The Seneca Falls Convention: Setting the National Stage for Women's Suffrage

The Seneca Falls Convention: Setting the National Stage for Women’s Suffrage

by Judith Wellman


On July 19–20, 1848, about 300 people met for two hot days and candlelit evenings in the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, in the first formal women’s rights convention ever held in the United States. Sixty-eight women (supported by thirty-two men who signed a separate list ("in favor of the movement" ) declared:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Sound familiar? It should, for these women’s rights advocates patterned their document directly on the US Declaration of Independence.

Although the convention became best known for its demand for women’s right to vote, the Declaration of Sentiments covered a wide agenda, asserting that women should have equality in every area of life: politics, the family, education, jobs, religion, and morals. "In view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country," the signers concluded:

their social and religious degradation,— in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.

As the first women’s rights convention, Seneca Falls initiated the organized women’s rights movement in the United States. Philosophically, the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments tied women’s rights to the country’s natural-rights tradition, incorporating widespread grassroots support for women’s rights into a coherent intellectual framework that challenged Americans everywhere to include women in the great American democratic experiment.

Until recently, historians have told the story of Seneca Falls primarily as part of the biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the convention’s main organizer. But recent scholarship has placed Stanton—and the convention—in the larger context of her own time. In the early decades following the American Revolution, several reformers suggested that women were equal in intellect and abilities to men. By the 1830s, pockets of reformers, influenced by late eighteenth-century republican ideals and egalitarian Christian values, argued for a woman’s right to speak out on moral and political issues. In the 1830s and early 1840s, these local groups spoke out both in favor of abolitionism and legal reform, and these two movements provided the seedbed—or even a dress rehearsal—for the women’s rights movement of the late 1840s.

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https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/seneca-falls-convention-setting-national-stage-womens-suffrage