L'issent The Meaning of Seneca Falls: 1848-1998 Gerda Lerner to the resurgence of modern feminism and the advances of the field of Women's History that the convention has entered the nation's con- sciousness. The establishment of Women's N 1848, acccording to Karl Marx and History Month as a national event during the Frederick Engels, "a specter [was] haunt- Carter administration and its continuance ing Europe—the specter of communism." through every administration since then has In1 that same year, the upstate New York vil- helped to educate the nation to the signifi- lage of Seneca Falls hosted a gathering of fewer cance of women's role in history. Still, it took than three hundred people, earnestly debat- decades of struggle by women's organizations, ing a Declaration of Sentiments to be spread feminist historians and preservationists to res- by newsprint and oratory. The Seneca Falls cue the building at Seneca Falls and finally to Woman's Rights Convention marked the be- persuade the National Park Service to turn it ginning of the woman's rights movement. into a historic site. Today it is a major tourist The specter that haunted Europe devel- attraction and has been enhanced by the es- oped into a mighty movement, embracing the tablishment of a National Women's Hall of globe, causing revolutions, wars, tyrannies and Fame on the site. This history of "long forget- counterrevolutions. Having gained state power ting and short remembering" has been an im- in Russia, China and Eastern Europe, twenti- portant aspect of women's historic past, the eth-century communism, in 1948, seemed significance of which we only understood as more threatening a specter than ever before. we began to study women's history in depth. Yet, after a bitter period of "cold war," which pitted nuclear nations against one another in , LIZABETH CADY STANTON, the great Com- a futile stalemate, it fell of its own weight in municator and propagandist of nine- almost all its major centers. F teenth-century feminism, has left a de- The small spark figuratively ignited at Sen- tailed account of the origins of the Seneca Falls eca Falls never produced revolutions, usurpa- convention both in her autobiography and in tion of power or wars. Yet it led to a transfor- the monumental History of Woman Suffrage. mation of consciousness and a movement of The idea for such a meeting originated with empowerment on behalf of half the human her and with Lucretia Mott, when they both race, which hardly has its equal in human his- attended the 1840 World Antislavery Conven- tory. tion in London, at which representatives of Until very recently, the Seneca Falls con- female antislavery societies were denied seat- vention of 1848 was not recognized as signifi- ing and voting rights. Outraged by this humili- cant by historians, was not included in history ating experience, Stanton and Mott decided textbooks, not celebrated as an important in London that they would convene a meet- event in public schools, never mentioned in ing of women in the United States to discuss the media or the press. In the 1950s, the build- their grievances as soon as possible. But her ing where it was held, formerly the Wesleyan responsibilities as mother of a growing family chapel, was used as a filling station. In the intervened, and Stanton could not implement 1960s, it housed a laundromat. It was only due her plan until 1848, when Lucretia Mott vis- ited her sister Martha Wright in Waterloo, a Copyright © Gerda Lerner , 1998. All rights reserved. town near Seneca Falls. There, Stanton met DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 35 SENECA FALLS with her, her hostess Jane Hunt and their tition with western agriculture, which brought friend Mary Ann McClintock. Stanton wrote: many farmers to bankruptcy. Economic uncer- "I poured out that day the torrent of my long tainty led many to embrace utopian schemes accumulating discontent with such vehe- for salvation. The region was known as the mence and indignation that I stirred myself, "burned-over" district, because so many as well as the rest of the party, to do or dare schemes for reforms had swept over it in rapid anything." The five drafted an announcement succession, from the evangelical revivalism of for a "Woman's Rights Convention" to be held Charles Grandison Finney, to temperance, at Seneca Falls on the nineteenth and twenti- abolition, church reform, Mormonism and the eth of July, and placed the notice in the local chiliastic movement of William Miller, who paper and the abolitionist press. predicted the second coming of Christ with precision for October 12, 1843 at three A.M. HE FIVE women who issued the call to The nearly one million followers of Miller had the Seneca Falls convention were hardly survived the uneventful passing of that night T as naive and inexperienced as later, and the similarly uneventful revised dates of somewhat mythical versions of the events March or October 1844, but their zeal for re- would lead one to believe. Lucretia Mott was form had not lessened. an experienced and highly acclaimed public The men and women who gathered in the speaker, a Quaker minister and longtime abo- Seneca Falls Wesleyan chapel were not a na- litionist. She had attended the founding meet- tional audience; they all came from upstate ing of the American Antislavery Society in New York and represented a relatively narrow 1833, which admitted women only as observ- spectrum of reform activists. Their local back- ers. She was a founder of the Philadelphia Fe- ground predisposed them to accept radical male Anti-Slavery Society and its long-term pronouncements and challenging proposals. president. The fact that she was announced Most of them were abolitionists, the women as the principal speaker at the Seneca Falls having been active for nearly ten years in chari- convention was a distinct drawing card. table, reform, and antislavery societies. They Elizabeth Cady Stanton's "long accumu- were experienced in running petition cam- lating discontent" had to do with her struggle paigns and many had organized antislavery to raise her three children (she would later fund-raising fairs. Historian Nancy Isenberg, have four more) and run a large household in who has analyzed the origins and affiliations the frequent absences of her husband Henry, of those attending the convention, showed that a budding lawyer and Free Soil politican. Still, many were religious dissidents, Quakers, who she found time to be involved in the campaign just two months prior had separated from their for reform of women's property rights in New more traditional church and would shortly York state, where a reform bill was passed just form their own group, New York Congregation- prior to the convention, and she had spoken alist Friends. Another dissident group were before the state legislature. Wesleyan Methodists who had been involved Martha Wright, Jane Hunt and Mary Ann in a struggle within their church about the role McClintock were all separatist Quakers, long of women and of the laity in church gover- active in working to improve the position of nance. Yet another group came from the ranks women within their church. All of them were of the temperance movement. Among the men veterans of reform and women's organizations in attendance several were local lawyers with and had worked on antislavery fairs. Liberty Party or Free Soil affiliations. Also The place where they held their conven- present and taking a prominent part in the tion was particularly suited for attracting an deliberations was Frederick Douglass, the audience of radical thinkers. The region had former slave and celebrated abolitionist for more than two decades been the center of speaker, now editor of the North Star. reform and utopian movements, largely due to Far from representing a group of inexperi- the economic upheavals brought by the open- enced housewives running their first public ing of the Erie Canal and the ensuing compe- meeting, the majority of the convention par- 3 6 n DISSENT / Fall 1 998 SENECA FALLS ticipants were reformers with considerable or- ganizational experience. For example, Amy Post and six other women from Rochester who came to Seneca Falls were able to organize a similar woman's rights convention in Roches- ter just two weeks later. One of the significant aspects of the Seneca Falls convention is that it was grounded in several organizational net- works that had already existed for some time and could mobilize the energies of seasoned reform activists. Most of the reformers attending had fam- ily, church and political affiliations in other areas of the North and Midwest. It was through them that the message of Seneca Falls spread quickly and led to the formation of a national movement. The first truly national convention on Woman's Rights was held in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1850. By 1860 ten national and many local woman's rights conventions had been organized. The Declaration of Sentiments The first day of the Seneca Falls meeting was reserved to women, who occupied them- selves with debating, paragraph by para- graph, the Declaration of Sentiments pre- pared by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Resolu- Elizabeth Cady Stanton addresses the Convention. tions were offered, debated and adopted. At the end of the second day, sixty-eight women and thirty-two men signed their names to a They also put the weight and symbolism of this Declaration of Sentiments, which embodied revered text behind what was in their time a the program of the nascent movement and radical assertion: "We hold these truths to be provided a model for future woman's rights self-evident: that all men and women are cre- conventions.