Stanton and Mott open a women's rights convention in Seneca Falls; 300 gather at the Wesleyan Chapel
Until a law passed earlier that year, married women in New York could not own the property they brought into a marriage; even after the law, wives elsewhere still could not vote, sit on juries, or sign contracts in their own name. On July 19, 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott (a Philadelphia Quaker visiting the area), and local Quaker organizers opened a two-day convention at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, drawing roughly 300 people. The first day was intended to be closed to men, though about forty attended anyway; the Declaration of Sentiments, a document modeled on the Declaration of Independence, was read and debated on the first day and formally adopted and signed on the second, ultimately gathering 100 signatures. Its most contested line demanded the vote for women.
Seneca Falls launched organized suffrage activism in America: the Declaration of Sentiments, adopted there, laid out demands the movement would spend seventy-two years pursuing before the Nineteenth Amendment passed. Frederick Douglass, its only Black attendee, argued he could not in good conscience accept his own right to vote while women were denied theirs, linking the abolitionist and suffrage causes in a way that continued to play out in reform politics for decades.
QWhy did a boy have to climb through a window before the convention could even begin?
When organizers arrived at the Wesleyan Chapel on the morning of July 19, they found the doors locked with no key in sight. Rather than delay the country's first women's rights convention, they lifted Daniel, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's young nephew, through an open window so he could climb inside and unbar the doors from within. The building itself had been financed in part by local reformer Richard Hunt, and it was reportedly the only large hall in the area willing to host such a gathering at all.
QWhat did local newspapers predict would happen to American households if women got the vote?
The Oneida Whig warned that if women insisted on voting and legislating, readers should brace for the loss of their dinners and their elbow room at the table. The Lowell Courier went further, picturing husbands forced to wash dishes, scour floors, and darn stockings while their wives were off at the polls. Not every editor scoffed: Horace Greeley's New York Tribune conceded that a sincere republican could offer no honest reason to deny women the same political rights men claimed for themselves.
