Seneca Falls Opens: Women's Rights Movement Is Born

Three hundred people crowded into a small Methodist chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, on July 19, 1848, to attend a convention that would reshape American democracy. Elizabeth Cady Stanton stood before the assembly and read aloud a document modeled on the Declaration of Independence, declaring that "all men and women are created equal." The convention grew from the frustrations of five women who met over tea two weeks earlier. Stanton and Lucretia Mott, both veterans of the abolitionist movement, had been denied seats at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London eight years prior simply because they were female. That humiliation had festered, and the tea party conversation quickly turned into an organizing session. They placed an advertisement in the Seneca County Courier with just five days' notice. The Declaration of Sentiments, drafted primarily by Stanton, catalogued eighteen grievances against male supremacy, mirroring the colonists' original eighteen charges against King George III. Women could not vote, own property in most states, retain their own earnings, or gain custody of their children in divorce. The document demanded full legal equality, access to education and employment, and the right to vote. That last demand proved the most controversial. Even Mott thought calling for suffrage was too radical and would undermine the convention's credibility. Frederick Douglass, the only prominent man to publicly support the resolution, argued passionately that political power was the key to all other rights. The suffrage resolution passed by a narrow margin, the only one that did not receive unanimous approval. One hundred of the roughly three hundred attendees signed the Declaration of Sentiments. Newspapers mocked the convention mercilessly, and many signers withdrew their names under social pressure. Seventy-two years would pass before the Nineteenth Amendment granted women the vote in 1920. Only one signer, Charlotte Woodward, lived long enough to cast a ballot.