SENECA FALLS | Convention Opened July 19, 1848

Lucretia Mott

July 19, 2020—This day in 1848 the Seneca Falls Convention opened, the first Convention on Women's Rights.

When the organizers of the convention (Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others) arrived at the Wesleyan Church in Seneca Falls, New York before the event that morning, they found:

• A small crowd of women already waiting. The church was locked. Someone helped Stanton's nephew through a window, and he unlocked the church.
• Men, who had been invited only to the second day of the conference.

The women decided to let the men stay, provided they held off talking until the second day.

One of the men who was waiting was former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. He had run an announcement of the event in his Rochester-based paper, The North Star.

The five Convention organizers (Lucretia Mott and three other Quakers, plus Elizabeth Cady Stanton) had drafted started drafting a women's Declaration of Independence,  starting "All men and women are created equal." Stanton took the document home with her and drafted what she called a Declaration of Sentiments with "injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman" and 11 resolutions calling for religious, economic and political equality. The ninth resolution called for women to be given the vote.

Mott was not in favor of this. She feared it went too far. "Lizzie," she said, "thee will make us ridiculous."

Stanton held firm, and the resolution stayed in. Stanton took the podium for the evening session, and she compellingly placed the struggle for women's rights in the tradition of the other reforms like the temperance and anti-slavery movements.

Frederick Douglass was the only African American person attending. He spoke up, saying, "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 comments were part of the suffrage play that I wrote that was featured at an event in Vienna, Virginia sponsored by the Turning Point Suffrage Memorial in 2017.

Eventually, one hundred people signed the Declaration of Sentiments.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in her diary, many years later: "We are sowing winter wheat which the coming spring will see sprout and which other hands than ours will reap and enjoy."

It would be 72 years before women would be granted the right to vote––and effectively, it was only white women who were effectively granted that privilege, because of state laws that restricted voting by African Americans.

Only one of the signers of the original Declaration of Sentiments was still living in 1920. Charlotte Woodward, who had been 19 and working in a glove factory in 1848, was too ill to vote.

SENECA FALLS | First Day, July 19

July 19–This day in 1848 the Seneca Falls Convention opened, convened because of the meeting of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who lived there, and Lucretia Mott, who was a visiting preacher for the Quakers.

Stanton and Mott had met eight years before in London, when both accompanied their husbands to an Abolitionist conference. They were told to sit in the balcony and keep quiet.

They seethed for eight years as Stanton raised her three sons and Mott honed her speaking skills at Quaker meetings.

The 150th anniversary of the convention was celebrated in several places in 1998. The best-attended of the celebrations appears to have been in the Geva Theater in Rochester, the nearest big city to Seneca Falls.

The theater, which holds 550 people, was filled. There was a standing ovation for the show, which featured a pageant showing how the spark of the convention lit the fire of woman suffrage that eventually spread across the United States. Roberta Wallace played the part of Inez Milholland. The three-term Mayor of Rochester, Bill Johnson, played the part of Frederick Douglass, who championed votes for women until after the Civil War. It then came down to a choice between universal male suffrage and votes for white women, and Douglass chose universal male suffrage. It took until 1920 for women to get the vote.

Back in 1848, there was no record of women voting in public elections that Elizabeth Stanton was aware of. (Actually women voted in some colonies and states. They voted in some New England town meetings before 1776.  Women owning property could vote in New Jersey for many years starting in 1776.  The Kingdom of Hawaii had universal suffrage starting in 1840, but years later it was cut back to male property-owners.)

When Elizabeth Cady Stanton suggested that women should seek the vote as one of their demands, Lucretia Mott responded: "Lizzie, thee will make us ridiculous."

Douglass disagreed. He was one of 40 men who showed up at the convention on the first day, July 19, despite the specific notation in the announcement that the first day was "exclusively for women". Men were admitted but were told they could not speak on the first day. Douglass spoke anyway, arguing that women should seek the vote because without the vote they would never have any power to redress violations of whatever rights they might claim.

Related Posts: Turning Point Suffrage Memorial . 100th anniversary of the 1913 March on Washington . June 11, 2017, Play Featuring Suffrage Leaders