Seneca Falls Convention

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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, and as a result is often called the birthplace of the feminist movement.

Different groups at different times have turned to founding documents of the United States to meet their needs and to declare their entitlement to the promises of the Revolution of 1776. At Seneca Falls, New York, in the summer of 1848, a group of American men and women met to discuss the legal limitations imposed on women during this period. Their consciousness of those limitations had been raised by their participation in the anti-slavery movement; eventually they used the language and structure of the Declaration of Independence to stake 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 canalized and connected to the Erie Canal.

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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 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. 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.

What brought three hundred men and women to this small upstate New York town in July 1848. 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 homefront. As a result, women were able to establish a place for themselves in society. Women such as Catherine 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 1830's. It was during this time that women's role as an educator 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 air 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 moderates. Obviously, the radicals promoted equality for all, including women, while the moderates clung to traditional gender roles. It was these moderates that 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 moderate abolitionists. It was at this meeting, while sitting in the balcony and walking through the streets of London, that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott met. Eight years later Stanton and Mott called a convention to discuss women's rights.

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The Call for Women's Rights 1848

On July 14, 1848, the Seneca County Courier announced that on the following Wednesday and Thursday a "convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women" would be held. It would take place in the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York. According to the National Reformer, the first session of the meeting was attended exclusively by women. It was during this time that the Convention issued a document titled the Declaration of Sentiments, a statement written by Stanton and modeled on the Declaration of Independence. The women wanted to draft the document without any male influence. The paper indicated that they opened the doors to all audiences Wednesday afternoon, during which Lucretia Mott, Stanton's accomplice, delivered a speech promoting equality of the sexes. On Thursday, Stanton delivered her Declaration of Sentiments.

In adapting the Declaration of Independence, Stanton 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; and a married woman's property and wages legally belonged to her husband. 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.

Stanton's 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. Following its delivery, "The National Reformer" records that the Declaration was discussed in length by radicals such as Stanton, Lucretia Mott and Frederick Douglass among others. Ultimately the document was adopted and signed with hardly any alterations and was to be published as a pamphlet for the whole world to digest. David Walker, in his efforts to gain recognition of the legal rights of Black Americans, similarly used the Declaration of Independence in his call to the American people on behalf of the oppressed Black population, both freed and enslaved. In the 1840s and even today, the language of Thomas Jefferson resonates through American life. Many Americans believe that the ideals of the Revolution are applicable to life in the present, just as the women of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention felt those ideals spoke to them.

Historian Gerder 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.

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See also

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External links

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References

  • 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.
  • Stansell, Christine. "The Road From Seneca Falls." The New Republic 219.6 (1998): 26-38. Proquest. ABI/INFORM. 20 October 2005.
  • Capron, E.W. "National Reformer." National Reform Nomination For President Gerrit Smith of New York 3 August 1848.
  • 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.
  • Brody, David, et al. America's History. 4th ed. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000.ast:Declaración de Seneca Falls
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