On July 19 and 20, 1848, nearly 300 men and women gathered at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls to attend a women’s rights convention. Considered by many historians to mark the beginning of an organized movement for women’s status and rights in the United States, the convention built on decades of political activism by women devoted to the causes of abolitionism, temperance, and religious reform. The convention broadened and sometimes redirected women’s political action. It used familiar language to articulate new political goals. Most of all, however, it gave notice that the legal and cultural identity of women in America could not and would not remain the same.
While the American Revolution severed the former colonies’ ties to Great Britain, it did little to alter the balance of power between women and men. Denied equal access to education, prohibited from joining professions, and without the benefit of apprenticeships in profitable trades, most women of the new republic were forced into economic dependency on men. Young women were taught the business of home management and child care, skills with their own economic worth that were nevertheless rarely sufficient to provide a woman with financial independence. Marriage was therefore a largely economic transaction, in which women and men exchanged their financial skills in order to form a household. Marriage also wrought another transformation on women. Upon marriage, women became “civilly dead”—that is, their legal identities were largely suspended in those of their husbands, who controlled their property, earnings, ability to contract and sue, sexual access to their bodies, and custody of their children. In general, only men were allowed to vote, serve on juries, enter the legal profession, or become elected officials. Women relied on men to act on their behalf in each of these arenas.
This left women on the civic fringes of the new republic forged during the Revolutionary War. What would their stake be in the perpetuation of the state? What role should the women who had upheld economic sanctions, worked on battlelines, and run households in the absence of their husbands be expected to shoulder now that the war was done?
The answer was a political identity rooted in motherhood. For the republic to flourish, it was necessary that the sons and daughters of the revolutionary generation understand the civic identity they had inherited. Who better to instill this in the youngest generation of Americans than their mothers? Seized upon by women as well as men as a means to channel their political expression, “Republican Motherhood” became the very definition of a woman’s political role.
It was as mothers (and for young women, mothers-to-be) that women made the majority of their political claims in the early 19th century. Early temperance activists used the rhetoric of motherhood to urge politicians to protect women against drunken husbands, financial ruin, and physical violence. Many women who lobbied state legislatures for the better protection of married women’s property rights did so with the argument that mothers and children needed protection from the wasteful financial habits of neglectful men. Rarely did anyone argue that women deserved equal legal rights with men out of basic justice. Those who did ran the risk of alienating the politicians they hoped to sway, opening themselves to ridicule or scaring their constituents with the possibility of a radically changed social order.
Yet the women at Seneca Falls did not make their claims to political activism on the basis of motherhood. The lasting impact of the convention was their plainspo-ken demand to be considered the equals of men and to be understood as citizens in their own right. The resolutions of the convention did not suggest that women deserved rights because they deserved protection from a harsh and violently male world. Instead, the organizers and attendees argued that the business begun by the American Revolution was not finished and could not be until the laws of the land recognized that “all men and women were created equal.”
The evolution of this particular brand of women’s activism owed much to the influence of Quakerism in the United States. More egalitarian than many religious groups, the Quakers encouraged women to speak at religious meetings and allowed them to become ministers. Members often considered social activism indistinguishable from spiritual responsibility. As a group, Quakers were fiercely opposed to slavery, and many of the most prominent women’s rights activists of the 19th century learned their organizing and public speaking skills as Quaker advocates of abolitionism. Angelina and Sarah Grimke, for example, became Quakers after moving to Philadelphia in the 1820s and were outspoken abolitionists throughout the 1830s. The public condemnation of their lectures to mixed-sex crowds propelled them to defend a woman’s right to political action.
Lucretia Mott was another Quaker abolitionist who became an advocate for women’s rights. In her youth, she had worked as a teacher and was paid only half the salary of her male colleagues. As an adult, she had hoped to join William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society but was denied membership because of her sex. In response, she formed the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Philadelphia and organized a series of conventions for women abolitionists. In 1839, after fierce debate, the American Anti-Slavery Society admitted women to its ranks, causing many who opposed this development to break with the organization and form their own society. Mott joined Garrison’s organization and was elected as a delegate to the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London.
Mott, along with five other women delegates, was refused entrance to the convention because of her sex. The occurrence compounded her earlier experiences with prejudice and persuaded her that a movement to advance women’s rights was as necessary as the abolition movement. Many of her ideas were honed in conversation with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the young wife of another American delegate to the convention, who was staying at the same boardinghouse as Mott. Stanton possessed only a fraction of Mott’s experience with reform movements, but she was nevertheless appalled by the treatment of the women delegates to the convention. The two agreed that a women’s rights convention should be organized in the United States as soon as possible.
It was eight more years before the convention would take place. Mott returned to Philadelphia, where she remained active in abolitionist circles and continued to preach as a Quaker minister. Stanton was absorbed by the birth and care of her children—three before 1847—and the management of her homes, first in New York, then in Boston. Everywhere reformists continued to press for changes in American society. Persistent lobbying eventually secured the passage of a married women’s property act in New York in April 1848. Antislavery petitions continued to pour into Congress, and the transcendental movement was flourishing in the Northeast. Within the ranks of Hicksite Quakerism, the pressure brought to bear by many liberals who wanted greater equality for women and a deeper commitment to secular activism resulted in a split in the movement. It was a time replete with the possibility of change.
In 1847 Stanton moved with her husband and children to Seneca Falls, New York. Close to the Quaker community in Waterloo and populated by many abolitionists, Henry Stanton hoped the town would offer him the opportunity to launch a political career. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, however, disliked her new home. She felt cut off from the intellectual circles of Boston and New York, could find no hired help, and found her children hard to control and frequently sick. As her husband began to travel, Stanton felt increasingly isolated. The home that had once been her solace began to feel like her jail.
In July 1848 Lucretia Mott traveled to Seneca Falls to visit her sister, Martha Wright. On July 13, Wright invited Stanton to join the sisters in a visit to their friends Mary Ann McClintock and Jane Hunt. The five women conversed, and in the course of the day, Stanton confessed her discontent with her life at home. The women sympathized and began to talk of the connections between domestic unhappiness and political dependency. By the end of the day, the five had resolved to call the convention that Mott and Stanton had proposed eight years before. The five sent announcements to local newspapers for a convention to be held in six days, on July 19.
It was harvest season around Seneca Falls, and the organizers expected only a few people to attend. Confounding their expectations, some 300 people flocked to the Wesleyan Chapel for the two-day conference, most from the local area, some from great distances, all from upstate New York. Almost everyone in attendance had experience in reform work, whether as Quakers, abolitionists, temperance workers, lawyers, writers, or newspaper editors. Some, such as Mott and Frederick Douglass, were already well known. Others, such as Stanton and Amelia Bloomer, would gain their greatest notoriety after the event. Unprepared for such a turnout, the organizers asked James Mott, Lucretia’s husband, to chair the event. (Within two weeks, another women’s rights convention was held in Rochester, New York; it was chaired by a woman.)
The centerpiece of the Seneca Falls convention was the “Declaration of Sentiments,” a list of political grievances generated by the five organizers and written by Stanton. Using the Declaration of Independence as a model, Stanton claimed that “[t]he history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurptions on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” The document then listed the grievances the women felt most keenly. Women were, they argued, prohibited from voting, from making laws, from securing elected office, from entering profitable employment, from gaining a useful education, and from gaining positions of authority in church. Women had no legal claim to their property, their earnings, or their children, were forced into unnatural obedience to their husbands before the law, were oppressed by divorce laws that favored men, forced to pay taxes without gaining representation, and subject to a moral double standard. In short, charged the women, man had “usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for [woman] . . . a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to God.” Worthy women, they argued, lacked the rights that men, regardless of character, enjoyed.
The Declaration of Sentiments was both shrewd and revolutionary. It was shrewd because it used the language on which the republic was formed to demonstrate the failings of government toward half of those it governed. It was revolutionary because it removed husbands, fathers, brothers, and children from a woman’s claim to citizenship. Women did not ask for the opportunity to serve others more faithfully. Instead, they demanded the right to serve themselves.
For two days, the men and women in attendance at the convention debated the declaration. Thirteen resolutions were offered and passed, 12 of them unanimously. One passed by majority vote—a resolution offered on the second day by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in which she called for a campaign for woman’s suffrage. It was a controversial resolution, not because the idea was new but because many activists feared that the idea would garner so much negative attention that it would make their other goals impossible to achieve. There were also Quaker women in attendance who did not want the vote, as it would make them party to a political system that approved of war.
At the end of the second day, 68 women and 32 men signed the Declaration of Sentiments. They ranged in age from 14 to 68 and came from a variety of backgrounds. Under immense pressure from their families and friends, many—including Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s sister Harriet— would later recant their support for the declaration. The principles and ideas it contain continued to spread, however, communicated through family and reform networks across the country. Women’s rights conventions were held in numerous states for years to come. The political and social demands of women became impossible to ignore.
Further reading: Gerda Lerner, “The Meaning of Seneca Falls, 1848-1898,” Dissent Fall (1998): 35-41; Judith Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman’s Rights Convention (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Judith Wellman, “The Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention: A Study of Social Networks,” Journal of Women’s History 3 (1991): 9-37.
—Catherine J. Denial
Sequoyah (ca. 1770-1843) inventor of the Cherokee syllabary
The Cherokee linguist Sequoyah (“Sparrow”) was the inventor of the Cherokee alphabet and written language. Sequoyah was born in the Cherokee village Taskigi (Fort Loudoun), Tennessee, around 1770, a member of the Paint Clan. His mother, Wurtee, was related to several important chiefs. It is believed that his father was the American soldier and trader Nathaniel Gist. The two apparently never married, and she relocated with part of her tribe to present-day Willstown, Alabama, where Sequoyah learned to tend cattle and hunt. During one hunting foray, however, he sustained a leg injury that left him permanently lame. Excluded from the usual tribal activities because of his injury, he took to drink and nearly died before embarking on a life of abstinence.
Sequoyah then began a career as a silversmith, gaining renown in this profession. As he actively traded with white settlers and traders in the region, he developed a fascination with their “talking leaves,” or books. Being intellectually inclined, he envisioned the advantages Cherokee could enjoy if they had their own alphabet and could transmit and preserve important information on paper. Around 1809 Sequoyah began experimenting with an Indian syllabary using pictorial symbols, but he abandoned this
Sequoyah, Cherokee linguist (Library of Congress)
Approach when the sheer number of symbols required became untenable. The Creek War of 1813-14 interrupted his studies, and he joined a noted Cherokee battalion that served under General Andrew Jackson.
In 1818 Sequoyah departed Alabama with his family and settled down in present-day Pope County, Arkansas, part of an early wave of Cherokee to move westward. Around this time he resumed his work creating a Cherokee alphabet. Fellow tribesmen taunted him and accused him of engaging in witchcraft, and on one occasion his home was burned down. But he persevered. By 1821 Sequoyah finally perfected his system, which utilized 87 characters to represent all the sounds of the Cherokee language. He had arrived at this solution by closely studying English, Greek, and Hebrew characters depicted in mission schoolbooks. That year he faced a gathering of elders in the tribal assembly and tested his system with his six-year-old daughter. When, to their amazement, she answered all written questions perfectly, the Tribal Council authorized adoption of Sequoyah’s syllabary. Formal instruction began, and within a few months large numbers of Cherokee could communicate over vast distances by the written word. Tribal literacy was firmly established in 1828 with the founding of the Cherokee Phoeni:x and Indian Advocate, the first Native American newspaper, which was written partly in English and partly in Cherokee. White missionaries also availed themselves of Sequoyah’s system by translating parts of the Bible into Cherokee.
In 1829 Sequoyah moved farther west to Indian Territory (Oklahoma), where many other Cherokee were compelled to settle. He was among the Cherokee leaders who prepared a revised constitution for their reconstructed nation in 1839. For his role as the only person to ever single-handedly invent a viable alphabet, Sequoyah was awarded a silver medal by his tribe and was also the first Native American awarded a pension. In 1843 he departed his new home in Oklahoma to search for a missing band of Cherokee purportedly farther west. While on this journey, Sequoyah died of dysentery in Tamaulipas, Mexico.
Further reading: Margaret Bender, Signs of Cherokee Culture: Sequoyah’s Syllabary in Eastern Cherokee Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); James Rumford, Sequoyah: The Cherokee Man Who Gave His People Writing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004).
—John C. Fredriksen
Seton, Elizabeth Ann (1774-1821) educator, religious leader
The first American-born Roman Catholic saint, Elizabeth Ann Seton founded the Catholic order known as the Sisters of Charity, the first American-based community of Roman
Elizabeth Ann Seton (Library of Congress)
Catholic women. She is also regarded as the mother of the parochial school system in the United States.
Seton was born into the prominent Bayley family of New York City. Her father, physician Richard Bayley, was an educator and a public servant who served as Columbia University’s first professor of anatomy and New York City’s first public-health officer. Her mother, the daughter of an Episcopalian minister, saw that their children were reared in the Protestant faith. Elizabeth would often accompany her father as he cared for the desperately sick Irish immigrants in the city’s quarantine on Staten Island. She was struck by both their poverty and their strong, sustaining Catholic faith.
In 1794 Elizabeth Bayley married William Magee Seton, a prosperous financier. They had five children, but as she raised her young family, she found herself drawn toward religious contemplation and charity. Early each morning, she left her fashionable house on the Bowery with a basket filled with medicines and food for the poor. Though pregnant, she ministered to the quarantined immigrants by her father’s side and nursed him through the course of the yellow fever he contracted from his patients. He died of the illness in 1801.
At the same time, her own family’s financial and physical health declined. William Seton had inherited his father’s troubled banking and shipping businesses, and they continued to founder. Meanwhile, a lingering tubercular condition left him a near-invalid. By 1803, William was convinced that only a sojourn in Italy, where he had lived for a time as a young man, would cure him. The couple set off with their eldest child, but to no avail; William died in Italy.
Elizabeth Seton found herself in a strange country, widowed, separated from her children, and without funds, but she was unbowed by all this hardship. Instead, she made many friends, all of whom were Roman Catholics. Again, she was fascinated by their faith. She began to study Catholicism in earnest, returned to New York in 1804, and there was confirmed a Catholic in 1805.
Her new faith made her very nearly an outcast in the New York of the day. Catholics were a distinct minority, made up largely of working-class immigrants. Seton found work as a teacher, but her notoriety and several incidents of anti-Catholic violence soon made life in New York impossible.
In 1808, the Archdiocese of Baltimore came to the rescue. Seton was invited to come, children and all, and open the first Catholic elementary school in America. Her school for girls was an immediate success—Catholics were a majority in Maryland, not the oddity they were in New York—and “Mother Seton,” as she soon became known, attracted four postulants, or nuns-in-training, within a year of her arrival. The women took vows, chose a habit, and lived, studied, taught, and worshipped together. The first American religious order had been born.
When a tract of land in Emmitsburg, Maryland, was donated to Mother Seton in 1809, she established the Sisters of Charity’s motherhouse there. During the next several decades, the sisters opened schools and hospitals in cities throughout the Northeast and as far west as Cincinnati. The order’s rule was influenced by St. Vincent de Paul and was organized along the lines of his Daughters of Charity in France. More than 150 of the sisters would serve as nurses in the Civil War.
Mother Seton was the order’s superior until her death in 1821. In 1975, she was canonized as a saint of the Catholic Church.
Further reading: Leonard Feeney, Saint Elizabeth of New York (Still River, Mass.: Ravengate Press, 1975.)
—Mary Kay Linge
World History
