jul 19, 1848 - The first women's rights convention is held

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The Seneca Falls Convention was the first women’s rights convention in the United States.

Held at Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York. The Seneca Falls Convention fought for the social, civil and religious rights of women and launched the women’s suffrage movement.

Despite scarce publicity, 300 people (mostly area residents) attended. On the first day, only women were allowed to attend (the second day was open to men).

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the meeting’s organizers, began with a speech on the convention’s goals and purpose:

“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.”

The convention proceeded to discuss the 11 resolutions on women’s rights. All passed unanimously except for the ninth resolution, which demanded the right to vote for women. Stanton and African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass gave impassioned speeches in its defense before it eventually (and barely) passed.

The five women who organized the Seneca Falls Convention were also active in the abolitionist movement, which called for an end to slavery and racial discrimination. They included:

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a leading women’s rights advocate who was a driving organizer of the Seneca Falls Convention. Stanton first became invested in women’s rights after talking to her father, a law professor, and his students. She studied at Troy Female Seminary and worked on women’s property rights reform in the early 1840s.

Lucretia Mott, a Quaker preacher from Philadelphia, was known for her anti-slavery, women’s rights and religious reform activism.
Mary M’Clintock, the daughter of Quaker anti-slavery, temperance and women’s rights activists. In 1833, M’Clintock and Mott organized the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. At the Seneca Falls Convention, M’Clintock was appointed secretary.

Martha Coffin Wright, Lucretia Mott’s sister. In addition to being a lifelong proponent of women’s rights, she was an abolitionist who ran a station on the Underground Railroad from her Auburn, New York, home.
Jane Hunt, another Quaker activist, was a member of M’Clintock’s extended family through marriage.

Stanton and Mott first met in London in 1840, where they were attending the World Anti-Slavery Convention with their husbands. When the convention excluded women delegates solely based on their sex, the pair resolved to hold a women’s rights convention.

Back in the United States, women’s rights reformers had already begun contending for women’s rights to speak out on moral and political issues beginning in the 1830s. Around the same time in New York, where Stanton lived, legal reformers had been discussing equality and challenging state laws prohibiting married women from owning property. By 1848, equal rights for women was a divisive issue.

In July of 1848, Stanton, frustrated with her role staying at home raising kids, convinced Mott, Wright and M’Clintock to help organize the Seneca Falls Convention and write its main manifesto, the Declaration of Sentiments.

Together, the five women drafted a notice to announce “a Convention to discuss the social, civic and religious condition and rights of Woman” around Hunt’s tea table.

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