Seneca Falls 1848, The Declaration They Almost Did Not Vote For

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was thirty-two years old, living in Seneca Falls with four young children, when she organized a convention in five days. It was July of eighteen forty-eight. She had been thinking about the convention for eight years, since she and Lucretia Mott had been barred from the floor of the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London simply because they were women. Now, in a small Methodist chapel in a mill town in central New York, she intended to say what she had been thinking.

She wrote the Declaration of Sentiments. She modeled it word for word on the Declaration of Independence, but she changed eleven words in the preamble. "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal." Between one hundred and three hundred people attended the two-day convention on July nineteenth and twentieth. Most of them were Quakers, abolitionists, and working women from the surrounding community.

The resolution on women's suffrage nearly failed. Even Lucretia Mott had argued it was too radical, too unlikely to be taken seriously. The vote was close. What turned it was a speech delivered from the floor by the only Black man in the room: Frederick Douglass, who had settled in Rochester the previous year to publish his abolitionist newspaper. Douglass argued that the right to vote was the foundation of all other rights, and that women deserved it on the same grounds as men. The suffrage resolution passed.

One hundred people signed the Declaration of Sentiments that week, sixty-eight women and thirty-two men. Among the signatories were Quaker farmers, free Black women, and a nineteen-year-old girl named Charlotte Woodward. She worked in a glove factory and had walked to the convention alone. She was the only signer of the Declaration who lived long enough to see the Nineteenth Amendment ratified, though by then she was ninety-one, in poor health, and by most accounts too frail to get to the polls.