Seneca Falls Convention

Seneca Falls Convention, 19–20 July 1848. The first meeting on behalf of women's rights in U.S. history, the Seneca Falls Convention inaugurated a movement that led to the constitutional enfranchisement of women in 1920. The chief figure was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a mother of four living in this upstate New York industrial city. She was aided by Lucretia Mott, the nation's foremost woman abolitionist. The two had met eight years before, at the World's Antislavery Convention in London, where Mott began to share with Stanton, an apt pupil, her Quaker‐based convictions about the equality of the sexes. The public expression of their partnership waited eight years because of Stanton's domestic obligations, but 1848 was also a year of international political upheaval and revolutionary inspiration. One hundred people, two‐thirds of them women, and almost all Quakers, attended the convention.

The convention's chief activity was discussion of a Declaration of Sentiments, Grievances and Resolutions. The preamble, written by Stanton, was modeled on that of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self‐evident: that all men and women are created equal.” The Declaration went on to indict the long “history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward women.” Specific grievances began with man's denial to woman of “the inalienable right to the elective franchise”; went on to the disabilities that law and custom imposed on wives by regarding them as the property of their husbands; and further encompassed woman's exclusion from higher education, trades, and professions, church authority and moral responsibility, and indeed from all that would build “faith in her own powers.” Of the thirteen resolutions, only the ninth, proclaiming “the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right of franchise,” proved controversial at the meeting, both because politics was customarily seen as exclusively masculine and because many of the Quaker, abolitionist members of the convention considered moral suasion superior to the corruption of politics. But Stanton's defense of the franchise demand, supported by the African‐American leader Frederick Douglass, carried the day, and the resolution passed. Two weeks later, a second session of the convention, held in Douglass's hometown of Rochester, New York, focused on the grievances of working women. Newspaper coverage was widespread but uniformly satirical and disrespectful. Beginning in 1850, national women's rights conventions were held annually, and a generation of female reformers began the complex task of undoing the engrained legal bias against women's autonomy and establishing sexual equality.
See also Antebellum Era; Anthony, Susan B.; Antislavery; Feminism; Gender; Woman Suffrage Movement.

Bibliography

Ellen Carol DuBois , Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in the U.S., 1848–1869, 1978.

Ellen C. DuBois