American Women Demand Their Rights

America's women's rights pioneers: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony

July 19, 1848 — The first formal meeting in America of dedicated feminists was held on this day and came to be known as the Seneca Falls Convention. They discussed the “social, civil and religious rights of women.”

The driving force behind it was 32-year-old Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She was the daughter of a judge and wife of Henry Stanton, a noted slavery abolitionist politician.

Standing alongside her was Lucretia Mott, a liberal Quaker preacher and an accomplished public speaker in the American abolitionist movement. She was also disillusioned by the lack of women’s rights.

Stanton and Mott met eight years earlier in London where Stanton was on honeymoon and with her new husband had chosen to attend a World Anti-Slavery Convention. Both women were outraged when they were prevented from speaking at the event simply because of their sex. The credentials committee had ruled that women were “constitutionally unfit for public and business meetings.”

Back in the United States, women faced similar prejudices. They could not vote and their property – if they owned any in their own name – was under the control of their husbands. They could not sit on juries and were paid considerably less for doing the same job as men – if they could get the work.

After marriage, women ceased to be independent legal beings and at the time of the convention many American women were devoid of all rights.

Mott had grown up “so thoroughly imbued with women’s rights,” she later admitted, “that it was the most important question of my life from a very early age.”

Stanton wrote: “When I first heard from her lips that I had the same right to think for myself that Luther, Calvin and John Knox had, and the same right to be guided by my own convictions, I felt a new born sense of dignity and freedom.” The two women became firm friends.

They were both guests on July 13 1848 at a tea party in New York, also attended, among others, by Mary Ann McClintock, wife of a Quaker minister. Stanton wrote later: “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.”

Inspired, those present agreed to hold a women’s convention the following week. A notice was posted in the Seneca County Courier.

On the following Sunday, July 16, a planning session was held at Mary Ann McClintock’s house where she, two of her daughters and Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted a document called the Declaration of Sentiments. Modelled on the Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Jefferson 72 years earlier, it declared:

“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 . . .”

When Stanton insisted upon including a resolution demanding voting rights for women, her otherwise supportive husband threatened to boycott the event. Even Lucretia Mott warned: “Why, Lizzie, thee will make us ridiculous!”

But Stanton stood firm and later explained her reasons: “To have the rights of drunkards, idiots, horse-racing, rum-selling rowdies, ignorant foreigners, and silly boys fully recognised, whilst we ourselves are thrust out from all the rights that belong to citizens — it is too grossly insulting to the dignity of woman to be longer quietly submitted to. The right is ours, have it we must — use it we will.”

* Charlotte Woodward, a 19-year-old glovemaker, read the announcement in the Courier and drove a horse-drawn wagon to the Wesleyan Methodist chapel in the upstate New York town of Seneca Falls eager to learn what it was all about. There she found a small, remote farming and manufacturing community in New York’s Finger Lakes district.

About 300 attended the convention, mostly ordinary people like Charlotte Woodward. One hundred of them – 68 women (including Woodward) and 32 men – signed the final draft of the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions. Women’s rights as a separate reform movement had been born.

Ironically, although the gathering was a convention for and of women, it was considered “unseemly” for a woman to conduct a public meeting, so Lucretia’s husband, James Mott, agreed to chair the two-day event. Mary Ann McClintock’s husband, Thomas, also took part.

Another major milestone in the campaign for women’s rights came in 1851 when Stanton met Quaker reformer Susan B. Anthony. They formed a life-long friendship and political partnership.

Virtually homebound because of her growing family, Stanton wrote articles, speeches and letters; Anthony, who never married, traveled the country lecturing and organizing.

Stanton later wrote: “I forged the thunderbolts and she fired them.” Susan B. Anthony’s name was to become synonymous with women’s rights.

The 19th Amendment to the US Constitution giving women the right to vote was ratified on August 18, 1920. The presidential election of Warren G. Harding in November that year was therefore the first time women could go to the polls.

* Charlotte Woodward, then 91 years old and married with the name of Pierce, was the only signer of the Seneca Falls Declaration to be alive when this milestone was reached. Sadly, because she was bedridden and nearly blind she was unable to cast her vote. Elizabeth Cady Stanton had died of heart failure in 1902, aged 86.

Published: July 11, 2022
Updated: March 21, 2024