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.

ANTHONY AND STANTON | Statue Campaign

L to R: Stanton, Anthony, Mott.

March 12, 2018 – Gary Ferdman's birthday is today and he wants you to give money to his campaign to have statues erected in New York City memory of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the first of the two to become committed to the Votes for Women cause. Stanton was at the Seneca Falls Convention; Anthony was converted to the cause a couple of years later, although her Rochester-area Quaker family was long committed to the abolitionist movement.

Stanton met Lucretia Mott in London at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Conference and the were told that women should keep quiet and sit in a special section reserved for non-voting observers. They were outraged, but Lucretia Mott went back to Philadelphia where she was a famed Quaker orator. Stanton had several children in succession and found her life as a mother in Seneca Falls to be difficult.

There is no statue to Stanton or Anthony in New York City. Famously, the statues to women are of ancient Greek or Roman gods, or Mother Goose. Mott, Stanton and Anthony are remembered in a sculpture in the U.S. Capitol building. Edna St Vincent Millay, who married the widower of Inez Milholland, wrote a poem dedicated (in the printed version) to Inez Milholland, which she read out in 1923 at an unveiling of the statue. This is the ending of a play I wrote about Milholland that was read at a fund-raiser in Vienna, Va. in 2017.

Millay and Milholland were both New Yorkers in the sense of New York City dwellers (Milholland was born in Brooklyn and lived there and on Madison Square; Millay became a Greenwich Village aficionado). It would be just as appropriate in due course to have monuments to these great women in the City. Millay was a student at Vassar when Milholland visited the college as an alumna with her husband, my mother's uncle, at Vassar's 50th Anniversary.

I have donated toward the erection of the statues to Stanton and Anthony. My second contribution is this appeal, in addition to the one I posted in 2016. Please give!

VOTES FOR WOMEN | July 19–Seneca Falls Convention

Site of Wesleyan Chapel, Seneca Falls.

At the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, N.Y., a woman’s rights convention–the first ever held in the United States–convened in 1848 with almost 200 women in attendance.

Why It Was Organized

The convention was initiated by Quaker Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, previously united in opposition to slavery.

They first met at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. Even though Mott was a full delegate, both Mott and Stanton were barred from the convention floor because they were women. Their anger flared and then simmered for eight years.

When Mott visited Stanton in 1848, they arranged for a tea at the home of Mary Ann McClintock. Also attending were Martha Wright and Jane Hunt. Together the group decided to advertise (on July 14 in the Seneca County Courier) a women’s conference to be held at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls. The announcement read:

A Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women will be held in the Wesleyan Chapel, at Seneca Falls, N.Y., on Wednesday and Thursday, the 19th and 20th of July current; commencing at 10 o’clock A.M. During the first day the meeting will be exclusively for women, who are earnestly invited to attend. The public generally are invited to be present on the second day, when Lucretia Mott, of Philadelphia, and other ladies and gentlemen, will address the Convention. 

What Happened

On July 19, 200 women and some men convened at the Chapel, and Stanton read the “Declaration of Sentiments and Grievances,” which she had drafted over the previous few days, modeled on the American Declaration of Independence, which in turn is widely believed to have been modeled on the 1320 Scottish Declaration of Arbroath. The preamble of Stanton's Declaration began:

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… 

The Declaration of Sentiments and Grievances detailed injustices to U.S. women and called upon women to petition for their rights. The men who attended the first day, even though they were only invited for the second day, were allowed to stay. One of them spoke–Frederick Douglass, who urged the women to introduce the suffrage demand.  Stanton favored it, but Mott was opposed.

On the second day the Declaration of Sentiments and Grievances was adopted and signed by the assembly. The convention also passed 12 resolutions–11 unanimously–which called for specific equal rights for women. The ninth resolution, on suffrage (“It is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise”) was the one of the 12 that was passed over opposing arguments.

The Seneca Falls Convention was followed two weeks later by a larger meeting in Rochester, N.Y. After 72 years, the 19th Amendment was adopted in 1920, recognizing the Federal rights of American adult women to vote.

Related Posts

Inez Milholland—Herald Uniform . Her Engagement to Marconi . Short Biopic on Her

TAKE UP THE SONG | Music

Dedication of the Portrait Monument,
at which Millay presented a poem.

I am looking again at the Take Up the Song Play that was produced in 1998 in Rochester, N.Y.

It might be feasible in a new production to use music for the sonnet "Take Up the Song" by Edna St Vincent Millay, upon rededication of the Portrait Monument of Stanton, Anthony and Mott.

But so far I have only found a somber composition by James Q. Mulholland. Take Up The Song | 10-96395 - Colla Voce Music. I think it needs something celebratory. Marching, something like "John Brown's Body".

HomeCatalogJames Mulholland Choral SeriesTake Up The Song | 10-96395. Take Up The Song | 10-96395. Take Up The Song. from "Mementos Of Millay" ...

"Take up the Song (forget the Epitaph)" by James Mulholland - YouTube

▶ 6:23

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0Xzv5gc4JQ

Apr 15, 2012 - Uploaded by adcahela

The Southern Miss Concert Choir performed "Take up the Song (forget the Epitaph)", from "Mementos of ...

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