Today's History: The Seneca Falls Convention

The Library of Congress provided the following information:

On July 19, 1848, the Seneca Falls Convention convened. Heralded as the first American women’s rights convention, the two day event was held in the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York. The convention had been advertised on July 11, 1848 in the Seneca County Courier. Despite the minimal amount of publicity , there were an estimated 300 attendees at the inaugural meeting. It is not surprising that many of the convention attendees lived locally, as there were a number of abolitionists living nearby. Many women and men working in the anti-slavery movement eventually became a part of the struggle to obtain equal rights for women. Convention organizer Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her husband Henry B. Stanton were both well-known and active abolitionists. In fact, all five women credited with organizing the Seneca Falls Convention were also active in the abolitionist movement.

Women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton made her first public speech on the initial day of the convention, which provided a framework with which to understand the purpose and goals of the Seneca Falls gathering:

"We are assembled to protest against a form of government, existing without the consent of the governed – to declare our right to be free as man is free, to be represented in the government which we are taxed to support, to have such disgraceful laws as give man the power to chastise and imprison his wife, to take the wages which she earns, the property which she inherits, and, in case of separation, the children of her love; laws test against such unjust laws as these that we are assembled today, and to have them, if possible, forever erased from our statute-books, deeming them as a shame and a disgrace to a Christian republic in the nineteenth century.…"

In addition to her speech, Elizabeth Cady Stanton also read aloud the Declaration of Sentiments, which was then discussed at length. The Declaration of Sentiments was modeled after the Declaration of Independence, but with the express goal of granting women the rights and freedoms that the Declaration of Independence granted to men. On the second day of the convention, the resolutions would again be debated over and put to a vote. Notably, while only women were allowed to attend the first day of the Seneca Falls Convention, the general public, including men, were invited to participate in the second day.