On July 19, 1848, the 300 delegates seated inside the Wesley Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York listened intently to Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s address to America’s first women’s rights convention. Stanton surprised her listeners by forcefully declaring, “We now demand the right to vote.” She later formulated this demand into Resolution 9 in her proposed Declaration of Sentiments.: “Resolved that it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.”
“Thee will make us ridiculous!”
The delegates recognized the need for actions to address the legal inequalities that transformed America’s women into second class citizens. But many women genuinely feared that demanding the suffrage would invite public ridicule. It is important to remember that the firmly entrenched cult of domesticity relegated women to a role as guardians of the home. At that time there was even a taboo against women speaking in public. Stanton’s friend and close ally Lucretia Mott famously warned, “Why Lizzie, thee will make us ridiculous! We must go slowly.”
Frederick Douglass seizes the moment
Mott was right. The nation’s press, politicians, preachers, and husbands overwhelmingly viewed the demand for suffrage as an attack on the natural order of a male-dominated country. Frederick Douglass understood the urgency of the moment. Famed as in eloquent orator, the former slave and prominent abolitionist rose to address the convention. Douglass argued that the right to vote represented more than a symbolic action; it also would become a powerful tool to help women gain self-respect by ending sex-based legal discrimination.
Douglass’s eloquence swayed the convention allowing Resolution 9 to narrowly pass. The Seneca Falls Convention’s call for suffrage changed the trajectory of American history. By refusing to abandon Resolution 9, Stanton and Douglass transformed the convention from a local meeting about societal grievances into a revolutionary political movement.
A long but successful struggle
The women who attended the Seneca Falls Convention faced a long and at times frustrating struggle. However, their petitions and marches finally prevailed. Of the 100 women who signed the Senecas Falls Declaration of Sentiments, only two lived to see the 1920 passage of the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the suffrage.
So why should you remember the Seneca Falls Convention? APUSH test writers expect students to know that the historic meeting marked the beginning of the women’s rights movement in the United States. The demands in the Declaration of Sentiments formed the movement’s agenda into the twentieth century. In addition to providing answers to multiple-choice questions, the Seneca Falls Convention can be used as an example for LEQ questions about the Second Great Awakening and nineteenth century reform movements.