Seneca Falls Convention

Over two summer days, 19 and 20 July 1848, around 300 people gathered in a Methodist chapel in the small town of Seneca Falls, in upstate New York, for the first convention called specifically to discuss the rights of women. Organised by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and a circle of local Quaker women, it adopted the Declaration of Sentiments, which demanded legal, social and religious equality and, after heated debate, the right to vote. It is widely remembered as the starting point of the organised women's rights movement in the United States.

In the 1840s law and custom barred American women from voting and serving on juries, and often from inheriting property or signing contracts. Many of the convention's organisers came from the anti-slavery movement, where women had begun to speak in public. In 1840 Mott and Stanton had travelled to the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London, where women delegates were refused seats and could only watch from a gallery. The two became friends and talked of holding a convention on women's rights. Progressive Quakers around nearby Waterloo, who held that men and women were spiritual equals, provided much of the support. In April 1848 New York passed a law protecting married women's property, a sign that change was possible.

On 9 July 1848, while Mott was visiting the area, she met Stanton, Jane Hunt, Mary Ann M'Clintock and Martha Coffin Wright at the Hunt home in Waterloo. They decided to hold a convention within days and placed a notice in the Seneca County Courier, giving barely a week's warning. At the M'Clintock house the organisers modelled their declaration on the Declaration of Independence, adding women to its claim that all are created equal and listing grievances against men rather than against the British king. Stanton, on her own initiative, added a demand for the vote; her husband, Henry, warned that she would turn the proceedings into a farce.

The first day was meant for women only, although about 40 men turned up and were allowed to stay quietly. Stanton read the declaration paragraph by paragraph so that it could be debated and amended. On the second day, with a larger mixed audience and James Mott in the chair, the declaration was adopted. It was signed by 100 of those present, 68 women and 32 men.

The resolutions were then voted on one by one. Only the ninth, calling on women to secure the vote, met serious opposition. Some feared it would discredit the more moderate demands, and even Lucretia Mott warned Stanton that it would make them look foolish. Frederick Douglass, the only African American present, spoke strongly in favour, saying he could not accept the vote for himself if women were denied it. The resolution passed by a large majority.

Newspapers across the country reported the meeting, many with ridicule, though Horace Greeley's New York Tribune conceded the justice of the claim. Local ministers denounced it from their pulpits. A second convention met in Rochester two weeks later, and from 1850 National Women's Rights Conventions became an annual event until the American Civil War. By 1851 votes for women had become a central demand of the movement. Only one signer, Charlotte Woodward, lived to see the Nineteenth Amendment pass in 1920. The chapel and Stanton's home now form part of the Women's Rights National Historical Park, established in 1980.

The convention falls between our 1815 and 1878 maps of the United States; New York State appears within the country on both.