Seneca Falls Convention

Seneca Falls Convention, assembly held on July 19–20, 1848, in the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, that launched the women’s suffrage movement in the United States. Seneca Falls was the home of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who, along with Lucretia Mott, conceived of and directed the convention. The convention’s resulting “Declaration of Sentiments,” which outlined the rights American women should be entitled to as citizens, is a foundational document in the history of the U.S. women’s rights movement.

Impetus and organization

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Organizers Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton first met at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. Mott, a Quaker minister and abolitionist from Philadelphia, was an official delegate to the convention, and Stanton and her husband, Henry Brewster Stanton, were in London on their honeymoon. Upon arrival at the convention, the women discovered that, because of their sex, they were not welcome to participate in the proceedings and were told that they could quietly listen to the discussion from a roped-off women-only section. The event solidified their determination to engage in the struggle for equal rights, and the two pledged to hold a convention to advocate for the rights of women.

On July 9, 1848, Mott, Stanton, Mary Ann M’Clintock, Martha Coffin Wright (Mott’s sister), and Jane Hunt gathered for tea at Hunt’s home in Waterloo, New York. M’Clintock, Wright, and Hunt, were, like Mott, members of the Society of Friends (Quakers), a religious group committed to simplicity, honesty, equality, and community. Nevertheless, the Quaker women were frustrated, as was Stanton, with the overall position of women in American society. In her autobiography Eighty Years and More (1898), Stanton would later write:

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I poured out, that day, the torrent of my long-accumulating discontent, with such vehemence and indignation that I stirred myself, as well as the rest of the party, to do and dare anything. My discontent, according to [Ralph Waldo] Emerson, must have been healthy, for it moved us all to prompt action, and we decided, then and there, to call a “Woman’s Rights Convention.”

An advertisement to “discuss the social, civil and religious condition and rights of Woman” was published just days later in the Seneca County Courier. Seneca Falls’ Wesleyan Chapel, a home church for progressive activists, was chosen as the convention’s location, as it had previously hosted political rallies and anti-slavery lectures. On July 16 the women met again, this time in M’Clintock’s parlor, to draft an agenda, and Stanton provided primary authorship for a “Declaration of Sentiments,” a detailing of their grievances that would become one of the foundational documents in the history of the U.S. women’s rights movement. (The table on which the “Declaration of Sentiments” was written is now in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.)

“Greatest rebellion the world has ever seen”

Over the course of the convention’s two days, an estimated 300 people participated, an unsurprising attendance number given the large community of abolitionists and progressive reformers that lived in the vicinity of Seneca Falls. On July 19, the first day of the assembly, only women were invited to attend—M’Clintock was appointed secretary, Mott provided opening remarks, and Stanton read the “Declaration of Sentiments.” The statement was closely patterned after the Declaration of Independence and itemized women’s oppression in politics, marriage, the law, education, and employment. Following discussion, the assembled women signed the declaration, and resolutions for reform were presented.

(Read the full transcript of the “Declaration of Sentiments,” a list of the signatories to the declaration, and the resolutions for reform presented and adopted by the convention.)

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The next day men were invited to join the convention, James Mott, the husband of Lucretia Mott, served as chair, and the declaration and resolutions were read to the men. Following debate, the convention passed 12 resolutions—11 unanimously—designed to gain certain rights and privileges that women of the era were denied. The ninth resolution—“Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise”—demanded the right to vote and narrowly passed upon the insistence of Stanton. In the end, 68 women and 32 men signed the “Declaration of Sentiments,” although many of the signatories later withdrew their names because of the intense ridicule and criticism they received after the document was made public. It nonetheless served as the foundation of the U.S. women’s suffrage movement, which culminated in ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, a critical milestone in U.S. voting rights history. Stanton would later refer to the Seneca Falls Convention as “the greatest rebellion the world has ever seen.”

Legacy

The Seneca Falls Convention and the “Declaration of Sentiments” have served as historical touchstones for American feminists and women’s rights activists, and the sites in Seneca Falls have become places of pilgrimage. After she secured the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in the 2016 election and became the first woman to be the nominee of a major party in the United States, Hillary Clinton referenced the historical importance of the convention in a speech at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, saying, “Tonight’s victory is not about one person. It belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible. In our country, it started right here in New York, a place called Seneca Falls.”

In 1980 the U.S. Congress established the Women’s Rights National Historical Park with the mission “to preserve and interpret for the education, inspiration and benefit of present and future generations, the nationally significant historical and cultural sites, structures, and events associated with the struggle for equal rights for women.” Managed by the National Park Service, the park’s sites, located in Seneca Falls and Waterloo, include a visitors’ center and Declaration Park, the Wesleyan Chapel, the historic homes of Jane Hunt, Mary Ann and Thomas M’Clintock, and “the center of the rebellion”—the former home of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.