One of the most significant results of the earliest stirrings of the women’s rights movement in America was inarguably the Seneca Falls Convention, held in the Western New York in the summer of 1848. Organized by local Quaker women and the aforementioned Elizabeth Cady Stanton, this gathering of notables – which included, among others, Lucretia Mott, temperance advocate and social reformer Amelia Bloomer (1818-1894), scientist Eunice Newton Foote (1819-1888), and anti-slavery activists Amy Post (1802-1889) and Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) – was in many ways a direct response to two countervailing trends then playing out in contemporary American society. On the one hand, as noted above, temperance organizations, abolitionist societies, and the emerging transcendentalist movement – among others – had all begun to provide American women in the 1830s and 1840s with some means of taking part in contemporary public life. And naturally, as women began to develop a sense of agency within these reform-minded spaces, they began to push against the boundaries that remained in place to limit the nature and latitude of their personal freedoms. To a large extent, the gathering at Seneca Falls was one of the most prominent early achievements in this particular line of action. Having asserted themselves within and through various reformist organizations and movements whose end goals were otherwise unconnected to the explicit cause of women’s rights, the women in question quite understandably sought to proceed to the next logical step in their quest for wider socio-political recognition by organizing specifically for the purpose of expanding and forwarding those selfsame rights.
Another reason that a number of
contemporary America’s most prominent female activists felt the need to
publicly assert themselves entirely apart from the organizations and movements
which had first allowed them some degree of political and social agency, of
course, was that male chauvinism remained a stubbornly common feature of
political pressure groups which were otherwise reform-minded and liberal.
Certain abolitionists, like William Llyod Garrison (1805-1879), did make a
point of encouraging female participation in the anti-slavery movement – to the
point that, in December of 1837, he declared in his anti-slavery weekly The
Liberator that he backed, “The rights of woman to their utmost extent” –
but others were far more circumspect. Brothers Arthur (1786-1865) and Lewis
Tappan (1788-1873), for example, split from Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery
Society in 1840 and formed their own American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society
in large part because they were uncomfortable with Garrison’s unflinching
support of women’s rights and his insistence on unfettered female participation
in the anti-slavery movement’s various efforts. The aforementioned World
Anti-Slavery Convention, held in this same year, likewise made clear to the
women in attendance that while their support for the cause of abolitionism was
appreciated, the male-dominated leadership of most of the anti-slavery
societies in the contemporary Anglo-American world were simply not willing to
allow their female contemporaries to speak in public forums or generally
participate as the equals of men. The Seneca Falls Convention was absolutely a
direct response to the assertion of exactly this kind of double standard. Women
like Stanton and Mott, having been led to believe that they were entitled to
contribute as fully as they were able to the socio-political reform movements
which aligned with their personal convictions, were not about to step back and
stay quiet when it became clear that most of their male colleagues expected
them to submit unquestioningly to male leadership. On the contrary, these kinds
of reverses only encouraged them to seek new forums in which to make their
voices heard.
The gathering in Seneca Falls was exactly
that kind of forum, and one which is made all the more remarkable by how quickly
it came together and the comprehensiveness of its declared aims. Conceived in
response to an informal conversation between Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, Jane Hunt (1812-1889), and several other women while Mott was in the
area visiting a Haudenosaunee reservation in Cattaraugus County, the first
session was convened slightly over one week following its announcement in local
newspapers on July 11th, 1848. Only women were invited to attend and
to speak during the first day’s proceedings (July 19th) and a list
of grievances and resolution was prepared for the approbation of the assembled
participants on the second and final day (July 20th). Charged with
drafting the bulk of this document, Stanton took inspiration from the text of
the Declaration of Independence and – with the assistance of her lawyer
husband, Henry Brewster Stanton (1805-1887) – included extracts from a number
of contemporary laws which explicitly sought to curtail the social and economic
rights of American women. But while the resulting Declaration of Sentiments
was, for the most part, a fairly moderate document concerned primarily with the
social and economic disabilities under which American women were then forced to
labor, one resolution in particular proved to be something of a sticking point
even for some of the men and women in attendance. Addressed, as were all of the
resolutions, to “mankind” whose history was said to be one of, “Repeated
injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct
object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her [,]” the first of
their number simply stated, as one of injuries in question, “He has never
permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.”
As Stanton was adding this particular
accusation to the original draft of the Declaration, her husband, the
aforementioned Henry Stanton, reportedly attempted to warn her off. Not only
was her personally opposed to American women being granted the right to vote –
a sentiment which, in fairness, put him in line with the vast majority of
contemporary American men – but his own ambitions made him disinclined to be
personally associated with such a radical position. Having been interested in
seeking political office for a number of years, Mr. Stanton accordingly
concluded – after failing to persuade his wife to excise the cited passage – that
the best course of action would be for him to be some distance away from Seneca
Falls when the conference actually took place. Not everyone who became aware of
the extent of Stanton’s ambition reacted quite so cravenly, to be sure, but her
husband’s read on the radical nature of the statement in question was
nevertheless far from inaccurate. The most common critique was that any
insistence on something as politically significant as the franchise would
inevitably overshadow the more moderate resolutions which the document in
question contained. The nation’s cohort of male legislators were not about to
grant women the right to vote simply because they were asked to, and any
attempt to push the issue was bound to create more problems than it would
solve. Mott was of this opinion, though she undoubtedly agreed with Stanton in
principle. “Why Lizzie,” she said in her characteristic Quaker speech, “Thee
will make us ridiculous.” As the debate went on, however, one voice in
particular rose in support of Stanton’s decision. Frederick Douglass, the only non-white
person in attendance, stated in no uncertain terms that he could not possibly
fight for the right of Black people in America to vote without also affirming
the right of American women to do the same. “This denial of the right to
participate in government,” he said, involved, “Not merely the degradation of
woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice […] but the maiming and
repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government
of the world.”
This
declaration on the part of Douglass, along with Stanton’s refusal to back down
from her stated position, ultimately allowed the cited resolution to pass by a
significant majority vote. And this was just as well, for the concluding
statement which Stanton had also written was similarly radical in its
character. “In view of [the] entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of
this country,” it began,
Their social and religious
degradation—in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do
feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most
sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights
and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States. In
entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of
misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every
instrumentality within our power to effect our object. We shall employ agents,
circulate tracts, petition the State and national Legislatures, and endeavor to
enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf. We hope this Convention will be
followed by a series of Conventions, embracing every part of the country.
Let it be marked,
before the present discussion proceeds any further, just how revolutionary this
statement was and what it represents within the context of the women’s rights
movement in the United States of America. In 1848, at a time when property
qualifications on the electoral franchise had only ceased to be the norm over
the course of the preceding decade, only about three million people out of a
population of twenty million could vote, and neither women nor non-whites could
cast ballots regardless of their citizenship status, the attendees of the
Seneca Falls Convention were actively demanding that the governments of the
United States grant women, “Immediate admission to all the rights and
privileges which belong to them as citizens [.]” Not only was this a stunningly
ambitious – one might also call it stunningly brave – act of political
self-assertion, but its place on the timeline of the American movement for
women’s rights further serves to drive home the manifest importance of the act
itself. Only eight years prior, in 1840, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady
Stanton had been denied the right to speak at an anti-slavery convention in
London. Now, in 1848, at a convention in many ways organized in direct response
to that earlier incident, these same women were demanding that they and their
contemporaries be immediately granted the right to vote. Seventy-two years
later, their demand would finally be met.
Long before that great achievement,
of course, would come decade upon decade of stubborn, patient work. First, in
the mold of Seneca Falls, would follow a whole series of women’s rights
conventions. The earliest among these was held at nearby Rochester less than
one month later, organized by many of the same people and chaired by local
anti-slavery activist Abigail Norton Bush (1810-1898). Though the Rochester
convention covered many of the same issues as its predecessor had done at
Seneca Falls – to the point of taking up and approving the same Declaration of
Sentiments – it was nonetheless remarkable for both pointedly addressing the
plight of local working women and for the attendance of a local couple,
Massachusetts transplants Daniel and Lucy Anthony. Reformist Quakers,
abolitionists, and close associates of Frederick Douglas, the Anthony’s second
child, Susan, would soon become deeply involved in the women’s rights movement
through her parent’s associations. Two years later, in Salem, Ohio, the first
women’s rights convention to be organized on a statewide basis was then held under
the leadership of Betsy Mix Cowles (1810-1876). With a remarkable attendance of
fully five hundred people, the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention was the first in
history to be simultaneously led and staffed exclusively by women, as well as
the first to allow only women to vote and to speak. The gathering’s final act
was also exceptionally noteworthy. In an attempt to take advantage of the fact
a state convention was about to meet for the purpose of revising the Constitution
of Ohio, the attendees drafted a memorial advising the delegates to codify
women’s right to vote. “Believing that woman does not suffer alone,” the
petition concluded,
When subject to oppressive and
unequal laws, but that whatever affects injuriously her interests, is subversive
of the highest good of the race, we earnestly request that in the New
Constitution you are about to form for the state of Ohio, women should be
secured, not only the right of suffrage, but all the political and legal rights
that are guaranteed to men.
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