The Seneca Falls Convention

In the 1830s and 1840s many women entered public life through religious revivals and reform movements, especially antislavery, where they met resistance to women speaking and organizing in public. In 1840 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott met in London at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, where women were excluded as speakers; angered, they vowed to call a women’s rights convention when they returned home.

Married women lived under coverture: they had no legal identity separate from their husbands and no right to their own property or wages. Women could not vote, were shut out of the professions and colleges, and held subordinate places in churches. The Declaration of Sentiments listed these grievances one by one.

Stanton and the M’Clintock family drafted the Declaration of Sentiments, rewriting the 1776 Declaration to begin: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal.” It charged that “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman,” starting with denying her “the elective franchise.” It went on to list married women’s lack of property rights, unjust divorce and custody laws, exclusion from profitable work and from the professions of theology, medicine, and law, and subordination in the church. The convention adopted the Declaration and a series of resolutions, and 68 women and 32 men signed. Frederick Douglass, the most prominent Black abolitionist of the day, was among those present.

The convention drew public attention and inspired further conventions. A movement for women’s rights began to take organized shape, closely tied at first to abolitionism.

Seneca Falls launched a campaign that culminated more than seventy years later in the Nineteenth Amendment (1920). The site is preserved today as Women’s Rights National Historical Park. The convention’s leaders were mostly white and middle-class; Black women such as Sojourner Truth would push the movement to confront race as well as sex, and the movement split after the Civil War over whether to support Black men’s voting rights before women’s.