Victory for the Vote. Doris Weatherford
and others—including husbands and children—they first perused documents from meetings they had attended for the causes of temperance, abolition, and even peace. All, however, “seemed too tame and pacific for the inauguration of a rebellion such as the world had never before seen.” Indeed, there was no precedent. From family roles (and unspoken family violence) to the dearth of educational and employment opportunities to the almost complete lack of legal rights and much more, women had problems that no male agenda had ever begun to envision, let alone address.
Finally they hit upon the right format: the nation’s Declaration of Independence, which was then 72 years old. Ironically, it would turn out to be exactly another 72 years later, in 1920, when women finally received full enfranchisement. The women’s Declaration of Independence thus fell at a precise midpoint of a female version of American history. Of course, those who wrote the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments had no way of foreseeing this long future. Instead, they set about their task with inspiration and even the good humor that comes with the excitement of doing something that will surprise and possibly shock. Stanton wrote later:
It was at once decided to adopt the historic document, with some slight changes such as substituting “all men” for “King George.” Knowing that women must have more to complain of than men under any circumstances possibly could, and seeing the Fathers had eighteen grievances, a protracted search was made through statute books, church usages, and the customs of society to find that exact number. Several well-disposed men assisted in collecting the grievances, until, with the announcement of the eighteenth, the women felt they had enough to go before the world with a good case. One youthful lord remarked, “Your grievances must be grievous indeed, when you are obliged to go to books in order to find them out.”
In just three days, these remarkable women had decided to hold a “convention”—without the delegate selection process that precedes most such gatherings—and made all the arrangements for planning it, publicizing it, and preparing an agenda for it. Their declaration was as dramatic as the more famous one Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues had prepared. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was analogous to Jefferson as the document’s chief author. With no resources beyond paper, pencil, pens dipped in inkwells, and their powerful intelligence, they framed their thoughts as eternal truths.
The declaration was ready for discussion when “the eventful day dawned at last,” but those in charge on the morning of July 19, 1848, felt a last-minute panic: the doors of the Wesleyan Methodist church in Seneca Falls, where the meeting was to be held, were firmly locked. One of Stanton’s nephews—the son of her sister Harriet Cady Eaton and “an embryo Professor of Yale College”—was boosted through a window and opened the chapel from the inside.
Meanwhile, crowds headed through the town. On a Wednesday morning in July, when they could have been cultivating or mowing or doing any number of the tasks that had to be packed into summer weekdays, some 300 people (of an approximate 8,000 living in Seneca Falls) chose instead to participate in this wildly unusual meeting. Women walked or, in many cases, persuaded their husbands to hitch up the horses to take them to town. The latter was so often true that dozens of men were present, and the leaders decided to ignore their own newspaper announcement that said the first day’s discussion would be limited to women. Because so many men were at the church, the women quickly decided that they could remain. In this reversal of their original plans, the women’s rights movement accepted an important principle from the beginning: feminism is not necessarily defined by gender.
Confronted by an unexpectedly large crowd, most of the women rapidly felt the inadequacy of their leadership training. Because of the taboo against public speaking by women and because, outside of the Quaker meeting house, and a handful of female anti-slavery societies, there were no women’s organizations, none had experience in parliamentary procedure or the fundamentals of running a meeting. They “shrank from the responsibility of organizing the meeting and leading the discussions,” Stanton said, and held “a hasty council around the altar.” Because experienced men were “already on the spot,” they decided that “this was an occasion when men might make themselves pre-eminently useful.” Men could “take the laboring oar through the Convention.”
This engraving from Harper’s Weekly parodies the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. (Library of Congress)
Lucretia Mott, who was “accustomed to public speaking in the Society of Friends, stated the objects of the Convention,” while her husband James, as Stanton later described him, stood “tall and dignified, in Quaker costume” as he presided. Frederick Douglass, a decade out of slavery and a recent resident of Rochester, joined in leading the discussion. Mary M’Clintock was appointed secretary—but she did not limit herself to secretarial duty; both she and her sister Elizabeth M’Clintock read “well-written” speeches. Stanton displayed her early talent in doing the same, while Martha Wright “read some satirical articles she had published in the daily papers answering the diatribes on women’s sphere.” Among the male presenters was Ansel Bascom, a recent delegate to a state constitutional convention, who thus was well qualified to speak to women’s property rights. Samuel Tillman, a young law student, had researched a “most exasperating” set of English and American statutes related to women, all of which demonstrated “the tender mercies of men toward their wives, in taking care of their property and protecting them in their civil rights.”
The meat of the convention was debate on the Declaration of Sentiments. After two days, “the only resolution that was not unanimously adopted was the ninth,” the one favoring the vote for women. Even longtime liberal Lucretia Mott did not favor this resolution, because she agreed with those who “feared a demand for the right to vote would defeat the others they deemed more rational, and make the whole movement ridiculous.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass, however, insisted that without this fundamental right to participate in government, the principle of equality for women would never be taken seriously. After long discussion, the resolution “at last carried by a small majority.” The document was signed by exactly 100 participants: 32 men and 68 women. Just one of them, 19-year-old Charlotte Woodward, would live to see the centerpiece of the declaration achieved: only she was still alive to vote in 1920.
Although they talked for two days in Seneca Falls, “there were still so many new points for discussion,” according to Stanton, that the excited participants planned a follow-up meeting for the big city of Rochester. It was to be held just two weeks later, on August 2, 1848. This time the Committee of Arrangement was composed of Amy Post, Sarah D. Fish, Sarah C. Owen, and Mary H. Hallowell—none of whom had worked with the original planners. So untapped were these women’s talents, however, that the Rochester organizers had no trouble setting precedents of their own.
The meeting, which was scheduled for the city’s Unitarian Church, was “so well advertised in the daily papers” that when the day came, it “was filled to overflowing.” The women’s personal growth also was exponential; they had gained enough confidence that they undertook the parliamentary offices at this meeting. James Mott was present and ready to preside again, but the night before the meeting, Amy Post, Sarah Fish, and Rhoda DeGarmo undertook to persuade Abigail Bush to assume the leadership. According to Bush, her old friends “commenced to prove that the hour had come when a woman should preside, and led me into the church.” Much later, she would say: “No one knows what I passed through on that occasion. I was born and baptized in the old Scotch Presbyterian church. At that time its sacred teachings were, ‘If a woman would know anything let her ask her husband.’ ” Somewhere, however, she found courage.
Amy Post called the packed house to order and nominated Abigail Bush for president, with Laura Murray as vice president, and three women—Elizabeth M’Clintock, Sarah Hallowell, and Catherine A.F. Stebbins—as secretaries. Elizabeth Cady Stanton later wrote that she, “Mrs. Mott, and Mrs. McClintock [sic] thought it a most hazardous experiment to have a woman President, and stoutly opposed it.” The original leadership was “on the verge of leaving the Convention in disgust,” Stanton said, “but Amy Post and Rhoda de Garmo assured them” that a woman “could also preside at a public meeting, if they would but make the experiment.” Those in attendance voted, a majority agreed, and