The Meaning of Seneca Falls: 1848-1998

...They are radical demands, which can only be achieved by transforming society for men and women, equalizing gender definitions for both sexes, assigning the reproductive work of raising the next generation to both men and women, and reorganizing social institutions so as to make such arrangements possible...

...The feminist argument based on biblical grounds can be traced back for seven hundred years prior to 1848, but the women assembled at Seneca Falls were unaware of that fact, because of the nonexistence of anything like Women's History...

...The region had for more than two decades been the center of reform and utopian movements, largely due to the economic upheavals brought by the opening of the Erie Canal and the ensuing compe3 6 n DISSENT / Fall 1 998 tition with western agriculture, which brought many farmers to bankruptcy...

...Generally speaking, women's rights have been won or improved upon in many parts of the world in the past 150 years...

...It was only due Copyright © Gerda Lerner, 1998...

...Another dissident group were Wesleyan Methodists who had been involved in a struggle within their church about the role of women and of the laity in church governance...

...self-determination and autonomy...

...By 1860 ten national and many local woman's rights conventions had been organized...

...In that same year, the upstate New York village of Seneca Falls hosted a gathering of fewer than three hundred people, earnestly debating a Declaration of Sentiments to be spread by newsprint and oratory...

...40 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 The cultural transformation on which demands for woman's emancipation build, has been enormous...

...But the same distinctions and tensions as in the first wave of feminism have appeared in the "new feminism" that started in the 1960s...

...F, LIZABETH CADY STANTON, the great Communicator and propagandist of nineteenthcentury feminism, has left a detailed account of the origins of the Seneca Falls convention both in her autobiography and in the monumental History of Woman Suffrage...

...And perhaps the most precious "right" we have won in these two centuries, is the right to know our own history, to draw on the knowledge and experience of the women before us, to celebrate and emulate our heroines and finally to know that "greatness" is not a sexual attribute...

...Autonomy means earning one's status, not being born into it or marrying it...

...They knew the biblical argument by Ann Lee of the Shakers and they echoed the antislavery biblical argument, applying it to women...

...whatever gains we made we have had to earn...

...Elizabeth Cady Stanton addresses the Convention...

...deprived of her property and wages...

...The Declaration departed from precedent in its most radical statement: The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her...

...One of the significant aspects of the Seneca Falls convention is that it was grounded in several organizational networks that had already existed for some time and could mobilize the energies of seasoned reform activists...

...protection of women against violence and sexual harassment...

...At the end of the second day, sixty-eight women and thirty-two men signed their names to a Declaration of Sentiments, which embodied the program of the nascent movement and provided a model for future woman's rights conventions...

...Their existence has not weakened the movement, as its critics like to claim, but has strengthened it immensely by grounding it more firmly in different constituencies...

...Still, she found time to be involved in the campaign for reform of women's property rights in New York state, where a reform bill was passed just prior to the convention, and she had spoken before the state legislature...

...They did know the Quaker argument, especially as made in her public lectures by Lucretia Mott...

...These are essentially reformist demands...

...Martha Wright, Jane Hunt and Mary Ann McClintock were all separatist Quakers, long active in working to improve the position of women within their church...

...It was through them that the message of Seneca Falls spread quickly and led to the formation of a national movement...

...But her responsibilities as mother of a growing family intervened, and Stanton could not implement her plan until 1848, when Lucretia Mott visited her sister Martha Wright in Waterloo, a town near Seneca Falls...

...single motherhood...

...Rights and Emancipation What progress has been made in the status of women since 1848...

...self-empowerment and the creation of women's cultural institutions, ranging from lesbian groupings to women's music festivals and pop culture...

...she had no voice in the making of laws...

...As we have seen, its program, from the start, embraced both—by demanding legal, property, civil rights...

...The fact that she was announced as the principal speaker at the Seneca Falls convention was a distinct drawing card...

...to the resurgence of modern feminism and the advances of the field of Women's History that the convention has entered the nation's consciousness...

...When it came to the list of grievances, the authors departed from the text and became quite specific...

...The movement started at Seneca Falls called itself the woman's rights movement— embracing both concepts, that of the individual woman as a person and as a citizen demanding rights...

...The first truly national convention on Woman's Rights was held in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1850...

...GERDA LERNER is a historian, writer and teacher...

...Y SELECTING the Declaration of Independence for their formal model and following its preamble almost verbatim, except for the insertion of gender-neutral language, the organizers of the convention sought to base their main appeal on the democratic rights embodied in the nation's founding document...

...They also put the weight and symbolism of this revered text behind what was in their time a radical assertion: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal...

...Those who transform nonviolently sign up for the long duration, through good times and bad—sustaining the warmth necessary for growth like a banked fire...

...Historian Nancy Isenberg, who has analyzed the origins and affiliations of those attending the convention, showed that many were religious dissidents, Quakers, who just two months prior had separated from their more traditional church and would shortly form their own group, New York Congregationalist Friends...

...Resolutions were offered, debated and adopted...

...It means freedom to define issues, roles, laws and cultural norms on an equality with men...

...The feminist program proclaimed at Seneca Falls spoke to vast constituencies of women...

...she was declared civilly dead upon marriage...

...What critics decry as the splintering and diffusion of the movement is actually its greatest strength today...

...The women's rights demands first raised at Seneca Falls have in the United States been generally achieved for middle-class white women...

...Women's emancipation is freedom from oppressive restrictions imposed by reason of sex...

...They include property rights, the right to one's earnings, the right to sue and be sued, the right to dispose of property...

...The uneven availability of child care for working mothers is another example...

...Until very recently, the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 was not recognized as significant by historians, was not included in history textbooks, not celebrated as an important event in public schools, never mentioned in the media or the press...

...Women were denied equal access to education and were kept out of the professions, held in a subordinate position in Church and State and assigned by man to the domestic sphere...

...The Women's Studies movement has struggled long and hard to bridge the two wings and encompass them educationally...

...Outraged by this humiliating experience, Stanton and Mott decided in London that they would convene a meeting of women in the United States to discuss their grievances as soon as possible...

...Having gained state power in Russia, China and Eastern Europe, twentiethcentury communism, in 1948, seemed more threatening a specter than ever before...

...Yet, after a bitter period of "cold war," which pitted nuclear nations against one another in a futile stalemate, it fell of its own weight in almost all its major centers...

...These rights are demanded on the basis of a claim to equality: as citizens, as members of society, women are by rights equal and must therefore be treated equally...

...Whatever gains were won, had to be won step by step, over and over again...

...Later woman's rights conventions would include some of these issues among their demands, although they used carefully guarded language and focused on abuses by "drunkards...

...Far from representing a group of inexperienced housewives running their first public meeting, the majority of the convention parSENECA FALLS ticipants were reformers with considerable organizational experience...

...the opening up to women DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 39 SENECA FALLS of nontraditional occupations...

...The other wing began as "radical women's liberation" and later branched off into many more specialized groups working on abortion rights...

...They have been partially achieved for working-class women and women of color, but progress has been very uneven...

...The Declaration of Sentiments The first day of the Seneca Falls meeting was reserved to women, who occupied themselves with debating, paragraph by paragraph, the Declaration of Sentiments prepared by Elizabeth Cady Stanton...

...Most of the reformers attending had family, church and political affiliations in other areas of the North and Midwest...

...While grievances pertaining to woman's sexual oppression were not explicitly included in the Declaration of Sentiments, they were very much alive in the consciousness of the leading participants...

...The women who launched a small movement in 1848 had to learn to stay with it over nearly four generations...

...It should also he recognized that the aims of feminism are transformative, but its methods have been peaceful reform, persuasion and education...

...The demands for emancipation are based on stressing women's difference from men, but also on stressing women's difference from other women...

...Revolutionaries splutter and flare up like rockets in the night...

...Yet another group came from the ranks of the temperance movement...

...The fact that it took seventy-two years of SENECA FALLS organized effort for American women to win the vote shows that social transformation and legal change is a slow process...

...The twentieth-century women's movement adopted the plural "women" to show inclusiveness and to reflect the fact that it was a broadly based, coalition-building movement...

...Stanton wrote: "I poured out that day the torrent of my long accumulating discontent with such vehemence and indignation that I stirred myself, as well as the rest of the party, to do or dare anything...

...They had to build, county by county, state by state, the largest grassroots movement of the nineteenth century and then build it again in the twentieth century to transform the right to vote into the right to equal representation...

...Feminism has behind it a record of solid gains without the costs of bloody war and revolution...

...They concluded that in view of the disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country . . . we insist that [women] have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States...

...The Declaration claimed universality, even though it never mentioned differences among women...

...Man has endeavored to destroy woman's self-respect and keep her dependent...

...This history of "long forgetting and short remembering" has been an important aspect of women's historic past, the significance of which we only understood as we began to study women's history in depth...

...What we now call "a woman's right to her body" was already on the agenda of the nineteenthcentury woman's rights movement...

...The worldwide movement of women for their rights and for emancipation has steadily progressed and is irreversible, although of necessity it has progressed at an uneven pace, due to different historical and cultural conditions in different countries...

...The nearly one million followers of Miller had survived the uneventful passing of that night and the similarly uneventful revised dates of March or October 1844, but their zeal for reform had not lessened...

...ET US NOT forget, ever, that when we talk about women's rights we talk about the I rights of half the human race...

...The acceptance of such ideas is still uneven and different in different places, but generally, the feminist program has been accepted by millions of people who refuse to identify themselves as "feminists...

...she was deprived of other rights of citizenship...

...DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 37 SENECA FALLS And one of the "grievances is: He [man] has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign to her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God...

...The achievement of a public voice for women and the recognition that women could not win their rights unless they organized, made Seneca Falls a major event in history...

...The place where they held their convention was particularly suited for attracting an audience of radical thinkers...

...The small spark figuratively ignited at Seneca Falls never produced revolutions, usurpation of power or wars...

...The five drafted an announcement for a "Woman's Rights Convention" to be held at Seneca Falls on the nineteenth and twentieth of July, and placed the notice in the local paper and the abolitionist press...

...The establishment of Women's History Month as a national event during the Carter administration and its continuance through every administration since then has helped to educate the nation to the significance of women's role in history...

...She has published ten books in women's history, the latest among them Why History Matters and The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimke...

...they all came from upstate New York and represented a relatively narrow spectrum of reform activists...

...All of the rights here listed are based on the acceptance of the status quo— all women ask is to be admitted to it on a basis of equality...

...The inequities cited and the demands raised in this Declaration were not entirely novel...

...As the nineteenthcentury movement matured, there developed some tension between advocates of these two different sets of demands, with the mainstream focusing more and more on legal and property rights, while radicals and outsiders, like sex reformers, birth control advocates, and socialist feminists demanded more profound social changes...

...It was not so much the originality, as the inclusiveness of the listed grievances that was important...

...Many other feminist demands that seemed outrageously radical thirty years ago have become commonplace today—the acceptance of lesbians as "normal" members of the community...

...Future woman's rights conferences before the Civil War would rectify this omission and pay particular attention to the needs of lower class and slave women...

...The Seneca Falls convention was the first forum in which women gathered together to publicly air their own grievances, not those of the needy, the enslaved, orphans or widows...

...Oppressive restrictions are biological restrictions due to sex, as well as socially imposed ones...

...The number of signers represented only one third of those present, which probably was due to the radical nature of the statement...

...All rights reserved...

...Elizabeth Cady Stanton's "long accumulating discontent" had to do with her struggle to raise her three children (she would later have four more) and run a large household in the frequent absences of her husband Henry, a budding lawyer and Free Soil politican...

...Although the media and many politicians with monotonous frequency declare feminism to be dead, many of its goals have been accomplished and its momentum, worldwide, is steadily rising...

...Many demands that seemed outrageous 150 years ago are now commonly accepted, such as a woman's right to equal guardianship of her children, to divorce, to jury duty, to acceptance in nontraditional occupations...

...What Meaning Does Seneca Falls Hold Today...

...It shows that a small group of people, armed with a persuasive analysis of grievances and an argument based on generally held moral and religious beliefs, can, if they are willing and able to work hard at organizing, create a transformative mass movement...

...It means financial and cultural independence, freedom to choose one's own lifestyle, regardless of sex...

...The naming of "man" as the culprit, thereby identifying patriarchy as a system of "tyranny," was highly original, but it may have been dictated more by the rhetorical flourishes of the Declaration of Independence than by an actual analysis of woman's situation...

...There, Stanton met DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 35 SENECA FALLS with her, her hostess Jane Hunt and their friend Mary Ann McClintock...

...Seneca Falls and the movement it spawned show that legal changes, hard won though they are, remain useless and can be reversed, unless social and cultural transformations sustain them...

...Self-determination means being free to decide one's own destiny, to define one's own social role...

...The feminization of poverty and the increasing income gap between the rich and the poor have turned many legal gains won by women into empty shells...

...They are both equal and different...

...Further, new forms of feminism by women of color or women who define themselves as "different" from the majority in various ways have sprung up and served their own constitutencies...

...The two informally defined wings of the movement often overlapped, sometimes collaborated on specific narrow issues, and recently have worked more and more on bridge-building...

...It is useful to think of women's demands as encompassing two sets of needs: women's rights and women's emancipation...

...Among the men in attendance several were local lawyers with Liberty Party or Free Soil affiliations...

...As stated in the Declaration: Resolved, That woman is man's equal—was intended to be so by the Creator, and the highest good of the race demands that she should be recognized as such...

...Elizabeth Cady Stanton had already in 1848 begun to include allusions to what we now call "marital rape" in her letters and soon after the Seneca Falls convention made such references explicit, calling on legislatures to forbid marriage to "drunkards...

...The specter that haunted Europe developed into a mighty movement, embracing the globe, causing revolutions, wars, tyrannies and counterrevolutions...

...She had attended the founding meeting of the American Antislavery Society in 1833, which admitted women only as observers...

...One wing focused mainly on women's rights—adoption of ERA, legal/political rights and representation and civil rights for women of different classes, races and sexual orientations...

...The idea for such a meeting originated with her and with Lucretia Mott, when they both attended the 1840 World Antislavery Convention in London, at which representatives of female antislavery societies were denied seating and voting rights...

...Economic uncertainty led many to embrace utopian schemes for salvation...

...Still, it took decades of struggle by women's organizations, feminist historians and preservationists to rescue the building at Seneca Falls and finally to persuade the National Park Service to turn it into a historic site...

...It has been claimed by historians, and by herself, that Stanton's controversial resolution advocating voting rights for women—the only resolution not approved unanimously at the convention—was her most important original contribution...

...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 Rochester just two weeks later...

...Women's participation in competitive sports is another area in which progress has been great, though it is far from complete...

...This was a hidden feminist theme of the mainstream woman's temperance movement in the 1880s and caused many temperance women to embrace woman suffrage...

...Their local background predisposed them to accept radical pronouncements and challenging proposals...

...The "specter that haunted Europe" left some gains, but mostly bloodshed, terror and devastation in its wake, and most of the inequities it sought to adjust are still with us...

...She was a founder of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society and its long-term president...

...The feminist appeal to natural rights and the social contract had long antecedents on the European continent, the most important advocate of it being Mary Wollstonecraft...

...The Seneca Falls Woman's Rights Convention marked the beginning of the woman's rights movement...

...THE FIVE women who issued the call to the Seneca Falls convention were hardly as naive and inexperienced as later, somewhat mythical versions of the events would lead one to believe...

...WOMAN HAD been denied "her inalienable right to the elective franchise...

...The demand for women's emancipation always includes the demand for women's rights, but the reverse is not true...

...For 150 years feminists have organized, lobbied, marched, petitioned, put their bodies on the line in demonstrations, and have overcome ancient prejudices by heroic acts of self-help...

...The second fundamental argument for the equality of woman was religious...

...Lucretia Mott was an experienced and highly acclaimed public speaker, a Quaker minister and longtime abolitionist...

...All of them were veterans of reform and women's organizations and had worked on antislavery fairs...

...the criminal character of sexual harassment and marital rape...

...Nothing "was given" to women...

...It was the confluence of a broad-ranging programmatic declaration with a format famil38 n DISSENT I Fall 1 998 SENECA FALLS iar and accessible to reformers that gave the event its historical significance...

...Thus, women's bearing and nursing children is a biological given, but the assignment to women of the major responsibility for the rearing of children and for housework is socially imposed...

...The region was known as the "burned-over" district, because so many schemes for reforms had swept over it in rapid succession, from the evangelical revivalism of Charles Grandison Finney, to temperance, abolition, church reform, Mormonism and the chiliastic movement of William Miller, who predicted the second coming of Christ with precision for October 12, 1843 at three A.M...

...discriminated against in case of divorce, and in payment for work...

...Like all major social and intellectual movements, feminism has many and diverse antecedents...

...Her work was well known in the United States, where the same argument had been well made by Judith Sargent Murray, Frances Wright, Emma Willard, Sarah Grimké and Margaret Fuller...

...They were experienced in running petition campaigns and many had organized antislavery fund-raising fairs...

...Women's emancipation has not yet been won anywhere...

...Also present and taking a prominent part in the deliberations was Frederick Douglass, the former slave and celebrated abolitionist speaker, now editor of the North Star...

...In the 1950s, the building where it was held, formerly the Wesleyan chapel, was used as a filling station...

...It will continue to live and grow, as long as women anywhere have "grievances" they can proclaim and as long as they are willing and able to organize to rectify them...

...Women, just like men, are placed in society as individuals and as citizens...

...In the 1960s, it housed a laundromat...

...She soon became an open advocate of divorce and of the right of women to leave abusive marriages...

...We should therefore never expect women to have one agenda, one set of issues or demands...

...and by demanding changes in gender-role definition and in woman's rights to her own body...

...Over the past 150 years all of the grievances listed at Seneca Falls have been resolved or at least dealt with, though new inequities and grievances arise in each generation...

...An example is the way in which legal restrictions on women's right to choose abortion have fallen more heavily on poor women than on the well-todo...

...Most of them were abolitionists, the women having been active for nearly ten years in charitable, reform, and antislavery societies...

...No one expects all men to have the same interests, issues or demands...

...Female police and fire officers and female military personnel are accepted everywhere without question...

...The continuing horrendous gaps in life expectancy, infant mortality and survival rates between white and African-American women is but one illustration of this unevenness...

...The men and women who gathered in the Seneca Falls Wesleyan chapel were not a national audience...

...They had read Sarah Grimke's Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and several of the resolutions in fact followed her text...

...The progress on economic issues, such as equal wages, equal access to credit, equal treatment in home-ownership and insurance availability has also varied by class and race, with much remaining to be done...

...Women's rights essentially are civil rights— to vote, to hold office, to have access to education and to economic and political power at every level of society on an equal basis with men...

...Yet it led to a transformation of consciousness and a movement of empowerment on behalf of half the human race, which hardly has its equal in human history...

...DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 41...

...Today it is a major tourist attraction and has been enhanced by the establishment of a National Women's Hall of Fame on the site...

...In fact, Sarah and Angelina Grimke had advocated woman's right to vote and hold office in 1838, and Frances Wright had done so in the 1830s...