A History
of the
American
Suffragist
Movement

 		 

Excerpt from Chapter Two: "Let Facts Be Submitted to a Candid World..."

Stanton and Mott in Seneca Falls

from A History of the American Suffragist Movement


Elizabeth Cady Stanton and child  

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
with her child

Desperately unhappy in Seneca Falls after the excitement of life in activist Boston, Stanton poured out her woes to her old soulmate Lucretia Mott, and, as Stanton would later write, they "at once returned to the topic they had so often discussed...the propriety of holding a woman's convention." With encouragement from the other women, they "decided to put their long-talked-of resolution into action, and before twilight deepened into night, the call was written, and sent to the Seneca County Courier." When it appeared in the paper a few days later, it read:


    WOMAN'S RIGHTS CONVENTION-A Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women, will be held in the Wesleyan Chapel, at Seneca Falls, New York, on Wednesday and Thursday, the 19th and 20th of July, current; commencing at 10 o'clock A.M. During the first day the meeting will be exclusively for women, who are earnestly invited to attend. The public generally are invited to be present on the second day, when Lucretia Mott, of Philadelphia, and other ladies and gentlemen, will address the convention.

The women gathered on Sunday morning in Mary McClintock's parlor...to write the documents that would form the agenda for discussion at the meeting--and, as it turned out, set the agenda for American women for more than seven decades. Had they known the gravity of the cause upon which they embarked, it is possible that they would not have undertaken it: none of the women who met around McClintock's mahogany table lived to see the achievement of their goals. As the human family enters the second millennium, the global change they dreamed of is still far from complete.

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