Note: Earlier this year I attended a
lecture by Marge Piercy sponsored by my old Alma Matter Shimer College. She talked about her book Sex Wars: A
Novel of Gilded Age New York. Two of the major characters in a fascinating cast that includes
historical figures as well as fictional ones were Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
her longtime associate and house mate Susan B. Anthony. Although the story mostly unfolds decades
after Stanton first stepped on the stage in Seneca Falls, it drops back to
cover that seminal event as well. As I
was getting my copy of the the book inscribed by the author, I gushed that I
had blogged about many of the characters in the novel. She seemed singularly unimpressed by our shared
interest. Any way here is proof that I
did not lie to her. I am resurrecting an
earlier post celebrating the meeting that convened 165 years ago today.
1848 was the year of revolution
in Europe. On this side of the pond another kind of
revolution, one that continues to this day, had its beginnings in a hastily
called meeting in a small industrial town in Upstate New York.
The Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention which was called to order on July 19, 1848, had been
hastily called by a group of women who had come together over tea at the home
of Jane Hunt to meet a visiting
celebrity. Lucretia Mott was a
leading Anti-Slavery advocate and
noted public speaker from Boston. Attending the tea were Mary Ann McClintock; Martha
Coffin Wright, Mott's sister; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a young mother
and veteran anti-slavery advocate, and Jane
Hunt.
Except for Stanton, the women were all members of the Society of Friends—the Quakers.
Stanton was a Freethinker,
although it was unlikely that her friends then understood how radical her
religious views were.
Stanton recalled meeting Mott in 1840 at the International Anti-Slavery Convention in London where women in the American
delegation were refused to be seated.
She then, according to her account many years later, went on a diatribe
about the general condition of women and their lack of economic and political
rights.
The women decided to call a convention to discuss advancing the status of
women. But it had to be done quickly
before Mott, the major draw to such an event, left the area. McClintock, only 27 years old, and Stanton were given the principle
assignment of making the arrangements.
The local Wesleyan Methodist
Chapel, the frequent site for anti-slavery, temperance, and other reform
causes, was secured as a venue for a meeting scheduled only eight days after
the tea. A brief call to meeting was
placed in the local Seneca County
Courier which was picked up by
Frederick Douglas’s North Star
and other reform publications.
Meanwhile Stanton was given the task of drawing
up a Declaration and a set of
resolutions. Shrewdly, she drew from Thomas Jefferson’s soaring rhetoric in
the Declaration of Independence. She
wrote that “all men and women had been created equal” and went on to list
eighteen “injuries and usurpations,” the same number of charges leveled against
the King in the original document, “on the part of man toward woman.”
She also drafted eleven resolutions,
most of them dealing with the right of women to own property, conduct business
in their own name and other legal and economic reforms. Ten had been broadly agreed to at the
tea. On her own authority, Stanton added
another, which she placed in the ninth spot which read, “Resolved: That it is the duty of the women of this
country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective
franchise.” The addition even shocked
Mott, who was afraid the inclusion of a demand for the right to vote would be
so radical that it would discredit the whole document. By Stanton’s later account Mott exclaimed, “Why, Lizzie, thee will make us ridiculous.” But all agreed to submit it to a vote of the
convention.
On such short notice the meeting was
hardly a national event. Many prominent
women and reformers from Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City were unable to
attend—indeed were likely completely ignorant it was taking place. Attendees would be drawn from the immediate
area around Seneca Falls.
Luckily for the organizers the Finger Lakes region was populated by
some of the most progressive and reformed minded people in the U.S. Heavily populated by progressive Quakers,
reform minded Methodists, Universalists and other religious groups, it was a
hot bed of early Abolitionism and of
other reform movements, especially Temperance,
the mother cause for many first generation feminists.
The call went out not just to women,
but to sympathetic men, of whom there were several, including Lucretia’s
husband James, a leading
anti-slavery crusader and Fredrick
Douglas from Rochester. Stanton’s husband Henry was a lawyer who advised her on points of law while she was
drafting the resolutions. But he had
political ambitions and was frightened by the call for the vote for women so he
arranged to be out of town during the convention so his name would not be
associated with it.
The convention started in the middle
of a rare blistering heat wave.
Temperatures would reach the 90’s both days. A sizeable crowd, including 40 men, was
outside the Methodist church waiting for admittance at 10 A.M. Unfortunately in the press of events, no one
remembered to ask the Sexton to
unlock the building. Stanton’s young
nephew had to be boosted through an open window to unbar the door.
Soon the crowd filled the main floor
and overflowed into the balcony. Men had
been asked to attend only the second day, but seeing so many there, they were
admitted but asked to refrain from speaking until the next day. McClintock was appointed secretary.
The first day was largely taken up by speeches by Mott and Stanton, a
humorous reading, and a first reading of the Declaration and Resolutions. To conduct business the next day, no woman
would step forward to claim the chair. It
was considered unseemly for a woman to preside over men. James Mott was called onto chair the morning
session where the Declaration and resolutions were debated. All of the resolutions passed unanimously
except the motion on suffrage, which experienced significant resistance.
Then Fredrick Douglas took the platform and delivered an eloquent plea of
support for the resolution, “In this
denial of the right to participate in government, not merely the degradation of
woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice happens, but the maiming and
repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government
of the world.” His argument swayed the
attendees who voted heavily in favor, although not unanimously and there were
some walk-outs. It would not be the last time Douglas and other prominent Black
Abolitionists came to the aid of early Feminism.
Emboldened by the radical turn of events Mott offered a twelfth resolution,
although she must have known that it would cause the loss of support for the
cause from several clergy present, “Resolved: For the overthrowing of the monopoly of the
pulpit, and for the securing to woman equal participation with men in the
various trades, professions and commerce.” The assembly, made up largely of
Quakers, a faith without ordained clergy but which allowed women like Mott to be
recognized as lay preachers, easily passed the addition. Predictably some of the clergy in attendance,
although never offering objection at the meeting, went back to their churches
to denounce the meeting and its document.
Out of an estimated three hundred in
attendance one hundred women and men signed the Seneca Falls Declaration,
although subsequent criticism caused some of them to remove their names. There were separate columns for the
endorsements of women and men. The
organizers considered the meeting a success.
Douglas prevailed upon Mott to stay in New York long enough for a second
convention to be held two weeks later in Rochester. Over the next two years similar local or
state conventions were held in Ohio—where Sojourner Truth made her famous “Ain’t
I a Woman” speech—Indiana ,
and Pennsylvania.
The novelty of the event and its radical declaration drew considerable
press notice, some of it supportive, but most of it either ridiculing or
reviling the meeting and its organizers.
Most of the reformist press was more or less positive. Horace Greely offered tepid support in
the New
York Tribune. But rival James Gordon Bennett derisively printed the entire Declaration in the New
York Herald expecting that the document was so outrageous that it would
self destruct.
Stanton had another opinion, “Just
what I wanted… Imagine the publicity given to our ideas by thus
appearing in a widely circulated sheet like the Herald. It will start
women thinking, and men too; and when men and women think about a new question,
the first step in progress is taken.”
Despite the publicity at the time
many participants did not think of the Seneca Falls Convention as
foundational. Mott regarded as just one
of many meetings she attended or addressed and as just a part of an on-going
process.
Many would look to the 1850 National
Women's Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts as the true
beginning of an organized movement. By
that time Stanton had become the ally of another rising feminist, Susan B.
Anthony and women’s suffrage took center stage as the main demand instead
of being a controversial add-on.
It wasn’t until 1876 when the now grey Stanton published the first volume
of History of Woman Suffrage that she celebrated the Seneca Falls meeting as foundational, “the
greatest movement for human liberty recorded on the pages of history—a demand
for freedom to one-half the entire race.”
Despite the derision of rival Lucy Stone, Stanton’s late
assessment became enshrined as the central act in a creation story.
By the time that book was issued, Stanton had been marginalized in the
movement. Even her closest ally,
Anthony, sometimes kept her at arms distance because of her scandalous
freethinking views on religion. Many
leaders believed the support of church women was essential to furthering the
cause and Stanton was a red flag in the eyes of many of them.
Some historians now believe that Stanton may have inflated the importance
of the Seneca Falls meeting in the book to regain her place as central to the
movement’s history. But then again many
of those same historians are as uncomfortable with Stanton’s apostasy as were
the likes of Lucy Stone.
Discounting the myths that have grown up around the event—it was not a
national convention, men were not only in attendance but played leading roles,
and suffrage was not the main focus—the contemporary press accounts of the
event and the energy that it gave to ongoing efforts, not the least of which
was launching Stanton’s career, make it clear that to be at Seneca Falls was to
be present at creation.
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