Everything about The Seneca Falls Convention totally explained
The
Seneca Falls Convention, held in
Seneca Falls,
New York on
July 19 to
July 20,
1848, was the first
women's rights convention held in the
United States. Prominent at the 1848 convention were leading reformers, including
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Lucretia Mott.
These reformers, active in the
anti-slavery movement; eventually used the language and structure of the
United States Declaration of Independence to state their claim to the rights they felt women were entitled to as American citizens in the
Declaration of Sentiments.
Seneca Falls was in a key location at the time, on the Great Western Highway which ran west from
Albany, giving travelers access to the West. The village's water power spurred the development of manufacturing industries, most notably various mills and pump manufacturers. The village also was part of
New York's
canal system, as the
Seneca River through the village had been turned into canals and connected to the
Erie Canal.
Background
In the
1840s the United States was in the throes of cultural and economic change. In the years since the
Revolution and the
Constitutional Convention, the nation's geographic boundaries and population had more than doubled, the population had shifted significantly westward, and many Americans' daily lives had drifted away from
Jefferson's vision of a nation composed of independent farmers. Instead, farmers, artisans, and manufacturers existed in a world built around
cash crops,
manufactured goods,
banks, and distant markets. Historians generally refer to this shift from production for a local economy based on a series of shared relationships to production for a distant, unknown market as the
Market Revolution.
Not all Americans welcomed these changes, which often left them feeling isolated and cut them off from traditional sources of community and comfort. In an effort to regain a sense of community and control over their nation's future, Americans, especially women, formed and joined
reform societies. They were inspired by the message of the
Second Great Awakening (a religious movement that emphasized man's potential and forgiveness of sin) and the
Transcendentalist message of man's innate goodness; reformers joined together in organizations aimed at improving life in the country. These groups attacked what they perceived as the various wrongs in their society, including the lack of free public school education for both boys and girls, the inhumane treatment of
mentally ill patients and criminals, the evil of
slavery, the widespread use of
alcohol, and the "rights and wrongs" of American women's legal position. The Seneca Falls Convention is a part of this larger period of social reform movements, a time when concern about the rights of various groups percolated to the surface.
Many factors contributed to bringing about the 1848 convention. Women of the Revolutionary era such as
Abigail Adams and
Judith Sargent Murray raised questions about what the Declaration of Independence would mean to them, but there had never been a large scale public meeting to discuss this topic until Seneca Falls. According to
America's History, after the American Revolution, many new social roles for women emerged. With the men preoccupied with the war effort, it was up to women to take over many of their responsibilities on the home-front.
As a result, women were able to establish a place for themselves in society. Women such as
Catharine Beecher and
Harriet Beecher Stowe began writing about women's moral superiority and publishing their works. Many women began participating in reform organizations whose goals were to improve the lives of others and to fight for the rights of those who couldn't speak for themselves, such as schoolchildren and the mentally ill. In
1834 the
New York Female Reform Society was established with
Lydia Finney as its president. It attempted to provide a moral working atmosphere to keep women out of prostitution. Other female leaders such as
Dorothea Dix focused their energies on prison reform in the
1830s.
It was during this time that women's role as educators also emerged. Catharine Beecher established several academies for women and her writings suggested that women were the most appropriate candidates for teaching positions. Finally the
abolitionist movement gave women another opportunity to become involved outside of the domestic sphere. With all of these structural changes, the time was ripe for a close examination of women's rights as well. A consciousness-raising experience, however, was necessary to turn these women's thoughts to their own condition.
The triggering incident was a direct result of participation in anti-slavery organizations by
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Lucretia Mott. Anti-slavery societies proliferated in the Northeast region of the
United States and in some parts of what today we call the
Midwest. Many of these organizations had female members. According to Cristine Stansell in her article
The Road from Seneca Falls, the abolitionist movement was what allowed women to get their foot in the door. They then began to use their involvement to promote women's rights. This caused the movement to split into two groups, the radicals and the conservatives. The radicals promoted equality for all, including women, while the conservatives clung to traditional gender roles. It was these conservatives who attempted to constrain women to the domestic sphere by refusing to let them participate in the abolitionist cause.
In
1840 the
World Anti-Slavery Convention met in
London; some of the American groups elected women as their representatives to this meeting. Once in London, after a lengthy debate, the female representatives were denied their rightful seats and consigned to the balcony by conservative abolitionists. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott met at this meeting while sitting on the balcony and walking through the streets of London. Eight years later Stanton and Mott called a convention to discuss women's rights.
The Call for Women's Rights 1848
In July of
1848, the
Seneca County Courier said that on the 19th and 20th of July, a "convention to discuss the condition and rights of women" would be held. The Convention had been planned at a meeting a few days earlier in nearby
Waterloo, NY, attended by Lucretia Mott of
Philadelphia, Elizabeth Cady Stanton of
Seneca Falls, Jane Hunt of Waterloo and Elizabeth McClintock of Waterloo. The meeting took place at the home of Jane Hunt.
The Convention would take place in the
Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York. While the first session was planned to be exclusively for women, the men who arrived for the event were not turned away. On the second day, the Convention approved a document titled the
Declaration of Sentiments, a statement written by Stanton and others and modeled on the
Declaration of Independence.
In adapting the Declaration of Independence, Stanton and her co-authors replaced "
King George" with "all men" as the agent of women's oppressed condition and compiled a suitable list of grievances, just as the colonists did in the Declaration of Independence. These grievances reflected the severe limitations on women's legal rights in America at this time: women couldn't vote; they couldn't participate in the creation of laws that they'd to obey; their property was taxed. Further, in the relatively unusual case of a divorce, custody of children was virtually automatically awarded to the father; access to the professions and higher education generally was closed to women; and most churches barred women from participating publicly in the ministry or other positions of authority.
The
Declaration of Sentiments proclaimed that "all men and women were created equal" and that the undersigned would employ all methods at their disposal to right these wrongs. The document was discussed in length by those in attendance. It was the voting provision which caused the most debate, but ultimately the document was adopted and signed with hardly any alterations and was published as a pamphlet. Of the approximately 300 people who attended the Convention, 100 signed the Declaration of Sentiments.
Historian
Gerda Lerner has pointed out that, in addition to ideas of social contract and natural rights, religious ideas provided a second fundamental source for the
Declaration of Sentiments. Most of the women attending the convention had been active in
Quaker or evangelical
Methodist movements. The document therefore draws from writings by the evangelical Quaker
Sarah Grimke to make biblical claims that God had created women equal and that man had usurped this authority by establishing "absolute tyranny" over woman. According to Jami Carlacio, Grimke's writings opened the public's eyes to ideas like women's rights and for the first time they were willing to question convention.
The convention in popular culture
- The Distillers, a female-fronted Australian punk rock band, released a song titled "Seneca Falls" on their 2002 album Sing Sing Death House. The song's lyrics pays tribute to the Seneca Falls Convention and its participants.
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