(HOST) July is a revolutionary month. Americans declared their independence on July 4th; Bastille Day – July 14th – marks the outbreak of the French Revolution. Teacher and historian Vic Henningsen reminds us of another revolutionary act whose 160th anniversary we observe this weekend.
(HENNINGSEN) In the spring of 1840 a number of American participants were excluded from an international Anti-Slavery convention in London. Their offense? They were women.
Eight years later, two of them reconnected at a tea party in the small town of Seneca Falls, New York. They were Lucretia Mott, a Quaker activist from Philadelphia, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a brilliant woman of liberal political views. Increasingly discontented with the constricted role of middle class housewife, Stanton later wrote that she was eager to "remedy the wrongs of society and of woman in particular." During an afternoon of spirited discussion, Stanton, Mott and others decided – almost on the spur of the moment – to call a convention to discuss the issue of woman’s rights, to meet in Seneca Falls later that July.
That gathering, on July 19th and 20th 1848, has been called the birth of the modern American women’s rights movement.
Adapting the language of the Declaration of Independence, the women of Seneca Falls asserted as a self-evident truth that "all men and women were created equal" and that men had deprived women of their freedom and dignity. Women couldn’t vote, they had little right to property, limited opportunities for education, and no chance for economic independence. But the major indictment was both broader and more fundamental. Man, they wrote, had "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."
No more, they cried, demanding moral, intellectual, economic, legal, and political equality for women. The last – the right to vote – became the centerpiece of the women’s movement for almost three-quarters of a century.
The Seneca Falls convention gave the world a document joining the rights of women to the revolutionary ideals of the American republic; it linked the crusade for women’s rights to broad currents of reform then sweeping the United States, particularly to the abolitionist movement; and, in Stanton, it gave that crusade one of its most powerful and persuasive voices. In 1851 she met Susan B. Anthony, whose superb political skills dovetailed with Stanton’s ringing oratory. For over half a century, the two were the most public symbols of the women’s movement.
Seneca Falls occurred seventy-two years after America declared independence. Seventy-two years later, in 1920, the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote. Now, almost ninety years after that, women have scaled the heights of academia, business, and politics.
Stanton and her allies would be pleased, but impatient. Yes, the vote and leadership positions were important, they would say, but the real struggle for women was – and is – for personal freedom, for autonomy, for self-respect. That’s a perpetual struggle and Americans may still rally to Stanton’s ringing battle cry of 1848: "The right is ours. Have it we must. Use it we will."