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Essay on First Women's Rights Convention
In July 1848, sixty-eight women and thirty-two men in Seneca Falls, New York, signed the Declaration of Sentiments, a document modeled after the Declaration of Independence, which had been written and adopted seventy-two years earlier. To many contemporaries, the addition of “and women” to Thomas Jefferson's famous sentence was as revolutionary as the original Declaration. Another seventy-two years would pass before the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution enfranchised women, the majority of the U. S. population; only one of the female signers of the Seneca Falls declaration lived to see it. Even today, full gender equality has not been achieved in American society. However, tremendous progress has been made since 1848, thanks to the organized movement for woman's rights triggered by the historic meeting at Seneca Falls.
The importance of the Seneca Falls Convention to the history of America was formally recognized in 1980, when Congress established the Women's Rights National Historical Park. The park's Visitor Center today features a group of life-size bronze statues representing key participants in the 1848 convention. One statue is highly unusual; it is of a woman who is obviously pregnant. She is Martha C. Wright, one of the five women who planned the convention. That July Martha was forty-one years old and six months pregnant with her seventh child. Her statue is testimony for the ages that the bearing of children does not necessarily preclude women from making important public contributions to society. Martha's condition limited her role during the convention sessions, but she was responsible for adding something distinctive to the proceedings a touch of humor.
Discussions at the Seneca Falls woman's rights convention were mostly very serious, but the official convention report notes at least one light moment: Lucretia Mott was a well-known Quaker preacher and antislavery activist, the only person whose name had appeared in the published announcement.....
