Seneca Falls, July 1848
The Seneca Falls Convention was a woman's rights convention held on 19 and 20 July 1848 at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, called at about a fortnight's notice by an advertisement in the Seneca County Courier.
It adopted the Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, and put eleven resolutions to the floor. One hundred people signed the Declaration: sixty eight women and thirty two men. It is the first convention called in the United States specifically on the rights of women, and it is where the demand for the vote was set down as a resolution and voted on.
Why the convention happened at all
The convention happened because two of the women who called it had been refused a seat at another one. At the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, the delegates voted not to seat the women who had been sent to it, and Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met there in those circumstances. Mott was already known in the American antislavery movement; Stanton, twenty two years younger, was not. Eight years later they and a small group of others resolved to hold a meeting on the condition and rights of women, and they placed a notice in the local paper.
The notice went into the Seneca County Courier at about a fortnight's remove from the meeting itself. That detail is worth holding onto, because it sets the scale of what happened next: this was not a national body with a mailing list and a year of preparation. It was a local announcement, in a village paper, for a meeting in a chapel, organized in two weeks.
The Seneca Falls Convention at a glance
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Dates | 19 and 20 July 1848 |
| Place | The Wesleyan Chapel, Seneca Falls, New York |
| Notice given | About a fortnight, by advertisement in the Seneca County Courier |
| Called by | Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a small group of others |
| Document adopted | The Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence |
| Signatures | One hundred: sixty eight women and thirty two men |
| Resolutions put | Eleven, of which ten carried unanimously |
| The exception | The ninth, demanding the vote, which Frederick Douglass spoke for and which carried by a narrow margin |
What the convention resolved, and the one resolution that divided it
The convention resolved eleven separate propositions, and the pattern of the voting is the most informative thing in the whole record. Ten of the eleven carried unanimously. That is a room in agreement on the grievances the Declaration of Sentiments had already set out, from property and education to the professions and the legal standing of a married woman. Then the ninth resolution was put:
Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.
It did not carry unanimously. It was debated, Frederick Douglass spoke for it, and it passed by a narrow margin. Everything that the American campaign for the vote did over the following seventy two years grew from a resolution that its own convention nearly declined to adopt, and the reason it nearly declined is not obscure. Property law and education could be argued as reform. The franchise was a claim on political power, and a number of the people in the chapel judged it so extreme that carrying it would discredit the other ten.
The Declaration of Sentiments itself, the longer document the convention adopted, has its own treatment in the section of this site given to what was actually said. What belongs in an account of the convention is that the Declaration was the frame and the resolutions were the program, and that the vote was one item in that program rather than the point of the meeting.
Was the Seneca Falls Convention successful?
Judged by what it produced within two years, yes; judged by what it demanded, it took seventy two years to be answered. The immediate results were real. The convention put a document on the record that other meetings could adopt or argue with. The first National Woman's Rights Convention followed at Worcester, Massachusetts in 1850, which turned an upstate meeting into a recurring national institution. Sojourner Truth spoke at the Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio on 29 May 1851, in a speech whose two surviving texts differ so substantially that the difference is a subject in itself. Within a few years the movement had a circuit, a set of arguments and a body of people who had signed their names to them.
The demand made in the ninth resolution was another matter. Congress did not pass the Nineteenth Amendment until 4 June 1919, Tennessee completed ratification as the thirty sixth state on 18 August 1920, and certification followed on 26 August 1920. Of the hundred signers, and of the leaders who organized the meeting, almost none lived to see it: Lucretia Mott died in 1880, Frederick Douglass in 1895 and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1902. Susan B. Anthony, whose own campaigning made her the name most often attached to the American suffrage movement, voted in Rochester on 5 November 1872 and was tried for it in June 1873, and she died in 1906.
Seneca Falls in an APUSH answer
An APUSH answer on the Seneca Falls Convention needs four things, and they are the four things a great many answers get partly wrong. Give the date as 19 and 20 July 1848 and the place as Seneca Falls, New York. Name the Declaration of Sentiments and say it was modeled on the Declaration of Independence, which is what makes it a rhetorical attack rather than a petition. Say that one hundred people signed it, sixty eight women and thirty two men, because the presence of the men is a fact about the convention and not a footnote. And say that of the eleven resolutions only the ninth, the one demanding the vote, failed to carry unanimously, that Frederick Douglass spoke for it, and that it passed narrowly.
Two things to avoid. Seneca Falls did not win any woman the vote, in New York or anywhere else, and nothing legal changed in July 1848. And it was not the beginning of women's political organizing in the United States, which was already underway in the antislavery societies and had been for years; it was the first convention called specifically on the rights of women, which is a narrower and more defensible claim.