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SENECA FALLS CONVENTION

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A touchstone moment and fulcrum point of both literal and symbolic significance, the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 is considered to have begun the organized first wave of the feminist movement in America. The nineteenth-century women's rights movement focused women's discontent about their social and legal situations and introduced the imperative of political change.

ABOLITION'S INFLUENCE ON WOMEN'S RIGHTS

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), the most important philosopher among the women's rights advocates in the nineteenth-century United States, was born into a conservative family. She married an abolitionist lecturer, Henry Brewster Stanton (1805–1887), in 1840, and together they attended the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London during their honeymoon. The movement for gaining women's right to vote can be dated back to that event, for the refusal to allow women delegates to participate challenged the activist women "to confront their own oppression," according to the historian Judith Wellman (p. 63). And it was in London that Elizabeth Stanton met the Quaker minister Lucretia Mott (1793–1880), who was to become one of Stanton's most important mentors.

After Elizabeth Stanton moved to the village of Seneca Falls, New York, in 1847, she and Lucretia Mott determined to hold a local convention to discuss women's rights. The necessary cultural conditions had been arising during public discussion about the implications of changing the laws against women's ownership of property. New York passed its first Married Women's Property Act in April 1848, allowing married women to control and acquire property legally. The stage was also set by events in June 1848, including the creation of a new group called the Congregational Friends, started by adherents of the Quaker faith in nearby Waterloo, New York, and by the formation of the Free-Soil Party, which sought to eliminate slavery in the United States western territories.

As the lives of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Henry Stanton demonstrate, the women's rights movement is linked significantly with the abolition cause. But it is not merely that women compared their oppression with that of slaves and used the metaphor of "slavery," because women also learned through participation in the antislavery movement how to turn their perceptions of injustice into a widespread political movement. As Ellen Du Bois explains, abolitionism provided women "with a way to escape clerical authority, an egalitarian ideology, and a theory of social change" (p. 32). When abolitionism grew beyond its evangelical origins and began challenging institutional Protestant religion, William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), editor of The Liberator, emphasized whites' and blacks' common, shared humanity. Abolitionist feminists applied this concept to women, and the philosophy that "women were essentially human and only incidentally female liberated them from the necessity of justifying their own actions in terms of what was appropriate to women's sphere" (Du Bois, p. 36). Furthermore, the Seneca Falls Convention shows that the emphasis on overcoming public apathy by raising and agitating sentiment about one's cause was a prominent method among advocates of both abolition and women's rights.

THE CONVENTION AT SENECA FALLS

Although the first announcement appeared only eight days before the meeting, approximately three hundred people attended the Seneca Falls Convention, held at the Wesleyan Chapel of the Wesleyan Methodist Church, an abolitionist denomination, on 20 and 21 July 1848. The object of the meeting, as stated in their public call, was to discuss "the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women." Women and men gave speeches, read aloud and discussed the content of the Declaration of Sentiments, made some revisions, and approved the document. The Declaration of Sentiments was a rewriting of the Preamble of the U.S. Declaration of Independence to declare men and women equal and to criticize the specific "injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman."

Signing continued on both days of the convention, but the reasons that only one-third of the persons present signed the document remain unknown. For instance, Quakers held egalitarian principles about men and women, but they might not have supported participation by either sex in the corrupt world of politics. Others may have sympathized but been reticent to sign publicly in support of women's political rights. All resolutions in the Declaration of Sentiments passed. Disagreement concerned whether men as well as women should sign the declaration and whether the convention should demand the elective franchise for women, or the right to vote; both questions were answered affirmatively. The only known African American to sign the declaration was Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), author of the most famous autobiography by an escaped American slave (1845), who spoke out for both women's suffrage and abolition.

Many other conventions, regional and national, followed this first convention, and national women's rights organizations were also formed. It is valuable to remember that these early women's rights activists had to teach themselves how to be instigators of a rebellion because their lives of domesticity had not trained them for such civic participation. Female friendships were thus an essential resource of the movement. Among the more supportive and enduring activist friendships was the relationship begun in 1851 between Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906), who is considered to have been the most effective recruiter and organizer of the women's rights advocates.

With the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920, giving women the right to vote, some people heralded the completed success of the goals motivating the Seneca Falls Convention. But more leaders believed that the work of feminism's "second wave" was just beginning and that there was much more work to do for achieving women's equality. There is no consensus on whether full parity has been achieved by the early twenty-first century.

LITERARY REFLECTIONS OF THE ISSUES AT SENECA FALLS

Without dramatizing the event itself, creative literature throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century regularly addressed the concerns expressed at the Seneca Falls Convention. Exploring what women's "rights" should be provided the conflicts for many novels, and the 1850s mark a turning point of heightened awareness and frequent contesting of the limited roles and living conditions previously assigned to American women. Many writers chose to advance or condemn progressive issues indirectly through their fiction. The inclusion of intellectually curious heroines in many popular novels by authors of all political leanings of this time period attests to the increased interest in women's minds and not just their bodies. The educational attainments of these female characters, in both their own learning and their employment as teachers, shows that the abilities of women extended beyond domestic management and that they could achieve success in the public sphere. However, best-selling authors usually ended books with the heroine's marriage, thus returning their women to the domestic sphere.

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), author of the Leatherstocking series of books, including The Last of the Mohicans (1826), reacted against the tide of support for women's rights. Cooper's The Ways of the Hour (1850) expresses his disagreement with New York's Married Women's Property Act, which he feared would bring chaos and destroy families. Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte (E. D. E. N.) Southworth (1819–1899) much more favorably addressed property laws and women's rights in The Discarded Daughter; or, The Children of the Isle, serialized during 1851 and 1852. Yet Southworth is best known for establishing a new type of heroine: the adventurous young woman who defies gender restrictions, struggles for the people and causes she loves, and outwits villainy, often while disguised as male. Southworth's most famous character is "Capitola the Madcap" from The Hidden Hand, a serialized tale that became a best-selling novel in 1888. Capitola performs typically masculine feats, such as rescuing a woman from a forced marriage, fighting a duel, and capturing a criminal and determining his just retribution. Another popular Southworth adventure novel, serialized under the title Britomarte, the Man-Hater (1865–1866), includes a heroine who is an outspoken women's rights activist. The literary critic Karen Tracey explains how Southworth used the "double-proposal plot" structure with a renegotiation of marriage customs to show that "the political and the personal are intertwined" (p. 133) and that women deserved the additional responsibilities they proved they could manage during the Civil War. The novel was republished as two books with milder titles, Fair Play; or, the Test of the Lone Isle (1868) and How He Won Her: A Sequel to "Fair Play" (1869), emphasizing the romantic endings.

Laura Curtis Bullard (1831–1912), a novelist and journalist, publicly promoted universal suffrage and reforms to improve women's lives, but her experimental novels reached comparatively few popular readers. In Christine; or, Woman's Trials and Triumphs (1856), the heroine initially rejects marriage and devotes herself to women's rights but ultimately combines marriage with her career in lecturing, writing about feminist issues, and training professional women workers. In 1870 Bullard took over the editorship of the Revolution, a feminist periodical begun by Anthony and Stanton to publish fiction and nonfiction on behalf of women's rights.

Henry James's novel The Bostonians (1886) features characters advocating women's rights, including a charismatic young public speaker romantically pursued by a southern man who believes women belong only in the private sphere of the home; he ultimately removes her from the activist community, keeping her from the lecture stage. Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's (1804–1864) The Scarlet Letter (1850) may be the quintessential American heroine, a character bringing unity to the fragmented women's roles in antebellum America and dreaming of a revolution in religious interpretation and relations between men and women. Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852) severely critiques feminists and reformers, but his creation of memorable and complex female characters contributes to his stature as one of America's most important authors.

Humorists were also inspired by the beginnings of feminism. In 1855 George Pickering Burnham's History of the Hen Fever: A Humorous Record in part parodied the women's rights movement. Newspapers also responded immediately with ridicule of the Seneca Falls Convention, which, added to family pressures, caused many signers of the original Declaration of Sentiments to withdraw their names if not their agreement. Softening her social commentary with comedy, Sara Payson Willis Parton (1811–1872), known as Fanny Fern, used her novel Ruth Hall (1855) and a weekly newspaper column from 1853 to 1872 to satirize social problems, lampoon male tyranny, and demand economic independence for women. From the 1870s to the early twentieth century, the satirist Marietta Holley (1836–1926) used the persona of Samantha, "Josiah Allen's wife," to endorse the causes of feminism and women's suffrage.

See also Abolitionist Writing; Declaration of Sentiments; Female Authorship; Feminism; Friendship; History; Marriage; Quakers; Reform; Suffrage

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Bullard, Laura Curtis. Christine; or, Woman's Trials and Triumphs. New York: DeWitt and Davenport, 1856.

Burnham, George Pickering. The History of the Hen Fever: A Humorous Record. Boston: James French, 1855.

Fern, Fanny [Sara Payson Willis Parton]. Ruth Hall, a Domestic Tale of the Present Time. 1855. Introduction and notes by Susan Belasco Smith. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Southworth, E. D. E. N. Fair Play; or, The Test of the Lone Isle. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1868.

Southworth, E. D. E. N. How He Won Her: A Sequel to "Fair Play." Philadelpha: T. B. Peterson, 1869.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815–1897. 1898. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993.

Secondary Works

Bardes, Barbara, and Suzanne Gossett. Declarations of Independence: Women and Political Power in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

Du Bois, Ellen Carol. Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869. 1978. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. New York: Knopf, 1988.

Tracey, Karen. Plots and Proposals: American Women's Fiction, 1850–90. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Wellman, Judith. The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Women's Rights Convention. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

Amy Cummins