The beginnings of historical movements towards civil rights are often located by an inciting event: Rosa Parks’s arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man on her way home from work in Montgomery, Alabama; the refusal of bar patrons to acquiesce to a yet another police raid at The Stonewall Inn, or the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, commonly taught as the site where the fight for women’s rights began.
But for each event, history-making and rightly celebrated as they are, there are others, less celebrated and sometimes even forgotten, that helped create those movement forward. Before Rosa Parks, there were Claudette Colvin, Septima Clark, Aurelia Browder, Mary Louise Smith, and Pauli Murray. Before Stonewall, there was the New Year’s Ball Raid of San Francisco in 1965, the Black Cat Raid in Los Angeles in 1967, and the Cooper’s Do-nuts Riot of 1958/9.
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The Seneca Falls Convention, too, was more of a preceding event than a galvanizing moment. It was a locally organized and attended meeting, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton herself, one of the organizers of Seneca Falls, stated in 1870 that “[t]he movement in England, as in America, may be dated from the first National Convention, held at Worcester, Mass., October, 1850.”
In the prologue to her book, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898, historian Lisa Tetrault observes that
[o]ne could anchor the beginning of the women’s rights movement in the United States in many events….. One could begin with the Grimké sisters’ practical and theoretical defenses of women as public actors in the 1830s. With [B]lack women’s resistance to slavery and to the systematic raping of their bodies. With the Lowell Mill textile operatives and their 1834 and 1836 strikes for fair treatment and decent wages. With the early anatomy lectures of Mary Gove Nichols and Paulina Wright (Davis) that helped women claim sovereignty over their bodies. With six women in upstate New York who, in 1846, two years before Seneca Falls…petitioned their state constitutional convention for the right to vote. With Lucy Stone’s 1847 lecture tour on women’s rights…. Or on a smaller scale, with the moment any given individual woman chose to enter a life of activism on behalf of her sex. Women’s rights had many beginnings. And for much of the early to mid-nineteenth century, people commonly invoked a variety of events when they spoke about the origins of women’s rights.”
One reason the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 grew in importance over the decades of the women’s rights movement—not only seeking the right to vote, but also equality in matters of marriage and property—may have been the document that resulted from it: the “Declaration of Sentiments.” Written by Stanton, the document intentionally echoes the US Declaration of Independence, where women are cast as the party seeking their independence and their “self-evident” rights from men.
Below, you can find the “Declaration of Sentiments,” annotated with relevant scholarship around the document, the background of the Convention, its origins in the abolition movement, the attendees, and the US women’s rights movement(s). As always, these articles are free to read and download.
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Declaration of Sentiments
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer. while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled.
He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.
He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners.
He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.
He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master—the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.
He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes, and in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given, as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women–the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands.
After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single, and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it.
He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration. He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.
He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her.
He allows her in church, as well as state, but a subordinate position, claiming apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the church.
He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in man.
He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God.
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He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.
Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation—in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.
In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the State and national Legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf. We hope this Convention will be followed by a series of Conventions, embracing every part of the country.
Firmly relying upon the final triumph of the Right and the True, we do this day affix our signatures to this declaration.
Lucretia Mott
Harriet Cady Eaton
Margaret Pryor
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Eunice Newton Foote
Mary Ann M’Clintock
Margaret Schooley
Martha C. Wright
Jane C. Hunt
Amy Post
Catherine F. Stebbins
Mary Ann Frink
Lydia Mount
Delia Matthews
Catharine C. Paine
Elizabeth W. M’Clintock
Malvina Seymour
Phebe Mosher
Catherine Shaw
Deborah Scott
Sarah Hallowell
Mary M’Clintock
Mary Gilbert
Sophrone Taylor
Cynthia Davis
Hannah Plant
Lucy Jones
Sarah Whitney
Mary H. Hallowell
Elizabeth Conklin
Sally Pitcher
Mary Conklin
Susan Quinn
Mary S. Mirror
Phebe King
Julia Ann Drake
Charlotte Woodward
Martha Underhill
Dorothy Matthews
Eunice Barker
Sarah R. Woods
Lydia Gild
Sarah Hoffman
Elizabeth Leslie
Martha Ridley
Rachel D. Bonnel
Betsey Tewksbury
Rhoda Palmer
Margaret Jenkins
Cynthia Fuller
Mary Martin
P. A. Culvert
Susan R. Doty
Rebecca Race
Sarah A. Mosher
Mary E. Vail
Lucy Spalding
Lavinia Latham
Sarah Smith
Eliza Martin
Maria E. Wilbur
Elizabeth D. Smith
Caroline Barker
Ann Porter
Experience Gibbs
Antoinette E. Segur
Hannah J. Latham
Sarah Sisson
The following are the names of the gentlemen present in favor of the movement:
Richard P. Hunt
Samuel D. Tillman
Justin Williams
Elisha Foote
Frederick Douglass
Henry W. Seymour
Henry Seymour
David Salding
William G. Barker
Elias J. Doty
John Jones
William S. Dell
James Mott
William Burroughs
Robert Smalldridge
Jacob Matthews
Charles L. Hoskins
Thomas M’Clintock
Saron Phillips
Jacob Chamberlain
Jonathan Metcalf
Nathan J. Milliken
S. E. Woodworth
Edward F. Underhill
George W. Pryor
Joel Bunker
Isaac Van Tassel
Thomas Dell
E. W. Capron
Stephen Shear
Henry Hatley
Azaliah Schooley
[Text taken from: National Parks Service, Women’s Rights National Historic Park, (Seneca Falls) New York: https://www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/declaration-of-sentiments.htm.]
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