In 1848 a group of women gathered at Seneca Falls, New York, to take a stand for the rights of American women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton had attended a world anti-slavery conference in London in 1840 and was frustrated because women were not allowed to speak. Lucretia Mott, a Quaker, was very active in the abolitionist movement but was also concerned about women's rights—or lack of them. At a social gathering of the two women and others near Stanton's home in Seneca Falls a group of Quaker women—Stanton being the only one who was not a Quaker—began discussing women's rights. They decided to hold a conference about a week later.
They placed a notice in a local newspaper, and a gathering of about 300 attended the meeting in a Methodist church. Stanton had drawn up a declaration of sentiments and a list of resolutions to be considered. Although this meeting and other ones were met with ridicule from the male population, the declaration and resolutions were published in a New York newspaper and thus received considerable publicity. Although many of their goals would be decades in coming, the conference was a milestone in the progress of rights for women. The National Women's Hall of Fame is now located in Seneca Falls, New York.
Stanton based her declaration on Jefferson's great Declaration of Independence. She began:
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. (See Appendix for full text.)
The meeting in Seneca Falls led to creation of the National Woman's Rights Convention, a series of annual meetings organized to promote women's rights. In May 1850 some of the women who had been at Seneca Falls and who were attending the first World's Anti-Slavery Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, decided to take advantage of the gathering. They invited those interested in discussing women's rights to stay on in Worcester. Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis, Lucy Stone and others spent the summer planning the convention. Approximately 1,000 people attended, and Paulina Davis was elected president. In her keynote address she said:
The reformation which we purpose, in its utmost scope, is radical and universal. It is not the mere perfecting of a progress already in motion, a detail of some established plan, but it is an epochal movement—the emancipation of a class, the redemption of half the world, and a conforming re-organization of all social, political, and industrial interests and institutions. Moreover, it is a movement without example among the enterprises of associated reformations, for it has no purpose of arming the oppressed against the oppressor, or of separating the parties, or of setting up independence, or of severing the relations of either. _
Men are not in fact, and to all intents, equal among themselves, but their theoretical equality for all the purposes of justice is more easily seen and allowed than what we are here to claim for women. _ [T]he maxims upon which men distribute justice to each other have been battle-cries for ages, while the doctrine of woman's true relations in life is a new science, the revelation of an advanced age,—perhaps, indeed, the very last grand movement of humanity towards its highest destiny, —too new to be yet fully understood, too grand to grow out of the broad and coarse generalities which the infancy and barbarism of society could comprehend.
The conference was favorably reviewed in the New York and Boston press. Subsequent meetings were held in Syracuse, Cleveland, Philadelphia, New York and elsewhere. In the 1860s, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony began the work for women's suffrage. It was finally achieved in 1919, although several territories and states had already given women the right to vote—as early as 1869 in Wyoming. The women's movement has continued into the 21st century. Although women have made enormous strides, many would argue that fully quality has not yet been achieved.
World History
