Seneca Falls Convention Quotes

Did I not feel that the time has come for the questions of women's wrongs to be laid before the public? Did I not believe that women herself must do this work, for women alone understand the height, the depth, the breadth of her degradation. - Seneca Falls Convention, 1848

Douglass was the only black person attending the Seneca Falls convention, and it remained a matter of lifetime pride that he was among the thirty-two men and sixty-eight women who signed the “Declaration of Sentiments.” He would always be delighted to be called “a women’s rights man.” The motto on the masthead of the North Star, “Right is of No Color and No Sex,” had been no mere sentiment. 38

In 1848, the first Woman’s Rights Convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York, unleashing a national conversation about the rights of women.

The July 1848 Seneca Falls women’s rights convention—brought about by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, among others—issued a “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions” that sanctified a movement’s creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” The italics are mine; the vision the suffragists’. Susan B. Anthony, an essential figure, echoed the point down the years: “It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed this Union,” she said in 1873 after she illegally cast a ballot for U. S. Grant for president. “And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people—women as well as men.

spent much of the next two years cowriting and editing her biography.  Emerson was a signatory of the “Declaration of Sentiments” of the first Women’s Rights Convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. And in 1855, he attended and addressed the convention in Boston.

A series of women's conventions in various parts of the country followed the one at Seneca Falls. At one of these, in 1851, an aged black woman, who had been born a slave in New York, tall, thin, wearing a gray dress and white turban, listened to some male ministers who had been dominating the discussion. This was Sojourner Truth. She rose to her feet and joined the indignation of her race to the indignation of her sex: That man over there says that woman needs to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches. . . Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles or gives me any best place. And a'nt I a woman? Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! and a'nt I a woman? I would work as much and eat as much as a man, when I could get it, and bear the lash as well. And a'nt I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen em most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And a'nt I a woman?

An angry discussion followed, during which belligerent ministers, who had come to the convention in an attempt to disrupt it, read aloud passages from the Bible to disprove Antoinette Brown's contention of equality. They read passages like "Let your women be silent in the churches; for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience," and "Likewise, ye wives, be in subection to your own husbands.

When Lizzy Stanton and I hosted the first women’s rights convention in Woodstock—” “I think you mean Seneca Falls?” Rhea frowned. “Wasn’t that in the ’60s?” “The ’40s,” I said. “The 1840s, if memory serves.” “So…Jimi Hendrix wasn’t there?” “Doubtful.” Rhea fiddled with her peace symbol. “Then who set that guitar on fire?