Seneca Falls, July Nineteen, Eighteen Forty-Eight

On a warm July morning in eighteen forty-eight, in a small town along the canal in central New York, a notice appeared in the local newspaper announcing a convention on the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women. It had been placed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and four other women, Lucretia Mott, Martha Coffin Wright, Mary Ann McClintock, and Jane Hunt, who had organized it in one week over tea at a farmhouse kitchen table. The venue was the Wesleyan Chapel on Fall Street in Seneca Falls.

They expected a modest gathering. About three hundred people came. Stanton had drafted the convention's central document in deliberate imitation of Thomas Jefferson.

It opened: We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal. The Declaration of Sentiments then listed eighteen grievances against the laws of a country that denied women the right to vote, to own property, to keep their own wages, to attend most colleges, or to hold public office. It was the Declaration of Independence aimed inward, at the republic's own failure.

The suffrage resolution was the most radical of its demands. Even Lucretia Mott thought it went too far. It was Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, who spoke from the floor to argue that no true believer in democracy could stop at race while also stopping at sex.

His intervention helped carry the vote. Sixty-eight women and thirty-two men signed the Declaration of Sentiments before the convention adjourned. Seventy-two years separated that chapel in Seneca Falls from the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Stanton did not live to see it. Neither did most of the women who signed. But the document they produced in two days in a small New York town named the wrong, framed the argument, and started the clock.

That morning in Seneca Falls, the women's suffrage movement in America had a beginning.