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First Ever Women’s Convention 160th Anniversary This Weekend

Local Libraries Commemorate Event with Displays

Story by Bernadette Cahill

All this week, both the Watauga County Public Library and the Blowing Rock Community Library have displayed books about women’s history and specifically about the long struggle women had to become full citizens of the United States.
The displays commemorate the 160th anniversary on July 19 and 20 of the first women’s convention ever in the world, a gathering that rocked public opinion because those attending endorsed a resolution that supported women’s right to vote.

The convention took place in 1848 at Seneca Falls, N.Y. where Elizabeth Cady Stanton lived.

At a social gathering—tea with Lucretia Mott, the slavery abolitionist who was visiting her Quaker friend Jane Hunt—Stanton commented about women’s status in the republic. Two other women with Quaker backgrounds, Mary Ann McClintock and Lucretia Mott’s younger sister, Martha Coffin Wright were also present.
“I poured out…the torrent of my long-accumulating discontent, with such vehemence and indignation that I stirred myself as well as the rest of the party to do and dare anything,” wrote Stanton later of what sounds like the first women’s consciousness-raising group.

Stanton and Mott had first talked of a women’s convention in 1840 when, at the international Anti-Slavery Convention in London, women were denied seating as delegates. Now, in 1848—a year of revolution in Europe—the time had come.
Once they had the convention planned, the women were unsure about what to do next. They sat around McClintock’s parlor table in Waterloo, N.Y., “as helpless and hopeless as if [we] had been suddenly asked to construct a steam engine,” wrote Stanton later.

They finally decided to draft a statement for the convention to consider that they called the Declaration of Sentiments. Although all the women contributed to the document, it was largely Stanton’s doing.

Stanton and Mott advertised their proposed convention on July 11, and, in spite of the short notice, they attracted about 300 women and men to the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls. Only women were admitted the first day, while men participated on the second.

Even though women were the instigators, it was still so unusual for women of that time to speak or lead in public that Mott’s husband James presided.
Shaking with nervousness because she had never spoken in public before, Stanton presented the declaration and concluded with eleven resolutions for the convention to ratify.

Ten of the resolutions passed easily. But the ninth, in a world where no woman anywhere had the right to vote, stopped everyone in her tracks. The resolution stated it was “the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.”

Many of the women attending found that too much—even organizer Lucretia Mott—but Stanton stuck to her guns and the suffrage resolution passed after former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass asked to speak and declared, “right is of no sex.”

While the New York Tribune wrote in half-support, “However unwise and mistaken the demand, it is but the assertion of a natural right and as such must be conceded,” outrage erupted in other newspapers. Some papers ridiculed the idea of women voting, having equal opportunity and removing double standards in judging the behavior of women and men. One newspaper in particular, while objecting to what had happened at Seneca Falls, described succinctly the then role of women and the public’s attitude to women generally: “A woman is nobody. A wife is everything,” the Philadelphia Public Ledger stated.

Stanton soon afterwards began to collaborate with a new friend, Susan B. Anthony, to campaign for the vote. Both women initially thought that now battle was joined they would have a speedy victory, but neither lived to see women as enfranchised citizens under the U.S. constitution.

Over time, in fact, the battle became a war. Women—later known as suffragists—were laughed at, insulted and forced to wait for the more pressing matter of the enfranchisement of freedmen in the late 1860s. Later, men assaulted them, while the authorities imprisoned them under trumped-up charges, and tortured them for campaigning. Women organized against the suffragists too.

Some U.S. women actually got the vote in the late 1800s—at the state level, first in Wyoming. By 1918, women could vote in 15 states. But women as citizens of the United States finally won the constitutional right to vote only in August 1920. Even then it only just made it—by one vote.

Women’s Equality Day on August 26 each year has, since 1971, commemorated the 19th Amendment to the Constitution that began its long journey in the resolution of women who bravely rocked the boat 160 years ago this weekend.

Excerpt from the Declaration of Sentiments Presented at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government…But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled…