The Ladies of Seneca Falls

On July 13, 1848, five women conversed over tea in a small upstate New York town. The next day, the local newspaper carried their announcement inviting women to attend “A Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.″ A few days later, the American woman's right movement became reality.

Miriam Gurko traces the course of the movement from its origin in the Seneca Falls Convention through the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote. She examines each of the movement's founders—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and others—to show the various backgrounds from which their feminist consciousness sprang and the unique contribution that each made to the destiny of the movement. This straightforward, comprehensive history of the early years of the woman's rights movement in America is essential background reading for anyone involved with women's studies.

With 34 black-and-white illustrations1. The Ladies of Seneca Falls     1
2. “What Does a Woman Want?”     5
3. Mary Wollstonecraft     15
4. From Colonial Dames to American Ladies     21
5. From Abolition to Woman’s Rights:
    I.   The Grimké Sisters     30
6. From Abolition to Woman’s Rights:
    II.   Lucretia Mott     47
7. Elizabeth Cady Stanton     56
8. Margaret Fuller     70
9. The Road to Seneca Falls     82
10. The Convention     93
11. Susan B. Anthony     108
12. Lucy Stone     122
13. Bloomerism      141
14. The Rub-a-dub of Agitation     155
15. Who Holds the Purse Strings     172
16. Lucy Stone and the Lucy Stoners     184
17. The Radical Team of Stanton-Anthony      194
18. Civil War and After: Who Gets the Vote?     207
19. George Francis Train and The Revolution     219
20. Schism     230
21. Are Women Persons?     238
22. The "Antis"     257
23. Beyond Suffrage     270
24. "The Solitude of Self:     281
25. The Grand Old Ladies     291
26. "The Stone That Started the Ripple"     302

Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions (1848)     307
Chronology     312
Bibliography     316
Index     321MIRIAM GURKO is the author of a number of books of American history and biography. Her books include The Ladies of Seneca Falls, Restless Spirit: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millary, and Theodor Herzl: The Road to Israel.  She died in 2003.Who were the ladies of Seneca Falls? Originally there were five: five ladies sitting around a tea table in 1848 in the small town of Waterloo in upstate New York. Four of them, the Quaker preacher Lucretia Mott of Philadelphia, his sister Martha Wright, Jane Hunt, and Mary Ann McClintock, listened while the fifth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton of nearby Seneca Falls, suddenly began to pour out her “discontent . . . with woman’s position as wife, mother, housekeeper.”
 
Until the previous year, Mrs. Stanton had led a highly stimulating life. As the wife of Henry Stanton, the abolitionist orator, she had attended the turbulent World Anti-Slavery Convention in London—where she first met Lucretia Mott—visited Paris, then settled in Boston in one of the richest periods of that city’s history.
 
It was a time of great reform movements—the abolition of slavery, temperance, religious agitation, campaigns to eliminate war—in which the Stantons took a leading part. They had three sons, but with a comfortable house and good servants, domestic life ran smoothly and she was free to enjoy the exhilarations of Boston.
 
It wasn’t until they had to leave the city because of Henry Stanton’s health and move to Seneca Falls in 1847 that Elizabeth Stanton began to live more like the average housewife. Their house was older, less convenient, and harder to run than their Boston house; she found it impossible to get good servants. Above all, she missed the intellectual activity and companionship she had enjoyed in Boston. Henry Stanton was often away on business, and she was left along with just the children. The dimensions of her life quickly shrank to painfully narrow limits.
 
By the time she went to Waterloo for a reunion with Lucretia Mott, her dissatisfactions had become so acute that, over the teacups, she found herself releasing “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 and dare anything.”
 
What they dared—and in those days it took monumental daring—was to call a woman’s rights convention. The possibility of such a convention had occurred to Mrs. Mott and Mrs. Stanton at their first meeting eight years before, but nothing had come of it. Now, however, they and the other ladies took action. That evening they wrote an announcement which appeared the next day, July 14, 1848, in the Seneca County Courier. It invited women to attend “A Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman” in the Wesleyan Chapel at Seneca Falls on the 19th and 20th of July.
 
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They had no idea of how to organize such a meeting, or what the outcome would be. It was the first time in history that women had ever done anything remotely like it. Yet from this almost offhand, accidental beginning would arise the dynamic woman’s rights and suffrage movements in the United States, and these would in turn inspire similar movements in other parts of the world.
 
In a sense the convention could be said to have arisen spontaneously from Elizabeth Stanton’s discontent, but even with Mrs. Stanton it wasn’t quite that spontaneous. Her early life, her experience at the London Anti-Slavery Convention, her observations and awareness of “the wearied, anxious look of the majority of women,” topped by her own personal frustrations, had all led to this moment. “It seemed as if all the elements had conspired to impel me to some onward step.”
 
But individuals, even as fiercely independent and forceful as Elizabeth Stanton, do not act in a historical vacuum. A long series of earlier events and stirrings helped establish a foundation for such a convention. The year itself, 1848, known as the “year of revolutions,” contributed its impetus. And though Mrs. Stanton’s complaints seemed relatively simple—too much domestic drudgery and too little mental activity, too much isolation and too little adult companionship—the problem was far more complex. Mrs. Stanton herself would explore not only the legal and social bases of her discontent, but the subtle psychological fogs through which women had to grope before understanding themselves and their relationship to the world.
 
Indeed, defining the problem was in some ways as difficult as solving it. What, after all, was wrong with the way women lived, as distinguished from all the things that might be wrong with the world as a whole? What, after all, did women really want?