Seneca Falls Convention: First Women’s Rights Convention

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The announcement of an upcoming ‘Woman’s Rights Convention’ in the Seneca County Courier was small, but it attracted Charlotte Woodward’s attention. On the morning of July 19, 1848, the 19-year-old glove maker drove in a horse-drawn wagon to the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel in the upstate New York town of Seneca Falls. To her surprise, Woodward found dozens of other women and a group of men waiting to enter the chapel, all of them as eager as she to learn what a discussion of ‘the social, civil, and religious rights of women’ might produce.

The convention was the brainchild of 32-year-old Elizabeth Cady Stanton, daughter of Margaret and Judge Daniel Cady and wife of Henry Stanton, a noted abolitionist politician. Born in Johnstown, New York, Cady Stanton demonstrated both an intellectual bent and a rebellious spirit from an early age. Exposed to her father’s law books as well as his conservative views on women, she objected openly to the legal and educational disadvantages under which women of her day labored. In 1840 she provoked her father by marrying Stanton, a handsome, liberal reformer and further defied convention by deliberately omitting the word ‘obey’ from her wedding vows.

Marriage to Henry Stanton brought Elizabeth Cady Stanton–she insisted on retaining her maiden name–into contact with other independent-minded women. The newlyweds spent their honeymoon at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London where, much to their chagrin, women delegates were denied their seats and deprived of a voice in the proceedings. Banished to a curtained visitors’ gallery, the seven women listened in stunned silence as the London credentials committee charged that they were ‘constitutionally unfit for public and business meetings.’ It was an insult Cady Stanton never forgot.

Among the delegates was Lucretia Coffin Mott, a liberal Hicksite Quaker preacher and an accomplished public speaker in the American abolitionist movement, who was also disillusioned by the lack of rights granted women. A mother of six, Mott had grown up on Nantucket Island,’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.’ In Mott, Cady Stanton found both an ally and a role model. ‘When I first heard from her lips that I had the same right to think for myself that Luther, Calvin and John Knox had,’ she recalled, ‘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 fast friends and talked about the need for a convention to discuss women’s emancipation. Eight years passed, however, before they fulfilled their mutual goal.

For the first years of her marriage, Cady Stanton settled happily into middle-class domestic life, first in Johnstown and subsequently in Boston, then the hub of reformist activity. She delighted in being part of her husband’s stimulating circle of reformers and intellectuals and gloried in motherhood; over a 17-year period she bore seven children. In 1847, however, the Stantons moved to Seneca Falls, a small, remote farming and manufacturing community in New York’s Finger Lakes district. After Boston, life in Seneca Falls with its routine household duties seemed dull to Cady Stanton, and she renewed her protest against the conditions that limited women’s lives. ‘My experience at the World Anti-provided the opportunity to take action.

On July 13 Cady Stanton received an invitation to a tea party at the home of Jane and Richard Hunt, wealthy Quakers living in Waterloo, New York, just three miles west of Seneca Falls. There she again met Mott, her younger sister, Martha Coffin Wright, and Mary Ann McClintock, wife of the Waterloo Hicksite Quaker minister. At tea, Cady Stanton poured out to the group ‘the torrent of my long-accumulating discontent.’ Then and there, they decided to schedule a women’s ‘convention’ for the following week. Hoping to attract a large audience, they placed an unsigned notice in the Courier, advertising Lucretia Mott as the featured speaker.

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Tags: American History, Politics, Social History, Women's History

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