The First Feminists

The American womens rights movement was born 158 years ago today, on July 19, 1848, when about 300 people gathered in Seneca Falls, New York. Their meeting was a result of long dissatisfaction. It all went back to when two of the events organizers were kept out of an abolitionist convention in London eight years before, simply for being women.

In 1840 a young woman named Elizabeth Cady accepted a marriage proposal from Henry Stanton partly so she could attend the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London with him. To her shock and dismay she found when she got there that women were not permitted to speak, or even to sit with the men. Her husband was not much bothered by this and took his seat. However the abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison refused to speak because of it.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as she insisted on being called, was outraged. Lucretia Mott, a friend of hers who had also hoped to attend, was similarly dismayed, though not surprised. Mott was older and more experienced in the antislavery world, and, in conversations with her, Stanton began to realize that she wasnt held in much higher regard by white men than were the slaves on whose behalf she had come to London.

The Stantons soon settled in upstate New York, where they had met. At their home in Seneca Falls, Elizabeth Cady Stanton would be near other women who shared her views. One day, while having tea, she, Mott, and three other women, Jane Hunt, Mary Ann McClintock, and Martha Wright, began discussing the lack of rights afforded to married women, who couldnt own land or significant sums of money. Also, divorce was almost impossible from an unwilling husband, even if he abused his wife, his children, or the bottle. When divorce did occur, women had no right to the custody of their children. The group decided that to make any progress they must start by holding a convention on womens rights.

They took no more than five days to put the convention together, and they advertised it in a Seneca Falls newspaper. About 300 people attended, 40 of them men. One of them was Frederick Douglass, who was already well known for his antislavery work. He was to play a key role in the conventions outcome.

The meeting lasted for two days. Lucretia Motts husband, James Mott, ran it, as having a woman do so was unthinkable. Elizabeth Cady Stanton had written up a document only days before that she called the Declaration of Sentiments, the general tone of which mimicked the Declaration of Independence. It described abuses and injustices inflicted on women and demanded that they be righted.

After her opening remarks, Stanton read the Declaration of Sentiments to the audience. Later the Declaration was read for a second time, after which there were votes on its various parts. Every part was controversial, but none more than its demand for the right to vote, whichwas especially difficult for those present to accept because most of them were Quaker; among Quakers, even men seldom voted.

By all accounts it was Frederick Douglass who finally convinced the group of the importance of woman suffrage. We are free to say, he wrote not long after, that in respect to political rights, we hold women to be justly entitled to all we claim for men. A hundred people, 68 of them women, signed the Declaration.

Douglasss speech at the convention began a period of almost 18 years during which he was one of the womens movements most important allies. There are two obvious reasons for his support. First, many women had been involved in the abolitionist movement. Second, the two causes were clearly similar in seeing a moral imperative in gaining basic civil rights for a large segment of the population that had been denied them. Despite this, the two causes did not ultimately remain fully sympathetic.

Friction between them occurred when it became apparent to the feminists that most of their male supporters, including Douglass, saw woman suffrage as secondary to suffrage for black men. Stanton and Susan B. Anthony wanted voting rights for blacks only if women got them too. At the second meeting of the newly formed American Equal Rights Association, Stanton demanded, Why ask educated women, who love their country, who desire to mould its institutions on the highest idea of justice and equality, who feel that their enfranchisement is of vital importance to this end, why ask them to stand aside while two million ignorant men are ushered into the halls of legislation?

Despite such comments, which sometimes descended to the baldly racist, the women still wanted Frederick Douglass to speak on their behalf. But in 1868 he wrote to a woman named Josephine Griffing, whom Stanton had appointed to communicate with him: I am now devoting myself to a cause [if] not more sacred, certainly more urgent, because it is one of life and death to the long enslaved people of this country and this is: negro suffrage.

This debate soon divided the political parties, with Republicans dropping the fight for woman suffrage in order to strengthen the argument for black suffrage, and Democrats picking up the womens cause in order to stave off black suffrage. As George Francis Train, a Democrat whose support Stanton and Anthony enlisted, put it, Women first and negro last is my slogan.

Black men, who had had been fighting for freedom since the nations birth, finally won the right to vote after the Civil War, with the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. Women had to struggle for most of a century too. They waited until August 1920 to gain suffrage. By then only one woman, Charlotte Woodward, of the original 68 who had signed the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848 was alive to cast her vote, which she proudly did.

Sally Waggoner is an undergraduate at Syracuse University.