Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement PIVOTAL MOMENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY Series Editors David Hackett Fischer James M. McPherson James T. Patterson Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy Maury Klein Rainbow’s End: The Crash of 1929 James M. McPherson Crossroads of Freedom: The Battle of Antietam Glenn C. Altschuler All Shook Up: How Rock ’n’ Roll Changed America David Hackett Fischer Washington’s Crossing John Ferling Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 Colin G. Calloway The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America Joel H. Silbey Storm over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War Raymond Arsenault Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement 32 Sally G. McMillen 1 2008 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright # 2008 by Sally G. McMillen Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McMillen, Sally Gregory, 1944– Seneca Falls and the origins of the women’s rights movement / by Sally G. McMillen. p. cm.—(Pivotal moments in American history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-518265-1 1. Feminism—United States—History—19th century. 2. Woman’s Rights Convention (1st: 1848: Seneca Falls, N.Y.) I. Title. HQ1418.M36 2008 305.420973'09034—dc22 2007031638 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper To my students This page intentionally left blank Contents Editor’s Note ix Introduction 3 1. Separate Spheres: Law, Faith, Tradition 9 2. Fashioning a Better World 35 3. Seneca Falls 71 4. The Women’s Movement Begins, 1850–1860 104 5. War, Disillusionment, Division 149 6. Friction and Reunification, 1870–1890 185 Epilogue: ‘‘Make the World Better’’ 229 Appendix A: Declaration of Rights and Sentiments 237 Appendix B: ‘‘Solitude of Self,’’ by Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Address Delivered by Mrs. Stanton before the Committee of the Judiciary, U.S. Congress, January 18, 1892 242 Notes 251 Acknowledgments 296 Index 298 This page intentionally left blank Editor’s Note hen Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that ‘‘all men are created equal,’’ he meant to limit this observation to Wthe male half of the human race—at least with respect to equal membership in the polity. And not even all of them, since almost 20 percent of Americans were enslaved in 1776, and Jefferson did not consider them to be equal members of the social order. Three-quarters of a century later, a women’s rights meeting in the town of Seneca Falls, New York, adopted a Declaration of Rights and Sentiments written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton affirming that ‘‘all men and women are created equal.’’ During the last two decades of the seventy-two years that separated these famous declarations, a ferment of reform had begun to challenge old institutions and old ways of thinking. Two of the most egalitarian and far-reaching reform movements had profound consequences for the future of America: abolitionism and women’s rights. The antislavery movement provoked an increasingly stri- dent proslavery counterattack that polarized the country and led to a revolution that abolished slavery and started the country on the road to racial equality before the law—a revolution that we know as the Civil War. The women’s rights movement was at first almost equally polarizing but relatively nonviolent. It also brought about a more gradual revolution that made women equal before the law and increasingly equal in other spheres of American life as well. The valley of the Mohawk River and the Erie Canal in which Seneca Falls is nestled was the antebellum ‘‘Burned-Over District’’ of New York State where the fires of this and other reform movements swept through the landscape and left it forever ix x Editor’s Note culturally changed. From there the transformation that brought equal rights to American women in the twentieth century spread across America. Sally McMillen frames this story around the careers of four remarkable women: Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and Susan B. Anthony. Their lives spanned the decades from the 1830s to Susan An- thony’s death in 1906, while Stanton’s and Stone’s daughters carried on the struggle to and beyond the Nineteenth Amendment that gave women the vote in 1920. At the beginning of this period, women yielded ownership of their property to husbands when they married, could not vote or serve on juries, were largely excluded from higher education, and were denied access to many occupations and professions. By its end, women had become part of the American polity in the ways that Elizabeth Cady Stanton had demanded in her Declaration of Rights and Sentiments at Seneca Falls in 1848. This is a dramatic story, a moving story, a powerful story, and a story that has not ended. Sally McMillen’s narrative conveys the drama and importance of the landmark events and the remarkable people that drove this story. The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 was indeed a pivotal moment in American history—not just the history of women, but of all Americans. James M. McPherson Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION 32 eneca Falls, New York, seems an unlikely site for a pivotal event in American history. Surrounded by beautiful, rolling farmland, the town sits Salongside the Genesee Canal, only a few miles off the New York State Thruway. Waterloo lies three miles to the west and is about the same size as Seneca Falls. Several miles to the east sits the town of Auburn. But Seneca Falls, located in what today is called the Finger Lakes District of New York, is where in July 1848 five women initiated a social revolution and inaugurated the women’s movement. Except for tourists who visit the site today to pay homage to the origins of the women’s rights movement, the town is a quieter place now than it was in 1848. Seneca Falls underwent significant alterations in the early twentieth century with the widening of the Cayuga-Seneca Canal, which eliminated more than a hundred industrial and commercial buildings and sixty homes. A visitor may find it hard to imagine the radical movement and controversial issues that five women generated in this tranquil setting. Today, the Seneca Falls Convention of July 1848 feels like an obscure event for most Americans. Students of American history probably have some famil- iarity with it, but most people have never heard of it. Yet this meeting changed the way American society (and much of the Western world) thought about and treated women in the mid-nineteenth century. It unleashed a complicated, lengthy struggle that continues to this day. At Seneca Falls, for the first time, women and men gathered for the sole purpose of articulating female grievances and demanding women’s equality. As Susan B. Anthony observed in the early 1880s, ‘‘Woman had not been discovered fifty years ago.’’1 Before Seneca Falls, no one could imagine that anyone would dare challenge, in such an organized 3 4 Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement manner, women’s subservience or their legal, social, and political oppression. Before 1848, the nation’s laws, traditions, and religious doctrines sustained women’s subordinate status and codified their lack of legal and political rights. This Convention, though it lasted only two days, put everything into question and fostered a commitment to transform the country into a true democratic republic. The Seneca Falls Convention took place during an exciting period in the nation’s history when many people were seeking to rectify the nation’s wrongs. Unlike other reform issues that galvanized concerned Americans—education, antislavery, prison reform, world peace, and intemperance—women’s demands were deemed the most radical. No women’s rights movement existed before 1848, nor had there ever been much appetite to question women’s status. While a handful of Americans such as Abigail Adams and Margaret Fuller expressed open dismay about women’s submission and their lack of basic rights, such comments were rare and inchoate. That all changed with Seneca Falls, which produced the ‘‘Declaration of Rights and Sentiments,’’ setting forth eighteen injustices women endured and articulating a series of resolutions to address those wrongs. When the Convention ended, a group of women (and a few men) were inspired to organize women’s rights meetings, lecture, write, and petition elected officials to persuade them that women deserved all the rights of citizenship, including the most radical demand of all: female suffrage. Seneca Falls led to a significant shift in Americans’ perceptions of women, their status, and the rights they deserved. Women set out to force male politi- cians to alter state and national laws that legitimized women’s secondary po- sition, to challenge ministers who continued to use the Bible to justify female subordination, and to convince men to rethink their monopoly on political power and give women the right to vote and to hold public office.