Women Siting Down to Tea in Seneca Falls Were Present at Creation

   

 Mrs. Stanton reads the draft of the resolution.

Note:  This celebration of the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention has been noted here several times before.  And it deserves to be.  It is also a reminder of how powerful just a handful standing up to all of the norms and expectations of their society can spark kindling that over time becomes a roaring bonfire.  Change is possible—even deep, fundamental, and revolutionary change.  The actions of a few, sustained over time and adversity, can lead to the paradigm shifts that seem to transform societies overnight.  Our own lonely collaborations around kitchen tables and in church basement meeting rooms may at this very moment be igniting that change.

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, was hastily arranged by a group of ladies who came 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 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.

 

                                                            A young Elizabeth Cady Stanton about the time of the convention.

Stanton recalled meeting Mott in 1840 at the International Anti-Slavery Convention in London where women in the American delegation were denied  recognition seating.  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.  Mott was impressed and the two began a friendship by correspondence when they returned to the U.S.

 

Quaker Lucretia Mott was already a senior activist in the Anti-Slavery movement.  Seen here with her supportive husband James in 1842.  James took the chair for the second day of the convention. 

In Hunt’s parlor, the discussion begun in London was shared.  The women eagerly added their own accounts and grievances.  It is unclear if Stanton, Mott or both came to the gathering with a plan or if it arose spontaneously.  In either event 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 principal assignment of making the arrangements.  The local Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, the frequent site for anti-slavery, temperance, and other reform cause meetings, was secured as a venue for a meeting scheduled only eight days after the tea.  A brief call to the meeting was placed in the local Seneca County Courier which was picked up by Frederick Douglass’ 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 rights 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 were 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.  

 

Abolitionist Fredrick Douglass helped publicize the Convention in his newspaper the North Star and spoke forcefully in support of the Declaration and Resolution, helping to sway the support of most men in attendance.   He and Stanton became life long friends and collaborators, each supporting the others work.  In today's movement lingo the recognized intersectionality. 

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 Douglass 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 Wesleyan Chapel as it appears today, its exterior restored by the National Park Service. 

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 Douglass 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 Douglass 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.  Douglass 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 it as just one of many meetings she attended or addressed and as just a part of an on-going process.

Others 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. 

 

Stanton's position with her partner Susan B. Anthony as the most important senior leaders of the Suffrage Movement was endangered by her open avowal of radical Free Thought.  Her 1876  history of the Women's movement helped establish the Seneca Falls Convention the foundational moment of the movement and remind readers of her pivotal role. 

It wasn’t until 1876 when the now gray 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.  

 

First Wave sculpture group by Lloyd Lillie depicting 20 Seneca Falls convention attendees including Mary Ann and Thomas McClintock, Lucretia and James Mott, Jane and Richard Hunt, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Martha Wright and 11 anonymous participants representing men and women who attended the Convention.

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.

 

What did Sojourner Truth Really Say in That Famous Speech?

Sojourner Truth giving her famous speech at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron in 1851.

On May 28, 1851 fifty-four year old Sojourner Truth mounted the platform and addressed the delegates to an Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron.  The meeting was held only three years after the inaugural Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. 

Truth was a former slave who had gained fame as a lay preacher and abolitionist speaker.  Accounts differ as to whether she was fully welcomed or if there were some women afraid that her presence would antagonize men otherwise sympathetic to her cause.  But Truth was already friendly with leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and most of her audience that day were either already convinced abolitionists, or at least sympathetic. 

The speech Truth gave has outlasted any other comments at the meeting and it is widely quoted by both feminists and African-American activists.  But the speech she gave may not have been the one widely quoted with its repeated refrain of “Ain’t I a Woman?” 

Truth was born a slave in 1797 in Swartekill, New York.  Her birth name was Isabella Baumfree, one of thirteen children.  The Hardenbergh family which owned her was from old Dutch colonial stock and Dutch was her first language.  She was sold along with a herd of sheep at the age of nine to English speaking tavern keeper John Neely for $100. 

By her later accounts Neely beat and raped her.  She was sold twice more becoming the property of John Dumont of West Park in 1810.  Conditions were less harsh than with her previous owners and Isabella, called Belle, labored there for several years.  She fell in love with a slave named Robert from a neighboring farm, but his owner forbad the relationship and beat him so severely that he later died.  Robert fathered her first two children. 

In 1817 Dumont selected another of his slaves, Thomas, to be her husband and he fathered three more children by 1826.

Under New York’s gradual emancipation law slavery would officially end on July 4, 1827.  Dumont had promised her release early in exchange for “doing well and faithful,” but reneged after a hand injury left her less than a fully effective worker.  Feeling cheated but determined to be fair to her master, she spun him 100 lbs. of wool, what she thought her remaining time was worth and escaped with her infant daughter. 

She could not take her other children because even under emancipation they would be held as bond servants until they were 21.  She found a sympathetic home with Isaac and Maria Van Wagener who took her in and settled her debt with Dumont for $20.  She stayed with them until emancipated under the law. 

Learning that Dumont had illegally sold her five year old son south to Alabama, she sued her former master with the support of the Van Wageners and after several months was able to recover her son.  She was the first Black in New York State to successfully sue a white man. 

During her time with the Wagner family she experienced a religious conversion and became a devout Christian.  

Sojourner Truth's association with the religious fraudster Robert Mathews led to her indictment for the murder of her previous employer.  After a sensational trial se was acquitted.

In 1829 she moved with her son Peter to New York City to serve as housekeeper for evangelist preacher Elijah Pierson.  Through Pierson she met the religious charlatan Robert Matthews, a.k.a. Matthias Kingdom and the Prophet Matthias who had bilked Pierson and several others out of two houses and large sums of money.  Bella went to work for him in 1832.  When Pierson died a short time later both she and Matthews were charged with his murder but acquitted.  Mathews headed west in an attempt to strike up an alliance with the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith leaving Belle behind. 

Despite the notoriety of the trial she was able to scrape together a living in the city.  Her son Peter signed on whaling ship in 1839 and after three letters never heard from him again. 

In 1842 she adopted the name Sojourner Truth because, “The Spirit calls me and I must.”  She became a Methodist, and like many others became a lay preacher and traveling evangelist mixing in a heavy dose of abolitionism.  Gaining a reputation she was invited to join Northampton Association of Education and Industry in Massachusetts in 1844.  One of many utopian social experiments of the era, the Association was founded by abolitionists and supported women’s rights and pacifism.  Other members of the association included leading abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Fredrick Douglass.  Like other communal experiments of the era, the Northampton Association collapsed in 1847 and Truth went to work as a housekeeper for Garrison’s brother-in-law.  

The front piece and title page of the first edition of Sojourner Truth's memoirs.

While there she dictated her memoirs to her friend Olivia Gilbert.  In 1850 Garrison arranged a private printing of The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave.  The book was widely read in liberal circles and cemented Truth’s reputation.  The same year she was able to buy her own home in Northampton for $300 and attended the first full National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts where she shared the platform such leaders as Lucy Stone, Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis, Ernestine Rose, and Antoinette Brown as well as old friends Garrison and Douglass.  More than 900 people attended the convention, which attracted wide, if sometimes derisive, coverage. 

Truth came to the 1850 meeting in while on a western speaking tour with abolitionist George Thompson.  The first published version of her speech was transcribed by local newspaperman Marius Robinson and was published a month after the event.  The speech was stirring and contrasted the leisure afforded white women who were “put on a pedestal” with the grim “work or die” reality for Black women both slave and free.  But it was rendered as standard English and nowhere included the words “Ain’t I a woman.” 

Those were included, along with idiomatic—and stereotypical—southern Black speech patterns in a version of the speech published 13 years after it was given by one of the meetings organizers, Frances Dana Barker Gage.  Gage’s version is the one widely quoted today.  Yet it has its many doubters.  It is unlikely that Truth, a native Dutch speaker who had spent her entire life well north of the Mason-Dixon Line, spoke with any kind of southern drawl, Black or otherwise.  On the other hand, supporters of the Gage version argue that Robinson “cleaned up” Truth’s raw language for his genteel readers. 

More telling are factual inaccuracies in the Gage version, including the claim that she had 13 children “most of which” were sold into slavery.  In fact she had five children, one of whom was temporarily sold into slavery.  Gage also embellished the circumstances of the speech, making it sound as if Truth spoke to a hostile audience, whereas contemporary accounts, including her own, attested to a warm reception.  The speech as recorded by Gage in 1863 began:

 Wall, chilern, whar dar is so much racket dar must be somethin’ out o’ kilter. I tink dat ‘twixt de niggers of de Souf and de womin at de Norf, all talkin’ ‘bout rights, de white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all dis here talkin’ ‘bout? Dat man ober dar say dat womin needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober ditches, and to hab de best place everywhar. Nobody eber helps me into carriages, or ober mud-puddles, or gibs me any best place! ‘And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman?...

By contrast Robinson recorded:

 I want to say a few words about this matter. I am a woman’s rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal. I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now...

To my ears, the originally published journal sound much more likely to have been given by a woman who had been raised in the North, had spent many years in association with highly educated people, and made a living as a preacher and speaker. 

Truth spent the next decade touring in support of abolition and women’s rights working in close association with Robinson.  She had many colorful encounters with hostile audiences, including one where a heckler insisted that she was a man, so she opened her shirt to show her breasts. 

In 1856 she sold her Northumberland home and moved to the Battle Creek, Michigan area which she would consider home for the rest of her life.  The household in her new home included a grown daughter, Elizabeth Banks, and two grandsons. 

                                    Sojourner Truth in her later years.

With the outbreak of the Civil War she saw her older grandson, James Caldwell enlist in the famous Black 54th Massachusetts while she recruited other blacks to rally for the Union.  In 1864 she was called to Washington to join the National Freedman’s Relief Association to improve the lot of newly freed slaves.  She met President Abraham Lincoln, and almost a hundred years before Rosa Parks insisted on riding Washington horse car trolleys effectively, if temporarily ending segregation on them. 

She tried to claim her 40 acres and a Mule as a freedman herself, appealing to President Ulysses Grant himself in 1870.  But despite seven years of effort was turned down because she was a woman and had been freed by a northern state years earlier.  

The Sojourner Truth Memorial statue in Florence, Michigan.

Truth resumed speaking tours after the war then returned to Battle Creek to try to vote in the 1872 Election.  But she was tired.  Sojourner Truth died in her Battle Creek home on November 26, 1886 at the age of 86.