Elizabeth Cady Stanton House, Seneca Falls

The white clapboard house at thirty-two Washington Street in Seneca Falls looks modest enough from the road. Elizabeth Cady Stanton called it Grassmere, and she called it, with only slight irony, the Center of the Rebellion.

Stanton moved into the house in May of eighteen forty-seven with her husband Henry and their three young sons. She was thirty-one years old, already committed to abolition and women's legal rights, and almost immediately frustrated by what she encountered in domesticity. As she later wrote, the isolation of running a household in a small upstate town, without intellectual companionship or a public role, clarified for her exactly what women were being denied.

Fourteen months after moving in, she helped organize a meeting at the nearby Wesleyan Chapel. On the nineteenth and twentieth of July, eighteen forty-eight, about three hundred people gathered for the first Women's Rights Convention in American history. Stanton had drafted the convention's founding document, the Declaration of Sentiments, modeling it on the Declaration of Independence. Where Jefferson had written that all men are created equal, Stanton wrote that all men and women are created equal. The document demanded equal rights in education, employment, and property, and it insisted on the vote, a position so radical that even some of Stanton's allies thought it went too far.

The house at Washington Street was where she prepared those arguments. It became a meeting place for a generation of reformers. Frederick Douglass, who had attended the convention and argued powerfully in favor of women's suffrage, was among the visitors.

Stanton moved away from Seneca Falls in eighteen sixty-two, eventually settling in New York City, where she continued her advocacy for the next forty years. The house was restored to its eighteen forty-eight appearance and is now part of the Women's Rights National Historical Park, a National Historic Landmark administered by the National Park Service.