—in which it seemed that the forces of change would carry everything before it and the world really could be made anew. Revolutions in Italy, Ireland, France, and Prussia were causing established governments to tremble all across the continent. In America, rising agitation involved such causes as temperance, prison reform, treatment of the mentally ill, and abolitionism.

The magnetism and very presence of female speakers on abolitionist platforms divided the anti-slavery movement over tactics even as it gave further impetus to the women’s movement. The powerful eyewitness testimony of Sojourner Truth and the southern-born sisters Angelina and Sarah Grimke posed a dilemma for the anti-slavery movement: should they enlist the very public help of these females (who were often more compelling than men on the stump) or should these women accept where custom had always consigned them (i.e., the home)?

The issue came to a head at the 1840 meeting of the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. After a floor flight, the so-called “Gradualists” (led by New York merchant Lewis Tappan) succeeded in banishing female members of the American delegation to a spot behind a curtain in the meeting hall’s balcony.

This physical position—not only not heard but not even seen—rankled Mott, a female delegate, and Stanton, the newlywed bride of a male delegate to the convention. Events and geography conspiracy to keep the two friends from joining forces again for eight years. What drew them together was an ideological fight on yet another cause—the Quakers’ position on slavery.

Mott, while visiting sister Martha Coffin Wright, supported a local Quaker group calling for abolitionism. It was a good opportunity to meet Stanton, living nearby in Seneca Falls. The three of them, along with Quakers Mary Ann McClintock and Jane Hunt (Stanton was the only non-Quaker in the group), began over tea on July 13 to discuss women’s issues. They decided to call for a grand convention. Immediately.

It was amazing how much they did with almost no time and not a lot of publicity. Only a couple of local papers and Douglass’s abolitionist publication, North Star, were able to get advance word out about a meeting to be held the following week. Stanton and her fellow organizers also worried that, because of hot summer weather and the height of the farming season, attendance would be poor. Nevertheless, some three hundred people managed to pack the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel for the event. (Ironically, because even Stanton grew unnerved at presiding over such a politically risky gathering, men were not only admitted, but, in the person of Lucretia’s husband James, even allowed to head up the gathering.)

The convention received a large amount of press coverage, much of it mixed. While some editors, such as the New York Tribune's Horace Greeley, were sympathetic, others—notably the New York Herald's James Gordon Bennett-- adopted a tack that has been used repeatedly—and all too successfully—over the years: dismiss the organizers as hysterics and misfits. To that end, Bennett reprinted the entire text of the Declaration of Sentiments, believing that he was exposing the group for what they really were. Stanton, however, welcomed this as a means of spreading their ideas.

In the coming decades, America would become convulsed over the slavery issue, relegating women’s rights to the back of the national agenda. Two decades later, Stanton and her friend Susan B. Anthony would find themselves in opposition to Douglass when the latter called for adopting the Fifteenth Amendment, which forbade denial of the suffrage on account of race, color, or prior condition of servitude—but said nothing about gender. By the time women were granted the right to vote in 1920, only one signer of the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments—Charlotte Woodward—was even alive.

This summer, Seneca Falls will undoubtedly be experiencing more tourists than ever because of the anniversary of the convention. However, local history buffs don’t have to go that far to see a place associated with feminist history. Tenafly, N.J., has a National Historic Landmark, a two-story, white Victorian frame house that was the residence of Stanton from about 1868 to 1887.