Seneca Falls Convention

The Seneca Falls Convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York on July 19 to July 20, 1848, was the first women's rights convention held in the United States. Prominent at the 1848 convention were leading reformers, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.

These reformers, active in the anti-slavery movement, eventually used the language and structure of the United States Declaration of Independence to state their claim to the rights they felt women were entitled to as American citizens in the Declaration of Sentiments.

Seneca Falls was in a key location at the time, on the Great Western Highway which ran west from Albany, giving travelers access to the West. The village's water power spurred the development of manufacturing industries, most notably various mills and pump manufacturers. The village also was part of New York's canal system, as the Seneca River through the village had been turned into canals and connected to the Erie Canal.

Background

In the 1840s the United States was in the throes of cultural and economic change. In the years since the Revolution and the Constitutional Convention, the nation's geographic boundaries and population had more than doubled, the population had shifted significantly westward, and many Americans' daily lives had drifted away from Jefferson's vision of a nation composed of independent farmers. Instead, farmers, artisans, and manufacturers existed in a world built around cash crops, manufactured goods, banks, and distant markets. Historians generally refer to this shift from production for a local economy based on a series of shared relationships to production for a distant, unknown market as the Market Revolution.

Not all Americans welcomed these changes, which often left them feeling isolated and cut them off from traditional sources of community and comfort. In an effort to regain a sense of community and control over their nation's future, Americans, especially women, formed and joined reform societies. They were inspired by the message of the Second Great Awakening (a religious movement that emphasized man's potential and forgiveness of sin) and the Transcendentalist message of man's innate goodness; reformers joined together in organizations aimed at improving life in the country. These groups attacked what they perceived as the various wrongs in their society, including the lack of free public school education for both boys and girls, the inhumane treatment of mentally ill patients and criminals, the evil of slavery, the widespread use of alcohol, and the "rights and wrongs" of American women's legal position. The Seneca Falls Convention is a part of this larger period of social reform movements, a time when concern about the rights of various groups percolated to the surface.

Many factors contributed to bringing about the 1848 convention. Women of the Revolutionary era such as Abigail Adams and Judith Sargent Murray raised questions about what the Declaration of Independence would mean to them, but there had never been a large scale public meeting to discuss this topic until Seneca Falls. According to "America's History," after the American Revolution, many new social roles for women emerged. With the men preoccupied with the war effort, it was up to women to take over many of their responsibilities on the home-front.

As a result, women were able to establish a place for themselves in society. Women such as Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe began writing about women's moral superiority and publishing their works. Many women began participating in reform organizations whose goals were to improve the lives of others and to fight for the rights of those who could not speak for themselves, such as schoolchildren and the mentally ill. In 1834 the New York Female Reform Society was established with Lydia Finney as its president. It attempted to provide a moral working atmosphere to keep women out of prostitution. Other female leaders such as Dorothea Dix focused their energies on prison reform in the 1830s.

It was during this time that women's role as educators also emerged. Catharine Beecher established several academies for women and her writings suggested that women were the most appropriate candidates for teaching positions. Finally the abolitionist movement gave women another opportunity to become involved outside of the domestic sphere. With all of these structural changes, the time was ripe for a close examination of women's rights as well. A consciousness-raising experience, however, was necessary to turn these women's thoughts to their own condition.

The triggering incident was a direct result of participation in anti-slavery organizations by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. Anti-slavery societies proliferated in the Northeast region of the United States and in some parts of what today we call the Midwest. Many of these organizations had female members. According to Cristine Stansell in her article "The Road from Seneca Falls," the abolitionist movement was what allowed women to get their foot in the door. They then began to use their involvement to promote women's rights. This caused the movement to split into two groups, the radicals and the conservatives. The radicals promoted equality for all, including women, while the conservatives clung to traditional gender roles. It was these conservatives who attempted to constrain women to the domestic sphere by refusing to let them participate in the abolitionist cause.

In 1840 the World Anti-Slavery Convention met in London; some of the American groups elected women as their representatives to this meeting. Once in London, after a lengthy debate, the female representatives were denied their rightful seats and consigned to the balcony by conservative abolitionists. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott met at this meeting while sitting on the balcony and walking through the streets of London. Eight years later Stanton and Mott called a convention to discuss women's rights.

The Call for Women's Rights 1848

In July of 1848, the "Seneca County Courier" said that on the 19th and 20th of July, a "convention to discuss the condition and rights of women" would be held. The Convention had been planned at a meeting a few days earlier in nearby Waterloo, NY, attended by Lucretia Mott of Philadelphia, Elizabeth Cady Stanton of Seneca Falls, Jane Hunt of Waterloo, Mott's sister Martha Wright of Auburn, and Elizabeth M'Clintock of Waterloo. The meeting took place at the home of Jane Hunt.

The Convention would take place in the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York. While the first session was planned to be exclusively for women, the men who arrived for the event were not turned away. On the second day, the Convention approved a document titled the "Declaration of Sentiments", a statement written by Stanton and others and modeled on the Declaration of Independence.

In adapting the Declaration of Independence, Stanton and her co-authors replaced "King George" with "all men" as the agent of women's oppressed condition and compiled a suitable list of grievances, just as the colonists did in the Declaration of Independence. These grievances reflected the severe limitations on women's legal rights in America at this time: women could not vote; they could not participate in the creation of laws that they had to obey; their property was taxed. Further, in the relatively unusual case of a divorce, custody of children was virtually automatically awarded to the father; access to the professions and higher education generally was closed to women; and most churches barred women from participating publicly in the ministry or other positions of authority.

The "Declaration of Sentiments" proclaimed that "all men and women were created equal" and that the undersigned would employ all methods at their disposal to right these wrongs. The document was discussed in length by those in attendance. It was the voting provision which caused the most debate, but ultimately the document was adopted and signed with hardly any alterations and was published as a pamphlet. Of the approximately 300 people who attended the Convention, 100 signed the Declaration of Sentiments.

Historian Gerda Lerner has pointed out that, in addition to ideas of social contract and natural rights, religious ideas provided a second fundamental source for the "Declaration of Sentiments". Most of the women attending the convention had been active in Quaker or evangelical Methodist movements. The document therefore draws from writings by the evangelical Quaker Sarah Grimke to make biblical claims that God had created women equal and that man had usurped this authority by establishing "absolute tyranny" over woman. According to Jami Carlacio, Grimke's writings opened the public's eyes to ideas like women's rights and for the first time they were willing to question convention.

The convention in popular culture

* The Distillers, a female-fronted Australian punk rock band, released a song titled "Seneca Falls" on their 2002 album "Sing Sing Death House". The song's lyrics pays tribute to the Seneca Falls Convention and its participants.

See also

* Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments
* List of signatories of the Declaration of Sentiments
* Women's suffrage
* Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)
* Reproductive rights - issues regarding "reproductive freedom"
* Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)
* International Women's Rights Action Watch (IWRAW)
* Vindication of the Rights of Women
* Women's right to know
* Committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality
* Subjection of women
* League of Women Voters
* In Defense of Women
* Parental leave
* Feminism
* History of feminism
* Worcester Women's History Project

References

"This article incorporates text from [http://www.ericdigests.org/2002-1/women.html Osborn, Elizabeth R. The Seneca Falls Convention: Teaching about the Rights of Women and the Heritage of the Declaration of Independence. ERIC Digest.] , a publication now in the public domain."

* Brody, David, et al. "America's History." 4th ed. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000. ISBN 978-0-312-40934-0
* Capron, E.W. "National Reformer." National Reform Nomination For President Gerrit Smith of New York 3 August 1848.
* Carlacio, Jami. ""Ye Knew Your Duty, But Ye Did It Not": The Epistolary Rhetoric of Sarah Grimke." "Rhetoric Review "3rd ser. 21.3 (2002): 247-263. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. 23 October 2005.
* Flexner, Eleanor. "Century of Struggle"
* Ryerson, Lisa M. "Falls revisited: Reflection on the legacy of the 1848 Woman's Rights Convention." "Vital Speeches of the day" 65.11 (1999): 327-332. Proquest. ABI/INFORM. 20 October 2005.
* Stansell, Christine. "The Road From Seneca Falls." "The New Republic" 219.6 (1998): 26-38. Proquest. ABI/INFORM. 20 October 2005.

External links

* [http://www.nps.gov/archive/wori/declaration.htm Text of the Declaration of Sentiments]
* [http://www.nps.gov/archive/wori/particip.htm Signers of the Declaration of Sentiments]