The Declaration of Sentiments
The Declaration of Sentiments is the founding document of the American women's rights movement, adopted at the Woman's Rights Convention held in the Wesleyan Chapel at Seneca Falls, New York, on 19 and 20 July 1848.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted it on the frame of the Declaration of Independence, sentence for sentence, so that the grievances of women were presented in the form Americans already recognized as the form of a legitimate complaint. One hundred people signed it: sixty eight women and thirty two men. Eleven resolutions were put to the convention alongside it, and ten passed unanimously.
What the Declaration of Sentiments actually says
The Declaration of Sentiments says that men have systematically deprived women of rights that the Declaration of Independence had already declared universal, and it says it by borrowing the older document's structure and substituting one word. Where the Declaration of Independence indicts a king, the Seneca Falls text indicts men as a class:
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.
What follows that sentence is a list of specific disabilities rather than an argument about them. The text names the denial of the vote, the legal death of a married woman who could not hold property or her own wages, her position in divorce and in the custody of children, her exclusion from the colleges and from the professions of law, medicine and the ministry, her subordinate place in the churches, and a moral standard applied to women that was not applied to men. Each is stated flatly as a fact submitted for judgment. The full text is short, and a reader who has been told it is a manifesto is usually surprised by how much of it is a schedule of law.
The eleven resolutions, and the one that almost failed
The eleven resolutions were the operative half of the document, and ten of them carried without a single vote against. The ninth did not. It is the one that demanded the ballot:
Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.
Delegates who had accepted every other resolution did not accept that one, and it is the only one of the eleven recorded as passing by anything short of a unanimous vote. Frederick Douglass spoke for the resolution on the second day of the convention, 20 July 1848, the day that was open to the public including men, and it carried by a narrow margin. That vote is the reason this document is remembered as the start of a suffrage campaign rather than as one more reform convention: everything else in the paper described a condition, and the ninth resolution named a remedy that would take until 1920 to obtain.
Who signed the Declaration of Sentiments
The signers numbered one hundred, and the split between them is worth stating precisely because it is often reported wrong.
- Sixty eight women signed, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.
- Thirty two men signed, including Frederick Douglass.
- One hundred names appear in total on the convention's printed report.
Signing carried a cost. The convention was reported and ridiculed in the press, and the ridicule fell on named people in a small town, which is a better guide to how the demand was received in 1848 than any later account of the meeting. The signature count is also the reason the document has a fixed shape in the record: the convention printed its proceedings, so the names, the resolutions and the vote on the ninth are all on one sheet, and there is no serious dispute about what was adopted.
Declaration of Independence vs Declaration of Sentiments
The Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of Sentiments are built on the same skeleton, which is the point of the exercise. The Seneca Falls text does not offer a new form of words. It reuses the older one and shows, line by line, that it had never been applied to women.
| Feature | Declaration of Independence | Declaration of Sentiments |
|---|---|---|
| Adopted by | The Continental Congress, at Philadelphia | The Woman's Rights Convention, at Seneca Falls, New York, on 19 and 20 July 1848 |
| Who is accused | The King of Great Britain | Man, as a class, in his conduct toward woman |
| Core assertion | The equality of all men | The equality of all men and women, women inserted into the same sentence |
| Body of the text | A list of the king's usurpations | A list of the legal and social disabilities imposed on women |
| Attached demands | Independence | Eleven resolutions, of which the ninth demands the vote |
| Signatures | Delegates of the Congress | One hundred: sixty eight women and thirty two men |
The insertion is the whole rhetorical move. By putting women into the most familiar sentence in American public life, the convention obliged its opponents to argue against a text they claimed to revere, and it left them with no ground to stand on except the assertion that women were a separate case.
How the convention was called and what came of it
The convention was called at roughly a fortnight's notice by an advertisement in the Seneca County Courier, which is why Seneca Falls, July 1848 is a small local meeting in the record and a national origin point in memory. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott had met eight years earlier in London, at the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840, which refused to seat its women delegates. The Seneca Falls meeting was the practical consequence.
What came of it was a movement that argued in public for seventy two years, and the Declaration of Sentiments set the method. The first National Woman's Rights Convention followed at Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850, and the annual conventions after it produced the body of speeches this site covers under the heading What was actually said. The line of descent is direct: when Florence Kelley told a Philadelphia audience in 1905 that child labor would not end while the mothers of the children had no vote, the argument in Child labor and the vote was the ninth resolution applied to a factory. They asked for it in writing in 1848, and it took until the certification of the Nineteenth Amendment on 26 August 1920 for the demand in that ninth resolution to become law.