Essay 9-C: The Seneca Falls Convention And Founding Documents

Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

At Seneca Falls, New York, a convention of men and women invoked the spirit of American reform.

Many Revolutionary Patriots, such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, called for the observance of their “unalienable Rights.” The founders of the United States and later the framers of the Constitution excluded women from the language of the Revolution. Abigail Adams, the wife of John Adams, the second president of the United States, called for women to have a representative voice in the new government.

It was in this age that the concept of republican motherhood matured fully. A republic, it was argued, depended on the rule of virtuous leaders. The mothers of the new republic were charged with rearing a moral citizenry and producing virtuous leaders. The republic depended not only on republican motherhood. In this limited capacity, women still acquired, albeit indirectly, a political role, for they trained virtuous leaders who ensured the success of the republic.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, British and French authors argued similarly. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed public life and virtuous womanhood were irreconcilable; the former distracted from performing the duties of the latter. Influenced by Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, a British author, argued in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) that motherhood provided the basis for female citizenship. She also called for the education of both sexes.

After the ratification of the U.S. Constitution (1789), women played key roles in various reform movements during the antebellum era (1820-1860). They became involved in the abolition movement and the temperance movement, to name two examples. A byproduct during this age of reform was the women’s rights movement. But for many female reformers, the abolition and women’s rights movement addressed the same problems.

The friendship between Mott and Stanton started in England and resulted in the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments. In 1840, Stanton and Mott attended the World Antislavery Conference in London. Although Mott was a delegate for the American Anti-Slavery Society, she was refused a seat in the assembly. So, too, was Stanton. Both had to sit in the balcony and were not allowed to speak. Even more, there was a curtain that kept them from being seen. Both had been humiliated and pledged to form a society that addressed the oppression that women dealt with on a daily basis.

Their idea was implemented in 1848. It took eight years because abolitionist leaders feared that Mott’s and Stanton’s idea might impede the effort to free slaves. Yet at Seneca Falls, New York on July 19-20,1848, approximately 300 people, male and female, met and debated women’s suffrage and discussed the possibility of women’s suffrage and all other matters that dealt with the “social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.” Stanton and Mott hoped to start the removal of what they deemed artificial boundaries, creating gendered and societal spheres. Many of the other delegates, like Mott, were “Quakers or glove makers,” persons, as historian Kathleen Brown describes, “whose religious convictions and participation in new forms of home production gave them a modern rather than traditional sensibility.” At the conclusion of the convention, the attendees had participated in the first formal women’s rights convention in the United States.

They purposefully used the language from the Declaration of Independence (1776) and incorporated it into the Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls. They asked not only for certain rights but also certain responsibilities, including being accountable for crimes. When asking for these rights and responsibilities, the women used descriptive phrasing when listing how they had been denied in a list of grievances. Here are a few passages:

“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course. . . .

He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.

He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.

He has withheld her rights, which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners. . . .

He has made her, if married, in the eyes of the law, civilly dead.”

The reaction was mixed across the United States. Some thought it was a precursor to communism, while some localities held their own convention with their local declarations. Newspapers covered the event, and it got the attention of a famous and nationally influential editor, Horace Greeley. What happened in Seneca Falls, New York, also influenced later reformers. Sojourner Truth and Susan B. Anthony are two examples.

In short, as historian Judith Wellman writes, “These women’s rights advocates patterned their document directly on the US Declaration of Independence.” Never shy, reformer Elizabeth Cady Stanton called the convention the “greatest rebellion the world has ever seen.”

Troy Kickler was the Founding Director of the North Carolina History Project and Editor of northcarolinahistory.org. He holds an M.S. in Social Studies Education from North Carolina A&T State University and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Tennessee.

Kickler is currently editor of Nathaniel Macon: Collected Letters and Speeches. He is also writing Black Children and Northern Missionaries, Southern Conservatives, Freedmen’s Bureau Agents, and Freedmen in Reconstruction Tennessee, 1865-1869. He has contributed to the anthology Children and Youth during the Civil War Era (New York University Press, January 2012; James Marten, ed.). He published with Notre Dame University Press and the University of North Carolina Press. His latest work was North Carolina’s Revolutionary Founders.

He has presented numerous papers at various conferences and forums, including the American Political Science Association and the Bradley Institute for the Study of Christian Culture.

In addition to contributing to constitutingamerica.org, he has served as editorial assistant for the Journal of East Tennessee History and has written articles and reviews for such publications as American Diplomacy, Carolina Journal,Journal of Mississippi History, Tennessee Baptist History, Tennessee Historical Quarterly, and The Journal of the North Carolina Association of Historians. He has also contributed to Exploring American History: From Colonial Times to 1877; Encyclopedia of American Environmental History; and The Old West: Yesterday and Today. He also has been the Colonial Records Editor of the State Archives of North Carolina.

Kickler has taught at North Carolina State University and Liberty University.

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