Declaration of Sentiments

DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS

DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS was presented to the first women's rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Modeled on the Declaration of Independence, it articulated the rights of women, listed types of discrimination women faced in the mid-1800s, and offered solutions. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Coffin Mott were among those who wrote the document.

Such efforts were not without precedent. In Revolutionary France in 1791, Olympe de Gouges wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen in response to the National Assembly's adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Gouges's treatise focused on women's role in the state and devoted considerable attention to the needs of mothers who lacked independent income and legal standing. Gouges was guillotined for her support of the French monarchy and her public feminist principles.

As with the French example, the Declaration of Sentiments utilized much of the language of the original with the intention of pointing out both its familiarity and its supposed inclusion of all. The declaration begins: "When, in the course of human events," a "portion of the family of man" finds it necessary to assume a new position, it must explain its course of action. It continues: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal." The document lists men's "oppressions" against women, which include monopolizing almost all "profitable employments;" keeping woman sub-ordinate in church and state; and working to destroy their confidence in their own powers. Resolutions to overcome these realities proposed providing full information concerning laws controlling women's lives and ending different standards for manners and morality in men and women. Sixty-eight women and thirty-two men signed the document, which remained a force in the women's movement of the nineteenth century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Bonnie S. Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement, 1830–1860. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Buhle, Mari Jo, and Paul Buhle, eds. The Concise History of Woman Suffrage: Selections from the Classic Work of Stanton, Anthony, Gage, and Harper. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds. History of Woman Suffrage. Six vols. New York: Source Books, 1970.

Hilda L. Smith

See also Suffrage: Woman's Suffrage ; Women's Rights Movement: The Nineteenth Century ; and vol. 9: The Seneca Falls Declaration of Rights and Sentiments .