The spirit of Seneca Falls
An 1840 meeting that barred women sparked movements on two continents
My heart has been in Seneca Falls this week, looking back on a transformative event that took place there July 19-20, 175 years ago. That’s when Elizabeth Cady Stanton presented a resolution that she had written, demanding that American women gain the right to vote, one of 18 demands of the first Women’s Rights Convention. The other resolutions are a profile of the egregious limits that curbed the lives of women. They called for political and religious equality; the right to claim their own wages; the right to own property; the right to testify in courts; the right to be educated; and the right to custody of their own children.
And of course, the vote, in Stanton’s unapologetic prose: “It is the duty of women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to elective franchise.” Stanton insisted upon the wording in the face of her father’s outrage and her husband Henry’s threat that he would leave town before the convention if she didn’t abandon her plans. She stood firm; he left. Even Lucretia Mott, that great Quaker orator and mentor to Stanton, had her doubts, saying, “Lizzie, thee would make us ridiculous.”
Stanton, Mott and three of Mott’s friends had decided to call for the convention a mere week in advance, publishing notices in area newspapers, and then wondered whether or not anyone would come. But the morning of July 19, 1848, the roads were jammed with carriages and carts for the two-day meeting, helped by the town’s proximity to Rochester, a hotbed of reform activity. The gathering had been a long time coming, both for Stanton and American women.
But her awakening had come eight years before, in London, at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention.
Henry Stanton was a delegate to the 1840 meeting and he and Elizabeth were on their honeymoon. Both were committed abolitionists and were eager to participate in the convention as were many other Americans traveling to the event. America’s anti-slave societies had equal membership of men and women. For that reason eight women delegates attended from the United States, including Mott.
But abolitionist groups in Great Britain were sex-segregated. Women could fundraise and support the men, but could never be equal members. So the Americans walked into a buzz-saw of opposition when they arrived with women delegates. All that first day in London, men debated whether or not women should be allowed to speak about slavery or participate in the future plans of the abolition movement. Many. especially the ministers, expressed utter contempt for the idea that women should do anything other than sit and be silent, as God intended. After hours of debate the men voted, and greeted the outcome with raucous cheers: the women present could do no more but listen behind a curtained wall.
It outraged Stanton, but she was thrilled to meet Mott for the first time at the meeting. Mott was two decades older than she, calm and firm, and they both agreed they would one day answer the humiliation. They talked for hours and Stanton suggested they should call their own convention one day.
And so they did in 1848. More than 100 came to Seneca Falls discuss and debate the future of women. Every resolution passed with large majorities. Then came the radical notion, which Stanton insisted upon, that women gain the vote.
The delegates thought that the demand would overshadow all the less controversial resolutions. Stanton rejected their timidity, saying at the meeting, as she wrote years later, “…to have drunkards, idiots, horse-racing rum-selling rowdies, ignorant foreigners and silly boys fully recognized while we ourselves are thrust out from all the rights that belong to citizens is too grossly insulting to be longer quietly submitted to. The right is ours. Have it we must. Use it we will.”
The resolution still may have gone down in flames, but the writer, former slave and altogether magnificent American Frederick Douglass was in attendance. He stood, thundering, “The power to choose rulers and make laws is the right by which all others would be secured.” In a stirring oration, Douglass urged support, something he looked back on with pride until the end of his days. With his help, the suffrage resolution passed - barely. Ultimately, the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, summarizing the problems women faced, was signed by 68 women and 32 men.
Repercussions were swift. Clergy were horrified. Editorials sputtered against the idea that women should have the vote, one calling the resolution, “The most shocking and unnatural incident ever recorded in the history of womanity.” Many withdrew their support and asked that their names be taken off the Declaration.
Yet a movement was born and the idea of woman suffrage grew. Mott soon regretted that she had ever urged her “Lizzie” to quell the stirring of her radical heart. She wrote a sweet letter to Stanton a few years later. “In thy coming work thou must do thyself justice. Remember the first convention originated with thee.”
In years to come, credit for the idea would often be misplaced. Mott’s role was inflated, something she worried about during her lifetime. I was startled to look up the Woman’s Rights Convention in an encyclopedia only to see a picture of Susan B. Anthony dominating the article. Anthony didn’t attend the meeting and didn’t meet Stanton until 1851.
It was Elizabeth Cady Stanton who lit the fire of the movement. Yet it was also the humiliating experience of the London meeting in 1840 that spurred her on, beginning not just the American feminist movement, but the British women’s rights movement as well. Anne Knight, an English woman in attendance, was just as angry as Stanton over the contempt men heaped upon them. She wrote a woman’s suffrage leaflet in 1847 and formed a woman’s suffrage organization in Sheffield in1851.
America owes an enormous debt to the 1848 Woman’s Rights Convention. But it also teaches a lesson for those who would humiliate women, then and now. The meeting in 1840 is remembered just as much for its attempts to silence women as to free the slave. It united women around the world to claim their rights.
Sadly, those who oppose the rights of women are still legion. But like our radical foremothers, we will be heard.
Editor’s note: Material for this article was gathered from several books, among them, “In her own right: The life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” by Elisabeth Griffith; “Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in 19th Century America,” by Carol Faulkner; “The Ladies of Seneca Falls,” by Miriam Gurko; “Eighty Years & More: Reminiscences: 1815-1897,” by Elizabeth Cady Stanton; along with assorted other books and articles.
Thanks for this new hilarious word: “The most shocking and unnatural incident ever recorded in the history of womanity." May the spirit of Seneca Falls and "womanity" rise up in the 2024 election!
Thanks for this piece, Maura. I have shared it with many friends to include founders and staff of the Jeannette Rankin Foundation. Ms. Rankin was the first woman elected to Congress. She worked hard for suffrage, and she was the first woman to lead the effort for suffrage in the United States House of Representatives. Here's a link to a summary describing her efforts: https://history.house.gov/Blog/2018/January/1-10-Suffrage-Committee/